How to get a Tory to agree with Laurie Penny

Nadine Dorries' amendments stem from her own anti-abortion prejudice and don't even deliver what they claim. They are an insidious attempt to restrict access to a service that helps thousands of women every year.

Over the last couple of days Nadine Dories has achieved a remarkable feat. As a result of her activities in the House of Commons and lobbying on the Health and Social Care Bill I find myself appalled by Government policy and in complete agreement Laurie Penny of the New Statesman - something I never really thought would happen.

Now I've never been a tremendous fan of the MP for Mid-Bedfordshire. She has campaigned to reduce the time limit on abortion and is a member of the socially conservative Cornerstone Group (motto: Faith, Flag, Family - creepy or what?). I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on a huge range of issues. Nevertheless, this week she has surpassed even her own chequered history.

Dorries worries that women seeking abortions don't have access to proper counselling before going through with the procedure. Some of the principal sources of this counselling are the abortion providers themselves. Since these providers receive money from the NHS every time they perform an abortion, they are financially incentivised to counsel vulnerable women to have abortions.

This is where the nonsense starts.

It paints abortion providers as institutions not that exist not to furnish women with the ability to choose, but to perform as many abortions as they can. This is mental! How would Dorries react to the suggestion that midwives should be prevented from advising pregnant women? After all, they depend on women giving birth for their livelihoods!

But, I hear you cry, surely you can't really object to ensuring the counselling we provide is independent? It should help women make the decision that's right for them not just provide a justification. Fine. But there are two responses to this:

1. There's no evidence that the current system doesn't provide independent advice already.
2. THAT'S NOT WHAT THE AMENDMENT DOES.

When you read Dorries' amendments, available here, they don't create a framework for ensuring abortion counselling is independent. Oh, they use the word "independent", sure, but their definition is intriguing:

Information, advice and counselling on abortion is independent where it is provided by:

"either a private organisation that does not itself provide for the termination of pregnancies or a statutory body".

In other words, counselling provided by the Catholic Church is independent. An evangelical Christian telling a teenage girl that she will burn in Hell if she terminates her pregnancy is independent. A professional counsellor employed by Marie Stopes explaining the pros, cons and risks of abortion cannot be independent.

I'll leave it to the experts to tell you the ways in which this will harm vulnerable women. However, I am happy to denounce it as a cynical attempt to manipulate thousands of women into making the decision Dorries wants them to make. It shouldn't be Tory policy and it certainly shouldn't be government policy.

If you agree, you can contact your MP through the Abortion Rights organisation.

An explanation, but not an excuse

The riots in London (and elsewhere in the UK) this week have presented us with a highly uncomfortable truth. A large proportion of our youth are willing, given the opportunity, to commit crime on an unprecedented scale. Faced with a police force unwilling or unable to stop them, they will rampage through their own communities, destroying everything that friends and neighbours have worked hard to build up.

These have been crimes perpetrated almost exclusively by apparently feral youths. Worse still, the victims have been those who should bear the least blame and most credit in these communities. The victims are honest and hardworking, providing important jobs and services where few of either exist. Many of them have risked a great deal to start businesses in difficult areas in the hope of a better future. That these people should have that hope trampled on for ephemeral consumer goods or the momentary high of a thieved bottle of vodka disturbs us all. Their dispassionate willingness to ruin livelihoods chills the blood of those anxiously watching through their own windows, praying the mob does not come for them. The victims were not bankers claiming massive bonuses while presiding over huge losses or politicians fiddling expenses. Neither were these attacks directed at the notoriously trigger-happy police officers of SO19, whatever the rights or wrongs of Mark Duggan's death may be.

All this has contributed to calls for a brand of policing more reminiscent of Cairo or Tehran than London; it has become fashionable, among people as well as politicians, to denounce the rioters as "mindless" and "purely criminal". Meanwhile, some on the left have bent over backwards to justify the looting. At one stage, the Guardian even quoted an historian describing the looting as "a political act". Both of these perspectives misread the truth of the situation.

