Tories and the tax on beer

The Guardian has interviewed people attending the Tory conference, including the chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association (formerly the Brewers' Society) who, while there in a professional capacity, also supports the party personally.

It's hardly surprising that most brewers, like most business owners, are Tories. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, brewers who became Tory politicians, known as the "beerage", included the Allsopps, owners of the one of the biggest breweries in Burton-upon-Trent.

More than three hundred MP's are members of the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group which exists to "promote the wholesomeness and enjoyment of beer and the unique role of the pub in UK society". Why then do they do so little to stop the pocket of the drinker being raided by the Chancellor in successive Budgets?

Close the Coalhouse door

I listened to the Radio 4 play Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater on Saturday afternoon.

Based on the writings of ex-miner Sid Chaplin, Close the Coalhouse Door is about the Durham miners' union from the strikes to achieve recognition in the 1830's through the Depression and post-war nationalisation.  It's also well known for the songs in it by Alex Glasgow which as well as Close the Coalhouse Door include As Soon As This Pub Closes and Socialist ABC.

Alan Plater wrote the play in 1968, before the coalfield battles of 1972, 1974 and 1984-5, so director Sam West brings the play up to the present day with an "alternate history" in which Thatcherism never happened. If only...

Hillsborough, truth and justice

I'm glad that the lies of the police, politicians and press about the 1989 Hillsborough disaster have been thoroughly exposed by the independent panel examining documents relating to that day, especially for the relatives of those killed whose long fight for the truth has now been publicly vindicated. But the apology made by David Cameron in the House of Commons yesterday struck me as hollow and cheap. And twenty-three years too late.

Will anyone responsible for what happened at Hillsborough in 1989 or the cover-up in the years since then be held to account for what they did? The policemen whose incompetence was the main cause of the disaster who then smeared the dead as drunken hooligans? The politicians - including the local Tory MP and the Prime Minister - who helped spread what they knew were lies in order to protect the reputation of the police? The newspaper editor who published the lies? The coroner who accepted without question the police's evidence and dismissed that of other witnesses such as fans?

I fear that Hillsborough will join a long list of incidents - Bloody Sunday, Bradford, Heysel, Zeebrugge - where even though the truth of what happened is known those responsible will ultimately escape justice.

Death in Derby

A sixth child has died following a house fire in Derby last week.

The head of the household, Mick Philpott, has been the subject of media attention in the last couple of years for being an unemployed father of fifteen children with his wife and girlfriend and has appeared on cheap - in both senses of the word - TV programmes fronted by the odious Jeremy Kyle and Ann Widdecombe.

Whatever you think of Philpott's lifestyle and what it says about the benefits and education systems, it cannot be right that eight people, including six children, were living in a three bedroom semi-detached house. It seems that the family had been on Derby council's waiting list for rehousing for some time.

The Government's decision to cap housing benefit can only lead to more situations where families are living in overcrowded housing, especially in London with its sky-high rents, and more firefighters facing the grim task their colleagues in Derby experienced last week.

Private school prattle

The Education Secretary Michael Gove yesterday made a speech to heads of private schools in which he argued that the dominance of privately-educated people such as himself in business, politics, journalism and TV is a problem.

If he were serious about tackling the problem, there is a lot he could do. Most of it would not even need new legislation, such as ending the charitable status of private schools and setting quotas for privately-educated pupils in university admissions equivalent to the percentage of school students they represent (around 7% , compared to a third now and rising to nearly half in top universities).

Of course, Gove will do none of those things, pushing ahead instead with more state-funded but privately-run Academies and "free schools" that may get a few bright working-class kids to Oxbridge but will increase rather than narrow the gap between rich and poor in education.

That horse and another gate

One of my favourite films is All the President's Men, based on the book by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. It tells the story of their investigation into the Watergate break-in and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon to avoid impeachment. 

Subsequent political scandals have since acquired the suffix -gate and the phone hacking scandal at News International is no different.  The revelation that David Cameron rode an ex-Metropolitan Police horse belonging to his friend, ex-Eton classmate and now racing trainer Charlie Brooks and his wife,  former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks - both of whom were arrested and released on police bail yesterday - summed up the corrupt connections between the police, politicians and News International and has led to the affair being dubbed Horsegate.

Surely a film will eventually be made about the phone hacking hacking scandal but who could possibly play the main characters?  Richard E Grant as Cameron? Dustin Hoffman as Nick Davies of The Guardian? I'm struggling with Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks to be honest.

A4e: the bigger con

Police are continuing to investigate "welfare to work" outfit A4e over allegations that its staff falsified documents to meet targets for finding jobs for the unemployed. There is now speculation that the Department for Work and Pensions is about to suspend its contracts with the company.

