A few months after he had formed the new Labour government in 1945, Clement Attlee grew tired of the stream of publicly offered but unwanted advice on how the government should conduct itself emanating from the LSE Marxist intellectual and Chairman of the Labour Party, Harold Laski. In a letter to Laski, Attlee wrote in his characteristically blunt style:
You have no right whatever to speak on behalf of the Government. Foreign affairs are in the capable hands of Ernest Bevin. His task is quite sufficiently difficult without the irresponsible statements of the kind you are making . . . I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome.
Ed Miliband, Labour’s new leader, has showed steady judgement and strong nerves in resisting pressures for instant policy-making and indiscriminate coalition-bashing from the sensation-seeking media and from Labour MPs impatient to lay into the government on every issue, every hour on the hour. He has made it clear that he is not going to rush into policy commitments given without regard to the longer-term strategy which Labour will need to work out in the coming months. That will call for extended consultation and analysis and Miliband is clearly right to refuse to rush it. But from the moment of his election as leader he has made it clear that it’s time to move on from New Labour and that the party in opposition will not be bound to defend, or try to perpetuate, New Labour policies and decisions that are widely seen (both at the time and in retrospect) to have been flawed, or even disastrous. He has mentioned specifically the attack on Iraq and New Labour’s often casual attitude to our civil liberties as examples of policies that Labour under his leadership will have to recalibrate. Many of us voted for the younger Miliband as leader precisely because of the electable candidates he seemed by far the likeliest to set a new course for the party that would be uninhibited by baggage from the past.
One of the many flagrant injustices perpetrated by a succession of authoritarian Labour home secretaries was the introduction of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), a system of indefinite and potentially permanent preventive detention of offenders even after they have served the punishment element of their sentences — a prime example of a panicky measure taken by irrationally risk-averse politicians intimidated by the reactionary demands of the Daily Mail, the Sun and the rest of the Murdoch press. There is no need to repeat here the overwhelming case for regarding IPPs as involving a huge injustice, contrary to the most elementary principles of human rights: numerous posts on this blog, and hundreds of comments on them, have spelled it out ad nauseam, and it has been strongly stated by every penal reform and civil rights organisation (there’s one example of many here) and even by the President of the Association of Prison Governors. Mr Miliband has given welcome indications of willingness to give selective support to the coalition’s promise to repeal some of New Labour’s more illiberal excesses, and Ken Clarke, Tory minister of justice and leading Tory liberal, has publicly condemned IPPs as indefensible, calling for their reform if not outright abolition.
What, then, are we to make of Jack Straw’s question to Ken Clarke in the house of commons on 23 November? –
Does the Secretary of State accept that it is inherent in both life sentences and the concept of IPP sentences, which are widely supported throughout the Chamber, that many prisoners will be tariff-expired because the idea is that they are not released until it is judged that it is safe to do so? Does he also accept that although it is true that the precise construction of the clauses was inappropriate and led to some very short tariffs, since the changes that I introduced in 2008, the number of new IPP sentenced prisoners has dropped by 50% from about 1,500 to under 1,000 a year? Would it not be far better for public safety to let that work through instead of prematurely releasing such prisoners?>
[Hat-tip: thanks to Charlotte Rowles for drawing attention to this.]
Mr Straw, Clarke’s predecessor as minister of justice, is no fool. He knows very well that his words will be taken as committing Labour to the attempt to defend and justify one of the worst of New Labour’s illiberal measures — measures that fed and nourished the disillusionment of hundreds or thousands of former Labour party members and supporters. If ever Labour is going to win back the trust of those whom New Labour alienated, it will have to be prepared to come to terms with such past failures as IPPs (together with 28 days detention without charge, control orders, excessive use of stop-and-search powers, ID cards and the national personal database, a mass of sweeping new offences under cover of the “war” on terrorism, and more). If the coalition moves to reverse this illiberal juggernaut, Labour under its new radical and small-l liberal leader must be able to cheer them on. (A recent Guardian interview with Mr Straw about aspects of his record as a minister in a succession of departments of the New Labour government provides an extended illustration of his impressive capacity for defending the indefensible.)