For years, urban communities across the country have struggled with crime, poverty and drug use. They have been left behind by an economy that has disproportionately rewarded the richest whilst leaving the rest to pick up the scraps. At the same time, the inexorable march of technology has beamed the wealth of the rich into the front rooms of the poor. Quality of life is measured by the clothes you wear, TV's you own and money you can spend above all else.

Politicians have sought to seize the centre ground with policies that appeal to the middle classes. They have rewarded home ownership while shrouding the failure of inner-city education in the cloak of inflated exam results. Drug policies have incarcerated parents in need of treatment, leaving children without role models and resentful of the state. Our adoption laws force willing parents to wait while channelling desperate children into an overstretched care system that abuses and dehumanises them. Too many youth and mental health workers have been dismissed as unnecessary ancillaries rather than key components of the fabric of society.

All of this has served to create a group with a smaller stake in society than any since before the First World War. Children grow up in areas bereft of opportunities in families where few have worked in years. The unchecked march of drug abuse (and pathetically dogmatic response to it) has created a huge number of teenagers for whom law-breaking is the norm. In this context, should we really be surprised that, convinced that the police won't intervene, they go on the rampage?

At the same time, parents seem to have abrogated their responsibilities on a scale hitherto unimagined. The suggestion that perhaps they should have control of their children has too often been greeted with a shrug and a gesture at how few services the state provides for young people. The state has convinced too many people that raising children is its responsibility and not theirs. This has led them to abandon their responsibilities and leave their children to find entertainment on the street. Our benefits system rewards bad choices by funnelling money to teenage mothers and pushing the long-term unemployed onto incapacity benefit. Too often entering the workforce is a foolishly uneconomic decision. For those who do seek work criminal records, drug use and a lack of education has probably permanently excluded them from employment. The only way out exists through crime and many are accustomed to criminality at a young age by their peers and older siblings.

As a result, there is now a group that has little stake in society and no hope of establishing one. They grow up knowing that when the opportunity to profit through crime appears, it should be taken and over the last few days, a myriad of opportunities have opened up in front of them.

These communities have been ignored by politicians of all stripes - Labour because they will vote for nobody else, so why bother? and Conservatives for the same reason. Politicians have hid from the problems - they are too many and too difficult - and left communities disenfranchised and disenchanted.

This is part of the reason why we had riots and looting in London this week. A group of people who society had tried to ignore were given an opportunity and took it. That is an explanation, but it is not an excuse. After Saturday, people looted because they thought they could get away with it and they wanted to. We must not forget the livelihoods they willingly and knowingly destroyed. Nor must we forget the people made to feel unsafe in their own homes, afraid that their street would be next. We must not forget that these criminals were callous and destroyed the very communities they lived in.

We must think carefully about how we address the reasons why they are in a position where looting makes sense; but we must not lose sight of the fact that they chose to loot because they thought nobody would stop them or punish them. They must be proved wrong.

The Madness of Blue Labour

Staying away from the furore surrounding Ken Clarke today (a more eloquent defence than I can deliver is available here), let us return to Labour's new intellectual direction, Blue Labour.

It seems we must have an enemy...
All politics is, to an extent, confrontational. It is an exercise in choosing one thing over another, one interest over another. Almost always it requires not only one thing to be good, but another thing to be bad. Here at Liberal Tory, we have endeavoured to avoid defining who we are against, a product mostly of the fact that we disagreed with many on some issues: the Tories on immigration, Labour on the economy, the Lib Dems on constitutional reform.

Now, however, the Labour party have dredged up a train of thought that Liberal Tory cannot help but denounce as insane. Blue Labour stands opposed not only to every liberal value held by Liberal Tory, but also stands in denial of every economic fact mankind has so far discovered.

Swinging left by swinging right
The great brains of the party have come together and concluded that for Labour, "the future is conservative". Blue Labour encourages the party to retreat from its position as a leader of progressive liberalism and instead embrace a narrative of Englishness designed to appeal to working class voters on the right. This narrative tells the poor and the vulnerable that their lives have been broken by others in the outside world. It tells them to cling to their 'culture' and to resist change. It tells them that if only they hold fast to their "imagined" communal identity and rail against the evil world outside that their lives and communities will be made new again.

