Why vote Labour? It's the poverty, stupid.

It’s amusing to watch the state of the parties in Britain at the moment. Why, there was even an article in the Guardian yesterday about how the leadership of both Labour and the Conservatives is expecting to lose the next election. This is quite curious as it’s highly unlikely that anyone else will win, so it looks like we have political leaders who have all of them, across the board, resigned themselves in advance to losing.

A pretty dismal spectacle, to be honest.

Not a piece of advice enough people are heeding
But they should

I can understand how it happens. Labour is sitting on a lead in the opinion polls which was up to around 11%, on average, for quite a few weeks, but has fallen to 9% now. Reproduced in a general election, that would give the party a sizeable majority. But would it be reproduced? An opposition heading for victory should be sitting on a much bigger lead than that two years out, to counter the almost inevitable swing back to the government in the final phase of a campaign.

So how did Labour get into this position?

First of all, there has been a surprising bit of sleight of hand carried off by the right. Surprising because it seems almost incomprehensible to me that they should have got away with it. Somehow, a large section of the British electorate has let itself be persuaded that Labour is to blame for the financial crash that hit us in 2008.

This is presumably based on the fact that Labour was in office at the time.

What no-one has ever explained to me, however, is how this squares with the fact that Labour wasn’t in office in the US, Japan, Italy, Ireland or any other of the countries far worse hit by the crisis even than we were. I accept that Labour – or at least Tony Blair’s version of it, New Labour – was insufficiently active in trying to control the scandalously irresponsible behaviour of international finance that precipitated the difficulties.

But that was international finance. It was an international crisis. No British government could do much on its own to prevent it or stem it.

Secondly, and this is a much more serious problem, Labour is being abandoned by many of its natural followers on the left. Criticised for having done far too little on the domestic scene, and with great justification for having taken Britain into a lamentable war with disastrous consequences in Iraq, Labour has haemorrhaged support from its core voters.

My message to such voters is extremely simple. There are times when the behaviour of Labour ministers leaves me in despair, if not disgust. To give just one example, the recent revelations about snooping on private citizens, which was clearly going on under the last government as well as the present one, show how easily Labour succumbs to the temptation to be as authoritarian as the Tories.

But against these lamentable acts, there is one simple observation that cancels out all the others.

The Blair and Brown governments failed in their mission to cut child poverty in half by 2010. But they did manage to take over a million kids out of poverty, and that was a remarkable achievement.

We learned a few days ago that by 2011/12, the present government had plunged 300,000 children back into poverty. Along with 600,000 adults. The numbers will have got worse since that deplorable achievement.

Just remember that one fact. Think of the back-breaking, mind-numbing effect of poverty. Think of it applied to children. Think of how it affects its victims for life, through lost opportunities, poor education and unrealised potential.

And then ask: can you possibly allow this government to get back in? And not voting Labour will let them back – or possibly something worse: UKIP is only too ready to out-Tory the Tories in their onslaught on the poor.

To avoid that fate, it’s worth swallowing hard and putting your cross on the ballot paper in the Labour box. You can always take them to task over privacy, or Trident, or secret courts afterwards.

After all, you might just get a bit of a hearing from them. You certainly won’t from the present lot.

Sumeria: just the guide for modern living

Occasionally we come across a religion that seems to speak directly to our hearts, because it embodies our own feelings about life and we can relate immediately to its underlying principles.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition sets the origin of mankind in the Garden of Eden. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a garden. I particularly like the small one we have at home. And I like it not just because under the careful hand of my wife Danielle, it’s becoming an increasingly attractive place to eat outside on the few occasions our English weather allows it, but also – dare I admit it? – because she’s decided to have flowers, vegetables and trees, but no grass.

Mowing strikes me as one of the deadliest punishments invented by man for the torment of his fellow creatures. Though I have to say that breaking clods of earth up is even worse, and schlepping great sacks of compost isn’t far behind.

So I’m not sure about a religion with its roots in a garden. That’s why I was so inspired by a recent visit to an exhibition about Sumerian society. Even though those guys lived in Mesopotamia some five millennia or so ago, they had a message which spoke directly to me down the ages. 