Inevitably this change of direction and renunciation of past excesses by Labour in opposition will hurt the amour propre of the former Labour ministers who were responsible for them. No-one enjoys being disowned by his or her old or new party comrades. But Labour has more at stake than Jack Straw’s desire to defend his own personal record. If Labour is ever to be electable again (and heaven knows, the coalition’s demonstration of reckless slash-and-burn makes its replacement in office of a rejuvenated Labour party urgently and manifestly necessary), the old dinosaurs of the Blair and Brown eras — at any rate, those of them still clinging to their parliamentary seats — need to be reminded of their duty to put the interests of the party and the country before their concerns for their own places in history. A measure of discipline needs to be restored. Perhaps Ed Miliband might consider a very private and personal note to his once senior colleague, along Attleean lines:
Dear Jack,
You have no right whatever to speak on behalf of the opposition. Questions of crime and security are in the capable hands of the shadow cabinet, of which you are not a member. Its task is quite sufficiently difficult without the irresponsible statements of the kind you are making . . . I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome.
Yours faithfully
E. Miliband
Leader
Time to crack the whip. Time to tell the dinosaurs to shut up.
Brian
Camilla is the Princess of Wales, and when Prince Charles becomes King, Camilla will be Queen, unless parliament decides otherwise — which it won’t.
Until now the royal family’s official line has been that when the Prince of Wales becomes King, his wife, who is currently supposed to be — indeed is — called the Duchess of Cornwall, will be known as “Princess Consort”. But today, Prince Charles was not entirely certain that this would be the case:
Asked in an interview on US channel NBC whether the Duchess of Cornwall could ever become Queen Consort, he initially stumbled over his answer. He then added: “We’ll see won’t we? That could be.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11800849)
(The clip on that website of Prince Charles “stumbling over his answer” is a royal collector’s piece, incidentally, although unfortunately accessible only to viewers in the UK, apparently.)
This excessive coyness about the unfortunate Camilla’s titles stems from The Firm’s belief, whether or not well founded, that public opinion would not be able to stomach the assumption by Camilla of the title “Princess of Wales” which in the eyes of much of the world irretrievably belongs to the late and now sainted Diana, the Prince of Wales’s first wife. Similarly, the nation, still supposedly grieving for Diana, is thought to be unwilling to accept the idea that when her husband becomes King, the woman who succeeded — some would say supplanted — her, Camilla, should become Queen. Hence the fancy titles devised for her: Duchess of Cornwall, eventually to be Princess Consort. But Charles’s agonised hesitation over the answer to the question whether Camilla would one day be Queen reveals that, as generally supposed, he hopes she will. And why not?
All this flies in the face of reality. As the wife of the Princess Prince[1] of Wales, and in the absence of legislation by parliament to the contrary, Camilla is the Princess of Wales, whatever she has been told to call herself. And if and when her husband becomes King, assuming that Camilla is still married to him at the time, as the King’s wife Camilla will indeed become Queen — not Queen regnant like Queen Elizabeth II, who reigns in her own right, but Queen consort as wife of a reigning King. The only way of preventing this happening would be by passing an Act of Parliament declaring that on Charles’s ascent to the throne, Camilla shall not become Queen. Such a law, which would require the consent of and possibly parallel legislation by the 15 other countries (plus the Cook Islands) of which the UK’s monarch is also the head of state, is clearly inconceivable.
No wonder Prince Charles was so comically flustered when asked that seemingly innocuous question. Had Rory Bremner caricatured the heir to the throne in such a way, we would all have said that he had gone over the top. By pretending that the plain facts are not facts but what the royal family, with the connivance of successive British governments, wants them to be, all because of their fear of public opinion and their continuing terror of Diana’s menacing shade, the royals have got themselves into a right old muddle. Camilla, Princess of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, seems a perfectly unobjectionable lady doing her job, such as it is, with considerable grace. When (and if) she becomes Queen, there seems no possible reason why she should not be formally recognised as such; indeed, to pretend that she is not the Queen when she manifestly is, will be to humiliate her even more than by the insulting refusal to recognise her now as Princess of Wales. Cowardice of this order will do much more damage to the standing and survivability of Britain’s monarchy than a robust acceptance of reality.
