Ministers accused of exploiting royal veto to block embarrassing legislation

Bills on Iraq, Rhodesia and hereditary titles were blocked by Queen - on advice of ministers who had political objections

• Robert Booth
• The Guardian, Tuesday 15 January 2013 18.37 GMT

Tam Dalyell, the sponsor of a 1999 bill that aimed to give MPs a vote on military action against Saddam Hussein, said he is 'incandescent and angry' that it was blocked by the Queen under apparent influence from Tony Blair’s government. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Government ministers have exploited the royal family's secretive power to veto new laws as a way to quell politically embarrassing backbench rebellions, it was claimed on Tuesday.

Tam Dalyell, the sponsor of a 1999 parliamentary bill that aimed to give MPs a vote on military action against Saddam Hussein, said he is "incandescent and angry" that it was blocked by the Queen under apparent influence from Tony Blair's government. It also emerged that Harold Wilson used the Queen's power to kill off politically embarrassing bills about Zimbabwe and peerages.

MPs and republicans have complained the little-known power to veto or consent to new legislation grants the Queen and Prince Charles unwarranted powers and is undemocratic. Detail about its application is only now emerging as a result of a freedom of information campaign by a legal scholar, and the Guardian revealed on Monday at least 39 different laws have been subject to the secretive royal consent arrangement.

Dalyall's military actions against Iraq bill would have given parliament sole authority to sanction strikes on Iraq, and he alleged Blair's government told Buckingham Palace the Queen should withhold her consent. The bill was introduced a month after the US and UK operation Desert Fox air strikes against Iraq.

"The issue as far as I am concerned is that Buckingham Palace was used by Downing Street," said Dalyell. "I don't blame the palace … this was entirely the handiwork of Downing Street. It was about snuffing out a measure they feared would have a lot of support. It was a sneaky way of avoiding an issue that should have come before the House of Commons."

Dalyell said he had been contacted by one of the Queen's aides following the blocking of his backbench bill and he understands the government instructed the Queen to refuse consent in order to kill off a proposal that was gaining Labour support among MPs opposed to military action in Iraq.
That appears to be supported by a Buckingham Palace statement on the application of the veto, which said: "The sovereign has not refused to consent to any bill affecting crown interests unless advised to do so by ministers."

A Cabinet Office spokesman said it would not "discuss any discussions between us and the royal palaces". Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's communications adviser at the time the bill was quashed, said he could not recall the case.

Dalyell said he was concerned that the power could be used to prevent parliament from intervening in future war plans through private members' bills.

"This could happen again," he said. "The palace has to be very careful not to do the government's dirty work. They blocked my bill because the government thought they were threatened in the House of Commons. This is relevant today. I was angry then and I still am."

At least two other bills have been blocked by the Queen, it emerged , both on the advice of ministers who had political objections. The first came in 1964 in the case of the titles (abolition) bill, which was embarrassing to Harold Wilson's newly elected Labour government, which had a slender majority and did not want any legislative debate about the desirability of titles such as lordships and damehoods.

The other was the Rhodesia independence bill of 1969 which sought autonomy for the African colony which Wilson's government was opposed to while it was in a state of rebellion. The examples were identified by Professor Rodney Brazier, a legal academic and informal constitutional adviser to the Queen's private secretary, in an academic paper published in the Cambridge Law Journal in 2007.

Chloe Smith, the Cabinet Office minister, said the Queen and Prince Charles had not vetoed any bills in the past decade, but it remains unknown which, if any bills, have been altered during the consent process. MPs and peers have been calling for greater transparency over the application of the royal powers of consent, but Smith this week told parliament the government would not publish a full account of which bills have been subject to royal consent because it would be too expensive.

The leggie who was one of us

It's hard not to admire the story and spirit of a club spinner who believed he would one day make it to the big leagues - and briefly did

Jarrod Kimber

January 16, 2013

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	Bryce McGain saw the darkness but refused to enter it © Getty Images Enlarge

 

I grew up in the People's Democratic Republic of Victoria. I was indoctrinated early. Dean Jones was better than Viv Richards in Victoria, and had a bigger ego as well. Darren Berry kept wicket with the softest hands and hardest mouth of any keeper I have ever seen. Ian Harvey had alien cricket. Matthew Elliott could score runs with his eyes shut. The first time I saw Dirk Nannes bowl, I felt like Victoria had thawed a smiley caveman. And even though I never saw Slug Jordan play, I enjoyed his sledging for years on the radio. 

