Data guru for hire

Back in 2014, somebody in the Labour Party thought they'd been very clever when they out-bid Ukip for the services of a freelance "election guru":

The Labour party has hired a Bolton-based betting expert to be its general election data guru after a bidding war with Ukip.

Ian Warren, 44, a self-taught election forecaster, spent the past 10 years working as a sole trader betting on election outcomes in the UK and the US.

Just like blogger Nate Silver across the Atlantic, Warren correctly predicted the electoral college in the 2008 and 2012 American elections, earning big money for his secretive corporate clients and funding his PhD in statistics and criminology at the University of Manchester.

Maybe the phrase "secretive corporate clients" didn't ring any alarm bells in the days before Cambridge Analytica became a household name. So when the guru came up with a cunning plan to outflank Ukip, nobody thought to ask why a supposedly progressive party was being advised to ape a gaggle of extreme nationalist single-issue fanatics with a grand total of one MP who, as we've since discovered, never even had a workable plan for achieving the single goal they were set up to achieve.

No, the "Blue Labour" tendency lapped it up and duly added "very real concerns" about migration to Labour's austerity-lite offer, leaving Ed Milliband to crash and burn:

“While many retain their loyalty to Labour, a sizeable proportion is moving to Ukip,” said Ian Warren, an election data analyst who contributed to the Fabians’ research. “In many constituencies that Labour is targeting in 2015, almost half of all households are comprised of these groups… when asked whether they are comfortable living in close proximity to people from different cultures and backgrounds, they are more likely to say no.”...

...[Tom Watson] said it was very important for the “Blue Labour” agenda championed by Lord (Maurice) Glasman and Jon Cruddas, the policy chief, which is based on “faith, flag and family”, to be an element in its election manifesto.

Yeah, trying to out-Ukip Ukip really worked out well for everybody, didn't it? Thank you, o guru, we are not worthy.

Of course, it would take more than merely being disastrously wrong to dissuade a guru of Warren's stature from lecturing the Labour Party on the folly of not heeding his ineffable wisdom. Maybe the fact that he chose to deliver his lecture from the bully pulpit of Conservative Home should also have rung alarm bells:

One of the most important examples of ‘walking across the aisle’ comes from Mark Reckless in Rochester & Strood; a story which has largely been untold, but which I would like to speak to Mark about.

Mark’s back story is straight from Conservative central casting: Oxford, career as a barrister, Policy Unit at CCHQ, elected MP in 2010. However, in 2014 he defected to UKIP. All of a sudden, he was forced to canvass Labour streets in the hope of peeling voters away from them. I know this, because I did a report for UKIP at the time. The point being that he was now forced to take the time to see the world through the eyes of Labour voters in Strood – a demographic he hadn’t needed to win before.

I haven’t spoken to Mark, but I do know that the campaign team found this experience energising. It’s a pattern other UKIP candidates raised as Conservatives have seen. It’s powerful because, for those candidates and activists, it alters their perspective, forcing them to challenge their own preconceptions. Who knows, for some it may only serve to reinforce them but I know that, for others, the experience has been somewhat cathartic.

So when I witness the partisan and abusive nature of the election of Corbyn [because there's nothing partisan or abusive about Ukip, obvs], you’ll see me slowly walking away from the scene, shaking my head. Having advocated a listening and understanding approach for so long, I wonder whether it might be best to vacate the area for a bit and let both sides tear each other to pieces...

...Because if Labour thinks it can understand UKIP voters by hectoring them it’s going to continue to lose them, and will deserve to do so.

Fast forward to 2018. Mark Reckless has left the sinking ship that is Ukip, a turn of events which Ian Warren might find embarrassing, if he didn't have more important things to worry about right now:

Data based upon demographics, class, finances and ethnicity, was used to identify core groups of Labour voters to be targeted with UKIP-led messaging and was instrumental in deciding where Nigel Farage appeared to speak during the Brexit campaign.

Leave.EU, Cambridge Analytica, the RMT Union and Trade Unions Against EU, and Labour MP Kate Hoey – associated with Labour Leave – gained access to the information via Labour’s 2015 general election data guru before referendum campaigns were officially designated by the Electoral Commission.

Blue Collar workers, struggling families, students, and ethnic minorities were among those specifically designated valuable to tailored social media targeting and doorstep canvassing. The data provided specific postcodes to be targeted on and offline, in order to attract millions of votes across the country – enough to swing the divisive referendum result.

The postcode and demographic briefings are being released in full, in the public interest, to assist any concerned voters in establishing whether they were affected as Labour have remained largely silent on the issue of Cambridge Analytica and concerns over data profiling....

...The huge dataset, based on the information of millions of Labour voters across the country, was allegedly built using Mosaic demographics and the results of party canvassing. It is believed to have been amassed during 2015 by political consultant Ian Warren, before he passed it on in a series of detailed briefings and a postcode targeting spreadsheet in early 2016.

