Letter from a neighbour

A VOTER’S MANIFESTO

VOTING.

More than two hundred years ago Thomas Hobbes pointed out that it was the task of politicians to make life for us all less nasty, less brutish and less short. Even taking into account the times in which we live such considerations are still a reasonable guide. You can apply it to what politicians say.

As someone who is a member of the Electoral Reform Society and after half a century of experience of elections I feel it is sad that there is so much “apathy” about. During the nineteenth century many people fought all their lives to ensure that our system became fair. In many ways it still isn’t. I think this election is more important than many people think because we have reached a position where commonsense indicates that it is not in the national interest for either of the main parties to secure outright victory. We need change. We need a better electoral system. There are problems that all the politicians seem unlikely to consider. The rest of this letter looks at some of the reasons why this is the case.

The state we are in seems at first sight to justify complacency particularly for those of us who live in reasonably comfortable retirement. As a passionate believer in lifelong learning I am aware that complacency is never an option. It is kind of egoism we dare not accept.

CRIME & PUNISHMENT: YOB CULTURE

This is a subject I have written to all the major political leaders about. The answers I got were informative. But there is no time or space to go into those answers here. At an earlier stage in my life I spent some time in the youth service something that Mrs Thatcher destroyed. There is little understanding of yob culture amongst the politicians and even less enthusiasm for tackling it. Twenty five years ago Mrs Thatcher destroyed the youth service, an institution which was primarily there to help teenagers adjust to society in a constructive manner.

We do have a problem with violent crime. The incidence of it has increased since the sixties. We lock up twice as many people now as we did then at a cost of £45,000 per prisoner per year. It is elementary arithmetic to work out that the cost of all this is in billions. We lock up many more people than our European neighbours. Very few countries lock up a greater percentage. The reasons for this increase in the prison population are many and complex: but it cannot be a simple coincidence that violent crime committed by young males between fifteen and twenty-five increased dramatically after the dissolution of the youth service.

Original culpability for this state of affairs has to lie with the Conservatives. Subsequent culpability lies with the present government “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime” really! Youth offending teams, asbos, and fines are all inadequate measures. Using a cliché they amount to an attempt to close the door after the horse has bolted. The current conservative policy “Let’s lock em up” is as expensively impractical as the plethora of government measures is inappropriate. We actually need an active trained youth service. We need a civilian form of national service perhaps one that looks at community needs which could in part be addressed by the energy of young people constructively directed particularly those young people currently described as Neets (not in education employment or training). Ecologically we need action to combat pollution; these young people could be employed in the replanting of forests throughout the United Kingdom. In the middle ages most of the UK was covered in forest; now we have fewer forests than our continental neighbours. Not only would all these trees give off oxygen they would also consume much of the water that presently causes so much flooding. There are obviously many things such an army of young people could do. It’s this kind of positive attack that we need to undermine yob culture. We have plenty of that here. Nationally there are forty attacks on fire services every day; some of them when firemen are lured to a location by false calls. This is yob culture in action

This is the kind of joined up thinking that seems to be beyond most of our politicians who once they are elected do more or less as they like for the next four years

IMMIGRATION.

This is an emotional subject where there is a great deal of misinformation and hype put out by tabloid newspapers. Most of us do not know that more people leave the UK each year than actually arrive here! They also assume that most of the immigrants coming here are third world asylum seekers. The reality is that most people, who come here, come from the EU and after that US citizens are the largest other single group. Muslim and third world immigrants are a minority. It’s wise to control this but hysterical to make it a major issue.

TRANSPORT & PUBLIC SERVICES.

Today as I write this railway workers are marching on Whitehall to present the case for returning both ownership and responsibility for railways to the state. Judging by the shambles which passes for railways in the UK, the case for this has been adequately made. Our railways are the least efficient and most expensive in Europe and there are managers being paid half a million pounds a year to run them! Public transport in general is extremely poor in these islands, worse than anywhere else in Western Europe. Our inadequate congested roads bear witness to this. On islands such as ours good public transport is essential. We need services not a collection of private companies whose main concerns are with profit and exorbitant salaries for inadequate managers. At present none of the major parties has anything sensible to say about public transport. It is incredible that the cheapest and most efficient way to get from Carlisle to London is to plan your journey well in advance, drive to Newcastle airport, get a cheap airline ticket to Stansted and take the train from there to central London. It will be faster and cheaper than the train! You will be using an airline founded by a Greek.

