New Labour – Page 17

Who You Gonna Call, Ghostbusters?

Published on May 7, 2008

For once the Guardian has a comment piece, by Madeleine Bunting, that tells it like it actually is for the thousands upon thousands of low paid and badly-treated people condemned to live their daily lives in quiet and increasingly panicky desperation as a result of New Labour’s complete capitulation to the corpocracy and their wilful destruction of access to free or low cost legal services:

The months of sitting on the commission listening to people’s accounts of their working lives and to those who tried to offer advice when things went wrong provided a glimpse of what an obstacle course it is when you’re poor. It’s not always the lack of material resources that cuts deepest, but the lack of power and the absence of options. When you’re sacked or when you don’t get the sick pay or holiday pay you are owed, how do you fight back? How do you find the employment adviser to help or the courage to stand up to an employer and the sheer guts to take a case to an employment tribunal with no legal aid or a lawyer to help you? The answer is that more often you don’t, you can’t – and that’s how you get trapped in bad jobs.

Poor pay is inextricably bound up with a culture of institutional negligence: no one ensures workers know their rights or how to find out about them; a myriad of enforcement agencies with tiny budgets confuse everyone, and the legal system to arbitrate on abuse is slow and inaccessible. While the government has consulted and dithered, low-paid, insecure work has flourished like some rapacious mould. The face-to-face legal advisers (which the most vulnerable are known to find easier to deal with) have been axed and replaced with cheap websites and telephone helplines (but how do you know about them?). English language lessons have been cut. While millions of pounds are devoted to advertising for benefit fraud, the amount allocated to advertise the national minimum wage was, until a recent increase, a sixth of that spent on a government campaign urging people to use tissues when they sneeze.

I was one of those face to face advisors for a long time and immediately post Labour’s landslide in ’97 a government packed with provincial solicitors and honourable members of the Bar began to deliberately dismantle the already precarious network of community legal services and advice agencies with the imposition of the cost cutting, bureaucratising and horribly complicated legal services contract scheme.

It was dressed up to look like a bonanza in funding for the voluntary sector and a boon for the regularisation of patchy legal services – but it soon became clear that the aim was to control, divide and demolish opposition to corporate law firms while eliminating several campaigning thorns in the side of government as a happy side-effect.

Put broadly, advice services mostly staffed by volunteers were now to compete with high street practitioners and big professional law practices – and each other – for legal aid funding, despite the imbalance in staffing and resources. Advice agencies staffed by volunteers with already shaky finances could not even begin to put a legal aid bid together, but other funding streams from other national and local schemes were gradually turned off; after all, there was a proper scheme now, apply to that.

But even if you could jump through the hoops required under the contract scheme legal aid cash itself was strictly cut back, with, in some instances, an 80% chance of success being required by the Board before allowing more than a standard hour’s funding. (When I left it was about 42 pounds an hour on a case, out of which had to come all and any overheads including admin and support staff and all the on-cost that employing paid staff implies.) Any lawyer or advice worker knows it can take an hour just to get someone to open up to you, let alone assess the evidence or take a statement and especially not to estimate the chances of success; how many potentially winnable cases, with say a 50 or 60% chance of succeeding on the first hour’s investigation, have failed at that very first hurdle?

I was one of the first law graduates to leave university with a student loan and it’s still a millstone round my neck. I had a place to go the Bar but couldn’t take it. A Tory government and the banks between them made sure working class women with children had as many obstacles as possible put in their way. A loans or grant for necessary professional training? How dare you, silly woman.

I had to watch and grit my teeth as my dozy friend with the well off parents in the home counties funded her long party through bar school and arrange a cushy pupillage for her in a relative’s chambers, despite her emotional instability and worrying drug use. No millstones round the neck for her.

I also watched as another friend, academically talented and with better results lose out on a Phd scholarship because the head of department and the other candidate had both been in the navy and knew the same people. I somehow suspect that she was black, working class and female had something to do with it too… which is why we worked for a Labour victory in ’97, despite clause IV and Tony Blair. We thought they’d be different. Listen to my hollow laughing.

But now it’s even worse for anyone who is at all interested either in becoming a lawyer and working in public interest law. You can either work fulltime in another job while studying fulltime, and almost kill yourself, or you can burden yourself with an amount of debt that will cripple you forever unless you can snag a place in a corporate law firm and again, half-kill yourself writing boilerplate contracts and doing some spotty senior partner’s nephew’s bidding for twenty-five years to pay it off.