OK, so they may have been a bit odd on style,
but they knew a thing or two about life

Their creation myth was based around the city.

Now I really like cities. They’ve got theatres and cinemas and museums and shops and restaurants. And cafés. The café, or at any rate the coffee it serves, is on its own sufficient evidence that human evolution hasn’t been entirely in vain, that despite appearances to the contrary, there has been some progress towards civilisation.

It has to be said that the city in the Sumerian creation myth left a little to be desired. Uru-ul-la, the city of distant times, was black and bleak, inhabited only by dead souls, making it somewhat lifeless and dismal. Think Birmingham on a wet autumn evening, perhaps just at the fag end of the rush hour. And if you don’t know Birmingham, I’m sure you can think of other examples.

Gloomy and miserable it may have been, but it was the model on which all other cities were based. It was the birthplace of the gods and it there even before living beings had emerged. They came along when one of the gods, Enki, decided to create men, as helpers to make things a bit livelier. Presumably, he needed some of them to be barristas in the cafés which, no doubt, he knew the cities would eventually attract.

Clearly, we owe it to Enki and his human assistants that we can enjoy Chinatown in San Francisco, Covent Garden in London or the Ramblas in Barcelona.

Pretty smart: the Ramblas brings the garden into the city

Now that sounds like a religion worth following. Certainly preferable to all that stuff about apples you should or shouldn’t eat. 

I mean, when it comes down to it, wouldn’t it be more fun to have the apple in the form of a cold cider on a café terrace anyway?

Persecuting the Irish: icon of our times

Noble, that’s the word for the Colegio de los Irlandeses, now part of the prestigious university of Alcalà de Henares near Madrid. 

Quiet, understated but self-assured, it is a fitting tribute to the offer of Spain to the persecuted Catholics of Ireland, to a refuge where they could safely study within the tenets of their faith.

Colegio de los Irlandeses, Alcalà de Henares

Makes you wonder what the ancestors of today’s Brits were up to, oppressing Irish Catholics. What good did it do them? Today Ireland is still Catholic and, what’s more, it’s independent of Britain. All that pain and suffering Britain imposed, and it gave neither nation anything benefit at all. You’d think we might learn.

The truth, of course, is that some people did very well out of the arrangement. A tiny number of people, but they were powerful. The holders of great fortunes in Ireland, particularly in the form of land, were doing just fine and saw no reason to loosen the reins. On the contrary, they felt they were absolutely entitled to see the army doing whatever it took to put down anyone uppity enough to question their right to enjoy what they, and their ancestors, had always enjoyed.

Meanwhile, in Spain the founding of the College had nothing to with preserving liberty from persecution. Far from it. Spain itself was more than happy to do its full share of persecution. Protestants: burn them. Moors, Jews: drive them out. And if they don’t go: burn them. Just like the Mayflower pilgrims, Spanish Catholics weren’t out to obtain religious freedom, just the freedom of their own religion to persecute anyone who belonged to a different one.

And in just the same way, a handful of people did very well out of the arrangement: the owners of the great fortunes, in Spain, Latin America or anywhere else controlled by force of Spanish arms, were convinced that this was right and proper and the preservation of their way of life was a divinely ordained duty.

That’s what makes the College in Alcalà so eloquent a monument. So eloquent today, I mean.

When a couple of crazed, misfit Muslims, who can’t distinguish between an act of political courage and a simple piece of barbarism, hack to pieces a British soldier in Woolwich they are perpetuating the attitudes that drove Britain to impose its will by force on the Irish. Or Spanish Catholics to force the conversion of Spanish Jews. Or Pakistani Sunnis to murder Pakistani Shiites. Or orthodox Jews to deny the right of Jewish women to pray like their male counterparts at the Wailing Wall.

What they are perpetuating is the mindset of anyone who is so sure of being right that it justifies inflicting suffering or even death on those who disagree.

That goes just as much for those, in the English Defence League and outside, who’ve reacted to the Woolwich murders with violence against Muslims and their institutions. Less obviously, it also applies to organisations that don’t themselves promote violence, like the United Kingdom Independence Party. They may not actively condone persecution, but by their attacks on immigration, they sustain the belief that a nation is better for being homogeneous.

