It’s not just Rupert Murdoch and his crooks. All the corporate barons who corrupted our political system must be unmasked

George Monbiot

guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 December 2011 20.30 GMT

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Have we ever been so badly served by the press? We face multiple crises – economic, environmental, democratic – but most newspapers represent them neither clearly nor fairly. The industry that should reveal and expose instead tries to contain and baffle, to foil questions and shut down dissent.

The men who own the corporate press are fighting a class war, seeking, even now, to defend the 1% to which they belong against its challengers. But because they control much of the conversation, we seldom see it in these terms. Our press re-frames major issues so effectively, it often recruits its readers to mobilise against their own interests.

Crime and antisocial behaviour are represented as the predations of the poor on each other, or on the middle and upper classes. “Blonde millionaire’s wife raped in luxury home by asylum-seeking benefits cheat” is the transcendental form of a thousand tabloid headlines, alongside “Pippa Middleton’s bottom gets £1m makeover from top designer”. Though benefit fraud deprives the exchequer of £1.1bn a year while tax avoidance and evasion deprive it of between £40bn and £120bn, the tabloids relentlessly pursue the petty crooks, while leaving the capos alone.

On Monday the rightwing papers applauded government plans to cut benefits for people in social housing who have more rooms than they need. The “growing scandal of under-occupation”, the Mail observed, contributes to the housing crisis, depriving larger families of the homes they need. The Express told us that “it is only right that decisions such as this must be taken”. But what about the private sector, where there’s a much higher rate of under-occupation, especially among the wealthy? When this column suggested that these under-used homes should be taxed, the corporate press went berserk. Only the poorest should carry the cost of resolving our housing crisis.

Not a day passes in which rightwing papers fail to call for stiffer regulation of protesters, problem families, petty criminals or antisocial teenagers. And every day they call for laxer regulation of business: cutting the “red tape” that prevents companies and banks from using the planet as their dustbin, killing workers or tanking the economy.

The newspapers’ own criminal behaviour, more of which is being exposed before the Leveson inquiry as I write, looks to me like the almost inevitable result of a culture that appears to believe that the law, like taxes and regulation, is for little people. While portraying the underclass as a threat to “our” way of life, the corporate papers ask us to celebrate the lives of the economic elite. Saturday’s Telegraph devoted most of a page to a puff piece flogging the charming jumpers being sold by a Santa Sebag-Montefiore (nee Palmer-Tomkinson) from her “white stucco Kensington House”. She works – if that’s the right word for it – with someone she met at Klosters, where she and her family “ski with the Prince of Wales and Princes William and Harry”. So far they have managed to sell 40 of these jumpers, which somehow justifies an enormous photo and 1,400 breathless words.

I mention this sycophantic drivel not because it is exceptional but because it is typical. A friend who used to work as a freelance photographer for the Telegraph stopped when he discovered that most of those he was sent to photograph were the well-heeled friends and relatives of people on the paper. Journalism is embedded in the world it should be challenging and confronting.

These papers recognise the existence of an oppressive elite, but they frame it purely in political terms. The political elite becomes oppressive when it tries to curb the powers and freedoms of the economic elite. Take this revealing conjunction in the Daily Mail’s leading article on Saturday: “David Cameron yesterday finally said no to the European elite – vetoing plans for a treaty that included an EU-wide tax on financial transactions.” In other words, Cameron said yes to the British elite. But it cannot be explained in those terms without exposing where power really lies, which is the antithesis of what the rightwing papers seek to achieve.

As the theologian Walter Wink shows, challenging a dominant system requires a three-part process: naming the powers, unmasking the powers, engaging the powers. Their white noise of distraction and obfuscation is the means by which the newspapers prevent this process from beginning. They mislead us about the sources of our oppression, misrepresent our democratic choices, demonise those who try to challenge the 1%.

Compare the Daily Mail’s treatment of the Occupy London protesters, confronting the banks, to its coverage of the camp set up by people of the charming village of Meriden, confronting some gypsies. “Desecration, defecation and class A drugs” was the headline on the Mail’s feature article about Occupy London. Published on the day on which the City of London began its attempts to evict the protesters, it deployed every conceivable means of vilifying them and justifying their expulsion.

The Mail’s Meriden story, on the other hand, was headlined: “Adding insult to injury: now villagers who have protested against an illegal travellers’ camp for 586 days are told: YOU are facing eviction.” The story emphasised the villagers’ calm fortitude and the justice of their cause. Presumably they don’t defecate either.

 

Press barons have been waging this class war for almost a century, and it has hobbled progressive politics throughout that time. But the closed circle of embedded journalism is now so tight that it has almost created an alternative reality.

Ten days ago, for example, the Spectator ran a cover story that could not have been crazier had it been headlined: “Yes, Father Christmas does exist, but he’s been kidnapped by lizards”. A serial promoter of mumbo-jumbo called Nils-Axel Morner, who claims he has paranormal dowsing abilities and that an iron-age cemetery in Sweden is in fact the Hong Kong of the ancient Greeks, was given 1,800 words to show that sea levels are not rising. Citing “evidence” that was anecdotal, irrelevant or simply wrong, explaining that it was all a massive conspiracy, Morner ignored or dismissed a vast wealth of solid data from satellites and tide gauges.

The Spectator kindly gave me space to write a response last week, but it strikes me that a story like this could not have been published five years ago. It first required a long process of normalisation, in which evident falsehoods are repeated until they are widely believed to be true. The climate talks in Durban were slotted by the papers into the same narrative, in which climate scientists and the BBC conspire to shut down the economy and send us back to the stone age. (And they have the blazing cheek to call us scaremongers.)

It’s not just Murdoch and his network of sleazy crooks: our political system has been corrupted by the entire corporate media. Defending ourselves from the economic elite means naming and unmasking the power of the press.

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot’s website

David Cameron and Nick Clegg asserted in the Coalition Agreement (pdf) that tackling public sector debt was the government’s ‘most urgent task’. It has been revealed this morning that across the finance industry, the verdict is failure.

The Treasury has collated 14 independent forecasters’ predictions (pdf, p.18) for net government borrowing over the next four years.

