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What a bunch of amateurs in the corridors of power
To go about arousing people's indignation, as columnists are paid to do, usually involves at least a little effort. It demands research, discussion, selection and argument or, if all else fails, some energetic exaggeration.
This past week there has been no need for any of that. A list alone will do; a brief mention of a few recent news items is all that is needed to make anyone quite sick with contempt for the way our country is run. I suppose we should be glad that this is not Russia or Italy but unvarnished events will soon be putting us columnists out of business.
Uniquely in British history, a distinguished civil servant was publicly named and used by the government and the Ministry of Defence in their battle with the BBC and with looming disgrace over the Iraq dossier scandal. Dr David Kelly was obliged by the government to give evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee, which commented on the integrity of his behaviour. On Thursday, after intense public scrutiny, Kelly disappeared from his home and apparently committed suicide.
A Labour MP in a rent boy immigration scandal was banned from the House of Commons for seven days for breaching the parliamentary code of conduct; he had helped his lover, a foreign male prostitute whom he had appointed as his researcher in the Commons, in his application for a student visa with a doctored document. A week is clearly felt to be a very long time in politics; punishment for abusing the immigration system is usually rather more severe.
Six per cent of patients in casualty (or 120,000 people) have to wait 12 hours or more on a chair or a trolley before they get a hospital bed, according to Department of Health figures published last week. Puzzlingly, this figure is 40 times higher than the NHS Trust figure, also recently published by the department.
A National Audit Office report disclosed that the proposed new Home Office building, when finished in 2005, will be too small to accommodate all its staff; there will be no room for 1,500 workers - one third of the total. Civil servants were accused of "poor planning".
Employment is down in the private sector but up in the state sector.
Michael Barber, head of the prime minister's "delivery unit" and the man entrusted to "deliver" on public services, warned the Commons public administration committee that setting targets for public services carries enormous risks; he argued that setting targets for schools and hospitals can work against good performance if managers focus on them "to the detriment of all other activities", that targets can demotivate people and the government "would not expect - and should not be expected - to meet them all". This ought to sound familiar but perhaps it still doesn't.
Despite Tony Blair's promise to separate the judiciary from the executive, his close friend Charlie Falconer, the new lord chancellor, announced that he would keep the power to veto prospective judges. Judges will be recommended by a supposedly independent new commission, but the government will be able to veto any one. No separation of powers there, then.
Scientific reports suggest that some food manufacturers have known for some time that the combinations of additives in some of the most popular fast foods are probably addictive and could cause obesity.
School children are being bribed with burgers to stop them playing truant: McDonald's is running a project which offers schools free meal vouchers, which teachers use to reward children who turn up or try hard. Some schools are taking them up.
New Labour spent Pounds 5.4m of taxpayers' money on special government advisers in 2002-03, more than double the amount spent in its first year in office.
Cherie Blair is looking for a spin doctor.
Brussels launched a wider fraud inquiry across the European commission amid public anger at the "vast enterprise of looting" that fraud commissioners recently discovered at Eurostat, the commission's statistical arm, and fury that whistleblowers have in the past been sidelined or worse.
Figures showed that the prime minister spent Pounds 2,837 of taxpayers' money to attend the wedding of the daughter of the Spanish prime minister.
Charles Clarke, the education secretary, admitted that there had been a serious "systemic failure" in the way schools are funded. Despite allocations of much more money, schools are warning that they may have to cut teachers' jobs, reduce the curriculum or even send children home for lack of funding. Labour came to power on a promise of "education, education, education" and state sector reform, and has been in office for more than six years.
The end of A-levels and GCSEs was proposed last week by Mike Tomlinson, former chief inspector of schools, who must know how well they are working. He called for a single diploma for all 14 to 19-year-olds, which will include voluntary work and interpersonal skills. It aims for "parity of esteem".
A Treasury-sponsored review reported that many universities are struggling with high levels of central government control. The same review warned Oxford and Cambridge to become more "business-like", or face the possibility of more central government intervention.
A High Court judgment last week added another burden to the overladen immigration service, making it harder for officials to catch fraudulent young asylum seekers who will now find it easier to abuse the system by pretending they are under 18.
Officials will then have to go through complicated checks to disprove any such claim.
