Category: Government and Public Sector

The invisible election. Or, if all politics is local how do I find out what’s going on?

Trying to remember the last time I read a local newspaper.  The headline in the local paper the day we moved in was Poplar Gang in Meatcleaver Bloodbath – which you’d think would be enticing enough to make me take out a lifetime subscription.  But I don’t think I’ve  looked at the Advertiser since.  There are lots of reasons why.  I live in the East End, but generally work and socialise elsewhere, and as I didn’t grow up round here my sense of belonging to a local community is pretty shaky.  (As a side issue,  I wonder if I’m unusual in not being locally engaged?  And, if I’m not,  does this make community action as a way of running public services look particularly flaky in London and other big cities?)

A lack of information becomes an issue when  there are local elections being fought.  I’ve seen  no campaigning going on round here apart from a Respect battlebus which occasionally thunders along the Mile End Road.  I haven’t been canvassed by anyone, there are few leaflets for the general election never mind the local  one.  There are lots of  don’t-vote-for-Gordon-Brown-he’s-got-a-silly-grin posters, but they don’t help with local issues.  There’s a referendum going on in Tower Hamlets to install a directly elected mayor that I didn’t even know was happening.

I’ll accept that my ignorance is  my own fault,  but having realised the problem I’m at a loss to know how to put it right.  I can follow Tim Donovan’s  BBC London blog, but he’s really writing about how national policy from the big three parties will affect London.   The same is true for the Standard.  London’s too big and too complex for even the BBC to get down to really local detail.   Which is why I looked at today’s East London Advertiser and found, well, not much.  There is  – shiver me timbers! – a pirate standing at the general election, but  nothing about the local poll.  It’s completely unfair to judge the paper on one edition, but it’s hard not to think of Nick Davies‘ warning of the decline of local newspapers and the sense that as they decline so  does local democracy.  The local papers are also under attack from local authority freesheets pumped out by councils wanting to show what a good job they do.  So, I suppose I do see a local paper every week – East End Life –  where the idea of great headline is something like Council Achieves Record Levels of Satisfaction.  I’m  just not sure I want to base my vote on it.

Don’t mess with Mr Inbetween

We must accentuate the positive – a Tory chorus since Friday.  So here’s a sneak preview of their next PPB – looks like they have Michael Gove on lead vocals, and is that an unexpected recall for John Redwood on piano?

Reasons to be cheerful 1-2-3

1.  We are too skint to have been away over Easter and so are not now stranded with two children and caffeine poisoning at a foreign airport, ferry port, Eurostar terminal or beach-head 

2.  Not only does Cleggmania put a spanner in the Tories’ works (just feel the outrage fizzing off the Mail’s presses – someone was stupid enough to let David Cameron prove that that he’s second rate.  Heads must roll!)  But just as satisfying,  it could also really upset Rupert Murdoch 

3.  Spring is sprung, the grass is ris, and you can hear the birds in the back garden

The next ten words

Can’t claim to be the first to post this today – there are doubtless countless versions of this being uploaded onto blogs across the country.  Here’s my contribution to the Bartlet tsunami.  If only tonight was going to be half as much fun.

And here’s a question I’ve been waiting for someone to ask since this woeful campaign started:

Moderator: Governor Ritchie, many economists have stated that the tax cut, which is the centerpiece of your economic agenda, could actually harm the economy. Is now really the time to cut taxes?

Gov. Ritchie: You bet it is. We need to cut taxes for one reason – the American people know how to spend their money better than the federal government does.

Moderator: Mr. President, your rebuttal.

Bartlet: There it is. That’s the ten word answer my staff’s been looking for for two weeks. There it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They’re the tip of the sword. Here’s my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we going to do it? Give me ten after that, I’ll drop out of the race right now. (Debate Camp)

What has the public sector ever done for us?

I was intrigued by yesterday’s story  that the Tories will save money by capping pay  at the top of the public sector so that no-one earns more than 20 times the lowest paid.   They also say they won’t fill vacancies in public sector back-office functions when they arise.

Apparently bosses at 10 of the companies supporting the Tory plans for NI would take a combined £74m pay cut if the rule were to be applied to them.  Or, as one letter in the Guardian points out, Stuart Rose can have his way on CEO’s pay as long as shelf-stackers at M&S get £750,000.  Sadly, this doesn’t seem likely.

I don’t have a problem with slimming down government.  Some public sector pay packages are excessive.   Of course there will be cuts, and there is waste to be eliminated – although not as much as is being claimed.  I’ve worked with  officials on very high salaries who couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag  and that isn’t acceptable.  My problem is  with the sense that the private sector is  to be protected at all costs, while the  public sector is for  losers who can’t hack it in the real world, and who don’t do anything important anyway so no-one will  miss them when they’re gone.

There’s certainly an argument that government can no longer afford to do everything.   The politicans’ job is to make some principled choices about what work needs to continue and what should stop, so that the important areas that remain can be properly supported.   Announcing what these priorities will be would allow the electorate to make an informed choice about what might happen after an election.  Fudging that  issue pre-election, or pretending that the problem can be solved by screwing down pay in the public sector and allowing services to be run like a giant game of musical chairs  is dishonest.

Purdah, in the dark

When I worked in government departments purdah always came as something of a relief.  Purdah is the period before an election when new government business or announcements about new business are put on hold so as not to sully the fairness and purity of the democratic process.  It means that for almost a month government communications departments can come off the announcement-a-day, got-to-look-busy treadmill and catch up on refreshing the website, doing something about planning for later in the year and generally doing those things that never rise far enough up the To Do list to actually get done.