Legal education is about much more than just educating lawyers, though – it’s about making information about the law available to the widest number of people so as to aid democracy. Rights and responsibilities, innit? An informed populace is an empowered and involved populace, yeah?

Isn’t that just one of Labour’s multifarious core values? Well no, not exactly:

A 62-year-old man from Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, on income support and facing eviction from his home of 50 years, was forced repeatedly to travel by public transport to west London to find a lawyer to advise him on legal aid.

His story came to light as a coalition of groups that provide legal and social welfare advice prepared to highlight the legal aid ‘desertification’ of England and Wales in the run-up to the introduction of the biggest reforms of public funding in more than 50 years.

A survey of law centres throughout the country by the Law Centre Federation, undertaken for Independent Lawyer magazine, has revealed the extent of the problem. It found that:

· Nine out of 10 centres regularly turned away clients eligible for legal aid;

· Seven reported that their ability to offer access to legal advice was deteriorating;

· One noted an alarming trend of violence towards staff;

· Seven identified specific gaps in provision where, for example, there was no publicly funded employment, housing or immigration advice in their area; and

· Three law centres reported problems finding help for victims of domestic violence.

‘The survey is a snapshot of what’s happening in the areas law centres serve,’ says Steve Hynes, director of the Law Centres Federation. ‘While we acknowledge that demand has always outstripped supply for civil legal services, there is a strong perception that things are getting worse. If the reforms are implemented as proposed, we will quickly see further fraying at the edges.’.

The negligence is deliberate. Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead? Why, such an informed populace migjht start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labour’s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion. Hence the policy of dismantling community legal services and access to civil justice, and don’t get me started on the deliberate destruction of criminal legal aid.

Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing ‘inefficiency’ of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against ‘the system’, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)

The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by ‘accredited’ representatives who’ve done a training course – many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your ‘own’ solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.

One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside”. Now, “the system is in meltdown.” If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.

Keep ’em ignorant, keep ’em quiet.

Now a new set of legal aid reforms has been published by Justice Minister Jack Straw and on first glance it looks like bad news for those still doggedly fighting away trying to protect the rights of ordinary people. Injustice – it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Go Cry, Emo Party

Published on May 3, 20082 Comments

Is there any way for Labour to regain any shred of credibility as a working class party, after the complete and utter fuckup they’ve made of things? Because if not, Labour is a dead party.

Well, possibly. First, if socialists rejoin the party en masse and use their heft to stack constituency and regional committees – a return to entryism, but in the open. Then if they get rid of Brown and an entire discredited generation of leadership, elect a new, visibly English (as opposed to Scots) and working class populist leader,

My money is still on Alan Johnson as leader. Johnson’s man-in-the-street qualities will serve Labour better in the media, a foil to the plummy Establishment Etonians who seem destined to have power (as so much else) dropped in their laps as an unearned benefit of the electorate’s reflexive disgust with the current government. The Tories have little in the way of actual policies – they are as frozen in the headlights of current world conditions as are all the other parties, and that they’ve done so well so far has been because of a mixture of expert media management and New Labour’s own exhausted disarray.

Politics in the next two years, if economic forecasts are accurate, is likely to become ever more class-based as those that have seek to hang on to what they’ve got and the less well-off, taxed beyond endurance, become more and more angry at the rich and those who enable them.

If the Labour party is to survive the left will have to rejoin the party en masse and force a generational putsch of Blairite/ Brownites. Co-opt the party to rescue the brand, in marketing terms; what other left organisation has the same brand presence? Why try to launch an alternative to Labour when the party is ripe for the plucking? There is a crying need for a party that’ll fight class war and which has an actual working class person leading it, rather than the closeted public schoolboys, incompetent Scots party droids, failed suburban solicitors and legacy Labour pubescents we’ve been subjected to so far.

But Emo Labour hasn’t got the gumption for root and branch reform to judge from the lame reaction by Brown and other Labour types on the news this morning. The only chance that Labour just might survive as an electoral force is if the real left get off their self-involved arses and take over a party that’s weak and ripe for the plucking, purge the Blairites and Brownites and force MPs to push through electoral reform pronto.

Hey, it could happen. I’m not holding my breath though. When push comes to shove most leftists would much rather wring their hands and talk theory on blogs than actually get out and do anything. But if Labour is about to be unelectable for yet another generation, the least the actual left can do is try and make it an opposition to reckon with.