The government announced a plan to generate 10% of energy by 2010 from wind turbines, mostly in the sea. The emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London said it would not work. "For wind energy to produce 10% of our energy even by 2020 we will have to build 20 two-megawatt windmills every week from today until then," Philip Stott said. There is "not a snowflake in hell's chance" of achieving this.
Hazel Blears, the police minister, proposed a scheme to pay young offenders up to Pounds 20,000 a year not to offend.
The media were overwhelmed for days with endless, sensational details of the story of Shevaun Pennington, 12, who disappeared with a man suspected of paedophile tendencies but came home safely. We learnt why psychologists told Pennington's mother to say what she said. The public could not possibly have benefited from these prurient details. Prospective paedophiles and kidnappers, however, could; these minutiae could have taught them about police procedures and how to avoid discovery.
The Diana, Princess of Wales fund stopped its payments to charities to protect its trustees, in a self-inflicted scandal of incompetence and snobbery.
An investigation into the Harold Shipman scandal showed the police were much to blame for incompetence and in one case for lying; three, or perhaps more, of Shipman's victims might have lived otherwise.
I could go on. I could comment. It's hard to resist but it's barely necessary. All one can say is what a bunch of incompetent amateurs. All one can ask is whether it was really, truly, ever thus.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 20, 2003 | Comments (0)
Lies, damned lies and health service spending
For the past couple of weeks, confronted with many spectacular lies, a lot of people must have been pondering about lying. I certainly have, wondering why it still startles me. After all, only a prig would claim that she herself never lies and I would rather be thought a liar than a prig: I will not claim that I have never lied. All the same, lying shocks me, even now, even after years in journalism.
The strange thing is that although politicians and public figures lie shamelessly and people know they do, we journalists - we reptiles of the gutter - have to be extremely wary of using the L word. Yet we ourselves are accused regularly of lying, and with impunity; rather like the royal family, journalists almost never sue for libel. Contrary to what people think, we're not really allowed to hand it out, but we have to take it.
I do not know whether Margaret Hodge, the minister for children, actually accused the journalists who exposed the Islington child sex scandals of lying, precisely; she certainly lodged complaints against them with the Press Complaints Commission and accused them of sensational gutter journalism. Yet in the end it proved that they were telling the truth and that she was - well, what was she doing? I couldn't say.
In late June an article appeared in The Times beside a photograph of Dr Gill Morgan, head of the NHS Confederation, with the headline "The 'lie' that haunts the NHS". Lying, even now, is no minor matter and the National Health Service is hugely important to us all, so naturally I read on.
I have written about NHS waste and bureaucracy many times - and recently. In response Morgan has accused me publicly of "ignorance" and of making a "claim" that is "baseless"; two senior colleagues backed her up and this paper, properly, offered them a right of reply and printed what they said.
"Common sense alone," she added in her letter to this paper, "makes it highly improbable that an organisation that has been underfunded for years would fritter away money on non-essential jobs." What can one say? "Improbable"? I don't think so. And a general appeal to common sense is not exactly a knock-down argument, you might think. Besides, common experience suggests something rather different, in the NHS and in all bureaucracy anywhere. Only last Friday, for instance, the NHS Alliance reported that GPs feel they have lost their power to managers; they feel that primary care trusts are driven not by doctors but by bureaucrats and by an alienating managerial culture.
The "lie" that Morgan was apparently talking about in The Times had to do with the same subject - excessive bureaucracy in the NHS. "At the start of the year," the article said, "a wholly fictitious story appeared in the national press claiming that there were more bureaucrats than beds"; "the accusation has spread" it went on, and was becoming an "established fact", but it was so wrong that it could not be allowed to stand. That is Morgan's view - I checked. She believes it's a myth based on a misunderstanding and a misuse of the figures.
"This was a cheap and easy attack," she said to The Times. As a matter of fact, such attacks are not cheap and easy; they involve endless trawling through complicated government figures and endless checking; all this takes a lot of effort and money. Only people who really mind about the NHS would bother.
One such person is Dr Maurice Slevin, a distinguished NHS oncologist. Early this year he produced a telling pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies with the support of many other distinguished consultants; he argued from Department of Health figures showing that the NHS has far too many managers, administrators and bureaucrats. The proportion is 25.7% of the total workforce, or one in four - an astonishing figure. By contrast, in the private sector, comparing like for like, the proportion is under 7%.