On the outside,  purdah is a curse.  There are no hard and fast rules as to what can and can’t be done or what forms of communication are OK and what has to stop,  The range of possible activity is so vast that no rule book could  cover everything.  Instead there is general guidance, guidance for civil servants, and dire warnings about what happens if you get it wrong.  Because no-one understands the rules, everyone takes the most cautious possible approach to applying the guidance.  Pretty much all activity stops.

I’m currently doing some work for an NDPB  (non-departmental public body, close relative of the ALB – arms-length body,  descendants of the great mother goddess Quango .)  My client has just informed me that everything I’m doing MUST stop next week – which is the best guess as to when the election is going to be called –  even though the calling of the election isn’t the  start of purdah.  My stuff can in no way be considered to be public communication, but so great is the fear of getting it wrong that even  useful development activity is stopped until hostilities are over (I sympathise with their point of view, by the way, even though I disagree that the guidance fits this particular case.)

At the moment no-one knows when the election is going to be, and the shadow of purdah has been limiting what new work is commissioned since the turn of the year.  At one point March 25 was considered a possible election date, so purdah would have kicked in at some point in February (and presumably started up again three weeks before the local elections in May).  The general election might still be pushed back to June 3, which means  full-steam ahead until May, and I will have wasted a couple of hours of  Good Friday finishing off stuff which could have waited until next week.

I appreciate that allowing freelancers to enjoy their bank holidays may not be the most important reason to back fixed-term parliaments, but a bit of clarity would help  everyone and would at least mean that  business can be planned around a timetable that has some relation to reality.

MPs (huh!) what are they good for?

On this morning’s Today programme, Geoff Hoon was trying to excuse his involvement in the  lobbying scandal by saying he was just looking for a job for when he stops being an MP.  Apparently for many of his former colleagues this has proved difficult because “the skills, the experience of a  member of parliament are not readily translatable into other walks of life”.   Really?  Off the top of my head I’ve come up with a starter list of transferable skills that any half-way decent MP should have built up over, say, the course of his or her first  term:

  • public speaking
  • public relations, media relations
  • issue-related campaigning, fundraising
  • running a small business
  • understanding the workings of central and local government
  • understanding the local structures which run the health, education, police and courts systems, social services, local planning regulations and the benefits system
  • ability to analyse and understand complex legislation
  • mediation between local interest groups
  • understanding  complex membership organisations

not to mention an extensive personal network of contacts and probably a pretty high national profile.  And that’s just MPs, Ministers have a whole different set of experiences to draw on. Now, I appreciate that it can be hard to change direction in middle-age, but lots of us have to do it and  I’d suggest that anyone with that little lot under their belt is probably a couple of steps ahead of your average job seeker.

The people have shrugged – the bastards

Came away from last night’s programme about reconnecting people with politics sadly disappointed that as an electorate we are badly failing our MPs.  It’s a wonder they can find the will to carry on.

We don’t go to their meetings (possibly because when we do we get harangued about doubting their integrity).  We don’t vote. We don’t respond to their blogs – although that side of the experiment seemed to die as soon as it was born and, as any fule kno, these things take time.  Not even Chris Brogan could build a vibrant blog community in a few weeks.   (And is anyone else as irritated as I am with the number of MPs who just use Twitter as an advertising channel for their activities?  Tom Harris, an MP who knows how to do these things, had a great blog post a while back with top tips for political tweeting which started with : 1. Don’t just broadcast – engage. Politicians who use social media to let everyone know what they think but who don’t even respond to others’ views are doing themselves no favours.  Quite right too.)

Anyway, back to last night’s MPs.    According to Ann Widdecombe we don’t even care enough to tell them what it is we don’t like so they can do something about it. (“They just shrug… I’ve been facing it for years… The shrug“)

Well, Mark Oaten found plenty of things we seem to think and not like about politicians, (“boring, egotistic, in it for what they can get, useless, lying, deceitful, full of waffle…”)perhaps they could start by addressing those, and realising one of the basic rules of communications – it’s not your audience’s fault if your message isn’t getting through.

Admittedly it’s hard to reflect the reality of several weeks’ events in one hour-long programme and perhaps the MPs were just badly served in the edit suite.  And I do have sympathy with MPs  (some of my best friends…) who on the whole work incredibly hard for little thanks on some intransigent social problems and seem genuinely motivated by a desire to do good.  At the moment they do seem pretty unhappy with their lot, as they fight against a corrosively cynical press and a strange uncertainty about their role.  In our highly centralised, party-dominated, control-freaky political system what is a backbench MP for?  Legislator? Holder of government to account? Lobby fodder? Social worker?  Maybe that’s the question they should be trying to answer, before they start worrying about why we aren’t engaging with them.

Michael Foot

I’m not usually in the business of political obituary but I’ve been moved by the tributes to Michael Foot as a man of wit, passion, intellect and principle.  And I loved this quote, which should be emblazoned across the front of the Labour Party website and stitched onto the rosettes of every prospective candidate.  It won’t be, of course.  It might upset the City.

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.

Belts will be worn tighter this year

(But only by some)

At the risk of committing career suicide by teasing COI, I thought the NIB in this week’s PR Week summed up everything you need to know about  how things work in Hercules Road:

COI is being restructured around six client themes.  A briefing from the COI suggests that the reason is planned cuts in public spending.  The move will see the COI make 12 new appointments – six group directors and six group strategy directors.