The Day After the Night Before

Published on May 2, 2008

Been listening to the response on Five Live to the local elections yesterday and it has been a non-stop parade of longterm Labour voters saying they couldn’t do it this time, that they either didn’t bother to vote, or voted for the Lib Dems or even the Tories. The straw that broke the camel’s back for most of these people? As I said on Wis[s]e Words last week, it’s the 10p tax.

By abolishing the 10p tax band while cutting the 22p tax band to 20p, Labour basically paid for tax cuts for the rich(er) with tax raises for the poor. It removed the final figleaf of respectability from New Labour, who until then had still been able to argue that despite all their crimes abroad, despite the pandering to the rich and the hollowing out of the welfare state, they were still dedicated to helping the poor. But the moment they shafted the poorest in society to pay for a middle class tax cut while being too scared to raise taxes on the truly rich, the little what differed Labour from the Tories was lost.

Which means Labour has lost their one big scare tactic: “vote for us or the Tories get in”. At this point, whatever the Tories do couldn’t be any worse.

Even Sheep Can Turn Savage

Published on April 24, 2008

There are mayoral and local elections looming in Britain and true to New Labour form, the Brown government has manufactured a pre-election crisis that requires all loyal New Labourites to instantly rally round the flag for fear of a Tory victory. But they’ve fucked that up too and now they’re about to get an electoral kicking.

This past few days I’ve been buried in the comment threads about the 10p tax band in the British daily papers and mainstream blogs and of all the comments about how New Labour has targeted the least well-paid to fund tax breaks for the more well-off (while handing 50 billion to bail out the profligate banks) this one sums up best the general tenor:

EastFinchleyite

Comment No. 1295787

April 23 21:51
GBR

In my 50s. Skills and energy winding down. What little I make is through being self-employed. Living on savings and investments until company pension kicks in in 7 years time.

No kids. Not married. Not a chance in hell of being one of the “compensated” so I expect to be damaged by this to the tune of £200 per year or more which is £1500 by the time I get to 60 and then at about £100 per year for the next 5 years. After that who knows.

My NuLabor MP is Rudi Vis. Current majority is 741. I used to be a Labour voter; now I will vote for whoever is most likely to unseat him. 370 more like me and you are toast mate. I have been unhappy with this Government’s illiberal policies for some time (ID cards, 42 days, PFI,PPP etc) but really couldn’t bring myself to vote Tory. Until now. They can’t be any more anti-poor than this. Stuff the rhetoric; any party that increases taxes on the poor to pay for reduced tax for higher earners is beyond the Pale. This has tipped me to voting for the best chance of ditching NuLabor regardless of who they are. Even Boris! Bite me and I bite back.

And there’s many many more like him, all prepared to vote against New Labour next week. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling shouldn’t be feeling smug this morning, although I expect they’re thinking themselves very clever now that Frank Field, self-appointed leader of the glorious 10 pence backbench revolution, has folded in favour of a few empty and entirely conditional promises of ….what, exactly?

In exchange for a letter outlining possible avenues of future potential action that may or may not be possible and which will be kicked into the long grass as soon as the next crisis comes along, Field and his fellow would-be insurrectionists have betrayed millions of the low-paid, who are feeling the pain in their pay statements and overdrafts right now, not in some far-off misty future of indefinite clauses and conditional half-promises.

The 10p tax backbench rebellion may have melted away like so much spring snow, but then it never was a real rebellion in the first place was it? It was just so much political theatre; funny how Frank Field always likes to stage his backbench rebellions when all looks ominous for Labour and usually just before a crucial vote or election, isn’t it?

Crisis? Potential vote of no confidence? Cue Field and his rebels, party whips, loyal journos and Polly Toynbee: “Oh noes! The sky is falling! The Tories might get in! Hold your nose and support New Labour!” But you only have to look at his voting record to see that Field is no old left Labour rebel and that his staged insurrection was just another bit of recycled spin.

Blair did that all the time: faced with defeat No. 10 would provoke a showdown which the government always won because of course the whips know all the MPs’ dirty secrets and can easily pressure backbenchers into backing off. Backbenchers would threaten rebellion, a face-saving agreement (which was really no agreement at all) would be cooked up between backbenchers and Alistair Campbell; the ‘rebellion’ would then mysteriously evaporate, leaving the government looking triumphant whilst at the same time reassuring local electorates that at least their MP wasn’t one of those slimy Blairite bastards. Neat.