Putting it another way, in the NHS there are eight administrators for every 10 qualified nurses, whereas in the private sector there are two administrators for every 10 qualified nurses. By administrators Slevin means managers, administrators and their support staff.
It has been argued by Morgan and her colleagues that Slevin has included essential staff such as doctors' secretaries as well as cooks, cleaners and painters.
But they must know that this is not true because his pamphlet explained how the figures were calculated, specifically excluding these people.
If the NHS could lose only some of the bureaucrats, he argued, it could save billions of pounds, raise the salaries of nurses and radiographers and recruit more medical staff without raising taxes. Instead NHS bureaucracy is getting more top heavy and more expensive; the new money is not delivering.
Slevin's is one of the best researched and most eloquent versions of the "lie" (produced, incidentally, in his free time and without payment). To call his argument a lie is, in effect, to call him, and all those who make the same case, a liar. That cannot be right.
I am aware that Morgan did not write the headline in The Times. She may not have wished to use the word "lie". She may not wish to call Slevin's argument a lie, or even "wholly fictitious". So I invited her, repeatedly, to dissociate herself from that headline. She has not done so.
This whole argument turns on how you count bureaucrats and how you identify them.
"Managers" and "administrators" and "support staff" are terms that are all too flexible, all too susceptible to spin. Morgan has complained that while the public thinks 20% of NHS employees are managers or senior managers, the real proportion is only 2.6%, down from 3% in 2001.
Spot the obvious disjunction. The total of senior managers and managers in the "manager" grade is not, and cannot be, anything like the total of all managers plus all administrators plus all secondary support staff and so on. What's more, the public does not make arcane distinctions between managerial or administrative grades when worrying about bureaucracy. The public simply means everyone who is not directly involved with treating the sick. How truthful was it to state the case this way?
It should be - it was until recently - possible to define one's terms properly and settle this argument. It ought to be easy to figure out who does what, as Slevin could last year, using Department of Health figures. But no longer.
According to Slevin, the department has recently, for reasons I have not discovered, changed the way it publishes these statistics; it is now impossible to see what the hundreds of thousands of administrators and their support staff do because they have been reclassified as "support to doctors and nurses" and other similar descriptions.
It is immensely depressing, at a time when the NHS needs all the informed, constructive analysis it can get, that it should suddenly be harder to get at the truth. It's immensely depressing that serious attempts to get at the truth should be dismissed as a lie. As they say, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
And now there are lies, damned lies and statistical spin as well.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 13, 2003 | Comments (0)
H is for hypocrisy as Hodge reveals the Stalinist truth
Journalists like me who have worked from home for years - since long before the internet revolution - have had to make our own collections of newspaper cuttings, along with other doubtful aids to memory and accuracy. I have a collection of bulging box files, eccentrically labelled, no more reliable than newspaper cuttings can ever be and hardly worth mentioning.
But I feel I have not been cutting up newspapers entirely in vain. The god of small things is not mocked. Somewhere in all those inelegant boxes of yellowing scraps lurked something that I have always treasured about Margaret Hodge.
Something from long ago. A telling little cutting that this week I longed to retrieve and bring to light at this indignant moment now that Mrs Hodge is, so astonishingly, our new minister for children.
But I could not quite remember where to look for it. Under H for hypocrisy? S for shamelessness? Or statism? N for neo-Stalinism? O for opportunism? T for trimmer? A for apology, glaring absence of? C for cronyism or child abuse? At last I found it, in the box marked, alas, "Social Trends". Margaret Hodge does indeed represent a most striking social trend of our day; she is indeed a heroine of our unheroic times, a new Labour luvvie and icon and a glaring example of the way we live now.
My treasured little cutting is nothing more than a letter to The Times from Mrs Hodge herself. But what a letter! It is dated April 29, 1996, from the House of Commons, in response to an article about childcare. "For too long", she writes with evident regret, "the early years of a child's life have been seen as the private concern of the parents." Words almost fail me. This is unreconstructed statism. I had thought this Dracula was dead, with a stake in its bad old heart.
But this is the spirit of Stalinism, horribly undead.
