After the Grenfell fire, the church got it right where the council failed

Giles Fraser in The Guardian

We are an “unsuccessful church”, the exhausted Rev Alan Everett told me, as I persuaded him to take a break and have some lunch. He meant that they only get 30 to 60 people in the pews on a Sunday morning and that it wasn’t one of those whizzy Alpha course churches beloved by London bishops and their growth spreadsheets. Next to us in the church’s sunny courtyard, an extended Muslim family talked openly about their escape from the fire. “Our lungs are full of smoke but at least, thank God, we are all alive.” A church worker told them where to find new shoes and clothes. It felt like a refugee camp. Perhaps it was a refugee camp. And hanging over the whole scene, Grenfell Tower, black and enormous. It stands as a biblical-scale condemnation to a whole society.

In the days after the fire, the church of St Clement’s, Notting Dale, became a hub for grieving families, generous donations of clothes and food – and camera-ready politicians. First Jeremy Corbyn came. Then a furtive Theresa May met a few residents in the church. Then Sadiq Khan was at mass on Sunday morning. I wanted to know from Everett how the church was able to respond so quickly in a way that the council didn’t. “I was woken up at 3am by a priest who lives in the tower, and so I came down to the church, opened the doors and turned the lights on,” he said. It all began from there. People started coming in out of the dark – often passersby looking to help. First they sorted out tea and coffee. By 7am, they had a fully stocked breakfast bar, with volunteers organising themselves into teams. Within hours, local restaurants were delivering food; clothes began to pile high in the church sanctuary – about 40 Transit vans’ worth, the vicar estimates. The place looked like a warehouse.

Listening to Everett, it struck me that “opening the doors and turning the lights on” was precisely the difference between the church and a local authority that had become arms’ length from its residents, continually dealing with local people only through intermediary organisations such as the locally much-hated Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation. The nicest thing I heard about the royal borough from local people was that it had outsourced its care for the poor as a cost efficiency. The worst, that it was deliberately running down its stock of social housing so that they could eventually bring in the developers.

Donations inside the church of St Clement’s, Notting Dale. Photograph: Matthew Barrett

In his Sunday morning sermon, Fr Robert Thompson, an assistant priest in the parish and also a local Labour councillor, channelled his anger. Contrasting the good communication of the local volunteers with the bad communication of the authorities, he said: “The people on the lowest incomes of this parish simply do not feel listened to, either this week or in previous years, by those in power. Worse than that, what the whole issue of the cladding and the lack of sprinklers may well highlight is that some people in our society have simply become excess and debris on our neoliberal, unregulated, individualistic, capitalist and consumerist society.” The churchy way of saying “I agree” with all this is “amen”. The church of St Clement was built and paid for in 1867 by Alfred Dalgarno, a philanthropist vicar with deep pockets and a compassion for the poor. Thompson is a councillor for the Dalgarno ward, named after him. “This parish was built pre-welfare state and it is going to be needed as we now enter the post-welfare state,” he told me, chillingly.

Of course, parishes like St Clement are only superficially unsuccessful. Its secularised charity arm, the Clement James centre, helps thousands of local people every year, into work, into university. That’s why the parish is so trusted locally. “We are called to share in the brokenness and the forgottenness of the people we serve,” the vicar explained. In poor parishes, the job is to keep the doors open and the lights on. And this being permanently present is no small thing. Not least because, as Christians believe, the light will always beckon people out of the darkness.

The Muck and the Top Brass

MoD lobbying claims: 

The fact that some of Britain’s leading ex-servicemen were prepared to lobby the Ministry of Defence on behalf of foreign arms companies is just the latest example of the cosy but compromising revolving door between Whitehall and the private sector, says Andrew Gilligan.

By Andrew Gilligan

6:45AM BST 15 Oct 2012

199 Comments

For the British people, the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance is a chance to honour the men and women killed and maimed in our name. For the Legion’s president, Lieutenant-General Sir John Kiszely, however, it is also “a tremendous networking opportunity” which “commercial people can get in on”.

The general’s tongue had been loosened by a £110,000 offer from South Korean arms dealers, who wanted his help selling their products to the Ministry of Defence. His Legion role, he told them, was “extremely useful for all these contacts”. As he explained: “If I tried to book in… to have a meeting on behalf of a company, I probably wouldn’t get past the door.” But “with Andrew Robathan [the Armed Forces minister], I would get into his office by saying, 'As president of the British Legion, you know, it’s time’… and that’s when you sow the seed.”

To the same generous Koreans, Admiral Sir Trevor Soar, ex-Commander-in-Chief Fleet and self-proclaimed “MoD warrior”, offered to “target” his former subordinates and “get them interested”. Sir Trevor, who only left the Navy this year, is still covered by the two-year lobbying ban commonly imposed on retired officers, but told his would-be clients that the restriction had “no legality” and he would “just basically ignore it”.

