Manufacturing consent – Page 18

75 quid? They could’ve got the same result with Jaffa Cakes…

Published on September 23, 2007

Tory blog Ian Dale’s Diary is alleging that Labour’s consultation process (the epitome of which is to be the laughable ‘citizens jury’) is a complete sham; and worse, that attendees are being paid cash in envelopes for their participation.

£75 for a Consultation? That’ll Do Nicely…

The word “consultation” means different things to different people. To me (and hopefully you) it would mean asking local people what they think of a particualr policy or plan. To New Labour it means something entirely different, as you are about to discover. t’s from the Dr Ray’s Focal Spot blog. In this post, Dr Ray, a hospital consultant describes the consultation process for the closure of a local District General Hospital. Perhaps I shouldn’t be shocked by this, but I am…

Yesterday evening I had an insight into the workings of Nulabours “consultation” process on the planned closure of NHS District General Hospitals and replacement with dumbed down polyclinics.A few weeks ago invitations to attend a public consultation were sent to consultants at our Trust. We were only given one day to reply for the meeting in the near future even though we have to give 6 weeks notice of leave because of “choose and book”. Obviously this meant that most of us could not attend but one consultant did take up the invitation.The location of the meeting was kept secret until three days before the event and when this consultant was eventually told the location and turned up in Birmingham for the “Citizens Jury” it turned out that medical staff were outnumbered 2:1 by laypeople specifically chosen by an agency to attend the event. The media were present and had obviously been invited to publicise the event.

The delegates were split up into groups and each allocated an electronic voting device. A “minder” was allocated to each group.Then the stars of the show arrived: Gordon Brown, Alan Johnson and Ara Darzi.There followed a rapid succession of questions from the podium on which the delegates were asked to vote. The minder was available to suggest the best answer if there was any doubt.Strangely, almost all the votes were 2:1 in favour of Nulabour’s policy. Even the question: “Would you prefer gynaecological surgery to be carried out in your GP practice even if it meant the closure of your DGH facility?” was answered with 2:1 in favour.Following the “consultation” the medical delegates were told to leave but the other 2/3 of the audience were kept back and each given an envelope.

My colleague was intrigued by this and managed to catch one of the “chosen ones” and ask about the contents. Each envelope contained £75 in cash! So now the consultation is over and the results indicate there is overwhelming public and doctor support for closing down the DGHs. I can only say that the way the voting was done makes the “Blue Peter” voting fraud seem like, well, “Blue Peter”. According to the Downing Street website there are nine more of these “consultations” due around the county. Thats an awful lot of people to bribe with taxpayers money, but once they’re done the business of closing the DGHs can start in earnest.

I’d like to think that this will be followed up by Her Magesty’s Press.

I’d like to think so too, but unless Greg Palast gets given the editorship of a broadsheet paper it’s doubtful.

Alhough the potential bribery aspect is a new wrinkle to me, anyone who’s participated in a community consultation exercise at any level during the past ten years will know for themselves that community consultation, while it may be fantastic in theory, is in political practice little more than a tick box exercise where there’s only one box to tick.

I’ve taken part in several consultation exercises, as a service user, an activist and in a professional capacity, and every single one has been a joke where we’ve been deliberately guided toward a predermined goal – though the tea and biscuits werre nice (foil-wrapped chocolate if we were lucky).

Apparently these days you get a bit more than nice china and unlimited gingernuts as an incentive.

It’s crystal-clear to those who’ve had dealings with New Labour that consultation exercises, or whatever the latest euphemism is, are totally empty gestures. The result has already been decided, the facts remain to be fixed around the policy.

Brown’s New Labour get their political way by dishonesty and spin whilst being at the same time political zealots comvinced of their own rectitude, even though evidence says otherwise. To deal with the cognitive dissonance that creates they must have us publicly agree with their policies, even if we don’t.

That’s what consultations are really for, maintaining an image of approving popular democracy, while doing what you want anyway.

Mind you, a consultation contract is a marvellous method of bestowing largesse to political or personal loyalists. Oddly enough they then often miraculously find that the populace is broadly in tune with policy goals. Voila, instant validation, except when it’s not – but then it’s all “the methodology must have been wrong, we need another consultation” . And another fat cheque from the Treasury.

Of Reichs and Men

Published on September 17, 2007

UPDATE: Sorry, no InstaDean for UC Irvine. An agreement has been reached, But the point made below stands.

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The University of California prides itself on being at the educational cutting edge; and it is, if by ‘curring edge’ what you mean is ‘in the vanguard of the new conservative reich’.