He first met with Cambridge Analytica to discuss the use of the information as part of Leave.EU’s campaign at the end of 2015.

Warren was head-hunted by Labour for the 2015 election campaign after his successful work with UKIP and continued to be closely associated with the party, polling members and working with Owen Smith on his leadership challenge during the remainder of 2016.

This is what Labour's privacy policy says about the personal information the party holds:

"We will never sell or share your personal information with other organisations for their direct marketing purposes without your explicit consent. We may share your data with third parties to perform services on your behalf and to help promote the Labour Party by serving you advertisements and content online about our politicians, campaigns and policies we think you might be interested in.”

Ian Warren insists that he's done nothing wrong, that the data he passed to Leave.EU was "bespoke" data created by himself and that "The data I used to inform this work for Leave.EU is NOT personal data; it is neighbourhood level data." But even if he is completely innocent of having breached data protection laws, it seems to me that he's guilty of having done more to help the people who put forward a failed bid for his services, Ukip, than he did to help the Labour Party, who were actually paying him.

They should ask for their money back, but I guess they'll have to make do with this uncharacteristic piece of humility from the great guru:

I am truly sorry to my friends in Labour for having to read this. There are some decisions I have made that I regret deeply; working with Leave.EU being one. But I have always acted professionally and in good faith, and will do so in the future. I am of course more than happy to speak with the party, and I am sure I will be soon. This whole thing is deeply embarrassing but the party should know one thing – neither I or the Labour party have done anything wrong here.

The cry of an innocent man, unjustly accused, or the squawk of chickens coming home to roost? Time will tell.

Corbyn: "I'm king of the world!" (spoiler: iceberg ahead)

Imagine that it's close to midnight on 14 April 1912 and we're on the bridge of the RMS Titanic. Watchers in the crows' nest have just spotted an iceberg ahead. What should we do?

There are two schools of thought.* Mister Barlow thinks that our top priority is to do everything possible to change course and speed, during our short remaining window of time, so that the ship can either avoid the berg, or try to hit slowly, at a speed and angle which gives us some chance of not sinking.

Mister Jones objects that while everybody's obsessing about the iceberg, conditions aboard the Titanic are unacceptable; the working poor are crammed into cramped, airless quarters in steerage, while the rich and powerful lounge about in their sumptuous staterooms, being waited on hand and foot, when not stuffing their faces with turtle soup and lobster at the Captain's table. Mister Jones is a fan of First Mate Corbyn's vision of something better, a Titanic that works for everyone.

Now I don't think Mister Jones is wrong. The massive levels of unfairness and inequality are wrong, bad and need fixing. But - forgive me if I'm being be a single-issue iceberg bore here - the iceberg is dead ahead, the time left for avoiding action is short, and if we hit and sink, who do you think will be first in the queue for the limited number of lifeboats (hint; it's probably not going to be the poor devils in steerage)? For the moment, I think that the pressing problem of iceberg avoidance deserves to occupy the top left quadrant of the Eisenhower decision grid.

That was my take on the "What - if anything - should progressives do about Brexit" debate, as argued by Owen Jones and Nick Barlow.

Credit to Boris Johnson for first suggesting the Titanic analogy.

*Of course, there are other courses of action, although the one being urged on Captain May by her senior officers ("Shut your eyes, full steam ahead and just keep on saying that we're definitely going to win the Blue Riband"), doesn't really involve enough neurological activity to qualify as a school of thought.

"We're going to build a wall and Ireland is going to pay."

Just when you thought that nobody could possibly out-stupid the Brexiteering eejits in the May government, Labour's Kate Hoey says "Hold my Guinness" and goes full Trump.

Labour pains

I'm pleased that Labour has a leader who recognises the former austerity consensus for the dangerous nonsense it was. Sadly, Corbyn’s Labour Party has its own en suite pachyderm. It's left to a post on the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute's blog to point out the elephant in the room:

While Corbyn’s much derided ‘0% strategy’ on Brexit proved to a be a short-term electoral masterstroke, assuring Red Kippers that he was committed to pulling out of the single market and clamping down on immigration, while allowing Remainers to project their hopes for a softer landing onto him, at some point a decision has to be made. It cannot be continually pushed down the line, hedged and obfuscated by vague promises of ‘tariff-free access’. Every one of Corbyn’s much-vaunted manifesto pledges relies on an increased tax-take and growth strategy which are predicated upon remaining in the single market, and thus entail retaining free movement. Yet his manifesto promise to end free movement (reiterated by John McDonnell in the weekend after the election result) makes nationalist protectionism the axiomatic position of both major parties, one which for Labour cannot be overturned without shedding one half of the electoral coalition which has secured Corbyn’s position

The struggle to win the support of the ex-UKIP Leave vote has led to Farage’s nativist agenda poisoning the well of the British polity as a whole, left and right – the real reason he is still never off the airwaves, despite UKIP’s ostensible collapse. The risk on one side is of economic catastrophe, on the other the development of a ‘stab in the back’ myth of national betrayal. No amount of energetic canvassing or witty memes can bridge such an abyss. It requires the political courage to be truly honest with the electorate about the consequences of withdrawal from the single market, traits which for all Corbyn’s purported authenticity have, in this context at least, been in short supply.