General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the Army during the Iraq War, offered to “dangle a fly in the waters” on the Koreans’ behalf. General Lord Dannatt, another ex-chief of the general staff and former adviser to David Cameron, boasted about how he’d avoid anti-lobbying rules by “targeting” an old school contemporary who happens to be the MoD’s permanent secretary. For a “reasonable” £100,000 for 24 days’ work a year, he’d set up lunch with the chief of defence procurement, Bernard Gray. Air Chief Marshal Lord Stirrup, former chief of the defence staff, told the South Koreans he would “grill” former colleagues and ministers on their behalf over private dinners at his house in London. “When do we start?” he asked.

This morning, amid the ashes of several distinguished reputations, the question is: where will it end? The chequebook-ready Koreans were, of course, undercover reporters from The Sunday Times. Of the eight senior former officers they approached, only two refused their blandishments completely. And for the Ministry of Defence, the implications are particularly seismic. The department is notorious throughout Whitehall for signing colossally expensive contracts that deliver poor value for taxpayers. Can there possibly be any connection between this and the fact that so many of its people go on to work for defence contractors? 

One of the most heavily criticised recent contracts is for the Royal Navy’s two new aircraft carriers. These will cost taxpayers more than £6 billion, even though one will be immediately mothballed and the other will carry no aircraft until 2020. At least four top officers and ministers involved – including the heads of the Navy and the RAF, the vice-chief of the defence staff, and the defence procurement minister, Baroness Taylor – went on to join companies involved.

Then there is the contract dubbed the “worst deal in history”: to give the Air Force 14 new Airbus A330 transport/tanker aircraft. Bought by a civilian airline, A330s cost as little as £85 million each, or £1.2 billion for 14. But the MoD is paying £10.5 billion – for aircraft it will not even own, but lease. Nor did the price include standard military fitments such as flight-deck armour, meaning that the jets were unable to fly into any war zone.

Roughly half the price, according to the National Audit Office, comprises financing costs and profits for AirTanker, the PFI consortium that actually owns the planes. Over the last few years, more than 30 MoD officials, including some directly involved in negotiating the deal, have moved from the ministry to the companies concerned. As Paul Flynn, a Labour MP who has campaigned on the issue of defence procurement, told me: “I am not suggesting misconduct by any individual here, but the prospect of retirement work is potentially corrupting.”

All this is known as the “revolving door”. In 2009/10, the latest year for which full figures are available, 326 officers or MoD officials were cleared to join the private sector. Of these, 240 went to defence companies. Fully 20 were generals, admirals or air marshals.

The problem is not confined to the MoD. At the Cabinet Office, John Suffolk has moved from the highly sensitive post of chief information officer to become global cybersecurity officer at Huawei, a Chinese company accused by the Pentagon of having “close ties” to Beijing’s military. Lord Hunt, the former Labour health minister, joined Cumberledge Connections, a health lobbyist run by a former Tory health minister. Baroness Smith of Basildon, once the minister responsible for information technology, has joined Vertex Data Science, a computer outsourcing firm.

The body supposed to regulate all this is called Acoba, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, part of the Cabinet Office. When they leave public service, ministers and senior officials must ask the committee to approve any jobs they’re offered (more junior staff, including the vast majority within the MoD, are dealt with at departmental level). But Acoba seems extremely reluctant to place its foot in the revolving door. In fact, over the past 15 years, it has not vetoed a single application. According to its annual reports, it considered 944 applications between 1996 and 2011. Of these, 412 were approved with conditions and 532 unconditionally. None was rejected.

Even where conditions were imposed – typically a ban on lobbying former colleagues – none has ever lasted for more than two years. Acoba’s chairman, the former minister Lord Lang, told MPs that longer prohibitions would be a “restraint of trade” and against applicants’ human rights. And, as Sir Trevor told the undercover reporters, even the existing bans have no legal or contractual standing. Acoba itself has no powers to police them: Mr Suffolk, the Huawei employee, has been told he must not “draw on any privileged information” from his time at the Cabinet Office, but that condition seems almost impossible to enforce. Last year, 13 former ministers, officials and military officers – including the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord O’Donnell – did not even bother to approach Acoba before taking new jobs.

Lord Lang has insisted that the committee “works extraordinarily well”. But in 2010, rather more extraordinarily, he was himself filmed by undercover reporters – this time from Channel 4’s Dispatches – offering his services to a fake lobbying company, though he told them he would do no lobbying personally. Mr Flynn says that the Commons’ public administration committee wanted to veto Lord Lang’s appointment to Acoba, but could not do so because it had already been announced. Instead, it has this year published a report calling for the entire organisation to be scrapped.

This week’s scandal seems sure to hasten that event. But replacing Acoba will be complicated. Those exposed yesterday have enjoyed careers for life and lavish pensions – one more reason why their conduct is so questionable. But younger civil servants and officers no longer have such luxuries. If they are to be able to support themselves, any new system must allow them to transfer between employers without penalising them for their periods of public service.