Frankly, this reeks of dog-whistle politics. Labour is embracing the BNP's narrative and abandoning the scores of voters who do not completely relate to "the popular symbols and iconography of Englishness" of which Blue Labour appears so fond. If, for example, you're not particularly up for singing in celebration of the Crusades and building Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land, Labour ain't for you.

Furthermore, it is a lie. These beliefs are a recipe that will leave communities stagnating in their own misfortune, refusing to accept that as the world changes, everyone must change with it. the Labour party has convinced communities of this before, only to watch them decay and disappear.

Politics for the sake of power
Blue Labour is not only wrong, it exists for a hideous reason. Its proponents do not believe they are right. They have decided it is the only way for them to win power. They have decided not to lead, not to make the case for a free and open England, but to sacrifice their convictions on the altar of high office. This is not behaviour that should be rewarded by the British public.

When parties disappear up their own arses
A quick glance through the articles and papers from Glasman et al tell me one thing. This is not a movement with which I am supposed to engage. It is not for the likes of me. These ideas are meant to be understood fully only by those who have read their Marx. Often, Glasman criticises Blairite reforms as 'managerial'. I am sure this stirs the souls of his academic brotherhood but for the rest of us, it is meaningless. As soon as a party starts to engage in this sort of theorising, it has spent too long in the ivory tower and should, quite frankly, go home.

Red Ed turns Blue - Part I

Wow. Is it me or is Ed Miliband's discovery and endorsement of the Blue Labour movement the single most howl-at-the-moon, batshit-crazy political idea since William Hague's 2001 election to keep the Pound? Is this intellectual train of thought not madder than a bag full of weasels?


And yet, could there be, amidst all the navel-gazing madness, a touch of genius? I think not. However, as a political manoeuvre four years before an election, it may yet bear fruit. 


Today: The sense in it
1. Look at the contributors - James Purnell, David Miliband, David Lammy etc are neither stupid nor bad politicians. A banal point it may be, but it would be unwise to dismiss Blue Labour as an insurrection of mad navel gazing academics.


2. The banking and market narratives - One thing that has hurt Labour over the past year is their inability to escape the dual charge of "you overspent" and "ok, even if it was all the bankers' fault, it happened on your watch". That Blue Labour grapples with this problem is a step in the right direction for Miliband. Furthermore, the British population is not convinced that it was spending by Labour that created the deficit. For every Tory out there, there is someone shouting from the Question Time audience that it is time we strung up the bankers. On top of all this, neither Tony Blair nor David Cameron has been able really to sell the benefits of markets to the British people. If Labour can generate a narrative that accepts and seeks to reverse their failures in financial regulation while also avoiding drifting towards statist interference and punitive taxation, they may yet resonate with the public. Glasman's ideas about democratising economic institutions may provide a framework within which Labour can perform such an act of political Houdinery.


3. Labour's dog whistle - When Ed Miliband writes "it is our families, friends and the places in which we live that give us our sense of belonging," I can see heads nodding around the country. This sort of sentence will speak to voters who feel their economic interests aligned with Labour yet their social beliefs with old-fashioned conservatism. Some of them now support the BNP. Many of them, we are told, are concerned about immigration. While here at Liberal Tory we think anti-immigration arguments are nonsense, they do have some electoral value. If Miliband continues to articulate these ideas, such sentences may prove particularly powerful in opposition to a PM who is respected as a leader by the electorate, but viewed as belonging only in Notting Hill.


4. Time - The collapse of the coalition and a snap election seems unlikely. The task for Ed Miliband is to present Labour as a changed, rethought and reinvigorated political force. A few headlines now about a changing Labour party will do his 2015 election campaign no harm at all.


Tomorrow: The madness of it...

A different law for Laws?

This week we heard what a bad man David Laws has been, prompting one Labour MP breathlessly to write to Scotland Yard demanding a full criminal investigation. See the Guardian barely control its glee here.

So what do I think here at Liberal Tory? Well, aside from my almost unbridled agreement with Laws' political views, I can't help but feel that the public is being deprived of an intelligent and able minister.