You silly sods

We're in the middle of a national crisis, directly triggered an incompetent government which is leaderless, divided and clueless.

Fortunately we're a democracy. There is an opposition. There is an alternative.

Unfortunately, the alternative seems to be the Judean People's Front's Crack Suicide Squad:

Corbyn spoke to heckles of “resign” from his own side, and taunts from the green benches opposite. Dennis Skinner, the veteran Labour MP for Bolsover, shook the leader of the opposition’s hand as he entered the chamber and made a “V” sign at other backbenchers.

Why has everybody in the country formerly known as Britain suddenly decided to embrace their inner idiot? Am I the last person to realise that it's National Facepalm Week?

Learned helplessness is the way forward, insists Tony Blair

In the 1990s and the 2000s, right-wing parties were the enthusiasts of the market, pushing for the deregulation of banks, the privatisation of core state functions and the whittling away of social protections. All of these now look to have been very bad ideas. The economic crisis should really have discredited the right, not the left. So why is it the left that is paralysed? 

Asks Henry Farrell, suggesting a plausible explanation for why the dysfunctional status quo shows no sign of changing. Maybe he's right and there are inescapable structural reasons why nobody's yet been able to reverse some of those 'very bad ideas':

The problem that the centre-left now faces is not that it wants to make difficult or unpopular choices. It is that no real choices remain. It is lost in the maze, able neither to reach out to its traditional bases of support (which are largely dying or alienated from it anyway) nor to propose any grand new initiatives, the state no longer having the tools to implement them. When the important decisions are all made outside of democratic politics, the centre-left can only keep going through the ritualistic motions of democracy, all the while praying for intercession. 

I hope it ain't so, but at least not having the tools is an adequate excuse for not finishing the job. The Labour party's resident back seat driver, Tony Blair, sees the same paradox, but his own excuse for doing little more than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic is about as convincing as 'the dog ate my homework':

The paradox of the financial crisis is that, despite being widely held to have been caused by under-regulated markets, it has not brought a decisive shift to the left. But what might happen is that the left believes such a shift has occurred and behaves accordingly.

The cataclysmic failure of a global economic and political consensus based on a distinct, explicit set of right-wing policies 'has not brought a decisive shift to the left', therefore Ed Miliband shouldn't even think about making any radical changes. We know it's broke, but we can't possibly fix it because Mondeo Man says no. The other lot can push the Overton Window as far to the right as they like, but woe betide Ed if he tries to push it back by a single inch.

It's one thing to recognise real obstacles to change, quite another to advocate learned helplessness as a political strategy. If this is the best Blair can come up with, he should stick to jetting around the world, offering his exclusive ego-massage service to the global elite, or enjoying drinks and nibbles with Toby Young and James Delingpole at the next meeting of the Michael Gove fan club.

Worst party political broadcast. Ever.

And now, here are some thoughts on immigration from a claymation stop-motion facsimile of Nigel Farage:
Maybe Ed read this:

Today the art of politics is to take public concern,  anger or bigotry and create a channel for it so that like flood water you can destroy one place or group while protecting another.

That was not supposed to be an instruction manual. Stupid boy.

And now, here is a short intemission, just to show that you can make something useful out of clay:

News management

Apparently, around 371,000 people who weren’t actually born in this country claimed work-related benefits last year. It’s estimated that 98% of these people had worked and paid taxes for long enough to be entitled to make a claim for jobseeker's allowance, income support, carer's allowance, disability living allowance, or whatever.

The Department for Work and Pensions is said to be investigating the "small number" of cases where claimants had “no lawful immigration status”. Employment Minister Chris Grayling admitted that the vast majority of the claimants were perfectly entitled to the benefits they’d claimed.

I understand all that. What I don’t understand is why this unremarkable non-story morphed into the top story on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, with Sir Andrew Green from MigrationWatch UK trying to scare Middle England witless with apocryphal stories of Bulgarian Big Issue sellers claiming to be self-employed (citation?) and Chris Grayling trying to reassure the same demographic that our ever-vigilant Government was ready crack down at the first hint of Bulgarian charity magazine-related misconduct, or similar.

It’s almost as if somebody in government is trying to divert attention from the government's own ill-thought out, failing, misleading, or just plain bonkers policies and big, bad news stories by encouraging journalists to focus on some trivial side issue that really is so tiny that the politicians can credibly claim to have it under control.

With no sign of Her Majesty's Opposition coming up with any alternative ideas the Coalition need to respond to, the Coalition will probably get away with this sort of news management.