So my favourite player has to be a Victorian. But my other love is cricket's dark art, legspin. I wish I knew whether it was being a legspinner that made me love legspin, or seeing a legspinner that made me want to bowl it. Everything in cricket seemed easy to understand when I was a kid, but not legspin. And that's where I ended up. I'm not a good legspinner, far from it, but I think that any legspinner, even the useless club ones that bowl moon balls, have something special about them. 

The first legspinner I ever fell for was Abdul Qadir. I'm not sure how I saw him, or what tour it was, but even before I understood actual legspin, I could see something special about him. His action was theatrical madness and I loved it.

Then the 1992 World Cup came. I was 12, it was in Melbourne (read Australia), and this little pudgy-faced kid was embarrassing the world's best. I was already a legspinner by then, but Mushie made it cool. This was the age where we were told spinners had no place; it was pace or nothing. Limited-overs cricket was going to take over from Tests, and spinners had no role in it. Mushie made that all look ridiculous as he did his double-arm twirl to propel his killer wrong'uns at groping moustached legends.

By worshipping Mushie I was ahead of the curve, because from then on, in Melbourne, Australia, and eventually England, Shane Warne changed the world. Mushie and Qadir had made legspinning look like it was beyond the realms of understanding, but Warne made it look like something humans could do, even if he wasn't human himself.

It was through Warne I got to Anil Kumble. He bowled legspin in such an understated way. It was completely different to Warne. His wrist wasn't his weapon, so he had to use everything else he had. Warne was the Batmobile, Kumble an Audi A4. Anyone could love Warne, his appeal was obvious. But to love Kumble you needed to really get legspin. The legspinner's leggie.

When I was young, my second favourite was a guy called Craig Howard, who virtually doesn't exist. Howard was the Victorian legspinner who Warne thought was better than him. To my 13- and 14-year-old eyes, Howard was a demon. His legspin was fast and vicious, but it was his wrong'un that was something special. Mushie and Qadir had obvious wrong'uns, subtle wrong'uns, and invisible wrong'uns. Howard had a throat-punching wrong'un. It didn't just beat you or make you look silly; it attacked you off a length and flew up at you violently. I've never seen another leggie who can do that, but neither could Howard. Through bad management and injury he ended up as an office-working offspinner in Bendigo.

But good things can come from office work. It gave me my favourite cricketer of all time. A person who for much of his 20s was a struggling club cricketer no one believed in. But he believed. Even as he played 2nds cricket, moved clubs, worked in IT for a bank, something about this man made him continue. A broken marriage and shared custody of his son. His day job had him moving his way up the chain. The fact that no one wanted him for higher honours. His age. Cameron White's legspin flirtation. And eventually the Victorian selectors, who didn't believe that picking a man over 30 was a good policy.

Through all that, Bryce McGain continued to believe he was good enough. Through most of it, he probably wasn't. He was a club spinner.

Bryce refused to believe that, and using the TV slow-mo and super-long-lens close-ups for teachers, he stayed sober, learnt from every spinner he could and forced himself to be better. He refused to just be mediocre, because Bryce had a dream. It's a dream that every one one of us has had. The difference is, we don't believe, we don't hang in, we don't improve, and we end up just moving on.

Bryce refused.

	The world would be a better place if more people saw McGain as a hero and not a failure. He just wanted to fulfil his dream, and that he did against all odds is perhaps one of the great cricket stories of all time

At 32 he was given a brief chance before Victoria put him back in club cricket. Surely that was his last chance. But Bryce refused to believe that. And at the age of 35 he began his first full season as Victoria's spinner. It was an amazing year for Australian spin. It was the first summer without Warne.

Almost as a joke, and because I loved his story, I started writing on my newly formed blog that McGain should be playing for Australia. He made it easy by continually getting wickets, and then even Terry Jenner paid attention. To us legspinners, Jenner is Angelo Dundee, and his word, McGain's form and the circumstances meant that Bryce suddenly became the person most likely.

Stuart MacGill was finished, Brad Hogg wanted out, and Beau Casson was too gentle. Bryce was ready at the age of 36 to be his country's first-choice spinner. Then something happened. It was reported in the least possibly dramatic way ever. McGain had a bad shoulder, the reports said. He may miss a warm-up game.