Their collected view is that chancellor George Osborne will borrow billions more than the Office of Budget Responsibility predicted he would in June 2010 (pdf, Table C7, p.90) – or that the OBR said Alistair Darling (pdf, Table 4.5, p.38) would have if Labour had been re-elected.

Here are the raw figures:

At worst, the government’s swinging cuts have stopped the recovery in its tracks, leading to borrowing far above and beyond what they predicted their supposedly profligate rivals intended. At best, with the European and global economy facing such turmoil, the facts have significantly changed since the general election of May 2010.

The current strategy has failed. It’s time for serious change.

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/11/george-osborne-set-to-borrow-billions-more-than-alistair-darling-was-projected-to/

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Denis Campbell, health correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 November 2011 18.48 GMT
Article history

Andrew Lansley and David Cameron, who have used criticisms of the NHS record on cancer to justify a planned shakeup. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/PA
David Cameron and Andrew Lansley’s repeated criticisms of the NHS’s record on cancer have been contradicted by new research that shows the health service to be an international leader in tackling the disease.

The findings challenge the government’s claims that NHS failings on cancer contribute to 5,000-10,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year, which ministers have used as a key reason for pushing through their radical shakeup of the service.

In fact, the NHS in England and Wales has helped achieve the biggest drop in cancer deaths and displayed the most efficient use of resources among 10 leading countries worldwide, according to the study published in the British Journal of Cancer.

“These results challenge the feeble justification of the government’s changes, which appear to be based upon overhyped media representation, rather than hard comparable evidence. This paper should be a real boost to cancer patients and their families because the NHS’s performance on cancer is much better than the media presents. It challenges the government’s assertion that the NHS is inefficient and ineffective at treating cancer – an argument for reforming the NHS,” said Prof Colin Pritchard, a health academic at Bournemouth University.

He co-wrote the research with Dr Tamas Hickish, a consultant medical oncologist at Poole and Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch hospitals in Dorset.

The research shows that ministers have misrepresented the NHS’s record on cancer in order to gain support for their unpopular shakeup, said Pritchard.

The prime minister and the health secretary have said that both survival and death rates from the disease in Britain are low by international standards. Cameron, for example, claimed during last year’s general election campaign that Britain had a higher rate of cancer deaths than Bulgaria.

The authors studied cancer mortality and the amount of GDP spent on healthcare between 1979 and 2006 in England and Wales and nine other countries, including Germany, the US, Spain, Japan and France.

While cancer deaths fell everywhere, England and Wales saw the biggest drop in mortality among males aged 15-74 – down 31%. While six countries saw falls of at least 20%, England and Wales – which in 1979-81 had the third highest rate with 4,156 deaths per million men – improved the most, achieving the fifth lowest rate among the 10 countries by 2004-06 with 2,869 deaths per million. Among men aged 55-64 and 65-74, who are more likely to get cancer, mortality dropped by 35% and 28%.

While mortality among women the same age declined by less, at 19%, that was the third biggest improvement after Japan (23%) and Germany (20%).

And the NHS was the most efficient of the 10 countries at reducing cancer mortality ratios once the proportions of GDP spent on healthcare were compared, the study found. While England and Wales spent less on health than most others, they achieved the biggest overall annual fall in cancer mortality over the 27-year period, of 900 deaths per million. Once average GDP spending on healthcare was compared, the NHS saw the biggest fall in male and female cancer deaths of an extra 119 lives a year per 1% of GDP spent, ahead of the Netherlands (74) and almost double that in Germany (68), France (67) and Japan (60).

“That shows how good England and Wales are on cancer care, relative to spend. We do significantly more with proportionately less. It means that 34,484 people are alive today that wouldn’t have been if things had not improved since 1980,” said Pritchard.

Two authoritative studies have concluded that cancer survival rates in the UK have lagged behind those in comparable major developed countries, though experts dispute which indicators give the most accurate picture of Britain’s cancer performance. For example, Prof John Appleby, chief economist at the King’s Fund health thinktank, published research in the British Medical Journal earlier this year which disputed the portrayal of Britain as “the sick man of Europe” and argued that cancer survival rates had been improving, significantly in the case of breast cancer.

Duleep Allirajah, policy manager at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: “In the past 10 years cancer services in the UK have improved dramatically. Waiting times have decreased and services have been modernised.” But, with cancer survival improving, the NHS now has to address new challenges, notably improving care for patients who have undergone treatment.

“Far too many people in the UK still experience sometimes serious problems related to their cancer treatment. For many these can persist up to 10 years after treatment. The focus now must be for the government and the NHS to address the issues of aftercare and making sure cancer is treated as a long term condition,” said Allirajah.

Pritchard said: “David Cameron and Andrew Lansley are happier with NHS ‘bad news’ stories rather than, as our research shows, that we should celebrate the NHS which, in monetary terms, is vastly superior to the private healthcare system of the USA.

“Of course we should always be looking to improve. But the only way to judge the NHS is to compare it with other countries, which shows that we are still getting the NHS on the comparative cheap.”

The Department of Health declined to respond directly to Pritchard and Hickish’s findings. “There is a difference between achieving efficiency and the results patients receive. While it is good that NHS cancer treatment is relatively efficient, we know that the results patients actually get lag behind many other countries,” said a spokesman.

“Our cancer strategy is clear – we aim to save 5,000 lives extra every year by 2015 which will bring us up to the level achieved in many other comparable countries. We owe it to patients to deliver standards which are up there with the best in the world,” he added.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/07/nhs-cancer-figures-cameron-lansley

Traditionally, benefits had gone up each spring with the overall cost of living as measured by the retail price index. But in his first budget the chancellor signalled that they would henceforth rise in line with September’s consumer price index instead, which measures the cost of shopping more narrowly.

There was some spurious pretext about bringing the arrangement into line with the Bank of England’s inflation target, but he did not bother to conceal his real game. The CPI excludes costly housing and so tends to rise slower, thereby ratcheting down the benefit bill every year until – by the end of the parliament – £6bn will be saved every year. This is not small change – it is one third of the vast £18bn which the government is hacking off the annual welfare budget. Debating alternative inflation measures is very much a minority sport, but over time they turn out to have vast effects. That is true not merely for the exchequer but also for those on the receiving end. Benefits could be pegged to the price of baked beans or even the tumbling price of computers, but those who rely on them would still need to grapple with rising rents to keep a roof over their head. This was always a change that ignored that reality, and achieved savings by making the poor steadily poorer.