Beats as it sweeps as it cleans

Some people have been making unfortunate claims that the UK's intelligence services were complicit in the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects who were detained and tortured overseas. The Foreign Secretary is concerned. 'The very making of these allegations undermined Britain's standing in the world as a country that upholds international law and abhors torture'.

Lessons have been learned. According to the BBC, there are plans to restrict what can be said about the security services in open court so, if abuses like the ones being alleged were to ever happen in future, the public need never know.

James Dyson secured Britain's standing as a world leader in bagless vacuum cleaner technology. Good to know that we also maintain our lead in sweeping potentially embarrassing information under the carpet. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

'Ridiculous opinions'

I think that we've got to look at the situation whereby one person can own more than 20% of the newspaper market, the Sky platform and Sky News ... I think it's unhealthy because that amount of power in one person's hands has clearly led to abuses of power within his organisation. If you want to minimise the abuses of power then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous.

The ED 9000 computer, (which is, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error).

Ed is not doing badly, but his call at the weekend for Rupert Murdoch to sell his newspapers showed that he sometimes loses touch with reality (who does he suppose will buy the loss-making Times?). It may hurt, but to get back on-piste, he must disown the more ridiculous opinions of those he surrounds himself with.

Daniel Knowles, writing in the Torygraph

Who's right here? If individual media organisations are less powerful, will this curb a nation's press freedom?  I looked at the top ten countries in the 2010 Press Freedom Index on the Reporters Without Borders web site (the UK ranked 19 last year, just below Australia and just above the USA). The OCED also publish a set of Sustainable Governance Indicators, which include the levels of media pluralism in the various OECD countries, so it's easy to compare how diverse the media are in the top ten countries (apart from Estonia at no. 9, which isn't in the OECD).

The OECD table offers qualified support for the notion that nations a free press doesn't necessarily entail the sort of market dominance enjoyed by the Murdoch empire. Eight, out of the top ten countries with the freest press* apparently have more plurality of media ownership than the UK. Correlation isn't causation, but at the very least this suggests that curbing oligopolies doesn't actually harm press freedom. I say 'qualified' because Iceland, which was deemed to have the very freest press in the world, (joint first with Finland) actually seems to have less media pluralism than the UK. Perhaps the relative concentration of media interest is counterbalanced by Article 73 of the Icelandic constitution, which states that:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and belief.

Everyone shall be free to express his thoughts, but shall also be liable to answer for them in court. The law may never provide for censorship or other similar limitations to freedom of expression.

Freedom of expression may only be restricted by law in the interests of public order or the security of the State, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights or reputation of others, if such restrictions are deemed necessary and in agreement with democratic traditions.

Estonia doesn't appear in the OECD figures, so I haven't been able to compare directly it with the others in the group when it comes to media plurality. Apparently, media ownership Estonia is mainly regulated by the country's Commercial Code and Law on Competition, rather than by any specific legislation about media competition, but I don't know how its media diversity compares with the UK.

In theory powerful media oligopolies might put the fear of God into politicians, keeping them on the straight and narrow and keeping the public informed about things the powerful would rather keep hidden. In practice, the UK's leading oligopolist was rather too cosy with politicians and senior cops to be taken seriously as an outsider speaking truth to power. If the media-political complex was a tent, News International was on the inside pissing out.

A convincing majority of the nations with (arguably) the freest presses in the world aren't dominated by such concentrations of media interests. Conversely, Italy, with Europe's most developed oligopolistic media-political complex, comes 50th in the Press Freedom Index, sandwiched between Burkina Faso and El Salvador. Italy's  incestuous tangle of media and political power, doesn't strike me as a model to emulate.

Press freedom might be in danger from ill-thought out or restrictive regulation of what the press can say or do, but it's not clear to me that rules ensuring media pluralism represent any such threat. Maybe Daniel Knowles has a point about large, profitable media companies subsidising loss-making but worthy projects, but somehow or other, a more diverse and apparently free press stubbornly continues to flourish in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, New Zealand and Ireland. All in all, I think this is one of the less ridiculous ideas in the EdBot 9000's memory banks.

*of course that's only according to one organisation, Reporters Without Borders,but it'll do for starters.

Taking a punt in the mothership

The Xscape building that squats beside Milton Keynes' shopping centre, like a Dalek mothership waiting to disgorge its exterminating army, currently houses the conurbation's indoor ski slope, a cinema, a rock climbing wall, along with sundry eateries, pubs and retail outlets. Exciting plans for an upgrade are afoot:

Xscape Milton Keynes has set the benchmark for quality in mixed leisure and retail development in the UK.

Building on this success, Xscape plans to take ‘The Ultimate Destination’ to the next stage, with additional development aimed at a diverse and sophisticated customer. Xscape’s plans will broaden both the leisure and retail provision, and widen the destination’s appeal, as well as complement and enhance the existing scheme to provide an improved offer to its loyal local catchment, and to attract more visitors from further afield.