No, he missed more than that. He missed months. As White, Jason Krezja, Nathan Hauritz and even Marcus North played before him as Australia's spinners. This shoulder problem wouldn't go away. And although Bryce's body hadn't had the workload of the professional spinners, bowling so much at his advanced age had perhaps been too much for him. He had only one match to prove he was fit enough for a tour to South Africa. He took a messy five-for against South Australia and was picked for South Africa. He didn't fly with the rest of the players, though, as he missed his flight. Nothing was ever easy for Bryce.

His second first-class match in six months was a tour match where the South African A team attacked Bryce mercilessly. Perhaps it was a plan sent down by the main management, or perhaps they just sensed he wasn't right, but it wasn't pretty. North played as the spinner in the first two Tests. For the third Test, North got sick, and it would have seemed like the first bit of good fortune to come to Bryce since he hurt his shoulder.

At the age of 36, Bryce made his debut for Australia. It was a dream come true for a man who never stopped believing. It was one of us playing Test cricket for his country. It was seen as a joke by many, but even the cynics had to marvel at how this office worker made it to the baggy green.

I missed the Test live as I was on holidays and proposing to my now-wife. I'm glad I missed it. Sure, I'd wanted Bryce to fulfill his dream as much as I'd wanted to fulfill most of mine, but I wouldn't have liked to see what happened to him live. South Africa clearly saw a damaged player thrown their way and feasted on him. His figures were heartbreaking: 0 for 149. Some called it the worst debut in history.

I contacted him after it, and Bryce was amazingly upbeat. He'd make it back, according to him. He was talking nonsense. There was no way back for him. Australia wouldn't care that his shoulder wasn't right; he couldn't handle the pressure. His body, mind and confidence had cracked under pressure. He was roadkill.

But Bryce wouldn't see it that way, and that's why he's my favourite cricketer. I wasn't there for all the times no one believed in him, for all those times his dream was so far away and life was in his way. But I was there now, at what was obviously the end. Bryce McGain saw the darkness but refused to enter it. That's special. That is how you achieve your dreams when everything is against you.

Before I moved to London to embark on my cricket-writing career, I met Bryce for a lunch interview. It was my first interview with a cricketer. We were just two former office workers who had escaped. At this stage Casson had been preferred over him for the tour to the West Indies. In the Shield final, Bryce's spinning finger had opened up after a swim in the ocean. He was outbowled by Casson and the selectors didn't take him. Surely this was it. Why would anyone pick a 36-year-old who had been below his best in his most important game?

Bryce knew he may have blown it. But he still believed, of course. We were just two former office workers with dreams. Two guys talking about legspin. Two guys just talking shit and hoping things would work out.

At the time it was just cool to have lunch with this guy I admired, but now I look back and know I had lunch with the player who would become my favourite cricketer of all time.

The world would be a better place if more people saw McGain as a hero and not a failure. Shane Warne was dropped on this planet to be a god. Bryce McGain just wanted to fulfil his dream, and that he did against all odds is perhaps one of the great cricket stories of all time.

Bryce is one of us, the one who couldn't give up.

To grasp the genius of PG Wodehouse, read him

The great writer’s gifts do not translate to the screen, so 'Blandings’ was bound to fail

Auberon Waugh called PG Wodehouse, pictured, 'the most influential novelist of our age' and a master of 'the Great English Joke' Photo: ALAMY

By Harry Mount

8:19PM GMT 14 Jan 2013

Blandings, the BBC’s new PG Wodehouse adaptation, will not win many converts to one of the great comic writers of the 20th century. It makes for perfectly harmless family viewing, and Wodehouse enthusiasts will back it out of loyalty. But Wodehouse’s sublime story of Lord Emsworth, and his devotion to his prize pig, was reduced to a banal, knockabout tale of toffs acting stupidly, decorated with a series of jaunty Twenties props.

All the posh Jazz Age signifiers were there – the plinkety-plonk Charleston banging away in the background, the thin-fat font on the opening credits. Timothy Spall, a gifted comedian, played Lord Emsworth straight out of the Central Casting school of Silly Earls. He never stood a chance. TV and film versions of Wodehouse are always bound to fail: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, both extremely witty Wodehouse fans, also reduced Jeeves and Wooster to dull, mirthless caricature.

Wodehouse’s exceptional talent was as a supreme prose writer – his work must be read, not performed. He may have written successful musicals; his dialogue may be perfectly timed, his plot lines beautifully crafted, as a glance at his densely worked manuscripts shows. But his real comic power depends on him being read – for the variety of literary references; for the bathetic pay-off at the end of a high-flown piece of writing; for the originality of his similes. These things don’t work when they’re put in the mouth of an actor – they sound too elaborate and forced.