At a time when the livelihoods and homes of several millions of Britons are under threat from the exaggeration and manipulation of a manageable economic and fiscal problem by a group of ruthless ideologues (i.e. H M government), the question of the precise titles of a middle-aged woman married to a vaguely eccentric prince may justifiably be regarded as light relief, just as the forthcoming nuptials of the prince’s son and heir, greeted on camera by the prince in question with a spectacular lack of enthusiasm, can be seen as a moderately welcome distraction from the gritty reality of Cameron’s, Clegg’s and Osborne’s Britain. Let us enjoy it while it lasts.
[1] Please see comment by Phil, below, to whom thanks for pointing out my typo!
Update, 20 November 2010: I have added a detailed separate comment below in reply to the interesting questions raised by Pete Kercher: please see http://www.barder.com/2978/comment-page-1#comment-95491.
Brian
I’m appalled by the qualified approval by Labour party shadow ministers[1] (and a distinguished Guardian commentator) for IDS’s savage attack on those who for one reason or another can’t work. As Martin Kettle remarked,
“YouGov reported this week that Duncan Smith’s most controversial proposal, the planned compulsory work placements for the long-term unemployed, is backed by 74% of voters. And that is reflected among MPs too.”
This general complacency in the face of almost unprecedentedly repressive proposals for driving the undeserving poor into the workhouse is profoundly depressing. To demonise and seek to punish as scroungers and layabouts the great majority of the unemployed who are either unemployable, or else desperate for work at a time of high and rising unemployment, is nothing short of wicked. To force the medium-term unemployed to undertake compulsory unpaid ‘community work’ — street cleaning, scraping off graffiti, that sort of thing — is absolutely unconscionable. No minimum wage — no wage at all, indeed; no right to join a union or to strike or to demand better conditions, in fact no rights at all; no option to pack it in and look for a better job; occupying a job which, if it’s a genuine one, ought to be available on proper terms to an ordinary job-seeker; literally ‘forced labour’ without even a token wage that would add marginally to overall demand in the economy and thus promote recovery from a recession for which the unemployed bear not the slightest responsibility but of which they are the defenceless victims. To describe it as ‘slave labour’ sounds an absurd exaggeration; yet how exactly is it going to differ? This is a kind of perverted puritanism run wild, based on a fantasy about work-shy scroungers and the idle poor, harboured by politicians with no experience or understanding of tedious, draining, unrewarding, repetitive work supervised, often, by unaccountable bullies.
This whole philosophy, one that treats the mass of ordinary people as work fodder for the enhancement of shareholder value and managers’ bonuses, is repulsive. We are a rich enough society to carry those who for various reasons can’t work — invincible stupidity, poor health, illiteracy, fatigue, stress and anxiety, absence of local job opportunities, whatever — without threatening to starve them if they don’t take some probably quite inappropriate job: or at any rate we could well afford to leave them alone if only we could contrive to arrange a much fairer distribution of the fruits of capitalism. For most professional middle- and upper-class people work brings fulfilment and satisfaction. For millions of the less fortunate, work is a wretched imposition, accepted — if available at all — as a condition of survival in a harsh inequitable society, inimical to relaxed family life, to entertainment, travel, varied experience, to leisure and pleasure and to all the things that make life worth living. Watch the commuters packed into the trains, tubes and buses on their return from an exhausting day at work: observe the weary, resigned, stressed faces, the irritability, the universal sense of fatigue. It’s a necessity for most, but to elevate it to a universally life-enhancing experience is a crude insult.
There’s an excellent letter on the subject in today’s Guardian from Professor Guy Standing of Bath University (name sounds like a character in Evelyn Waugh) which is worth quoting in full here:
Letters: Workfare and the cost of benefits
Those discussing welfare reform should learn some basic economics (Hardship payments to be scrapped, 12 November). The main reason there is high unemployment is that there is insufficient aggregate demand. A second reason is that a market economy needs some unemployment, for efficiency and anti-inflationary reasons. The move to therapy for the unemployed, which Labour pushed, and the workfare scheme of the coalition government, treat unemployment as mainly due to behavioural deficiencies by the unemployed. This is nonsense.