Enthuses an infomercial on MKWeb. I've toyed with trying my hand at copy writing, but I'm held back by the thought that I might have to write something like that, in which case I'd obviously have to kill myself. There's something chilling about infomercials. Like zombies, they appear animated on the surface but quite dead inside. On the plus side, at least the unrestrained use of similes makes life around here seem quite exciting, what with invading Daleks* taking in a little retail therapy and the attack of the zombie advertorials. Did I mention that only this Monday, a swarm of wasps was spotted heading down Newport Pagnell High Street in the general direction of our house? Life's one long white knuckle ride around these parts, I tell you.

Anyway, the improved offer, intended to lure even more of those diverse and sophisticated customer units into the mothership, includes Milton Keynes' very own casino, a legacy of Tony Blair's cunning plan to reanimate communities up and down the land with a transfusion of Las Vegas magic.

On my personal list of enterprises likely to enhance the general happiness and well being of people in the area, a casino comes pretty close to the bottom, somewhere between a toxic waste dump and a low security facility for the criminally insane. Even if the potential increase in assaults, rapes, robberies, larceny, burglary, car theft, embezzlement, fraud, lost productivity, unemployment, bankruptcy, anxiety, depression, heart attacks, wife beating, child neglect, child abuse and suicide isn't as great as the gambling industry's critics suggest, a marginal increase in any of the above doesn't sound like a win to me. But maybe that's just me being an old killjoy. After all, the upside is that people enjoy having a little flutter, letting their hair down and, for the majority, the odd spot of gambling is just a bit of fun, isn't it?

Well maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But after reading Michael Greenwell's first-hand account of a night in a casino (a link well worth clicking), I have to say it doesn't sound like my idea of fun.

*I notice that the headline in today's Daily Express is screaming "DUSTBIN CHAOS ON THE WAY", clearly an omen of the coming Dalek apocalypse.

What if they gave a tea party and nobody came?

Here’s another indication that the shouty Libertarian minority aren’t going to be liberating us from the tyrant state any time soon, at least in the UK.

When the coalition came to power, the noise from the herds of angry blogatarians sweeping majestically across the Internet subsided from a deafening cacophony of outraged bellowing to a low chuntering background drone. Without the stimulus of “ZaNu Labour” to maintain their permanent state of tumescent rage, many signed off from blogging with a triumphant cry of ‘my work here is done’ and, one by one, crept silently to rest.

Fast forward to 2011 and there's little sign of a burgeoning Tea Party-style movement taking to the street and holding politicians to account. May’s Taxpayer’s Alliance-inspired “Rally Against Debt” failed to get anybody other a minuscule clique of True Believers on to the streets.

Of course, a movement's success isn't necessarily limited to the number of followers it can accumulate. If an idea influences those in power, if it nudges government policy in a particular direction, then it's making a difference, even if it doesn't spawn a mass following. The coalition's agenda of cutting fast and getting rid of jobs in the public sector is an example of coalition policy travelling in the same general direction as the Libertarians, although neither as far, nor as fast, as the Libertarians want. However, this isn't a unique idea the Libertarians are bringing to the party; for many Conservatives, the Tory-led coalition is merely fulfilling aspirations that have been in the mainstream of their party since Thatcher. It might be convenient for the Tories to have a few Tea Party wannabes urging them on in the press and blogosphere, but they don't need them any more than Baroness Thatcher needed Sarah Palin.

The coalition do, however, have a few more specifically libertarian-flavoured initiatives. Let's see how one of the most "radical" ones is going. The “free schools” project in England was intended to inspire parents dissatisfied with their local school to set up their own new school from scratch. 

Most parents don’t have vast reservoirs of unused spare time, educational qualifications and educational experience just lying about waiting to be used, not to mention many already being knackered by the existing, competing, demands of work, parenting, making ends meet and running a household, so it’s a reasonable assumption that this an authentically ideological Libertarian idea about what the world should be like, as opposed to a pragmatic assessment of how to allocate limited resources.

The first problem is that “free schools” aren’t a proper Libertarian idea. They’re still funded by taxpayer's money and will be chasing precisely the same pot of money as the despised "bog-standard comprehensives.' But Free Schools still appeal to the libertarian tendency because they’re not controlled by Local Authorities which are, according to angry Libertarians, staffed entirely by parasitic numpties unfit for life in the glorious world of the unfettered free market.

Anyway, how’s it all panning out? To provide a bit of context here, there are in the order of 17,000 primary schools in England forjust over four million children and around 3,000 maintained secondary schoolsserving just over three million pupils, according to figures culled from the Department for Education.

Channel 4’s FactCheck blog found that a grand total of eight Free Schools will definitely be opening their doors to pupils this September and there are further sixteen that might open in the autumn term, subject to their funding being signed off. OK, this is only Year Zero for the Educational Revolution but, even so, it’s only about 3% of the 700 “expressions of interest” Michael Gove was boasting about.