Take this line in The Inimitable Jeeves: “When Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.” It incorporates several Wodehouse devices: the contrary thought of elderly aunts being the most terrifying of creatures; the Boris Johnson-esque tendency to drop in obscure Latinate words; the metaphor that becomes a simile.

All this takes skill, knowledge and wit which combine in the mind to produce the comic effect; on film, that line would fall flat. Without the brilliant prose, the BBC’s Blandings became just bland; a silly story about posh twits making a pig fat.

  It’s perverse that the bad telly adaptations go on being made, while the books aren’t read much nowadays. In the month before Christmas, the top five Wodehouse titles sold fewer than 100 copies. None of the Blandings books sold more than 30 copies. Other 20th-century British comic writers are doing much better. Over the past 14 years, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh – a devoted Wodehousian – has sold 142,000 copies; Leave it to Jeeves has sold 32,000 copies over the same period. Why has Wodehouse’s readership fallen off a cliff?

It’s not as if people aren’t interested in the subject matter – just look at Downton Abbey. Funny, posh people are in vogue, too: witness Miranda Hart, riding high in the Christmas TV viewing figures and the non-fiction bestseller charts.

Part of the reason is Wodehouse’s references. However lightly delivered, they depend on at least a passing understanding of classics, English literature and the Bible; Wodehouse won a senior classical scholarship to Dulwich College in 1897. He never shows off how clever he is, but he does assume a certain level of knowledge in order for the reader to laugh at, say, Bertie Wooster in Right Ho, Jeeves: “I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii.”

In order to get that, you don’t have to know who the Nervii were; but you do have to know who Caesar was. There has also been a coarsening shift in English humour over the last generation that has left Wodehouse marooned on an island with his ageing band of fans.

In the 1973 anthology, Homage to PG Wodehouse, Auberon Waugh called him “the most influential novelist of our age” and a master of “the Great English Joke”. By that, Waugh meant the teasing of all people who take themselves too seriously – whether it’s the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury or your self-important next-door neighbour.

That teasing still goes on, of course. But modern comedy is either a race to the bottom – be as rude as you can be about the Queen – or it’s ultra-gentle, observational Michael McIntyre stuff.

The BBC has wrongly placed Wodehouse in the ultra-gentle category – thus the Sunday teatime slot. He doesn’t belong there. Wodehouse is caught between the two poles of the modern age – mischievous but not vulgar, inoffensive but not anodyne. His gifts cannot be captured by the screen, the ultimate medium of the modern age, either. That’s not to say he’s outdated. His genius has been obscured, not promoted, by television exposure. Read him; don’t watch him. He is still timelessly funny.

Overcome by a sense of betrayal

Prem Shankar Jha

The Hindu

 

People are beginning to believe that democracy, in which they had faith all these years, is part of the problem and, therefore, cannot be part of the solution

The torrent of anger that erupted all over the country after the 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi — whom the media named ‘Nirbhaya’ — was raped and thrown out of a moving bus has obscured a profoundly disturbing anomaly: the rape was a criminal act committed by individuals. But most of the anger of the public has been directed at the government. Barring a few lapses, the Central and State governments acted promptly, and with commendable efficiency. The Delhi police captured the alleged rapists within hours and the government spared no expense in its attempt to save her life.

The police also showed an uncharacteristic restraint in dealing with the protesters. To control the crowds with a minimum of violence, policemen put themselves repeatedly in harm’s way. A constable, P.C. Tomar, laid down his life doing his duty. Many others were injured.

The Delhi High Court and the State government took the pent up grievances of women’s associations and other human rights groups to heart and acted speedily to meet their demands. The former set up five special courts to hear the backlog of rape cases. The Lt. Governor made it mandatory for police stations to register all complaints of rape and other crimes against women. So why did the media and the public spare no effort to shift as much of the blame as possible on to the shoulders of the state?

 

Smouldering anger

The answer is that the rape acted as the trigger for an older, and deeper, anger in people — one that has been smouldering for years in their hearts. This stems from a profound sense of betrayal. Democracy was meant to empower them. Instead, in a way that few of them understand even today, it has done the exact opposite.