In concentrating on the media allegations against A4e there is a danger of overlooking the wider scam the company is engaged in.  Even if A4e staff haven't been falsifying records, or senior executives were unaware of it, the company is still running a massive swindle.

A4e's "welfare to work" approach consists of dragooning unemployed people into overcrowded premises, delivering cod-psychological motivational speeches to them, forcing them into unpaid "work experience" and ignoring the fact that there are far more people out of work than there are jobs.  In many cases, it subcontracts work to one of dozens of competing local agencies, slicing off a large share of the money as profit and leaving them to fight over the scraps. Even it was finding jobs for unemployed people, that is work that should properly be done by DWP civil servants whose numbers have been cut by the last Labour and current Tory-Lib Dem governments at the same time they were awarding A4e multi-million pound contracts.

A4e and its founder Emma Harrison share one thing with benefit claimants: they depend for their entire income on public money.  Harrison has awarded herself close to £7 million in bonuses, charged luxury overseas trips to the company and lives in style at Thornbridge Hall, a country estate in Derbyshire.  She has been invited to Downing Street and to Buckingham Palce to receive a CBE. As the saying goes, steal a penny and you're a thief; steal a million and you're a lord.

The Church of Rome in England

The idea that there's any lingering anti-Catholicism in England took another blow yesterday as Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Dunacan Smith led the charge against the poor that is the Government's Welfare Reform Bill and ex-Tory party chairman and now head of the BBC governors Chris Patten appeared before the Leveson Inquiry into press standards alongside BBC chief executive Mark Thompson.

The Church of England has been pretty accurately described as the Tory party at prayer. The reverse is not quite the case though: as well as a Nonconformist former PM (Thatcher), the Tories also have a sprinkling of upper-class Catholics in their ranks like Michael Ancram and Julian Fellowes.

As a lapsed Catholic atheist from Manchester, I am unsurprisingly descended from the Irish peasant and labouring classes who since the nineteenth century have been more prevalent in the North West of England than the upper-class descendants of English recusants. The priests and bishops I knew in my youth came from Cavan or Mayo rather than Ampleforth or Stonyhurst. Although I've never met an upper-class Catholic, I nevertheless have a interest in and certain regard for the English recusants who refused to give up their faith and went underground, sending their sons to be educated on the Continent and smuggling in priests. In part this is based on having enjoyed Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and Paul Scofield's superb performance as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons but is also to do with being impressed by people prepared to stand against the stream whatever the cost.

Racking up rents

It looks like there will be a mini-revolt on the Government benches in the House of Lords later today over the Welfare Reform Bill. Lib Dem peer Paddy Ashdown has said he will vote against proposals to cap benefits at £26,000 per household per year and others are likely to join him, including it appears at least some of the twenty-six Anglican bishops who sit in the Lords.

The Government are appealing to a number of right-wing tabloid myths in the Welfare Reform Bill. Ashdown's specific objection is to the capping of Child Benefit which in the Tory mindset is about stopping the feckless poor overbreeding and punishing the moral failings of single mothers. The Bill is essentially a divide and rule tactic, telling workers that their enemy is not the bosses but other workers who are living it up at their expense by having lots of children or swinging the lead on Incapacity Benefit.

£26,000 is equivalent to £500 a week. A large percentage of that will be taken up by Housing Benefit. Nowhere in all the media coverage is there any discussion as to where that money goes, not to benefit claimants but to their landlords. The root problem is not that benefits are too generous but that rents in private rented accommodation are too high.

The situation is especially acute in London, especially in central London where demand for housing far outstrips supply. Two things could be done to tackle this: regulation of the housing market by the Government introducing strict rent control and building more council houses.

Another point overlooked by the media is the circular relationship between the Government, banks and private landlords. The boom in building private flats in the 2000's was funded by credit and many of them were bought by private landlords on buy to let mortgages so at least part of the money paid out in Housing Benefit ends up via interest payments in the hands of banks bailed out by the taxpayer.

Prisoners of Poundland

I wish Cait Reilly well in her legal challenge about unemployed people being forced to work for free.  As someone who's been involved in a high profile legal case against my employer, I also sympathise with her over the way she's been attacked in the tabloid press by uninformed and overpaid right-wing journalists.

Reilly is an unemployed graduate from Birmingham who volunteers in a museum.  The jobcentre told her she had to accept a two week "training placement" at Poundland or lose her meagre unemployment benefit of £53 a week.  The "training placement" was unsurprisingly nothing of the sort, consisting of stacking shelves and cleaning floors.