Homogeneity was what all those persecuting powers, driving out Muslims, Jews, Catholics or Protestants were trying to do, too. Looking back on their attempts in the past, as I did when I saw the Colegio de los Irlandeses, I had to ask myself ‘why did they bother?’

Though, seeing how many people seem to be rallying to the banner of intolerance again today, perhaps the question ought to be, ‘why do they still bother now?’

The rain in Spain

It’s always fun to test received phrases and sayings in practice.

Travel broadens the mind, I’m told.

This I’ve always taken as meaning that they do things differently in other places and visiting them helps understand that one’s own way isn’t necessarily the best, let alone the only one.

Sometimes, though, travel can reveal things to be exactly the same somewhere else. In a village, up in the mountains north of Madrid, we came across an English party over for a wedding. Spain in June: unbearably hot, flooded with sunshine, making a high-factor sunblock vital for health. Not hard to imagine what the happy couple were expecting.

They didn’t get it. Instead they, and we, found fine rain alternating with grey skies which would have felt like that most comforting of places abroad, a home from home. Except that England enjoyed superb weather over the weekend. 

The experience at least gave me the satisfaction of learning that the rain in Spain by no means stays exclusively in the plain. You can get plenty of the damn stuff up in the mountains too. Even in June.

We took advantage of the occasional gentle rain and the cool temperatures under grey skies to tackle a bit of a hike to a place called ‘the cascades of purgatory’. Interesting notion. The place is actually rather attractive, the waterfall impressive. The purgatorial bit is the eight kilometres to get there, including a 500 metre rise. 

The Falls
Not so purgatorial as the way to get there

The irony is that the walk took us two hours each way, admiring the falls about two minutes. As they say, what matters isn’t the destination, but the journey.

Danielle in the Sierra
Proving that the journey matters as much as the goal
and adding a splash of colour as vivid as the flowers she's photographing

Of course, once we’d finished the sixteen kilometre round trip – something good about that number, incidentally, since it just takes you into double figures in what I still shamefacedly regard as real money, working out at ten miles – my youngest son Nicky felt he’d barely scratched the surface of his need for exercise. So he went off to climb another mountain pass by bike, to ensure that he didn’t have a wasted day of it.

He was doing the same stuff today, though this time we went up ahead of him by car and could greet him, cameras at the ready, as he reached the top. 1796 metres above sea levels, after a 700 metre climb. And barely out of breath.

Hard to tell from the photo, but he's smiling

Watching him convinced me that every remarkable endeavour includes a measure of madness.

Nicky reaches the top.
He seemed disappointed there wasn't any more

That isn’t a received expression, though. I offer it as a modest contribution to the world’s stock of proverbial sayings. And at least I can attest to the truth of this one, from the behaviour of a member of my own family.

Sarin in Syria and toxic reactions

So France and Britain have unearthed evidence that the Syrian government has used the nerve agent Sarin against its own people.

That’s a shameful act, and it’s understandable that for the US as well as the French and British governments, it represents a red line they’ve said they won’t let the Assad regime cross. So their accusations, coming on top of the successful British and French move to lift the EU arms embargo on Syria, suggest there’s a head of steam building up to intervene against Assad. At the very least, the governments seem intent on supplying weapons to the rebels.

What’s impressive, at first glance at least, is that they’ve gone to the trouble to build up some evidence for their view before acting on it. The problem is they’re ignoring rather a lot of other evidence.

The first is that Western intelligence agencies don’t have a terribly good track record on information about inhumane weapons in the Middle East. We went down that road over Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and it didn’t lead anywhere we’d want to go again.

Qusair. Now recaptured by government forces.
Is this somewhere we really want to get sucked into?

The Iraq experience rather makes my second reason for reticence over renewed Western intervention in the region. All these Arab springs, they’ve had mixed results. Probably the one that has done best was Tunisia, and even there there’s plenty to question, not least the current trial of feminist activists. But whatever Tunisia achieved, it managed without Western involvement. On the other hand, where we have stuck our oar in, things have often gone pretty badly. 