Empowerment requires the rule of law. People feel empowered only when they know that they have rights, and that the institutions of government exist, first and foremost, to enforce them. The rule of law is, however, only another name for justice. Empowerment therefore requires justice. The bedrock from which the anger that erupted on December 17 sprang is the denial of justice. In spite of being a democracy for 65 years, the Indian state has not been able to create something that people value even more than material benefits: a just society. It has achieved this unique feat by making both its elected legislators and its bureaucracy, not to mention its lower judiciary, immune to accountability. It has therefore become a predatory state that the people have learned to fear.

The hallmark of the predatory state is the universality of extortion. In India, we regularly lump extortion together with bribery under the generic title of corruption. In doing so, even the most ardent of reformers inadvertently conspire with the predators to hide the true, ugly, face of our democracy. Bribery and extortion are, in fact, two entirely different forms of predatory behaviour, and have markedly different effects upon the relationship of state with society.

Bribery is voluntary. The bribe giver chooses to give money or favours to influence a choice, steal a march over rivals, or hasten (sometimes delay) a decision. Bribery harms the economy and society cumulatively over a period of time by preventing optimal choice, increasing cost and lowering the quality of the product or the service rendered. But it has limited political impact because it is a voluntary transaction between consenting adults and the injustice it does is confined to a small circle of rivals.

Extortion is an entirely different form of predation. It requires no contract; no negotiation; and therefore no element of consent. It is a simple exercise of brute power by an employee or representative of the state over the citizen. Its commonest form is to deny the citizen the services to which he is entitled until he agrees to make a ‘private’ payment to the functionary in whom the power of the state is vested. Every act of extortion is a fresh reminder to the citizen of his or her impotence. This becomes complete if he or she is denied redress for the abuse of power.

In India this has been all-but-denied not simply by law but by the Constitution itself. Article 311 of the Constitution reads: “No person who is a member of a civil service of the Union or an all India service or a civil service of a State or holds a civil post under the Union or a State shall be dismissed or removed by an authority subordinate to that by which he was appointed.” It makes it clear that this injunction applies to not only civil but criminal cases as well. For the Central services, the empowered Authority is the President of India; for the State civil services, it is the Governor. This has meant that no prosecution can by initiated without the permission of the Central or State government. As the dismal experience of the Central Vigilance Commission has shown, in civil cases this permission is rarely given.

 

Complaints against police

One set of figures illustrates the impunity with which civil servants can break the law. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s annual report Crime in India 2007, between 2003 and 2007 citizens filed 282, 384 complaints of human rights abuses against the police. Of these only 79,000 were investigated; only 1,070 policemen were brought to trial and only 264 — less than one in a thousand — were convicted. All but a handful stayed on at their posts, free to wreak vengeance on those who had dared to complain against them. It is therefore a safe bet that the actual number of such abuses is at least 10 times the number reported. It helps to explain why a girl who filed a complaint of rape with the police in Lucknow about two months ago was raped by the Station House Officer, then repeatedly by the investigating officer, but could not muster the courage to get the latter caught, and report the former till she felt empowered by the protests in Delhi.

The Constituent Assembly lifted Article 311 almost verbatim from a clause in the Government of India Act 1935 whose purpose was to protect British civil servants, notably the police, from incessant harassment by sharp-witted Congress lawyers. But the 1935 Act did not put the civil servant above the law. This was because he could be held accountable, as Edmund Burke had shown, by the British Parliament. In independent India, however, this restraint was destroyed by the progressive corruption, and criminalisation, of the political class that it now serves.

The root cause of both is the lack of any provision in the Constitution for the financing of elections. In Britain where the average constituency covers 380 square kilometres and has around 60,000 voters this is a nuisance. In India where the parliamentary constituency covers 6,000 sq km and holds 1.3 million voters it has proved a catastrophe.

In the 1950s, the need for funds was met to a large extent by the rising industrial class and by the Princes. But when these two began to desert the Congress in favour of the Swatantra Party and the Jana Sangh in the 1960s, Indira Gandhi banned company donations to political parties and abolished the privy purses. After that the only way in which political parties could stay in the game was to break the law.

Over the ensuing decades, two sets of predatory networks have developed to finance, or otherwise influence, elections. The first is of criminals who provide the muscle to intimidate voters; the second is of local money-bags and power-brokers who rally support for candidates belonging to one or the other party in exchange for favours when it comes to power.