More broadly, yesterday’s disclosures might trigger a wider reappraisal of Britain’s reverence for its top military officers. The brass are among the few senior public servants still relatively immune from public criticism, with the monumental failures of Iraq and Afghanistan customarily blamed on dishonest politicians or cheese-paring officials. In fact, many of the most pig-headed mistakes were made by Britain’s military leadership.

Yet old generals can also be a vital check and balance in the system: protesting against defence cuts, criticising the Government when it strays off course. Ministers will love it if they are banned from the MoD’s precincts, as the current Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, suggested yesterday, but the Forces may well come to regret it. Still, should that happen, the generals really will have no one to blame but themselves.

Immigration Song

Immigration Song

by Giffenman

Its immigration say the Tories
The cause of all our worries
So lets shut the door
Keep the peril from our shore
And the BNP can make our curries

The fault may lie with the bankers
Managers, footballers and rich wankers
Yet its the always the brownman
yellowman and other bogeyman
Who will be showered with hard conkers

So lets shut the door
Keep the peril from our shore
And the BNP can make our curries

Why does the UK government struggle to reach its net migration target?

Figures show net migration is at a record high. To understand why, we must break it down into its main components

• 
• • Matt Cavanagh
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 February 2012 17.30 GMT
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Statistics out this week show that 250,000 more people came to the UK than left in the 12 months to June 2011. Photograph: Clara Molden/PA

"Net migration" – total immigration, including both foreign and returning British nationals, who are intending to come for a year or more, minus total emigration – is the metric which ministers have chosen for their overall target.
They have pledged to cut it "from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands" by 2015. But the latest statistics out this week show net migration remaining at a record high: in the 12 months to last June, 250,000 more people came to the UK than left. In other words, in its first 15 months, the government made no progress towards its target.
Why is cutting net migration so difficult? To answer this question, we need to break it down into its main components.

Emigration

This may seem like a surprising place to start, but – contrary to the narrative of anti-immigration campaigners, and Conservative ministers – it is emigration not immigration that has driven recent changes in net migration, with immigration remaining stable since 2004. One of the government's problems is that emigration remains low by recent standards.
This week's figures show a small rise in emigration of UK nationals, up 12% to 143,000, but this is offset by a fall in emigration of foreign nationals. Fewer people seem to want to leave the UK for work-related reasons during a time of global economic downturn, and retirement and "lifestyle" emigration by British nationals – highly dependent on UK house prices and pensions – remains lower than before the financial crisis.
The government plans to make it harder for working migrants to stay longer than five years, and for overseas students to stay on and work after graduation: these changes should mean that in future years, more foreign nationals will start returning home, but are unlikely to make enough of a difference to help the government hit its target.

Work migration and the immigration 'cap'

Despite the rhetoric, the only kind of immigration which is actually "capped" is one sub-category of working migrants, those from outside the EU, and excluding those on "intra-company transfers", and certain other exceptions. This covers 20,000 out of total immigration of just under 600,000 – around 3%.

Students

Overseas students are the largest category of migrants coming for a year or more, around 240,000. The government intends to reduce this number, and believes its policies are already starting to have an effect: the number of student visas fell by 4% in 2011. But it will be challenging to reduce the numbers enough to help meet the overall target.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has lobbied internally against more severe restrictions on student visas, concerned about the impact on higher education finances (given the cuts in central government funding) and about the UK's position in this lucrative global market, one of the few areas of potential growth and export revenue over the coming years.

Family

Immigration on the "family route" has been falling over recent years, but ministers need it to fall faster if they are to hit their target. They are planning to introduce a minimum income requirement, which could disqualify around half of the roughly 50,000 who currently come to the UK on this route. But if this goes ahead, it is highly likely that this policy will be challenged in the courts.

European Union migration

The slight fall in the number of work visas granted to foreign nationals from outside the EU (down 7%) appears to be more than offset by an increase in the number of eastern Europeans coming to the UK to work, with eastern Europe continuing to contribute around 50,000 to the overall net migration figure.
The government cannot control migration to and from the EU, and trends here are hard to predict, but if the performance and prospects of the UK economy decline relative to those EU countries which are crucial to migration, such as Poland, this could reduce net migration, as fewer Poles arrive and more return home; however, there could still be more immigration from other struggling economies like Greece.
Overall, the government finds itself in the perverse position that its best chance of hitting its net migration target is if the UK experiences a prolonged economic downturn. If instead, as we all hope, we start returning to growth late this year or early next, ministers will face a more difficult set of choices. The risk is that the net migration target will force them to attempt more drastic reductions in work and especially student migration, simply because those are the easiest categories to control, and despite the fact that they are also the most economically beneficial categories, and the kind of immigration which surveys suggest the public are least bothered about.