We cannot cover the country in concrete. The obvious and ecologically beneficial way to tackle our communication problems is greater use of public transport. If we want people to use it then its got be cheap and accessible. It cannot be a vehicle for profit and giant managerial salaries. (Eg Arriva trains CEO £500,000. plus). The spread of acronyms associated with railways perhaps echoes the muddle: Railtrack, Network Rail, ATOC etc.

Both major parties believe that private = good, public = bad. Is this sensible? Good public services require “high morale” amongst the involved workforce. Privatisation brings with it considerable insecurity which undermines morale and frequently leads to fractious services. I find it sad that I can remember what it was like to work for London Transport when most employees were proud to wear the uniform. Now there is plethora of route privatisations and a cacophony of companies involved and obviously little co-ordination and even less consideration for passengers. Is this the way forward? It’s the fashion to treat all services as businesses. Are schools businesses? Are hospitals businesses? Some commentators call this the Thatcherite consensus. Blair calls it New Labour. What would you call it?

HOUSING

The last senior politician to tackle housing problems successfully was Harold Macmillan some forty years ago. Initially the Thatcherite approach to housing had some appeal. People who owned their own houses would automatically look after them with a sense of responsibility resulting in the elimination of sink estates. It has not happened quite like that has it? In practice the initiative has driven up house prices and the stock of housing has not been sufficient to satisfy demand. The end result vast swathes of the country closed to first time buyers. There is now an unmet need for housing in many parts of the UK which can only be tackled by political action. There is little sign of it from any major party.
The full force of the conundrum can be conceived when we consider the plight of a young couple leaving university with £40.000 worth preparing to tackle a mortgage in the region of £200.000 plus! How would any of us like to cope with that? Where are the political answers?

FINANCING PUBLIC SERVICES.

Privatisation has been the legacy of the last Conservative governments. New Labour has taken up these right wing policies with as much enthusiasm as Thatcher and Major. Some privatisations have worked: telephones are an example but many have signally failed: the failure of railways is the obvious one. There are academic arguments about the validity of other privatisations. They all provide very large salaries for senior executives and wage cuts for the workers involved. Lawyers and politicians have tended to do well out of them.
But most of us remain unaware of the scale and scope of privatisations and of the enormous dimension of the public equity which has been handed over to the private sector. PPP and PFI are the acronyms we have all become aware of. For instance the very first hospital which cost £13 million to build has resulted in a £37 million return to investors. That’s nice work for those involved but it’s our cash that’s gone walkabout and the next generation that’ll still be paying!

QUANGOES.

These are manna from heaven for politicians. They were first used by Mrs Thatcher as a means of putting some kinds of decision making at one remove from parliament. “Let’s shift responsibility and find someone else to blame” If anything goes wrong, you can blame the quango concerned. They now control great swathes of our public life at one remove from the politicians. Appointments to them are not easily understood and they give politicians plenty of scope for patronage.
Some examples: the Highways Agency, the NSPCC, (Capita has virtually become one), the Further Education Funding Council. They are fundamentally undemocratic and we should make attempts to repatriate many of the services they dominate to direct political control. How else can we be sure that they are accountable? Oh yes let’s have another regulator! Do you know what I am thinking?
Believe it or not but an argument can be made that control of education is less democratic now than it was in 1895? Progress! What progress?

LOCAL TAXATION

The first criterion that applies to a tax is that it should be related to peoples’ ability to pay. Taxes that don’t do this are referred to as flat taxes. Council tax is a flat tax which one suspects the current government has used as a second income tax. It has risen much faster than inflation and for retired people represents an ever increasing proportion of their restricted incomes. Now with revaluation just ahead of us this tax threatens to overwhelm us all. Really the only insurance against an inequitable property tax is a charge against income. People who would rather it stayed as it is produce many arguments against it but it should be simple enough to relate our local tax to our ordinary tax code. Yes it is a kind of fair poll tax.
This consideration brings us to the notion of a fairer tax system. I feel that income tax should not be levelled at all on incomes less than £15000. But that would be a subject for greater discussion. After all people in this income bracket are paying a lot of tax: vat, insurance premium tax, national insurance, the fuel tax surcharge, rates etc.

NHS

I was seriously ill thirty five years ago and received excellent care in an NHS hospital where the senior sister controlled the ward, the doctors looked after medical care and an almoner dealt with the public. There was no sign of managers. Why do we need numerous NHS managers on salaries well over 100,000! That’s always been a mystery to me.
There is plenty of controversy over MRSA. In the rest of Western Europe the super bug has been defeated so why is it apparently so virulent here? The main reason must be inadequate cleaning. Although everyone now knows that privatized cleaning has been disastrous our politicians have been slow to learn the lessons. But health services are difficult to provide because as they get better we all expect them to be better still. Our expectations cannot be met.
It remains true to Bevan’s ideal: respond to clinical need not to “ability to pay”. We should be grateful for that.