As these have become more entrenched, they have virtually eliminated intra-party democracy at the grass roots and progressively reduced the number of constituencies in which State and Central party leaders can bring in fresh candidates chosen on the basis of merit. In the current Parliament, for instance, at the last count 159 MPs had criminal charges pending against them. Another 156 are second generation ‘princelings’ whose parents established the clientelist networks that now serve them. The State Assemblies are even more closed to new aspirants: 44 per cent of the MLAs in Bihar, 35 per cent in West Bengal and 30 per cent in Gujarat face criminal charges. The proportion of ‘pocket boroughs’ is also higher in the States than at the Centre.

 

Predatory state

The perennial need for money lies at the roots of the predatory state that India has become. Today, its ruling class consists of corrupt politicians who are served by an extortionate bureaucracy and police that are shielded from public wrath by nothing less than the Constitution of India.

In earlier decades, people’s anger was held in check by their faith in the democratic system. They therefore gave vent to their demand for accountability in the state by turning out to vote in ever larger numbers and regularly overthrowing incumbent governments. Only in recent years has it begun to dawn on them that democracy has become a part of the problem and cannot therefore be part of the solution. The protest is therefore moving closer to the borders of revolt. This has been apparent in the Maoist uprising that began in 2005, and has driven the state out of large parts of 83 districts in the country.

The Anna movement last year was another turning point because it was the first time that the urban middle class took to the streets. December’s mass protests in Delhi were the second time. History teaches us that this is the point at which the state usually begins to crumble. Were this to happen in India, it would not lead to the emergence of a more just and accountable Indian state but to its disintegration.

There is still time for our Central and State leaders to remember that no society that has lost its sense of justice, and, therefore, its moral legitimacy, has survived for long. But they are beginning to run out of it.

 

(The writer is a senior journalist)

If you think we're done with neoliberalism, think again

The global application of a fraudulent economic theory brought the west to its knees. Yet for those in power, it offers riches

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013 20.30 GMT

‘The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles

How they must bleed for us. In 2012, the world's 100 richest people became $241 billion richer. They are now worth $1.9 trillion: just a little less than the entire output of the United Kingdom.


This is not the result of chance. The rise in the fortunes of the super-rich is the direct result of policies. Here are a few: the reduction of tax rates and tax enforcement; governments' refusal to recoup a decent share of revenues from minerals and land; the privatisation of public assets and the creation of a toll-booth economy; wage liberalisation and the destruction of collective bargaining.

The policies that made the global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples – in a thousand business schools, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and just about every modern government – have argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a 30-year global experiment, and the results are now in. Total failure.

Before I go on, I should point out that I don't believe perpetual economic growth is either sustainable or desirable. But if growth is your aim – an aim to which every government claims to subscribe – you couldn't make a bigger mess of it than by releasing the super-rich from the constraints of democracy.

 Last year's annual report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development should have been an obituary for the neoliberal model developed by Hayek and Friedman and their disciples. It shows unequivocally that their policies have created the opposite outcomes to those they predicted. As neoliberal policies (cutting taxes for the rich, privatising state assets, deregulating labour, reducing social security) began to bite from the 1980s onwards, growth rates started to fall and unemployment to rise.

The remarkable growth in the rich nations during the 50s, 60s and 70s was made possible by the destruction of the wealth and power of the elite, as a result of the 1930s depression and the second world war. Their embarrassment gave the other 99% an unprecedented chance to demand redistribution, state spending and social security, all of which stimulated demand.

Neoliberalism was an attempt to turn back these reforms. Lavishly funded by millionaires, its advocates were amazingly successful – politically. Economically they flopped.

Throughout the OECD countries taxation has become more regressive: the rich pay less, the poor pay more. The result, the neoliberals claimed, would be that economic efficiency and investment would rise, enriching everyone. The opposite occurred. As taxes on the rich and on business diminished, the spending power of both the state and poorer people fell, and demand contracted. The result was that investment rates declined, in step with companies' expectations of growth.

The neoliberals also insisted that unrestrained inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared. The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries – worse than in any previous recession of the past three decades – was preceded by the lowest level of wages as a share of GDP since the second world war. Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages suppress demand, which suppresses employment.

As wages stagnated, people supplemented their income with debt. Rising debt fed the deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware. The greater inequality becomes, the UN report finds, the less stable the economy and the lower its rates of growth. The policies with which neoliberal governments seek to reduce their deficits and stimulate their economies are counter-productive.