Now, however, Osborne seems to have concluded that this impoverishing process is taking place rather too steadily for his taste. Although September’s CPI rose by 0.4% less than the overall cost of living as captured by the old RPI, amid rising prices it nonetheless climbed at the relatively rapid rate of 5.2%. That should obviously trigger an automatic 5.2% rise in most benefits, but the chancellor is said to be bristling at the thought of claimants getting a rise that outstrips those for people in work. Regular pay is currently rising at a mere 1.8% a year, and hence the chancellor is scrambling round for some means to evade his responsibilities under his own new rules.

There is talk of an outright freeze, but this is mere kite-flying designed to soften up opinion for a somewhat less savage proposal that finally emerges. To deny poor families and still more poor pensioners any assistance in meeting rising fuel and food bills would be beyond the political pale. It would also almost certainly breach the law and trigger a judicial review. Beyond an obligation to do something, however, there is much wiggle room within the legislation. Whereas the value of income tax allowances have been protected through an automatic uprating process which parliament wrote into law by parliament back in the 1970s, MPs have shown less concern for benefit claimants than wage earners, and have mandated the work and pensions secretary merely to “have regard for prices” in setting benefit rates.

There are slightly tighter duties in respect of the national insurance benefits that accrue to those who have paid their stamp, including the state pension. Ministers have in any case signalled they want to protect the basic pension, and indeed have actually moved towards a more generous indexation regime for this payment, even though it is the costliest benefit of the lot. The £18bn in cuts they have already pencilled in are loaded away from the old, and piled instead upon the shoulders of the younger poor. And it is in relation to the means-tested benefits that these people claim that the government now enjoys the freest hand to snatch back what should be an automatic rise.

Osborne’s political calculator is still functioning – no doubt many workers on stagnant pay will resent benefit rises. But his moral compass is askew: the reason why benefit payments need special protection during hard times is precisely because they affect the poor. The unemployed and the sick do not have the scope to muddle through by scrimping and saving as those who are lucky enough to be in work do. Iain Duncan Smith understands that the government’s claims of concern about the unfortunate in a broken society are already strained, and would be shredded entirely by an arbitrary move to cheat people out of protection against inflation which that they were so recently promised. The welfare secretary is said to be ready to take the chancellor on over this, as indeed should any Liberal Democrat who still wants to claim that they are part of a progressive government. After all the regressive cuts announced, that phrase already rings hollow. A policy expressly designed to ensure that the poor suffer the pain of inflation would take the “progressive” claim into the realms of bitter satire.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/george-osborne-benefits-cheat

To pay tribute to one of the towering heroes of the Labour movement;

To speak tonight alongside Geoffrey Goodman, Nye’s close friend and an authority on the man himself;

To join a long and distinguished line of past lecturers including Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown, Robin Cook and my predecessor as Shadow Chancellor, Alan Johnson who have given this lecture.

And to understand why, 51 years after his death, we are still today celebrating the life and contribution of Aneurin Bevan to Labour and the trade union movement, you just have to look back at those past lectures and the tributes they paid.

But I am not going to start this lecture by quoting from the current generation of Labour greats who have paid tribute to Nye Bevan – but by quoting from one of the next younger generation of Bevanites.

Because I have been helped in researching this lecture by a young Bristol graduate, Ellie Gellard, the young woman who Labour chose to introduce Labour’s last manifesto in a new hospital in Birmingham.

And the name on Twitter she goes by?

‘Bevanite Ellie’

And when I asked her to put into words why Bevan was her hero, she told me:
“Bevanism is the perfect political combination of principle and power.

“Nye was the most vocal proponent of a democratic socialism which actually delivered for the people it sought to help.

“A figure who, still today, shows us that to change society for the better, we need to be true to our roots and our founding principles, but to do anything for the people we represent, we first and foremost need a Labour Government.”

So let me start this lecture tonight with that good news: the legacy of Bevan is alive and well and being taken forward by the next generation of Labour activists.

And tonight, as Shadow Chancellor, I want to explain why Bevan is a hero of mine too.

BEVAN THE HERO

Everyone has a special reason why Bevan is a hero.

For some, there is the fact that he overcame great hardship. Born in Tredegar – the son of a miner – forced to leave school at 13, self-taught, then winning a scholarship to the Central Labour College in London, sponsored by the Miners’ Federation… these were his first step towards Westminster – to become an MP in 1929, make it to the Cabinet and then be Deputy Leader.

For others, there is the fact that – even before he was first elected to Parliament in 1929 – he had established a reputation as a brilliant speaker with that rare gift to inspire and lift an audience.

A great speaker – and such a colourful and controversial and sometimes frustratingly volatile figure – storming out of the Cabinet in 1951, expelled from the Labour party once, and almost a second time; passionately in love with his wife, Jennie Lee, a Labour heroine in her own right; a vocal critic of Winston Churchill, Ernie Bevin, the Daily Mirror, Tory “vermin” – and pretty much everyone else at some point in his career.

Of course, for all of us, it was his passion and compassion alongside his hard work, persistence and patience, delivered the greatest achievement of Labour in power of the last century – the National Health Service – his lasting legacy, renewed and reaffirmed in the twenty-first century by the last Labour government, and now threatened as never before by the current Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition.

And then there is the fact that Bevan never made it to be Labour leader, in part, and aside from that famous volatility, because he put his beliefs before political expediency at key moments in his career – which is, for some romantics, enough of a reason to bestow hero status. But again, he is far from being alone in the history of our Party.

For me, though, there is an extra special reason.

Because Bevan rose to be a senior figure in the Labour Party – and an impassioned platform speaker – despite struggling for all his life with a stammer.

And for Bevan, this struggle was the making of the man.