In Libya the results have been at best patchy. And in Iraq, they were disastrous: at huge cost, above all in Iraqi lives, we’ve converted that country into a client state of Iran, the nation the West most loves to hate in that part of the world. Which presumably wasn’t the aim of the exercise.

It looks as though we could end up doing the same thing in Syria, by putting entirely the wrong people in power. Al Qaida elements are increasingly dominating the rebels. Certainly, we’d be supplying arms to the nice guys, but how could we prevent them sliding into the hands of the bad guys afterwards?

It’s hard to see how anyone can possibly still believe that getting involved in warfare around the Middle East will do the West the slightest good. That our governments still indulge that fallacy can only be a tribute to the power of their faith, or at least its capacity to overwhelm any aptitude they may have had for sober policy-making.

The faith in British and French government circles may not move mountains but it can shift arms and involve us in another debacle. Which has already started: the first, and dramatic, consequence of the ending of the EU arms embargo is that Russia has provided Assad with advanced anti-aircraft missiles. Emboldened, the regime has since recaptures Qusair, for a long time a major rebel stronghold. And the conflict now has the potential to become a proxy war between Russia and the West.

That the British government should be that wilfully blind is perhaps understandable: Britain has previous form on blundering into Middle East wars on misleading or even faked evidence. But the French? They had the good sense to stand out against the Iraq disaster. They got that one right, so why are they out there beating the drum with Britain this time? Such a disappointment, that Hollande fellow.

The British electorate is way ahead of its government in the good sense stakes. Polls suggest that three quarters are apparently opposed to our arming the rebels. Sadly, however, I remember the biggest ever demonstration in British history: two million people opposing intervention in Iraq. Blair took us in anyway.

We seem to be standing on a dangerous slope we could slip down to results as toxic as any nerve agent being used in Syria.  That would put us in danger of proving Hegel right: ‘What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.’

We fail to learn from our errors and condemn ourselves to repeating them. The saddest consequence is that the price will be paid first by the Syrian population, and then by our own.

The sword-waving politicians responsible will merely wipe the blood from their hands, write best-selling memoirs and make a fortune on the speaker circuit.

A century on, women are still suffering for human rights

Spare a thought today, 3 June, for a woman of 41 who, this time a hundred years ago, was preparing to spend her last night of health on earth: the following day she would make a gesture that would win her undying fame, by her death.

It now seems clear that Emily Davison had no intention of sacrificing her life as she prepared for her symbolic act. She had written to her sister about her forthcoming visit to her in France; in her pocket were found a return ticket to London and another to a suffragette dance that evening.

Neither would be used. Because in between, as the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913 was drawing to its close, she ran out onto the track towards the King’s horse Anmer and, it was thought at the time, deliberately threw herself under his hooves. She sustained a fracture to her skull from which she died in hospital on 8 June.

Emily Davison falls, fatally injured
But did she throw herself under the horse?

She was however clutching a cloth in her hand, believed to be the ‘Votes for Women’ sash later found nearby, and it now seems likely that her plan was to throw it round the neck of the horse. What a great gesture that would have been! As the King’s horse crossed the line, it would have been sporting a suffragette banner.

Instead, she was fatally injured and attained mythical status: the woman who gave up her life for the vote.

This evening I’ll raise a glass to her memory and try to imagine what her last night at home must have felt like. How nervous she must have been, knowing that the following day she was going to provoke shock in some, admiration in others, by an act that at the very least would expose her to great danger.

An admirable woman who deserves out heartfelt gratitude, not only from women but also from men: a century on, women voters are all that stands between the British electorate and a renewal of the mandate of possibly the worst government the country has seen since the War. Well, since the last Tory government, anyway.

Far too many men have been taken in by the jolly affability of an indolent, incompetent and brutally uncaring Prime Minister. A majority of women has seen through him. Thanks to Emily Davison and her fellow suffragettes, they have the vote and the opportunity, in 2015, to rid us of this wearisome cheat.