Workfare rests unashamedly on the view, stated by the government’s American adviser, Lawrence Mead, that welfare should be made so unattractive that the claimants will take any job and that they should be encouraged to “blame” themselves. There are many reasons for believing workfare is misguided and ultimately vicious. I have reviewed the evidence in several books, and years ago predicted that this is where the neoliberal state would end.
The objections to the government’s scheme and to the Labour party’s current position include cost. Workfare has proved extremely expensive, and it only manages to be less so because it drives people off welfare and out of the labour market, not into jobs. Guaranteeing the unemployed a job for four weeks is a sleight of hand. What jobs? The likelihood is that they will be “make work” schemes, scarcely of the type to motivate people. They will disrupt any search for meaningful activity, and could intensify any adverse attitude to jobs. If they were real jobs they would lower the opportunity and wages of others already doing or hoping to do such jobs.
But worst of all, coercion will be advanced. There is no evidence that vast numbers of people are suffering from a “habit of worklessness”. Many of those not in jobs work hard, caring for frail relatives or children, dealing with episodic disabilities, and generally working. Building social policy on the basis of a tiny minority being “scroungers” or “lazy” is expensive illiberal folly. Much better would be to go in the other direction, delinking basic income security from jobs and then improving incentives for work of all kinds.
Guy Standing
Professor of economic security, University of Bath
That should be compulsory reading for all those who are tempted to suppose that there must be some merit in the coalition’s plans to force the unemployed to work at the very time when coalition policies are gratuitously throwing a million more blameless people out of work. All men and women of good will and even a smidgin of generosity of spirit should resist these repulsive proposals by all available legal means. They should be opposed, not for the sake of opposing, but because they are monstrous.
Brian
[1] To be fair, Douglas Alexander, Labour’s shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, also stresses that “Jobs, not threats, get families off welfare“, which pithily demolishes Mr Duncan Smith’s whole mean-spirited and misguided project.
At least, I hope they will be my last words on the subject.
The Guardian today (9.xi.10) publishes in its ‘Response’ column my article about the BBC’s tardy apology to Bob Geldof and Band Aid for a World Service programme that seemed to imply, quite wrongly, that most Band Aid supplies for famine relief in Ethiopia in the 1980s were diverted for buying weapons. I wrote regretting that the BBC’s apology had not gone much wider:
The BBC’s apology to the Band Aid Trust was far from adequate
Listeners were misled that 95% of famine relief aid for Ethiopia was diverted to the military
Your report of the BBC‘s apology to Bob Geldof‘s Band Aid for the misleading impression given by a World Service programme alleging wholesale diversion of famine relief aid to Ethiopia, said: “Sir Brian Barder, the British ambassador to Ethiopia between 1982 and 1986, was positive about the BBC’s response.” (Sorry, Sir Bob: BBC’s apology to Geldof over Band Aid programme, 4 November).
I did indeed welcome the BBC’s “far-reaching apology to the Band Aid Trust for the seriously unfair and misleading impression given by the … programme.”
But the second part of my comment, unaccountably omitted from your report, was far from positive:
“But I am sorry that the BBC has not taken the opportunity to put it beyond doubt that contrary to the false impression gained by thousands of people hearing the programme or reporting it elsewhere in the media, the allegations of diversion reported in the programme applied only to a small amount of aid given to a limited area of Tigray then under rebel control, not to the international relief effort in the whole of the rest of Ethiopia. Although it was not the main question in the Band Aid complaint, this would have been a welcome opportunity for the BBC to put the record straight on that important issue too.”
Even before the programme went out, I personally asked its producer to correct this damaging impression, but my appeal was ignored.