This isn’t just a numerical embarrassment for the proponents of the Free School movement, but an ideological one. As Shadow Education Secretary Andy Burnham cheekily pointed out, with 100 civil servants tasked with launching the Free Schools initiative and no more than 3,000 children set to attend in the first year, we’re talking one civil servant for every 30 kids. If that’s freeing education from the dead hand of bureaucracy, then my name’s Ayn Rand.

One of the stated aims of the Free Schools policy is to tackle educational exclusion by allowing parents in deprived areas with failing schools to create a better alternative. In fact, out of the 24 Free Schools either definitely or positively opening this autumn, nine are in the top 50 per cent better-off areas in England and four of these are existing independent schools seeking Free School status in order to qualify for state funding. That still leaves the majority in the poorer than average parts of the country, but the numbers involved are a drop in the ocean.

The tiny numbers involved aren't that surprising. In the real world, busy parents really don't have time to drop everything and just build a brand new school as if they were throwing together a piece of flat-pack furniture. Free School pioneer Toby Young let that particular cat out of the bag when he realised that he couldn't attend the Rally Against Debt (which he thought was hugely important) as well as taking his kids to see a pirate exhibition, as promised. I don't blame him for wanting to give the kids a treat, but if it's that hard for a busy parent to commit to a one-off event, how many are realistically going to make the huge, rolling, week-in, week-out sacrifice of time necessary to start a half-way decent school?

The FactCheck blog highlights another interesting fact. Although the launch of Free Schools has been a flop, Academy Schools, free from Local Authority control, have been on a roll. Academy Schools are, of course, a legacy of Tony Blair’s New Labour although the Conservatives have always supported the idea. There were 203 Academy Schools up and running at the last election. That figure had increased, when FactCheck recently checked its facts, to 704, with schools converting to academy status at a rate of two every school day.

Unlike Free Schools, a fringe fad that looks doomed to fail, Academy Schools are growing at a worrying rate. Worrying because money funnelled into this fad has been money held back from the majority of schools still in local authority control. Worrying because Academies can be set up by any crank with enough money to cough up 10% of an academy’s capital costs, famously including that God-bothering car salesmen who wanted to introduce creationism in the classroom. Worrying because they’re creating a two-tier education system, with academies creaming off the most successful schools, leaving the local authorities to manage whatever’s left. Worrying because, at a level when children need a good general education at a local school, academies specialise, which is no use at all to parents if their local school’s specialism doesn’t happen to coincide with their child’s aptitudes and abilities.

Although there are a few libertarian dog-whistle words like “competition” and “choice” in the academy project, it’s not radical, but disturbingly close to the mainstream post-Thatcherite orthodoxy embraced by Conservative and New Labour alike. In some ways, academies combine the worst of both worlds, being largely funded by taxpayers, yet not being accountable to the public, or subject to Freedom of Information legislation, offering choices based on what the provider chooses to provide rather than what the user needs and introducing the relentless attrition and distraction of competition, without the advantage of being self-funded.

So I’m not worried about unworkable libertarian pipe dreams actually being enacted. What does concern me is how mainstream it's become for politicians to introduce inane and wasteful initiatives in the name of "doing something." For all the faux competition, faux "choice" and boasts about being radical and innovative, all the New Labour and Coalition flagship educational reforms have really done is to slice up the same cake of taxpayer’s money into slightly different slices, whilst wasting resources and demoralising teachers with endless change. All of which is more relevant to children's education than the wishful idea that millions of hard-pressed parents are going to magically discover they've got the time, energy and expertise to set up and run their own schools.

Miliband aims low and misses

What is Ed Miliband playing at? We've got a Coalition of out-of-touch millionaires laughably pretending to share our pain as they pile on the misery month by month, Nick Clegg attempting to prove that he's totally not sold out by flicking a wet towel at the PM, or whatever other gesture passes for Muscular Liberalism this month, Andrew Lansley and Michael Gove blundering about like hyperactive toddlers in a glassware shop and Ken Clarke incapable of remaining conscious for either the budget or the President of the USA.

Surely it can't be that difficult for Ed to sound as if he's offering something a bit different, a bit more positive, ever so slightly more inspirational? But, no, he still seems to be playing follow-my-leader with the Tories and the right-wing press. First, he decided that a bit of immigrant-bashing worked for the Tories, so he thought he'd tag along, too. Now he's noticed that it's fashionable to kick the unemployed and smear them with the 'benefit cheats' tag (it's a good job the unemployed aren't as tireless as our parliamentarians and bankers when it comes to helping themselves to taxpayer's money, or we really would have a problem on our hands).

I really can't understand it. Can Ed not understand that being David Cameron's Mini-Me is never going to  make him look like a statesmanlike Prime Minister-in-waiting, or even like somebody with something slightly different or original to bring to the debate? Besides, the role of Cameron's Mini-Me is already being adequately filled by NickClegg, who'd probably flick any usurper across the buttocks with a wet towel.