I buy completely the argument that he wanted to protect his sexuality. Similarly, I buy the argument that he could have claimed more money by claiming for his home in Yeovil legitimately. So, there was no pernicious motive and no gain from his wrongdoing. Yet there was wrongdoing, so it is right that he should be punished in some form.

So, has he been punished? Absolutely. He has been effectively suspended from the cabinet for a year, publicly condemned and suspended from the House for a week.

So is it time he returned to government? Absolutely. If official forms of punishment are to mean anything, they have to be a way for people to atone for what they have done. If we do not provide atonement through punishment, then that punishment is simply revenge, a communal lashing out at someone who has displeased us. In the case of David Laws, when he has completed his suspension, he should be welcomed back immediately. As soon as the PM has an opening for him, he should retake his place on the front bench and I hope the PM finds that opening quickly.

I can't help but feel though, that a quick trip to the voters would be the best thing. If Laws' constituents are willing to forgive him and return him to Parliament, then their opinion should be the only one that counts. If they are not willing to forgive him, then he would have no mandate and no place in the house.

A couple of supplementary thoughts:
On Question Time this week, someone asked if a person hiding their relationship status when claiming housing benefit should be similarly forgiven. Well, yes if they hadn't profited from it and if their motives had been pure and if they had already received a suitable punishment. If any of these things aren't true, then obviously not.

What bothers you more, that David Laws broke the rules or that Gordon Brown has only made 1 speech in a debate this year while submitting 9 written questions and attending less than 14% of votes? Not bad for £65,000 is it? Compare those numbers to Laws' 3 speeches, 83 written questions and more than 63% voting record*. If you want an example of someone taking their constituents and the public for a ride, look to the Rt Honourable Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

*Figures from http://www.theyworkforyou.com.

Is choice really what we want from the NHS?

Since the local elections and AV referendum last week, the principal victim (aside from a host of Lib Dem councillors) seems to be Andrew Lansley's health reforms, long a matter of controversy for the government. Without wanting to delve into the rights and wrongs of the political battle, let's have a quick look at what's driving the proposals (and some of the opposition).


The rationale for the reforms essentially comes down to two factors: efficiency and patient control and choice.


The efficiency argument:
Lansley tells us that, while the NHS has been delivering improvements, it has been delivering very poor value for money in exchange for those service improvements. This is a fair enough assertion and makes sense when you consider the volume of money pumped into the NHS in the last decade. Lansley blames Primary Care Trusts and the legion of middle managers that comes with them - not exactly an uncommon Tory target. He believes they suck up resources that should sensibly be directed towards patients.


Maybe this is true. However, the NHS has been in a state of Maoist permanent revolution for a long time now. Whether it has been Public Private Partnerships, the introduction of targets, the removal of targets, new PCT's replacing old PCT's, new Health Secretaries replacing old ones, patient's charters and legal rights to care, the NHS has been being formed and reformed for at least a decade. Would not an equally compelling explanation for the NHS's inefficiencies be this constant upheaval? How could any organisation function effectively while keeping up this rate of change? It might well be a refreshing boost for a Health Secretary to turn round and just run the NHS, properly, for a little while. They could spend a few years working out the kinks in the system we have now, getting to know the way it really works and improving it incrementally.


That just isn't sexy enough though. If you were an ambitious minister, why would you go for incremental improvement when you could acquire Bevan-esque fame by introducing the all new NHS panacea? Which brings us on to...


Choice and patient control:
Lansley tells us that our GP knows better how to treat their patients than the central government does. Maybe. I'm sure it's a nice "10 word" political message that plays well in the nursing home heartland of the Tory vote. Then again, as we all know from the West Wing "ten word answers can kill you in political campaigns", and this is a particularly fatuous answer.


Apparently, I will have greater control over my treatment if my GP is involved in commissioning the service. I will be able to choose which hospital to go to and which doctor should treat me. At last, I will be blessed with the final objective of the last two governments: choice in public services! Manna will flow from central government heaven as everyone is treated by their favourite doctors and taught by their preferred teachers... Hallelujah!!