EDUCATION.

Education has become a political football. That’s a shame. If we want to look for an education minister who enjoyed public confidence and political punch then we have to go back to Sir Edward Boyle! 1944! “Choice” is being banded about by politicians as something that the public wants. Yet when the public does indicate clearly what they want as in Northumberland right now, the politicians from Milliband downwards tell them they want something else.
In a county like this for many people there is no practical choice. Keswick, Wigton, Aspatria, Kirby Lonsdale; in all these places there is only one secondary school and the only practical policy is to make the schools involved as good as they can be. The only slogan that really makes sense is “Every school a good school”
When we look at our international performance it’s not good. Sweden 6% illiterate UK 15%. This should tell us that our principle educational aim should be to eliminate illiteracy before we worry about faith based schools, special schools failing schools, league tables, ofsted, and all the other digressions which our politicians are so fond of.
Many years ago I read an educational book recommended by Sir Edward Boyle, it was called “The School of Barbiana” the first line within it read “Giuseppe has a problem” It went on to indicate that the whole school had a problem. The school involved was a great success. The inference was that education should be “child-centred” and what have we got a bundle of notions about a multitude of schools offering “choice”; something that in practice hardly ever exists and a system which is still failing the least able. Failure is very costly to us all in crime, blighted lives, alienation and even poor productivity by society as a whole. This observation will not be popular with the Woodheads of this world but it’s really quite simple: “Collective excellence ultimately depends upon individual achievement. Child-centred education is not woolly headed poppycock; it’s the necessary first step to national success. Let’s stand for the individual. It’s in the word education…bringing out the best. Putting it another way we might quote Charles Kingsley’s advice to children “Do as you would be done by”. It goes for us all.
And what kind of society is it that rewards young people who achieve educational success with a bucketful of debt?

THE LOTTERY

A brief consideration of the lottery gives us clues about the kind of society we live in. Introduced to assist good causes it sounds very creditable. What has it done? It’s proved a source of finance for the government with the first tranche of takings going straight back to the government as tax. It’s been used to support government spending as with the latest “School Meals Trust” another unnecessary quango”. It provides extra directorships for managers at the top of some of Britain’s biggest companies who actually run it under the masthead of Camelot. The government promised a “not for profit lottery”, they gave us Camelot. You don’t need a lottery win if you are at the heart of it. No wonder Branson was not allowed to run it on a “not for profit” basis really the only ethical justification for state involvement. What has it done for all those good causes that miss out on grants? It’s impaired their ability to raise their own money. Does it deserve your support?

PENSIONS

SERPS (created by Barbara Castle) was generally recognized as an excellent way to create good pensions. Mrs Thatcher destroyed the system. People do not trust pension providers either state or private. There really can be no proper provision for pensions until there is a national political consensus on how they can be provided. Stealing pensions is fashionable. Everyone knows this. There is little trust around an until there is pensions will continue to be inadequate and presumably some pensioners will continue to die of cold./

CONCLUSION

As an entrepreneurial pensioner I feel that it’s a comment on us all that more pensioners die of cold here than in Finland! We have become a nation which is unfair to both young and old. With a government that says its left of centre we still have inadequate pensions, relatively high taxes and young people facing educational debt and astronomical mortgages? What kind of way forward is this? What has either main party got to offer? What is obvious is that we need a parliament that is not dominated by either of them. We need a country where the driving idea comes from another British political philosopher Jeremy Bentham “Let’s run things for the greatest good of the greatest number”. Currently we look like a nation that is run principally for the benefit of a new “managerial” class.

Thank-you for reaching the end of this letter.

I hope you enjoy voting Philip Nash 76 Croft Road.

The main disadvantage of FPTP is that it freezes the electoral status quo. Up to the early 'eighties there were two parties contesting elections, but the consensus broke down with the arrival, in 1981, of the Liberal Democrats. it should be obvious that three major parties make it possible for most constituencies or wards to return representatives with only a minority of the votes. Since it means that most voters would have voted against the elected representative the system could hardly be called democratic.
Other new parties can begin taking part in elections, parties which, for all we know, cold include a governing party of the future. But FPTP ensures that only those aready established stand a chance of winning.