As John Campbell writes in his biography, this stammer:

“…did not make him hate himself, or in the least degree diminish his self-confidence. Instead it drove him… to public speaking, first at Sunday school, later at lodge meetings, as a technique of mastering the demon by meeting it head-on… he used to practice declaiming large chunks of poetry on walks with his sister, he became adept at using the stammerers’ device of using an alternative word when he might stick on the obvious one…”

Techniques which stammerers everywhere will most certainly recognise.

As Campbell concludes:

“Whatever caused Bevan’s stammer, and whatever scars his stammer left, the determination and ultimate success with which he faced, harnessed and practically eradicated it was the first revelation, and the first exertion of an exceptional will.”

Which is why, for stammerers like me, Bevan will always be a special kind of hero.

BEVAN: A VISONARY AND A PRAGMATIST

But my admiration for Bevan goes beyond the personal.

Because, as I argued at a special Guardian fringe meeting at our Party Conference in 2008 – organised to debate who is Labour’s greatest hero – Nye Bevan combined two important qualities both essential for success.

First, he was a visionary.

As Geoffrey Goodman has said:

“I can think of no one in Labour’s pantheon who evoked and inspired the vision of a socialist society more eloquently and vibrantly than Aneurin Bevan.

And in the words of Jennie Lee following Nye’s death in 1960:

“He was not a cold blooded rationalist…..He was no calculating machine. He was a great humanist whose religion lay in loving his fellow men and trying to serve them.”

Growing up in a mining community in South Wales he saw hardship first hand. For Nye, Westminster was therefore a place to build a better future for the people he represented.

And no task was too big or too daunting. While Beveridge set out the five giants threatening our post-war society, Bevan sought to slay as many of them as possible.

And while slaying demons, Bevan also famously took no prisoners among his opponents – in others parties and also, at times, in his own – coruscating about the economic mistakes of MacDonald and Snowden in 1931, woundingly mocking of Winston Churchill in 1945, and – typical of the rebellious streak that held him back politically – storming out of the Cabinet over the costs of rearmament in 1951.

But second, and despite these outbursts, Bevan was also a pragmatist – who always knew that principles and values required political power to make a difference.

As a Cabinet minister, he compromised when necessary. As a political leader, he was a realist who was prepared to take the tough decisions when that was not the politically expedient thing to do.

As Labour historian Kenneth Morgan has written:

“Bevan had a sense of the compromises and complications that the exercise of power might involve. The language of priorities, the relativism of his political philosophy, were essential ingredients of his outlook no less than the socialist bedrock.”

Or in the words of Bevan himself, at the beginning of the 1945 general election campaign:

“We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, now we are the builders.”

Take the NHS.

His vision of healthcare – free at the point of use, based on need and not ability to pay, one National Health Service – was born of his own practical experience of hardship in the valleys of south Wales. And it was radical, challenging and difficult to come to terms with – for foes but also for friends too anxious at seeing local municipal hospitals nationalised.

But Bevan the NHS architect was also a self-confessed pragmatist.

After a long, complicated process of negotiation with the vested interests of the health-care system, during which the very future of the NHS itself was cast into doubt, Bevan put aside purity, giving the BMA important concessions on earnings and pay beds… but without ever compromising the founding principles of the NHS.

As he famously said, to get the doctors on board, he “stuffed their mouths with gold”.

And on defence and international affairs, too, we see this same combination of vision and pragmatism.

Staunchly internationalist, appalled by the post-war direction of Soviet policy, an early advocate of NATO, famously critical of the Korean War and its implications for Britain…

… his disavowal of unilateralism at the 1957 Labour Conference again showed his pragmatism in action – famously suggesting the consequence of such a policy would be like sending the Foreign Secretary “naked into the conference chamber”… all in the face of howls of protests from his Bevanite followers.

Indeed, it was disagreement over Bevan’s stance on disarmament which provoked the famously Bevanite Tribune newspaper to part company with Nye, who had been a board member at its launch in 1937.

And as monthly columnist of Tribune myself now for over eight years, I know that Nye Bevan would want me and all of us today to celebrate the news that, despite its financial troubles, an agreement has been reached with the proprietor and staff to allow the paper to continue as a co-operative – I hope securing the future of this august and historic part of the Labour movement.

BEVAN AND THE ECONOMY

Bevan – a visionary and a pragmatist – on the NHS and defence… and on the economy too.

Over the past year, I have regularly said that Britain and the world must learn the lessons of the early 1930s – the mistaken austerity, the misplaced policies of the coalition National Government, the failure of international cooperation – if we are not to repeat the mistakes of those years.

And coming into Parliament in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash, the second biggest financial crisis of the last hundred years, the trigger for a decade of stagnation and rising unemployment, Bevan’s speeches are highly instructive for today’s economic debate.

From the outset, Bevan argued, at a time of financial meltdown, that to do nothing, to fail to take a lead, to blindly accept the consensus…was a complete abdication of the responsibility of political leadership.

In his biography of Bevan, Michael Foot describes a conversation between MacDonald and Bevan:

“the premier explained how his economic advisers had told him the crisis had passed its peak, how the unemployment figures would soon be turning the other way, how ‘recovery was just round the corner’, how if the Party avoided internal embarrassments it might soon be able to face the country with renewed prospects of victory. Bevan left the interview in despair.”

Sounds familiar?

And Bevan was deeply disparaging of the new National Government’s attempts to blame everything on the previous Labour government, speaking in the House of Commons in December 1931:

“it would be foolish for hon. members to say, as some have said, that this crisis is due to (2 1/2 years of) Socialist Government. That is too frivolous…it ignores the fact that in countries which have not enjoyed the advantages of a Socialist Government the crisis is even worse… if that were so, the defeat of that Government and the mere coming into existence of a National Government would have resuscitated British industry, and it would be showing signs of immediate revival, whereas it is lying prostate as ever.”

Sounds familiar too?

But while angry in his opposition to the economic failings of the coalition, and desperate for an alternative vision, Bevan’s pragmatism and realism again shines through in that debate:

“If you have a certain purpose in view, you seek for the right instruments to carry out that purpose, and the National Government, if it is to justify itself, must declare its purpose and plan… is it not obvious that the PM is merely fobbing off the House of Commons with one tit-bit after another in the hope that time will come to his rescue? I would prefer to see in power a strong party Government with a party programme, clearly thought-out and boldly executed, than this stalemate, the miserable conspiracy which today is called a national government… Let us face our problems in the spirit of realism.”