A couple of things spring to mind here though:


1: Will I care?
Having recently broken my leg, I can't help but feel that most NHS users won't really care about choice. At the point where you're wheeled into A&E from your fall or your car accident you're not exactly in any mood to break out the medical journals. Are you seriously going to try and figure out where is the best place to go for a relatively routine operation? No. What you do want, however, is to rely on the fact that there will be somebody there who can perform it competently and quickly. And what do I know about my treatment anyway? I'm not a doctor? I pay for the NHS so that there is somewhere I can go to be told what needs to happen and for that to happen, not so that I can have an existential crisis over the relative benefits of an intra-medullary rod or a full leg cast. 


2: Choice is bullshit anyway.
Ok, I'll admit, if I'd just been told I had bone cancer, I'd prefer to go to the best hospital available, spurning my local cheap and cheerful (but not cutting edge) oncologist. But that's exactly the point, everyone makes that choice. Nobody puts their hand up for the inferior treatment, in the same way that nobody puts the bad school down as first choice. The cutting edge hospitals fill up and everyone get indignant when they're told "yeah, you could choose to go there, but there's no way you'll ever actually get a bed there".


Maybe I have to make a trade-off between waiting time and quality. Fine, but what do I know about making that decision? How does my chance of survival alter with untreated time vs. quality of doctor? At the end of the day, I have bone cancer or leukaemia or HIV not a bloody medical degree... Wouldn't I be happier to be allocated a competent doctor by an efficient system that got good treatment to me quickly?


The whole story around choice is pure political mythology. The nature of choice is that you have to give something up to get what you want. That doesn't really work when something's free at the point of delivery...


Finally, a note on private provision:
One massive source of opposition to the bill is that "private companies will take the profitable services, sticking local hospitals with the complicated expensive services"...


So?


If the private company does take the profitable services, that will be because they can do them for less than a public provider (even though they have to factor in a profit margin). This is good news, we are saving money. We can use some of this money that we didn't have before to pay for more complicated, expensive treatments provided publicly. Result!


How on earth can this argument possibly be made in opposition to the bill? Of course, because all private companies are evil, bloodsucking vampire squid squeezing the life out of our beautiful country.  Well, maybe, but more on that another day...

Universities, public policy and incentives

So, today's source of liberal fury is the Guardian's revelation that the government plans to allow universities to offer "off-quota" places to British students able to pay top-dollar.

The latest mental university funding idea...

The basic idea behind this is that top universities will offer all their government sponsored places to poor kids and ask all the rich kids to cough up, regardless of how good they are. The result? More poor kids go to Oxbridge and - hey presto - social mobility!

Only... THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN!

Once again, those creating public policy seem to be doing it on the back of a fag packet with a big helping of wishful thinking. In all the ideas around funding universities, relatively little attention is paid to how universities and students are actually likely to behave. In this instance, the government is expecting universities to massively disincentivise good rich students from coming. Why would they ever want to do that? Isn't it more logical that they would offer the cheap places to their top choices, regardless of background, then offer expensive places to the rich kids who didn't make the first cut but could probably end up with a 2:1 with a bit of work.

So what is the end result? More rich kids go to Oxbridge, poor kids get the same bum deal and social immobility is entrenched. Terrific.

Equally, Oxbridge et al could just keep the number of places they offer the same, charging rich kids more for the privilege. This may be good for Oxbridge, but it is not good for anyone else. It will make it easier for Oxbridge to avoid offering bursaries etc to poorer students, since their fee structure will already look highly progressive. As a result, the policy serves only to inflate the cost of an education at our top universities.

Policies like these really get my Tory goat. For starters, they massively increase the impression that Tories are there to serve the rich - I've a sneaking suspicion that this policy comes from a rich minister afraid his kid can't compete for a place as things stand. Furthermore, this is a pretty stupid idea from an economic perspective. Real equality of opportunity guarantees that the country gets the most out of its best people. Turning Oxford and Cambridge into bastions of privilege deters others from even applying. More bright kids from poor backgrounds will give up on Oxbridge and uni altogether. They won't get the best from their potential and neither will the country.

So all in all, thumbs down from a Liberal Tory perspective...