The BBC’s official line acknowledges that the implied slurs on Band Aid were unjustified, but claims that “the ruling [by the BBC itself!] validates the main thrust of the programme’s journalism” (initially described by the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, as “robust and excellent journalism”). The BBC complaints website says: “The programme made clear that the allegations of diversion replied [sic] to aid reaching Tigray, not to the Ethiopian relief effort as a whole, and that much aid had served its intended purpose.” So why did hardly anyone who heard it take away that impression? The allegations actually concerned around 3%-4% of total relief aid to Ethiopia and not any in government-controlled areas. But virtually every report in the media of the apparently sensational revelations in the programme, based on the BBC’s own publicity and on the programme itself, interpreted it as alleging that up to 95% of all famine relief aid for Ethiopia in the 1980s had been diverted for military use.
That universal misinterpretation not only defamed the dedicated aid workers concerned but was also bound to discourage people from contributing to disaster relief funds in future. It isn’t just Band Aid to which the BBC owes an apology, but to the British government, other donors, charities and, above all, ordinary people who gave so generously.
We still await the BBC’s apology for even now repeating by implication this slur on all those who worked to save millions of Ethiopians from starvation in one of the most effective and incorrupt international relief operations ever mounted. Meanwhile, my reaction to the BBC’s limited and inadequate apology so far is anything but “positive”.
Sadly but predictably, this quite uncontroversial piece has attracted the usual complement of online comments, some sound and sensible, some dubious, some deeply pernicious, ignorant and misguided. The latter have driven me to adding to the online version of my column a comment of my own:
I am dismayed — but not much surprised — by many of these comments on my ‘Response’ column article above. Some are obviously not worth answering, but here are just a few points on some of the others:
1. It is simply not true that the emergency famine relief aid to Ethiopia was “channeled … through Mengistu’s government in Addis” and absolutely false that any of it was diverted by the then Ethiopian government for uses other than those intended. Hardly any of it was in the form of money; it was almost entirely aid in kind: grain and other food, medicines and medical supplies, tents and hospital equipment, trucks and aircraft to transport it, and hundreds of young relief workers from all over the world — nutritionists, feeding centre distribution workers, doctors and nurses, drivers and pilots and baggage handlers, and many more. All this was under the control of NGOs such as Band Aid, Oxfam and Save the Children (and dozens more), government aid personnel, and above all representatives of all the major UN specialised agencies, including aid monitors working under the close supervision of the UN Assistant Secretary-General, Kurt Jansson, a highly experienced and efficient Finnish international public servant and his staff. It was closely monitored from its arrival at the ports or airports to the time it was distributed to starving or sick famine victims. The RAF physically collected huge quantities of it from the ports and flew it to the famine areas to be dropped to starving people or delivered to small dangerous landing-strips and unloaded for them. Any diversion would have been spotted instantly, reported and stopped.
2. Those who condemn all humanitarian emergency aid to save innocent, desperately poor people from death by starvation, on the crazy grounds that it doesn’t instantly eradicate poverty in the country to which it’s given, should be ashamed of themselves. Every contribution given to Ethiopian famine relief in the 1980s saved someone’s life, or helped to do so. Without it, perhaps 6 or 7 million people, including women and children, would have died but were saved. To confuse humanitarian emergency aid, to relieve the effects of a terrible famine, with development aid designed to raise living standards and gradually eradicate poverty in the medium and long terms is simply illiterate. And to try to discourage others from contributing to such good causes in the future by making wild and unsupported allegations about corruption and diversion is nothing short of wicked.
3. Both the BBC and Bob Geldof (and his Band Aid colleagues) are first-class institutions and people who do a magnificent job. The BBC occasionally stumbles, as in this case. But to dismiss it in the extravagant terms of some of the comments here is pernicious. Our country would be infinitely poorer without the BBC. Bob Geldof and Band Aid did superb work in Ethiopia, not only in active famine relief, but also in awakening the conscience of the world to the tragedy unfolding in Ethiopia and the desperate need for help.
4. The semi-literate subheading above my column (“Listeners were misled that 95% of famine relief aid for Ethiopia was diverted to the military”), to which one comment has objected, was the work of a Guardian sub, not me. But I am genuinely grateful to the Guardian for publishing this column and thus letting me help in a small way to set the record straight.
Lastly, I would urge anyone interested in reading a fuller account of the issues raised here, and the reasons for bitterly regretting the false impression given by the BBC World Service programme, to visit http://j.mp/a7eQVq and http://j.mp/bR2Xq8. Like my column in today’s Guardian, above, both are based on first-hand experience, on the spot, of the Ethiopian famine relief programme, not on a bunch of confused preconceived ideas and prejudice.