And what happened next?

The national Government did not listen to criticism – whether Labour Bevan or the Liberal John Maynard Keynes. And what followed? The Great Depression of the 1930s, mass unemployment and – yes – the deficit got worse.

As I said to the Labour Conference this year and last: you either learn the lesson of history or you repeat the mistakes of history.

That is why I have argued that, facing a similarly dangerous economic crisis today, we need our political leaders to put ideology aside, demonstrate the same pragmatism and look at the facts.

And in setting out Labour’s alternative five point plan for growth and jobs at this year’s Labour Party Conference, I drew again on the parallel with the 1930s, arguing that our country – the whole of the world – is facing a threat that most of us have only ever read about in the history books – a lost decade of economic stagnation:

- The aftermath of a worldwide financial and banking crash;

- Families and businesses fearful about the future, cutting back on spending and investment;

- Governments all around the world trying to cut spending at the same time;

- Demand sucked out of the economy;

- Stock markets tumbling, banks in trouble, economies stalling, unemployment rising – a vicious circle as slow growth makes it harder to get deficits down;

- Not a crisis of any one country or continent – but a spiralling global crisis – from which no economy can be safe…

- … Threatening the jobs, pensions and living standards of families here in Britain and across the world.

Not – as the Conservatives claim – simply a crisis of public debt which can be solved – country by country – by austerity, cuts and retrenchment – but truly a global growth crisis which is deepening and becoming more dangerous by the day.

The world must remember the lesson of the 1930s: that there is no credibility in piling austerity on austerity, tax rise on tax rise, cut upon cut in the eventual hope that it will work when all the evidence is pointing the other way.

A conclusion that, for all his – in my view – misplaced antipathy to John Maynard Keynes, I am sure that Bevan and Keynes would today agree with.

BEVAN TODAY

And this Bevanite combination of vision and pragmatism must continue to guide us now – in opposition, and as we develop a credible and radical programme for government. And I choose the words ‘credible’ and ‘radical’ with care.

I believe it would be a profound mistake to now shy away from setting out our values and a radical vision for the future. In the face of a right wing and ideological government, core Labour values of fairness and social justice are more important than ever.

But we must show that we do not hold values for their own sake or for show. Our beliefs and principles are our reference point but we must also show what they mean in practice, how they are relevant to people’s lives in the 21st century and how they will guide our work in building a better Britain in the current economic and fiscal conditions.

And that means our opposition and our vision for government must be credible as well as radical and based on our values. Because we must make clear that part of that vision is rooted in a robust and credible economic analysis – to persuade people in their heads as well as their hearts to come back to Labour again.

The fact is that we do have a radically different set of values and approaches to this Conservative-led government.

Where Margaret Thatcher promised to “roll back the frontiers of the state” and Michael Howard smeared a publicly funded NHS as “Stalinist”, in government we recast Labour’s mission to proclaim: “by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone”.

As a matter of ideology, based on their values – whatever the Conservatives say about the responsibility we all have to act together – they will not do what is necessary to deliver social justice and opportunity for all. It is the same old Conservative ideology of small state and deep spending cuts, leaving the vulnerable relying on charity.

So instead of the private and voluntary sectors working alongside an empowering and enabling public sector, the involvement of charities and businesses is being boosted not to enhance public provision but to undermine it. Each new policy, fresh initiative or hasty Bill pushed through Parliament sees the state being withdrawn from support for the economy, the family and public services.

I take a different view of the importance of supporting the economy and sustaining public services and protecting those on lowest incomes as we ensure the deficit comes down in a steady and balanced way – a different view that is as important to our economic success as it is fundamental to our Labour and cooperative roots.

They have a narrow view of the role of the state – that it stifles society and economic progress. We have a wider view of the role of state – a coming together of communities through democracy to support people, to intervene where markets fail, to promote economic prosperity and opportunities.

They have a narrow view of justice – you keep what you own and whatever you earn in a free market free for all. Ours is a wider view of social justice that includes equal opportunities, and recognises that widely unequal societies are unfair and divisive.

Far from thinking that electoral success is based on the shedding or hiding of values, I believe we now need to champion those values and the importance of a fairer Britain – to show we are on people’s side after all. We need a much stronger, clearer vision of the fairer Britain we will fight for – very different from the unfairness and unemployment the right wing coalition’s deep and dogma-driven cuts will cause.

The dividing line at the next election will remain between progressives who believe in rights and responsibilities – strong communities, supported by enabling government with a strengthened voluntary sector guaranteeing fairness and justice for all, and Conservatives who do not accept that there is a collective responsibility and are determined to pursue deep cuts in spending, leaving the vulnerable with less support and charities stepping in.

But it will not be enough simply to set out warm words and wishful thinking. It is not enough to wail that cuts are unfair, because if the Tories can persuade people they are unavoidable we won’t win the argument.

That is why the real lesson from New Labour’s political success was the importance of combining our values with economic rigour and tough fiscal disciplines. That is why it is vital that we show that deep Tory cuts are avoidable as well as unfair.

So my vision for Labour has at its heart an alternative economic plan to the devastating strategy of this Conservative-Liberal Democrat government; an alternative plan that is rooted in economic history and analysis as well as Labour values and principles.

Because just as Ramsay MacDonald and his chancellor Philip Snowdon did after the biggest financial crisis of the last century, David Cameron and George Osborne claim deep spending cuts are unavoidable to slash the deficit and satisfy the markets.

It is the same strategy then and now to ease pressure on sterling and hope that downward pressure on wages would boost competitiveness and trigger a private-sector led economic recovery.

But then as now the promised private sector recovery has failed to materialise as companies themselves retrench, unemployment is rising, and growth is stagnant.

The government says deep cuts are unavoidable – and when I say they are wrong – that the spending cuts and tax rises go too far and too fast and are a political choice, not economic necessity – Cameron echoes MacDonald and calls his critics “deficit deniers”.

They enthuse about a private-sector led economic recovery; they say the governor of the Bank of England; and that the financial markets demand rapid deficit reduction. But that argument was always nonsense – as the stagnation of our economy for the last twelve months has shown.