There is of course nothing wrong with unemployed people being offered training or volunteering.  When I was unemployed in the mid-90's, I took a computer course arranged by the jobcentre.  After I was made redundant a few years ago, I volunteered as an advisor in a law centre (now closed due to Government cuts).  These "training" schemes however have nothing to do with training and everything to do with Poundland and other employers in the already low-paid retail sector exploiting the expanding pool of unemployed young people when they need extra staff.

If I was forced to work in Poundland for nothing or lose my benefits, I think I'd turn up every day on time and then work as slowly as possible, "accidentally" dropping or knocking over stock on a regular basis.  Somehow, I don't think I'd be there two weeks.

Warehouses for the poor?

Neither of housing minister Grant Shapps' announcements on New Year's Day, that the Government intends to prosecute council house tenants who sub-let their homes as well as increasing rents for well-paid tenants, were that surprising.  What did bring me close to putting my fist through the TV screen though was the subsequent discussion on the BBC news channel.  Two journalists - neither of whom I'd guess has much experience of social housing - homed in on the twenty thousand or so council tenants who earn £100,000 and agreed with each other that "council houses weren't meant for people like that".

By "people like that" they meant skilled workers and they are completely wrong.  The idea that council houses were built only for jobless, poor people to live in is not only historically inaccurate but politically poisonous, implying that society has no responsibilty to provide housing for anyone but the most desperate and in doing so should spend as little as possible.

The two things that drove council housing building between the late 1930's and early 1950's were slum clearance and bomb damage in the Second World War.  When my own grandparents moved to the Wythenshawe estate in South Manchester, they saw it as moving to the countryside from inner city Old Trafford.  Manchester City Council even called what would eventually become the biggest housing estate in Europe its Garden Suburb.  My grandad worked as a toolmaker at the giant MetroVicks engineering factory in Trafford Park, my grandmother behind the bar in a pub and later on school dinners.  Like their neighbours in the full employment and increasing affluence of the 50's and 60's, they bought a car, a TV and a fridge and saw their children go on holiday abroad. The idea that they constituted a social underclass is a joke.

The idea that only unemployed or poor people should live in social housing has two roots.  One is the United States where public housing in cities like New York and Chicago was designed, as the poet Carl Sandburg put it, as "warehouses for the poor". The other dates from the Thatcher government of the early 1980's which simultaneously ran down manufacturing industry and sold off council houses so that in the end many estates did become largely peopled by deprived and jobless tenants.  The idea that that was the intention from the beginnning is far from the truth though and the BBC housing correspondent who claimed that it was should read about the history of what he purports to be an expert on before he speaks.

Cameron attacks a straw man

David Cameron's speech on the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible declaring that "we are a Christian country. And we should not be afraid to say so" and decrying people who "argue that by saying we are a Christian country and standing up for Christian values we are somehow doing down other faiths" is a case of attacking a position that no one holds.  Tory ex-Cabinet minister Michael Portillo also weighed in with "We all know the classic cases of political correctness that you are not allowed to mention Christmas, and cards that you send out at this time of the year must not mention Christmas and things like this."

Cameron seems to be saying that the English language, architecture, art, history, literature and music have all been influenced by Chrisitianity. But who has ever denied that?  Portillo's remarks are even more lame-brained.  If "we all know" that you can't mention Christmas or send Christmas cards any more, he won't have any trouble reeling off a list of people he knows who object to the mention of Christmas or to people sending cards.

I also find it amusing that the Church of England is now reduced to being defended by a self-proclaimed "wishy-washy" Anglican PM who has said that his faith comes and goes like the radio reception in the Chilterns and a lapsed Catholic atheist.

Bigmouth Strikes Again

I don't know or care whether Jeremy Clarkson was being serious when he called for striking public sector workers to be executed on TV the other night.  He obviously said it to be controversial and provoke a reaction which is just what he got as Twitter and Facebook went into meltdown.  Given he was on the show to promote a book, him and his publicist must be laughing at all the publicity his remarks have attracted.  Rather than phoning the police or complaining to the BBC, a much better response would have been to yawn and turn over.  It's like a child throwing a tantrum: make a fuss and they just carry on; ignore them and they give up.

Clarkson's pal David Cameron has unsurprisingly tried to downplay the remarks.  Cameron and Clarkson have a lot in common: educated at public school, part of the Chipping Norton set in Oxfordshire, and ironically, unlike the strikers they condemn, in receipt of very generous wages and pensions paid for by the taxpayer.

Toffs and tax

Having been on the public sector workers' pensions demo in Manchester yesterday, I watched the BBC2 programme Your Money and How They Spend It more out of interest than any expectation of it being very incisive.

My low expectations of the programme were borne out as the presenter, ex-national chairman of the Young Conservatives Nick Robinson, interviewed former Labour and Conservative Chancellors of the Excheque who all basically said: "People want decent public services but won't vote for higher taxes".  Needless to say, the obvious point that rich people and big companies could pay more, or in many cases even start paying tax, was not put to them.