Of course, for much of her life Hodge was indeed a diehard old leftist; in her time as leader of the notorious and loony left Islington council (1982-1992) she sported a bust of Lenin and flew the red flag over the town hall. Yet the date of this letter was 1996, only a year before the so-called new Labour landslide.
Hodge, like new Labour, was supposed by then to have changed her deepest red spots and to have completely reinvented herself; to have become rich, presentable and socially ambitious. She was by then an inner-circle Islington new Labour luvvie, friend of Tony, confidante of Cherie, a Blair babe and a crony reliably devoted to the Project, part of which was to persuade voters that old Labour's hardline state interventionism had been discredited and dumped.
Undeterred, as so often, by ludicrous contradictions in her life, Hodge wrote blithely on, in Stalinist vein. "The state has only intervened" (in children's early years), she continued, with evident regret at this lamentable failure of the state to get in on babies from birth, "at points of crisis when a child is thought to be at risk."
I wondered then, and I wonder now, how that letter might have struck the many Islington children who were not just at risk, but at risk from the state itself, and who were sexually abused, repeatedly, under the care of the state, in the form of Islington council, while Margaret Hodge was in charge. That scandal emerged in 1992, only 3A years before her startling letter to The Times.
How could she be so disgracefully insolent as to allow herself to say anything at all in public about state care of vulnerable children, or about children at all? Had she not learned what everybody now knows, that the state makes a very bad parent? Why had shame not silenced her, permanently?
Readers may remember the story. Margaret "Enver" Hodge, nicknamed after the dictator of Albania, was where the buck stopped in Islington in 1992. In October of that year the Evening Standard published a painstaking exposure of one of Britain's very worst paedophile scandals, among children in care in Islington.
The abuse was persistent, widespread and, in parts, organised - and it involved council employees, among others. Yet far from setting up a full inquiry, at once, Hodge denounced the newspaper for "sensationalist", "gutter" journalism and complained to the Press Complaints Commission. Five official inquiries then vindicated the stories and the journalists, those low-minded reptiles of the gutter, later won prizes for defending the defenceless.
Hodge admitted she had made a mistake about the Standard's reports. But she has never, ever apologised to the children of Islington. An even halfway decent person would certainly have apologised wholeheartedly to the victims, at the very least.
A truly honourable person of real feeling would have resigned, or at least left public life. A council leader cannot necessarily know the details of everything that goes on and may even be misinformed or misled, but has accepted full responsibility and must resign on principle.
She did not. At least, if her departure in October 1992 was a resignation over this, I am unaware of it and would welcome clarification.
The story gets worse. The Evening Standard alleged last week that Hodge was told in April 1990, more than two years before the scandal became public, that something was very seriously wrong. Two senior frontline social workers are now prepared to blow the whistle publicly; they say that Hodge failed in 1990 to take their warnings seriously and refused to give them extra staff and money to conduct further investigations. They now say they continued to submit warning reports that their superiors, and Hodge, did not take seriously.
Perhaps it will emerge one day how many innocent children suffered and how many guilty adults got away during the resulting delay.
When in 1995 an independent report backed up the newspaper reports, Hodge said: "It would be inappropriate for me to comment." But why? Why not simply apologise, at least? Yet this is the woman who, most inexplicably, Tony Blair has just chosen to make his new minister for children. One can only gasp.
It means, among other things, that she will be responsible for the government's response to the Victoria Climbie report (which they have now delayed). It is incomprehensible.
Perhaps Blair feels, in the spirit of his new minister's letter to The Times, that "for too long the early years of a child's life" have been kept out of the power of his government and of Enver Hodge. Perhaps he simply doesn't know of her little problem at Islington, though that is hard to believe since she is so prominent in the Blair inner circle. Perhaps his advisers did not know of it, though every journalist in Britain did. Perhaps they thought it unimportant.
My own view is that at a profound level they see nothing wrong with her and with people like her. They don't understand the meaning of shame. It doesn't embarrass them. There is very little that could. Hodge is new Labour incarnate, and I think we must admit that we tend to have the politicians we deserve.
That's why she is a heroine of our time. People like her are the people who make it to power and influence. But she's not alone. I intend to come back to some of the others.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 06, 2003 | Comments (7)