Brian Barder
Enough said, I devoutly hope.
Brian
Throughout today (4 November) the BBC is broadcasting an apology to Sir Bob Geldof and Band Aid for wrongly implying in a BBC World Service broadcast back in March that its allegations regarding the supposed diversion for military purposes of up to 95% of the famine relief aid for Ethiopia in the 1980s referred to Band Aid relief supplies, whereas the allegations made no mention whatever of Band Aid. The BBC’s apology is widely reported in the rest of the media too. The Guardian’s report quotes me as reacting ‘positively’ to the apology.
In fact the Guardian’s report omits the second half of my comment on the BBC apology, which was not positive at all. I welcomed the comprehensive apology to Band Aid, but went on to say:
But I am sorry that the BBC has not taken the opportunity to put it beyond doubt that contrary to the false impression gained by thousands of people hearing the programme or reporting it elsewhere in the media, the allegations of diversion reported in the programme applied only to a small amount of aid given to a limited area of Tigray then under rebel control, not to the international relief effort in the whole of the rest of Ethiopia. Although it was not the main question in the Band Aid complaint, this would have been a welcome opportunity for the BBC to put the record straight on that important issue too.
I have recorded my criticisms of the World Service programme elsewhere on this website and need not repeat them now (see for example
http://www.barder.com/ethiopia-famine-relief-aid-misinterpreted-allegations-out-of-control).
For a more up-to-date assessment of the adequacy, or lack of it, of the BBC’s response to Band Aid’s complaint, you won’t do any better than read Owen Barder’s blog post today (Thursday 4 November) at http://www.owen.org/blog/4052 (“The BBC sexed up a report about aid to Ethiopia”). [Full disclosure: as Owen admits in his post, he is my son.]
The central charge against the programme, apart from its utterly baseless implied slur on Bob Geldof and Band Aid, is that it gave almost everyone who heard it or who heard the BBC’s publicity for it the firm impression that it was reporting credible allegations that up to 95% of all the huge amounts of famine relief aid given from all over the world to Ethiopia in the 1980s had been diverted to buy guns and ammunition. In fact the allegations reported in the programme (with the BBC’s implied endorsement) applied only to a small and completely separate relief operation in a limited area of one Ethiopian province then controlled by rebel forces – an operation which amounted to at most 3 to 4 percent of the total Ethiopian relief effort. No allegations of that kind have ever been made against the quite separate, huge main relief programme in Ethiopia proper, i.e. the rest of the country under the then government’s control.
Yet the BBC, having belatedly and reluctantly yielded to Band Aid’s determined demand for an apology for the slurs on itself, still claims that apart from the implied accusations against Band Aid, the programme as a whole was ‘valid’. Well: please read Owen’s blog post and decide for yourself.
My interest in this derives from my own extensive if modest involvement in the Ethiopian famine relief effort as the then British ambassador in Ethiopia (1982-86). I am in no doubt at all that this effort, by a score of governments, NGOs, and Ethiopian and other relief workers, supported by the generosity of private individuals all over the world, was outstandingly successful in saving some 6 to 7 million Ethiopians from death by starvation. It was one of the most effective and uncorrupt operations in the annals of disaster relief. It grieves me to see the BBC, presumably unintentionally, giving world-wide currency to the ludicrous suggestion that almost all of the relief supplies given for distribution to famine victims throughout Ethiopia were actually diverted and sold to buy arms and ammunition for rebel soldiers. And it angers me to see the BBC doggedly refusing to acknowledge that this has been the amply documented result of a single misguided and heavily publicised radio programme on the much respected World Service. The BBC is a great institution of which all Britons should be proud (and some are). But it has made a much bigger and more damaging error here than it’s prepared to admit, even now. Out of mere amour propre, the BBC is now compounding its responsibility for a single act of folly by still refusing to acknowledge the extent of its error. At a time when its independence from government is threatened, this is a monumentally stupid moment for such obstinacy.
Brian