The impending reduction of the UK's top rate of income tax (from 50% to 45%) will not boost government revenue or private enterprise, but it will enrich the speculators who tanked the economy. Goldman Sachs and other banks are now thinking of delaying their bonus payments to take advantage of it. The welfare bill approved by parliament last week will not help to clear the deficit or stimulate employment: it will reduce demand, suppressing economic recovery. The same goes for the capping of public sector pay. "Relearning some old lessons about fairness and participation," the UN says, "is the only way to eventually overcome the crisis and pursue a path of sustainable economic development."

As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the US, it strikes me that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.

Statistics cast doubt on coalition's '500,000 new jobs' claim

Labour accuses government of 'fiddling figures' after ONS data shows 105,000 of total on mostly unpaid back-to-work schemes

• Shiv Malik and James Ball
• The Guardian, Tuesday 15 January 2013 15.55 GMT

'105,000 of claimed new jobs turn out to be just schemes - this explains why employment seems to have risen,' said Stephen Timms, the shadow employment minister. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

 

Government claims to have created an additional 500,000 jobs in the past year have been called into question after it was revealed that one in five of the people involved are on government work schemes, including tens of thousands still claiming unemployment benefits.

In the last few months the government has trumpeted "record high" employment and the net creation of half a million jobs over the past year.

But figures obtained by the Guardian from the Office for National Statistics show that just over 20% of this total (105,000) involves those on largely unpaid government back-to-work schemes, the majority of whom are still claiming jobseeker's allowance.

They include unpaid workers doing voluntary and mandatory work experience in supermarkets and charity shops.

Many more tens of thousands with no jobs, training or pay, who simply attend regular job hunt workshops as part of the work programme run by the Department for Work and Pensions, are also being counted as employed.

The ONS, which is responsible for employment figures, says it is following guidelines set out by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and counts people as employed if they are adding to the nation's economic output, regardless of whether or not they are paid.

But Labour accused the government of "fiddling the figures" by continuing to highlight them.
Ministers said that they were aware of the "quirk" in the system and had asked the ONS to alter its methods but still insisted that it made little difference to the overall picture.

Figures released in November showed that in the year from September 2011 510,000 net jobs had been created in the UK.

In December's autumn statement, the chancellor, George Osborne, highlighted these statistics, saying employment was "at a record high" and that it was forecast to continue to rise, adding that Britain now had "a greater proportion of its people in work than either the eurozone or the US".
But of those "employed", 105,000 were in back-to-work schemes. While people on such schemes have been counted within the employment figures for years, last year there was a dramatic increase in their number. This growth was partly down to new ONS 2012 counting criteria, under which the statisticians stopped tracking people on Labour's back-to-work schemes as the programmes were being wound down, and started tracking those on the new schemes of the coalition.
Though some of the people on government schemes were doing paid work while being helped as part of the work programme's support service, data from the Labour Force Survey, upon which employment figures are calculated, shows that at least 26,305 of these were doing voluntary unpaid work experience.

Overall a substantial majority of the 105,000 were likely to be subsisting on unemployment benefits – given that several DWP schemes are entirely unpaid – and only a minority of people on the work programme would have been in paid work placements.

Paul Bivand, from the research organisation Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion, said: "People who are unemployed should be counted as unemployed, whether or not they are on government schemes.

"The ONS should recognise that people who are not in a paid job, and are required to look for work to get their benefit, are unemployed. Whether they are getting job search help from Jobcentre Plus or work programme providers is immaterial."

A parliamentary answer from the ONS director general, Glen Watson, given in October last year, confirms that even if people were claiming jobseeker's allowance, they could still be counted as employed.

He said: "Those participants [in government schemes] whose activity comprises any form of work, work experience, or work-related training, are classified as in employment. This is regardless of whether the individual is paid or not."

Shortly after taking office in the last reshuffle in the autumn, the employment minister, Mark Hoban, wrote to the ONS director general seeking a change in the organisation's methods, saying he was "surprised to discover that a number of people on government programmes are classed as in employment".

Hoban wrote: "Many people struggle with the idea that someone in work-based training or a period of work experience can be categorised [as employed]."

The DWP dismissed as ridiculous any suggestion that it was creating back-to-work schemes involving work experience to boost overall job figures, saying its record of trying to deliver transparent figures spoke for itself.

Hoban said: "The fact is that there are 700,000 extra people in work compared to 2010 and unemployment has been falling since last spring. Any quirk in the way a small number of people on our schemes are counted makes little difference.

"These figures are independent of government and were collected in the same way under the previous administration, but I want them to be absolutely transparent which is why I've already raised this issue with the ONS last year."