My only regret is that the Bank of England, when it designed the new five pound note and removed the only woman’s face other than the queen’s to appear on any of our banknotes, did not choose to replace it with Davison’s instead of Churchill’s. Can you imagine? Davison on one side, the Queen on the other. It would have been as deliciously ironic as the King’s horse carrying a suffragette banner a century ago.

Nor shall I be thinking only of Davison as I raise my glass tonight. My thoughts will also go to another woman, in a country at least as badly in need today of the kind of radical reform that Emily Davison sought back then.

Today, Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, jailed and shamefully treated in a Russia that has come a lot less far from the Soviet Union than we hoped when the Berlin Wall fell, ended an eleven-day hunger strike after extracting some concessions over the conditions of her imprisonment.

The Pussy Riot defendants in a Russian courtroom

I’m delighted she was able to end her hunger strike before it took her life, and glad she’s won concessions. But it would have been far better that neither she, nor her friend Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, had been gaoled in the first place.

Two regimes denying human rights. Women a hundred years apart suffering to resist them. Surely a cause that deserves a thought tonight.

Whistleblowing isn’t always good for your healthcare

‘The press lives by disclosure,’ wrote John Delane, iconic editor of the London Times in the nineteenth century. 

It isn’t even any old disclosure. News is something we all want to know and someone else wants to keep quiet. Publishing it is journalism at its most effective.

The whistleblower has a key role in making it happen.

Not the least shameful aspect of many recent scandals has been the attempt by people in authority to silence potential whistleblowers, and much of the outcry has been over the failure to listen to them in the past it time to correct problems: it’s often the people at the coalface who know what’s going wrong and who could launch action to correct it if only they could gain a hearing.

So I’m keen on a campaigning, disclosing press, and I’m keen on whistleblowers having the opportunity to make themselves heard.

However, there needs to be some intelligence in the way information is handled as well. Otherwise, as much damage can be done by irresponsible disclosure, as would have been done by unprincipled concealment.

My local hospital, the Luton and Dunstable, has in place a well-resourced discharge planning department, putting it at the cutting edge of health service management today because it embodies a goal pursued across the NHS, to encourage collaboration between social workers and district nurses as well as nurses and managerial staff from the hospital. 

The aim is to prepare for the earliest possible discharge of patients, under the best possible conditions: there is nothing to be said for keeping patients in hospital any longer than necessary, if only because hospitals are dangerous places (full of sick people) with a high chance of infection, patients recover better in their own beds, and beds are at a premium for others impatiently awaiting their turn.

Most discharges are uneventful. But sometimes discharge planning has to make sure that patients have district nurse or social care support in place, that their medication is ready, that they are going home to an environment in which they can continue to recover, and so forth. It’s hard work, under great pressure, involving the coordination of many different agencies and their staff.

Now it’s impossible to do good work without occasionally getting it wrong. The only people who never make mistakes are those who never make anything. The trick is not to be put off by fear of making errors, but to recognise them quickly, take action to correct them and learn the lessons.

So the Luton and Dunstable hospital is to be congratulated for carrying out regular audits of its discharge planning work. It’s entirely right that the department should understand its shortcomings and plan how to make sure they don’t occur again. Audit is a key way of providing information to support appropriate action.

So what a pity it is that a reporter on the Herald and Post, perhaps seeing himself as a latter-day Bob Woodward, got an article on the front page of the paper denouncing the cases that went wrong, such as the two patients discharged with cannulas still in place, or the dementia patient sent home with no-one ready to receive him. These are highly regrettable incidents, but the journalist might have mentioned that the problem discharges are a tiny proportion of the total, less than one in a hundred, and that the hospital has an exemplary record of handling discharges.

The press lives by disclosure.
But sometimes that’s less than helpful

The publicity won’t produce an improvement in service: the hospital was working on that already. Instead, what we’ll see is an increased reluctance to make information available if it can be abused. That can only increase the difficulty of achieving improvement.

Whistleblowers are essential in a healthy society. And the press does indeed owe it to itself, and to us, to live by disclosure. But it would be useful if the press learned that the disclosure of information is a right that comes with an obligation to exercise it intelligently.