It’s a good trick to pull off and more often than not it’s worked for New Labour, because at least when Blair lied and spun he did it semi-competently. But Gordon Brown can fuck up anything, even deceit. In any other political generation a Prime Minister who had been accused of outright falsehoods by a columnist in a broadsheet paper would sue for libel. But of course he can’t, because he is a liar and not just a liar but an incompetent fool of a liar:

A third possibility, of course, is that what Brown said was untrue. After all, once the budget was public on March 21, it did not take long for the IFS and the opposition parties to work out that the numbers of losers far exceeded any figure like 25,000 (publicly, Brown gave no figure for the number of losers in his speech to parliament). Today the estimate is that more than 5 million of the poorest voters have lost out. The gap between what Brown said to Blair and what is now acknowledged is so great that it appears fairly clear that Brown gave Blair false information. My information is that Blair thinks this is the case.

I wondered when Blair would stick the knife in. Kettle goes on:

One can guess at many reasons why Brown behaved in this way – and any theory is not much more than a guess. Maybe Brown and Balls didn’t trust Blair and didn’t want to hand him a reason for reopening the budget and disrupting their strategy. Maybe Brown and Balls, with the premiership at last in their sights, had such accumulated contempt towards Blair that they thought that they could fob him off with false information. Or maybe Brown and Balls thought the number of losers did not matter in the bigger scheme of things. Perhaps they were so fixated on using the budget as a springboard to launch Brown towards an early general election that they thought it made overriding political sense to produce a tax-cutting budget that would cause confusion among the Tories – irrespective of the marginal impact on the poor.

For once Martin Kettle gets it right – they just don’t care.

Take Brown’s continued insistence on no deviation from his disastrous tax policy, regardless of the results and add it to Ed Balls’ “So what?” moment at Budget questions in the Commons and it’s clear as day the current government really don’t give a damn what the fallout from their decisions is, or who gets hurt, as long as Labour hang on to power just that little bit longer.

That truth is certainly sinking in to many voters as a result of 10p tax fiasco; those who’ve taken the time to publicly comment are almost unanimous in planning to give Labour a bloody nose in the local elections and they don’t care who they have to vote for to do it either, whether it’s Boris or the BNP. For far too long Labour have treated the poorly-paid like sheep, forgetting that sheep also have teeth and will bite when cornered.

As for Frank Fields’ empty histrionics and his immediate acceptance of what any idiot could see was an empty promise from an empty suit, written in disappearing ink on soluble paper, well, that particular bad actor will be also up for re-election at some point. I hope he’s got a job to go to.

A License To Break The Law

Published on April 12, 20081 Comment

If there is any one thing that lays bare the rottenness of the British political system for all to see it’s the news that following the court’s excorating decision on the Saudi Arms for Oil and bribery deal yesterday, the Tories are to support Labour in giving the Attorney General powers to shut down politically sensitive criminal investigations just by citing ‘national security’.

As with the attempt to censor coroners’ courts in the matter of soldiers’ deaths by inadequate equipment in Afghanistan, not only do they want to cover up their own past lawbreaking they want to print themselves a license to break the law in the future.

We cannot question or protest, it because it is secret. Why is it secret? Because it’s secret. Shut up, it’s national security.

But national security has little to do with this nor do the jobs of arms industry workers, though the profits of the arms companies is certainly a consideration. What’s really at stake is the personal security of the great and the good in parliament, the cabinet, the civil service, diplomacy and finance, who have committed crimes not just of political expediency but greed, trading others’ human rights for their own personal aggrandisement in order to mainstain the arms and oil industries and their longterm collusion with a vicious theocratic dynasty that tortures and beheads its own people (and sometimes ours, too)to maintain its power.

The Al-Yamamah deal and the corruption around it well precedes the current administration – Thatcher set it in motion – but New Labour joined in with enthusiasm once they had a taste of Saudi largesse themselves. New Labour’s starry eyed petty-bourgeois, tempted by riches and power, were easily persuaded that to reveal and prosecute in the Al-Yamamah deal could bring down the entire edifice of British government – and worse prominent politicians of both parties could go to jail. That there’s a revolving door between government and the the arms and oil industries has been a standing political joke for decades. .

Few hands are clean in any party and then of course, if the SFO pursues Al-Yamamah, then it must pursue Bush the CIA and the US government, since the deal was handled through Bush family vehicle Riggs Bank. the US justice department is considering a investigation, but if it’s shut down here, then what will there be to investigate?

For the sake of saving their own skins and Bush’s both parties are handing a future government and Prime Minister – and who knows what or who that’ll be in ten years, given the current fashion for repression – the power to commit whatever crimes they like under cover of protecting us. They mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.