Choosing sides

Now you believe either that George Osborne’s deflationary policy to reduce the deficit is a disaster falling on those least able to bear it or that it is a necessary response to a national emergency. You believe that the recession was caused either by the folly of the bankers or the extravagance of Gordon Brown. In short, you are either left-wing or right-wing. You must choose, for you cannot be both.

Nick Cohen

I'm moderately cheered by Ed Balls' unexpected accession to the Shadow Chancellorship.  I can see a couple of reasons to be cheerful:

1. The coalition have a simple message that they want and need the public to hear and believe - that there is no alternative to massive cuts in services, immediate job losses and dismantling as much of the public sector as possible, as quickly as possible.  Labour front benchers who fail to challenge that message and don't propose anything other than slightly watering down what the coalition are already doing might as well give up, go home, and not come back until they've worked out what they went into politics to achieve. At least Ed Balls still believes there is an alternative:

Mr Balls said Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne were damaging the economy with their deep cuts to public spending to try to erase a deficit of more than 10 per cent of national output.

"Our task ahead is to take on George Osborne and David Cameron's decision to cut too far and too fast, recklessly putting jobs and growth at risk," Mr Balls said.

"We will hold them to account for the decisions they have taken. There is an alternative: A fair economy which puts jobs and growth first."

Today online

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2. Ed Balls seems capable of mastering his brief and giving George Osborne a seriously hard time:

The good news for the Labour Party is that they've got themselves a new, combative, economically literate shadow Chancellor, a man who was put on God's good green earth to make George Osborne's life intolerable.

The Independent

Not before time - bring it on. 

My cheerfulness is moderated by a few other considerations:

1. We're told that Balls was an enthusiastic participant in Labour's civil wars, industriously briefing against rivals and not above stabbing a few backs. He also has a reputation as a bit of a bully, which wouldn't raise him in my estimation. How much of this is true and how much is just gossip and smear, I have no way of knowing. A swift reading of the comments thread on this post at Harry's Place confirms that some people out there do really hate him. All this internal bickering sounds worryingly like the Judean People's Front v. the People's Front of Judea to me.

2. His voting record on asylum, ID Cards and anti-terrorism places firmly him on Labour's authoritarian wing.

3. He's yet another top politician who just happens to have been privately educated.* In these hard times Osborne and two thirds of his cabinet colleagues are vulnerable to the charge that they belong to a privileged, out of touch, élite, but if Balls attacks on that front, this is the sort of response he's likely to get:

Labour gives Osborne a load of stick from being an upper class, privately educated snob who wears a semi-permanent smirk. Now they have Balls, who is an upper class, privately educated snob who, err, wears a permanent smirk.

I have my reservations, but if Ed Balls has made the choice to actively and effectively oppose the coalition rather than just feebly bobbing along in its wake, we may yet see that smirk wiped off Osborne's face.


* At Nottingham High School, which may be a snip compared with Eton, but is still way beyond the means of most of Balls' constituents (I'm assuming he didn't win a scholarship).

A no brainer

George Osborne is a pampered lightweight with a smug, punchable face, tasked with implementing policies guaranteed to infilict misery on millions. An easy target. His Labour shadow should be making mincemeat of him, but dear, oh dear:

Alan Johnson's inability to tell a Sky News interviewer over the weekend the rate of national insurance paid by employers was merely the latest in a string of unconvincing performances. Before taking up the job of shadow Chancellor, Mr Johnson seemed unsure whether VAT was levied on food. And since being appointed to his post in October, he has sent out confusing messages over how quickly Labour would cut the deficit and the party's attitude towards a graduate tax. It is unsurprising therefore that, even within his party, some are beginning to mutter about his suitability for the post.

The sad thing is Johnson's general cluelessness was on display for all to see long before Ed Milliband made him shadow Chancellor. After all, this is the same Alan Johnson who believed that biometric ID Cards and their associated database were such a good use of public money that their introduction was a 'no brainer'. He went on to add:

Given the growing problem of ID fraud and the inconvenience of having to carry passports coupled with gas bills or six months worth of bank statements to prove identity, I believe the ID card will be welcomed as an important addition to the many plastic cards that most people already carry.

Why is anybody surprised that he's now sending out unclear, unconvincing and confused messages?
It's almost as if Ed Milliband doesn't want to defeat the coalition any time soon. Maybe his strategy is to give them a free hand to pile misery on misery until people are so demoralised that they'll vote for the opposition in desperation, no questions asked.

Maybe his masterly inaction will cause the coalition to collapse under the weight of its own stupidity, but I'm not holding my breath.

There must be quite a few things worrying Cameron and Clegg at the moment. The threat of leaks and scandals, headline-grabbing own goals, mass protests, riots and Lib Dem back benchers jumping ship when they realise that nobody will ever trust (or vote for) them again, to name but a few. But a Labour leader who resembles one of Nick Park's Plasticine characters isn't one of them.