The shadow employment minister, Stephen Timms, said that the government had been caught "fiddling employment figures".

He said: "105,000 of the claimed new jobs turn out to be just schemes. This helps to explain why employment seems to have risen when there has been no growth.

"Ever since the election ministers have accused the last government of fiddling employment figures – now they have been caught red-handed themselves."

Asked whether it was appropriate to count those on the jobseeker's allowance as employed, an ONS spokesperson said: "The classification of people as either employed, unemployed or economically inactive is based on an internationally agreed set of guidelines.

"This approach has been applied as consistently as possible to our labour market statistics for over 20 years, despite many changes to government training programmes and work-related benefits.
"The criteria are reviewed on a regular basis although no fundamental changes are expected in the foreseeable future."

Is this the loneliest generation?

The Government is trying to quantify social isolation amid health fears

Brian Brady

Sunday, 13 January 2013

Government officials have been ordered to find out exactly how lonely Britain's population is, amid concerns that "the most isolated generation ever" will overwhelm the NHS.

The Department of Health is attempting to measure the extent of "social isolation" in the UK, after warnings that it has sparked spiralling levels of illnesses including heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia and depression.

Research has revealed that loneliness is a growing problem in the UK – particularly among the elderly – with one in three admitting that they sometimes feel lonely. Among older people, more than half live alone, 17 per cent are in contact with family, friends and neighbours less than once a week, and almost five million say the television is their main form of company.

However, the trend is expected to worsen in the coming years. The Office for National Statistics disclosed last year that the number of Britons living alone has risen to a record 7.6 million – one million more than in 1996 and amounting to almost one in three households.

But beyond the personal problems the "loneliness epidemic" presents, ministers have been put on alert over its wider impact – and financial costs. Loneliness is blamed for piling more pressure on to health and social care services, because it can increase the risk of complaints including heart disease and blood clots. Experts also believe it encourages people to exercise less and drink more – and ultimately go to hospital more often and move into residential care at an earlier stage.

The Government's attempts to measure social isolation among people using health and social care will increase the pressure on the NHS and councils to tackle the problem now – to slash millions from their spending on the effects of loneliness in the future.

The care and support minister, Norman Lamb, said: "For the first time, we will be aiming to define the extent of the problem by introducing a national measure for loneliness. We will be encouraging local authorities, NHS organisations and others to get better at measuring the issue in their communities. Once they have this information, they can then come up with the right solutions to address loneliness and isolation."

It is the latest in a number of attempts to gauge, and change, the national mood: Tony Blair appointed the LSE academic Lord Layard as his "happiness tsar", while David Cameron has previously tried to measure people's well-being. In each case, the driving aim was to cut health and social welfare costs by making people feel better about their lot.

An official guide on combating isolation, issued to local authorities by the organisation Campaign to End Loneliness, says: "Tackling loneliness will reduce the demand for costly health care and, by reconnecting individuals to their communities, it will give renewed access to older people's economic and social capital." The guide points out that a scheme in Essex where lonely people were "befriended" by volunteers cost £80 per person but produced annual savings of £300 per person. Another project directing older people to local services cost £480 but realised savings of £900 per person.

Anne Hayden, a Dorset GP, saved more than £80,000 in costs for six patients who were "high users of NHS services" with a befriending scheme to boost their emotional well-being. David McCullough, chief executive of the WRVS (formerly the Women's Royal Voluntary Service), said: "It's to the benefit of not only the patient, but also the NHS as a whole, that GPs spot the early warning signs of isolation and refer patients to services such as befriending or community centres."

Case study

Win Noble was a nurse who had to give up work to care for her husband after he had a stroke and heart attack.

"It's not until you're on your own that you feel miserable. My husband died in 2001. I had nursed him for 20 years.

"In 2005, my next-to-oldest daughter died and then so did my youngest daughter. I was on my own because the rest of the family don't live in the area and I'm partially disabled, so I can't really socialise. One of my other daughters is housebound, one lives in Rhyl and one in Skegness and my only son is in Sleaford. I hadn't seen my son for five years but he rings me and came down this week.
"I don't see the others. I used to read a lot of books, from the mobile library, and I do a lot of puzzles just to keep occupied.

"Age Concern contacted me and suggested a craft class. After a few weeks they started to get a group together to play games like Scrabble and have quizzes. I got really involved and really enjoyed it. I became a volunteer and people needed me again."

Rachael Bentham