The most interesting part was where Robinson walked round a racecourse asking people who they thought "the rich" were, how much "rich people" earned and how many of them there were.  Unsurprisingly, the richer people are, the higher their bar for what counts as rich.  No one admitted to being rich themselves even when they clearly were and estimates of how many people earned the same as them were also way off with people guessing that 25% of the population earn over £120,000 rather than the actual figure of 1%.

Police and thieves

I listened to this programme on Radio 4 before about the police strikes of 1918 and 1919 in Liverpool and London, presented somewhat imcongruously by the Tory ex-Cabinet minister Michael Portillo.

One thing it blew out of the water was the idea that in the past everyone respected the police and private property. In Liverpool, there was mass looting of shops when the police struck for higher pay and recognition of their trade union.  The strikers also found that the support they expected to get from trade unionists wasn't forthcoming as dockers, railway workers and seamen remembered the beatings they'd had at police hands in the 1911 transport strike.

Although large numbers of strikers were sacked after the walkout (and then blacklisted by MI5), the police did get higher pay as a result, albeit not trade union recognition - the Government instead set up the Police Federation and expressly forbad it from striking.  As Portillo noted, the reliablity of the police to the State came in handy when the Tories were beating down the miners and printers in the 1980's.

GPs and sicknotes

The government has a plan to cut the amount of time people take off work sick.  They want to stop GP's writing sicknotes and hand the job over to an "independent assessment service", presumably a private company who get paid for the number of people they refuse a sicknote to. 

The plan is based on two ideas, neither of which is true: that lots of people go off sick from work long-term (as opposed to a "sickie") when there's nothing wrong with them and that GP's give sicknotes to people who they know are not sick.

I've got a couple of ideas to reduce the amount of time people take off work sick: make workplaces healthier and cut NHS waiting times. 

Five years ago, I was off work for over a year as a result of an industrial injury to my knee.  After seeing my GP, it took six months to go for a scan and another six months for an operation.  At the end of two months physio I returned to work. As a doctor said to me, if I'd been Wayne Rooney I would have had the scan and op on day one and after physio been back at work after a couple of months.

Of course, the government won't do either of the things that would reduce work-related sickness as the first would require strong trade unions in every workplace and the second taxing the wealthy to pay for decent public services.

No, no, no

I won't be going to see the new film about Margaret Thatcher when it's released in the New Year.  You need a pretty strong stomach just to watch the trailer.

The plot seems to have been pulled straight off the Hollywood shelf: grocer's daughter from small town braves male chauvinism to reach the top.  The producers claim that the film is a "compelling story of ..a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world." No mention obviously of the millions of lives smashed apart as a result, from the miners, printers, steelworkers and dockers thrown out of work to the hundreds of thousands of young people with no hope of ever finding a job. 

As we return to recession and mass unemployment under the Tories, young people who see the film might at least learn who was responsible for creating the dog-eat-dog society they now have to live in, hopefully just in time to celebrate Thatcher's death with the rest of us. I've had a bottle of champagne on standby for months now...

Who benefits?

As part of its response to this summer's riots, the government has announced that it intends to give the courts powers to cut up to £25 from the benefits of those convicted of and fined for a criminal offence.

Recently published research has shown - not very surprisingly - that most people convicted of looting in the riots are from the poorest communities across Britain, about a third of whom receive social security benefits.  Who actually believes that making poor people poorer is the way to cut crime?  David Cameron for one does.  "The system as it stands at the moment is far too soft," he claims.  

Social security benefits are set at a level the laws says people need to live on.  If nearly half is deducted by judges as fines, what does the government think people will do to survive?  But then Cameron, Clegg and Osborne don't think like us.  To them £60 is what they pay for a cheap bottle of wine, not what has to last them all week.

Crisis, what crisis?

The media hoo-haa about the problems being experienced by Blackberry users continues with The Guardian today reprinting the tweets of celebrities caught up in the end of the world as they know it including Alan Sugar, cricketer Kevin Pietersen, Jemima Khan and Alastair Campbell who added the hashtag #getmybloodyblackberrybackon.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the official unemployment figures topped two and a half million for the first time since 1994 - i.e. the last recession under a Tory government - with nearly a million of those signing on young people between 18 and 24.

Thirty years ago today

The Tory party is meeting in Manchester this week, at the convention centre that was Manchester Central railway station until the late 60's.  The photograph shows it standing derelict in 1981, a couple of years after a Tory government had come to power proclaiming that there was "no alternative" to economic slash and burn policies that devastated large swathes of British industry and put millions on the dole.

With the Tories back in power, how long before it looks like this again?