Not content with resting on its laurels after producing such horrors as UC Berkeley’s Boalt Professor of Law John “Torture Memo” Yoo, now via Lawyers, Guns and Money comes the story of the university’s politically-motivated dismissal of eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky:

IRVINE, Calif. — In a showdown over academic freedom, a prominent legal scholar said Wednesday that the University of California, Irvine’s chancellor had succumbed to conservative political pressure in rescinding his contract to head the university’s new law school, a charge the chancellor vehemently denied.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a well-known liberal expert on constitutional law, said he had signed a contract Sept. 4, only to be told Tuesday by Chancellor Michael V. Drake that he was voiding their deal because Chemerinsky was too liberal and the university had underestimated “conservatives out to get me.”

Later Wednesday, however, Drake said there had been no outside pressure and that he had decided to reject Chemerinsky, now of Duke University and formerly of the University of Southern California, because he felt the law professor’s commentaries were “polarizing” and would not serve the interests of California’s first new public law school in 40 years.

Oh, give me a break. No outside pressure? My ass. This kind of political censorship and pressure is not new to the university; it has quite a history of political repression and coercion.

War! What Is It Good For? Keeping Pundits’ Careers Afloat…

Published on September 10, 2007

Truer words have seldom been spoken than Michael Tomasky’s in this morning’s Grauniad, on the way the talking heads provided the impetus for the illegal invasion and how they continue to drive the Iraq war along, despite all the evidence that it’s lost:

[…]

Cynosure though he will be today, Petraeus in fact has only a limited role to play in seeing to it that the US continue its mad engagement. The stars of that dispiriting drama will be the phalanx of foreign policy experts based in Washington, who will, in the wake of the general’s testimony, fan out across the cable channels and op-ed pages, arguing that giving the surge one more chance is the only “serious” option.

These, you see, are the “serious” foreign policy people. It’s good work if you can get it. You may be thinking that you become a serious foreign policy person by often being right about foreign policy. But this just shows how little you know about how these things work.

No – you become a serious foreign-policy person in Washington by dint of meeting two criteria. First, you should adopt the most hawkish position you can plausibly adopt, so that you come across as appropriately “tough-minded”. Second, you must note what all the other serious foreign policy people are saying and take care to ensure that your position is sufficiently indistinguishable from theirs for you to be lumped in with them when the time comes for the Washington Post to write a group profile of Washington’s serious tough-minded foreign policy people.

At the moment the tv talking heads’re nominally Republican: give it a couple of years and they’ll be equally nominal Democrats. The new pundit cohort is practicing its on-air persona already (Ezra, Matt Y. et al – yes, I’m looking at you).

Either way, nominal Republicans or nominal Dems, they’re paid pundits first and foremost and they don’t want that to change. Why throttle the goose that lays such golden eggs?

For skilled practitioners of the art, this tends to work out marvellously, career-wise. Take Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, the two emblematic seriousistas of the Bush age. Both are scholars at the Brookings Institution, a centre-left thinktank, and both are nominal Democrats. Both were also early fans of the Iraq war. Pollack achieved special notoriety with his book The Threatening Storm, which persuaded many a liberal who might otherwise have looked askance at a war undertaken by the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney war to support it.

Here in America, we’re taught that in the realm of ideas, no less than of products of commerce, the free market sorts everything out – it rewards the good ideas and punishes the bad ones, and at the end of the day fairness will obtain.

Excuse me while I splutter with laughter.

Well, the famous invisible hand seems to have left the world of foreign policy seriousness untouched, because Pollack and O’Hanlon, far from paying any price for their errors, are just as celebrated as ever. They published a major op-ed piece in the New York Times in late July touting the progress being made in Iraq, and O’Hanlon’s byline appeared again on the page a mere five weeks later. This week, cable bookers will be calling them so often that they might as well set up cots in the studios.

Of course, all this hasn’t worked out too well for the country or the world. But that’s tolerable in Washington, because the important thing here is that the status quo should not be disrupted.

Read more…

Well done Mr Tomasky, but how long has it taken you bloody journalists and pundits to come to this point of view?

Do a word search on this blog and look for ‘status quo’ and you’ll see that “the status quo should not be disrupted” is what I and many, many others have for years been saying is the driver of US domestic and foreign policy, regardless of individual party affiliation.

Do keep up – if only you and your media colleagues had noticed this and spoken out like this 5 years or so ago we might not be in this godawful mess. now