First, there is no precedent to believe that, with slowing growth in our main trading partners and companies deleveraging, public sector retrenchment will stimulate private sector growth. The 1930s and 1980s proved the opposite. And we have seen in recent months that private sector jobs have failed to fill the gap left by cuts to public sector jobs.

This argument is as specious as the government’s claim that the reason why we have a large deficit is because of Labour’s spending prolificacy. The truth is that Britain started the crisis with lower national debt than America, France, Germany and Japan. It was a global crisis triggered by the irresponsibility of bankers not public servants – it was not too many teachers, nurses and police officers in Britain which caused the Lehman Brothers investment bank to collapse in New York.

Second, while I respect Mervyn King, 1931’s bank governor Montagu Norman also strongly advocated the “Treasury view” that rapid cuts were necessary. Sometimes even bank governors get it wrong, especially when the political and media wind is blowing so strongly in one direction.

And third, the idea that the UK faces a financial crisis if we do not cut the deficit faster is a fiction. Outside the Eurozone and with low long-term interest rates, Britain faces no difficulty servicing its debts, and the main worry in financial markets is now about the absence of growth.

What matters to market credibility is not how tough politicians talk on deficit reduction, but whether their plans are deliverable. Savage cuts which hit the economy or are politically undeliverable won’t in the end achieve sustainable deficit reduction or build market confidence either. In fact, the government is already set to borrow £46 billion more than they planned.

That is why I believe we need a slower, steadier, fairer deficit reduction plan, which does not put jobs, growth or front line services at risk, is more likely to succeed and have market credibility too.

So yes, there is an alternative. And following in the tradition of Bevan and Keynes, it is Labour’s responsibility to set it out: a clear five point plan for growth and jobs, a more sensible timetable for deficit reduction, and a robust explanation of why that will better support our economy and public finances.

We do need to set out distinctive values, ideas and vision for the future. But the risk is that we talk only of our values and visions and fail to focus on the economic realities we face and persuading people.

That is why we must set out spending discipline and tough new fiscal rules alongside action now for growth and jobs to get the deficit down.

In the 1990s the challenge for Labour was to win people’s heads as well as their hearts. After 13 years in government we lost too many hearts. We have to win them back. But in the process we also have to win their heads too. We need a credible and radical programme for government.

That’s how – drawing upon a Bevanite combination of vision and pragmatism – I believe we combine our values and the pursuit of electoral success so we can put them into practice too.

CONCLUSION

So it is clear why Bevan is a hero of mine… stammering, the NHS, defence, the economy – a pragmatic Labour visionary.

But let me return to the argument I made at that Guardian fringe meeting of three years ago, at which the Guardian political columnist Martin Kettle asked me to make the case for Nye Bevan as the greatest Labour hero of the past one hundred years…

Why Nye?

That he is a hero of our movement is beyond doubt, right up there with Keir Hardie, Clem Attlee, Barbara Castle, Tony Crosland, Neil Kinnock and (– yes – )Tony Blair and Gordon Brown too.

But the greatest hero?

What is extra special about Nye Bevan, I argued, is that his passion, his values and his example inspired a succeeding generation of followers, the Bevanites, who were loyal to their hero and determined to nurture his legacy in a way that no other Labour figure has achieved.

Keir Hardie and Clem Attlee were great leaders who paved the way, but who were the Hardie-ites, the Attlee-ites?

Barbara Castle? Well she was a Bevanite, as was Harold Wilson, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock.

And, unlike ‘Gaitskellite’, ‘Bevanite’ remains a meaningful term – still today invoking a Labour vision of a better and more equal society.

That is why, I argued, Nye Bevan deserves the title of Labour’s greatest hero.

And what greater tribute to the great man than that he is still a hero today – his name evoked by a new generation to describe their approach to politics.

Ladies and gentlemen – just ask Bevanite Ellie…

Thank you

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Posted November 1st, 2011 by Ed’s team
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2011 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Shadow Chancellor Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

The Guardian, Friday 28 October 2011

Chief executives’ pay rose on average by 43.5%, finance directors’ by 34.1%, and all other directors by 66.5%, according to the latest IDS survey. Photograph: Photodisc
Total earnings for directors of FTSE 100 companies increased by 49% last year, far outpacing pay claims for workers outside the boardroom.

A FTSE 100 executive typically received an average of £2.7m in 2010, according to the research by Incomes Data Services, which analysed payouts of salaries, bonuses and long-term incentive plans the last financial year.

For chief executives, the average total pay deal was £3.8m – an average rise of 43.5% – while IDS calculated that finance directors received an average increase of 34.1%,to take their average to £2m, while all other directors received an average increase of 66.5%, to take their average to £2.2m.

The directors enjoyed such large increases in the total take-home pay as bonus schemes compensated for the average 3.2% rise in base salaries that they were awarded last year. Inflation is running at 5.2% while data from IDS shows that pay deals in the private sector are running at 2.6%.

Steve Tatton, editor of the IDS report, said: “At a time when employees are experiencing real wage cuts and risk losing their livelihoods, without further explanation it may be difficult for FTSE 100 companies to justify the significant increase in earnings awarded to their directors.

“The pay gap between the boardroom and the shop floor does not yet show any signs of closing.”

The average bonus payment for FTSE 100 directors stood at £906,044 – a rise of 23% on last year. While the IDS data showed rising pay in Britain’s boardrooms, bonuses for City workers this year were forecast to fall 28% to £4.2bn – only just above levels paid out in 2002-03 and the lowest since the banking crisis.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research thinktank has concluded that bank bonuses will be down because of the turmoil in the eurozone, which has resulted in banks reporting lower profits. The CEBR points out that bonuses are also lower because some banks have been paying out higher base salaries and lower bonuses to meet regulatory requirements.

Douglas McWilliams, the CEBR’s chief executive, said: “Although I wouldn’t want to be a Porsche salesman now, with the fat cats having to tighten their belts, the real losers from falling bonus payments are the Treasury and the taxpayer.”

The directors of the largest 100 British companies are in line for average annual pension payments of £224,000 each, according to a survey today.