Worse than that, Plasticine man doesn't even have a decent sidekick. Wallace had the smart, loyal, resourceful Gromit, whose unflappability and common sense got his master out of many a sticky situation. Hapless Ed Milliband has ended up with Alan Johnson. I'd trust Gromit’s judgment any day over Alan Johnson’s.

And Gromit's stern glare and exasperated eyes-to-the-sky expression would be far more effective responses to the nonsense coming out of George Osborne's self-satisfied mouth than anything Alan Johnson has yet come up with.


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A silver lining

I'm no great fan of the Con-Dem coalition, but they deserve some credit for hacking back the proliferation of intrusive, costly, insecure, unworkable and unnecessary databases so beloved of New Labour's Stasi Tendency. The ID Card Scheme was the worst offender, but today we can also celebrate the end of an insane project to put the details of every child in the country onto a vast database, accessible to 300,000 users. The last administration's mulish determination to continue with this madness was made all the more infuriating by the fact that plenty of people were patiently explaining in a clear, coherent manner why this was A Really Bad Idea. For example, here was Terri Dowerty, a representative for Action on Rights for Children, being consulted, but not listened to, back in 2007:

“Anyone with a basic knowledge of IT will know that it is impossible to keep a database safe and away from abuse, especially when there are a proposed 300,000 staff being given access to it."

Contactpoint will contain details about every one of the 11 million children in the country. It will list names, addresses and gender and give links and contact details to for schools, GPs, parents and other carers, such as hospital consultants and other professionals. Because it is designed to flag up children at risk, it will also show if the child has been the subject of a formal assessment on whether they need extra help.

The database will be available to an estimated 330,000 vetted users. Some of those allowed to check records, such as headteachers, doctors, youth offender and social workers, are uncontroversial, but critics have questioned why other potential users, such as fire and rescue staff, will have access to the database.

In a memorandum to the House of Lords Select Committee on Merits of Statutory Instruments, Dowerty argued that two-factor authentication does not protect the system from all outside attack, particularly as Contactpoint will be accessed via internet protocols. She pointed out that neither does it prevent careless disclosure or the unauthorised sharing of login information.

"Last year The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust reported a 'wholesale sharing and passing on of system log-in identifications and passwords', recording 70,000 cases of inappropriate access to systems, including medical records, in one month," Dowerty said.

Via  Computeractive. Heaven knows, I don't want to see this coalition in power for five years, but if they stay in for just long enough to dismantle a bit of the database state, they'll have proved themeselves useful for something. I just hope the Labour party spend some of its time in opposition getting over its bizarre infatuation with the panopticon.

The Brown Inheritance 2

Brief correction to my earlier post. There is one other candidate in the Labour leadership race with a better voting record than the high-profile clones. It looks as if John McDonnell has also retained some principles and capacity for independent thought. To date, of course none of the on-message apparatchiks seem to be voting for him, either.

Via Chicken Yoghurt, again.

With an opposition wasting a good crisis like this and a coalition government probably unable and/or unwilling to protect Mr and Mrs Average from an uncaring world in continuing economic turmoil, I was beginning to think that nothing could save us from a future of crushing misery. Then I discovered that, with a microwave oven and few simple ingredients, you can make chocolate cake in a mug in five minutes and realised that life still had meaning, after all.

Zadie Smith for leader of the opposition

Our "progressive" opposition is learning from its mistakes, seriously debating policies and getting back to a coherent, compassionate set of principles. Only joking - the surviving hollowed-out management droids are still apparently incapable of uttering a thought that might cause the slightest discomfort to the powerful. So it's back to reflexive triangulating and shifting blame where it belongs, down to those least able to fight back. Me, I'm still backing Zadie Smith. Here's the straight dope, via the Torygraph and the Chicken Yoghurt blog:

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Burnham said: “We were in denial. We were behind the issue all the time, and myths were allowed to develop. There’s still an ambivalence among some in Labour about discussing immigration. I’ve been accused of dog-whistle politics for doing so.

“But it was the biggest doorstep issue in constituencies where Labour lost. People aren’t racist, but they say it has increased tension, stopped them getting access to housing and lowered their wages.”

It’s a classic transfer of blame thing this, isn’t it? New Labour’s abject failure to address the housing shortage ’stopped them getting access to housing’. New Labour’s failure to address the rights of agency workers, living wage programmes and exploitative employment law ‘lowered wages’.

Have refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants had their hands on the levers of power recently? I’m pretty sure Johnny Foreigner didn’t dictate housing and wage levels in the UK over the last decade. I’m almost certain that was down to the Thatcherite settlement Burnham and his mates hug so close.

On the basis of past voting records, there's depressingly little choose between the real-world candidates scrabbling over the Brown Inheritance, although at least Diane Abbott distinguished herself by voting (moderately) against some of the excesses of the War On Terror hysteria, voting against the introduction of student top-up fees and at least dithering over ID cards, rather than voting strongly for the sorry fiasco.