The report shows 362 top directors have built up final salary pensions worth £568m and the average pension pot transfer value is at a record high – £3.91m compared with £3.8m last year. Directors also retire earlier than their staff. The most common age is 60, while for ordinary scheme members it is 65 and expected to rise.

The highest earning pensioner among current FTSE 100 directors will be the former chief executive of oil group Royal Dutch Shell, who is entitled to £1.2m a year from his company scheme. Jeroen van der Veer, who stepped down from the top job in 2009 but remains on the board, has amassed a pension pot worth £21.6m, the TUC has revealed in its 9th annual PensionsWatch report.

Just before his retirement, Van der Veer declared that pay had little impact on performance, saying: “If I had been paid 50% more, I would not have done it better. If I had been paid 50% less then I would not have done it worse.”

The details of FTSE directors’ pensions comes days after another survey showed that chief executives at the top 100 companies saw pay and bonus packages jump by an average of £1.3m to almost £4.5m last year, the biggest leap in nine years.

According to a study commissioned by the High Pay Commission, the average pay deal for a FTSE 100 boss soared from £3.09m to £4.45m as business leaders were able to enjoy record windfalls from share-based incentive schemes, thanks to a sharp bounce in the stock market.

The benefits reaped from the stock market bubble by FTSE 100 executives have not been mirrored on the shop floor. Annual wage rises stood at 2.2% for the final three months of 2010. Factoring in the rising cost of living – the retail price index stood at 4.8% last December – that means most workers in Britain saw a significant decline in their real incomes.

The TUC survey shows a growing number of bosses receive cash instead of, or in addition to, company pension scheme contributions. Pearson’s long-standing chief executive, Marjorie Scardino, banked the largest cash payment, of £620,700 – nearly 76% of her salary – while Peter Clarke, chief executive of hedge fund Man Group, pocketed £532,000 – 94% of his salary.

Stephen Hester, chief executive of state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland, received the third largest cash payment, collecting £420,000, or 35% of his salary.

Companies with defined contribution schemes – less advantageous than the final salary schemes gradually being phased out – make much larger contributions to directors’ pensions as a proportion of salary than they do for the average employee.

Directors surveyed enjoyed average company contributions of 22% of their salaries. The average for all employees is 6.7%, while many companies set default contributions even lower, at 3%, according to the Association of Consulting Actuaries.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “This survey highlights the real pension scandal in Britain today. Public sector workers are rightly furious about being told that their pensions of just a few thousand pounds are ‘gold-plated’ and unaffordable by the same business leaders who stay silent on the multimillion-pound pensions that many enjoy themselves.”

Barber added: “It’s hardly a surprise that these lavish rewards are signed off when directors sit on each other’s company remuneration committees. This culture of mutual backslapping must be tackled by giving ordinary staff members a voice on remuneration committees.”

Barber called on the government to force companies to disclose directors’ pension arrangements so that they could be scrutinised by staff and shareholders.

With more directors opting for cash payments, the TUC says pensions secrecy is increasing. In some cases, retirement cash is listed under other “emoluments”, making such payments harder to detect. “This may result in the number of directors being covered in any review of executive retirement provision shrinking,” according to the report.

Directors still receive 23 times more than the average worker, a figure which has stayed fairly constant since the survey began in 2003. Members of company and public sector schemes receive an average annual pot of £9,568, while the average public sector pension is £6,497.

Darren Philp, policy director for the National Association of Pension Funds, said: “More transparency is needed around boardroom pensions. It is also worrying that directors’ pensions are not usually linked to performance. This could mean bosses are rewarded in their retirement despite failure in the job. Pensions must not become a back-door to boosting pay.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/07/ftse-directors-pensions-worth-millions

Nick Maes’s mum Wil lived with a diagnosis of dementia for three years

Earlier this month, Dr William Lloyd Bassett, a Shropshire GP, was hauled in front of a disciplinary panel at the General Medical Council.

It was alleged that he’d deliberately hastened the death of a terminally-ill man by giving him a huge dose of morphine.

The case made headlines across the country, and prompted debate about the fine and treacherous line between aiding a patient in distress and hastening death.

But for me, this case was especially shocking. For I had witnessed Dr Bassett in action: he gave my mother morphine as she was about to die.

The recent General Medical Council hearing centred on an incident in May 2009 when Dr Bassett went to the home of a man dying from lung cancer and treated him with a high dose of diamorphine.

This led to him being questioned over his fitness to practise; a serious charge that could have ended his career.

Crucially, though, the family of the man who died would have nothing to do with the charges against him, and supported Dr Bassett 100 per cent in his actions.

The patient had become deeply distressed in his final hours. Although Dr Bassett accepted that the 100mg dose of morphine was too high and a mistake, it led, in all likelihood, to a more peaceful death

Last week, the hearing decided that Dr Bassett should continue to practise, but issued a warning of serious misconduct against his name.

Such cases mean many GPs are now nervous about administering pain relief to people in the final hours of life, in case they find themselves in a situation similar to Dr Bassett’s.

Dr Clare Gerada, chair of the Royal College of GPs, agrees that doctors are frightened to administer powerful opiate drugs.

‘It’s very difficult for doctors to offer palliative care because of the threat of manslaughter charges should the patient die soon afterwards. When one hears of a patient dying after a dose of morphine, there’s a sense of relief that you’re not the one who has administered it.’

Dr William Bassett gave Wil morphine as she was about to die

But after witnessing Dr Bassett at work in a similar situation as he attended my dying mother three years ago, I can only thank him for his caring, professional intervention.

At 83, my mother Wil — the name she was known by to all her family and friends — had been living with a diagnosis of dementia for three years.

Yet she managed to remain at home because of the stalwart support of her family, and carers who came in a couple of times each day.

Mum was determined to stay put. That was her resilient, forthright character — some would call it bloody mindedness, but it made her who she was.

When a social worker pushed for her to enter a home, the idea was swiftly rejected — by Mum and by us as a family. She’d cling to her staunch independence, a trait compounded by losing her husband Arthur nearly 40 years earlier.

But Wil’s general health was suddenly complicated as her vital organs began to fail: heart failure, water retention, high blood pressure and immobility intensified the problems.

Our family GP had no sure way of telling how long she might live, although it was suggested she might survive for another two weeks.

Mum’s condition rapidly deteriorated. Within 24 hours, she looked intensely frail and was hallucinating.

But that evening she seemed to rally. She sat up in bed and enjoyed an impromptu party, drinking brandy, laughing and chatting with all those closest to her.

Mum loved a good party and I think secretly enjoyed being the centre of this particular one. Our spirits were raised, even though we sensed, deep down, this would be the final stage of her illness.

At midnight, as my three sisters and I prepared Mum for bed, she had a seizure. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, her body became a dead-weight and any colour that might have been there drained from her complexion. It was as if she’d imploded.

We eased Mum back into bed, tacitly understanding the end was close. Yet none of us really quite knew what to do. We’re not a foolish or mawkish family by nature, yet confronted by our mother’s inexorable slide towards death we found ourselves helpless.

It was eventually decided to call Shropdoc, the local out-of-hours doctor’s service. Dr Bassett isn’t our family doctor; it was sheer luck that he happened to be on call that night. His response was quick, and after examining Mum he suggested sending for an ambulance.

Nick Maes, aged four, with his mum Wil

We didn’t want Wil to go to hospital; there was no logical reason to send her. Dr Bassett respected our wishes and left, urging us to call again if there were any change.

We took it in turns to sit with Mum. But as the night drew on, Wil became restless, pointing into space, trying to shift her tiny frame off the bed. Mum’s agitation and distress became more marked and then she was sick.

At 4am we called Shropdoc again and Dr Bassett returned. It was obvious that neither I nor my sisters knew what we were doing. Dr Bassett’s presence was a huge reassurance to us, and more importantly to Mum, towards whom he was compassionate. He was with us for an hour all told and his manner was exemplary.

He spoke with Mum as she drifted in and out of semi-consciousness, asking her how he could help. Eventually he suggested that she might like morphine as a drip and as an oral dosage to ease her pain and relax her. (Wil hadn’t had any other medication until that point.)

Mum was unequivocal and nodded agreement. Wil was a woman who’d always said she wasn’t afraid of death, and now her old resilience flashed back. I felt an innate sense of relief, as did my sisters, that a decision had been made and a course of action taken.

Dr Bassett didn’t shy away from explaining what would happen, not to Mum nor to us, her children. The morphine would calm her and relax her; as the drug worked she’d probably slip away with less fight, drifting inescapably into a deep sleep.

He attached a line to Wil’s leg and placed the morphine drip-feed device on the dressing table — an incongruous addition to the knick-knackery of mirrors, perfume and jewellery usually found there.

Ensuring Mum was comfortable, Dr Bassett slipped quietly out of the house, leaving us to sit and gently talk with her.

The morphine quickly took effect, and she drifted off into a calm and deep sleep. We sat around her bed, holding her hands, stroking her hair, reminiscing about the marvellous times we’d had together and telling her how much we loved her.

Just after 9am the next day — a little over five hours later — Mum stopped breathing; she’d died with dignity and in peace.

The nature of her death was due to Dr Bassett’s seemly and humane intervention.

Her suffering had been minimal and she’d had the great good fortune to die in her own bed surrounded by all of her children.

Because of this experience, I’m under no illusion that assistance for those in the final stages of dying should, if requested, be given by doctors without fear of reprisal.

I’m not advocating wholesale euthanasia, or ending life along the lines practised at centres such as Dignitas in Switzerland. But when life is undeniably ebbing away, it is surely our responsibility, as a kind and caring society, to alleviate unnecessary suffering.

Doctors are rightly governed by a strict code of conduct. Key to the principles of medical ethics is that the doctor acts in the best interest of the patient. This would include giving pain relief to ease the suffering of the dying patient.

But this action can conflict with another key principle: do no harm. Even small doses of morphine suppress breathing, and there is a point where adequate doses may, inevitably, stop the breathing.

Dr Clare Gerada explains: ‘There’s no guidance regarding the amounts of diamorphine to be used on patients. This is because some cancers require hundreds of milligrams and others maybe just 10 or 20. It makes it very difficult for doctors because it’s difficult to predict.

‘Morphine is a very good drug, not because it kills people, but because it calms people down; and in the case of lung cancer makes it easier to breathe.’

Yet I would argue that if someone was on the verge of death, then what difference would alleviating the pain and hastening the inevitable make?

It’s a pragmatic approach, due in no small way to the practical influence of my mother.

‘We all have to go at some time,’ my mother would say. ‘No exceptions. There’s nothing to be scared of.’

Of course, the real fear is of dying in anguish. But the use of morphine to ease this fear still conjures up — almost unavoidably — awful memories of Dr Harold Shipman.

However, we shouldn’t make these nervous connections and demonise the drug. It’s vital that we have open and honest dialogues with GPs, patients and families in order to make informed decisions.

Until recently, it was common knowledge that the family GP, when tending the dying at home, might help shorten the suffering with morphine.

Maybe this was more an implicit arrangement — an unofficial, yet profoundly caring intervention that was acknowledged but not openly talked about.

Perhaps in previous generations there was a greater level of interaction between doctor and patient than we have today.

Each year, approximately half a million people die in Britain. A recent report from the think-tank Demos shows two-thirds of us would like to die in the peaceful and familiar surroundings of our own homes.

This is an infinitely preferable option to the noisy and frightening environments found in over-stretched and busy hospitals.

Yet, in reality, barely 18 per cent actually manage to achieve this last wish — which equates to more than 190,000 dying in hospital each year when they would rather die at home.

The Dying for Change report suggests that by 2030, just one in ten will have the opportunity to die at home.

Charles Leadbeater, the report’s co-author, said: ‘It’s not just that we’re living longer; part of this means that people are dying over a longer period, losing first their memory and then their physical capacities in stages.

‘If we put in the right kind of supports for people to cope at home, many tens of thousands of people could have a chance of achieving what they want at the end of life; to be close to their family and friends, to find a sense of meaning in death.’

From sitting in those final moments with my mother, I know nothing is as intimate or as personal as being with someone as they die. It is a great and intensely private honour.

And when my time comes, I can only fervently hope that someone as caring and as compassionate as Dr Bassett will be at my bedside.