Clegg

Privatisation will threaten Royal Mail’s six-day service, warns campaign group

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[Well of course the service will suffer, postage charges will rise, postmen and women will be sacked – that’s what businesses do to make money. Many Tory and Liberal-Democrat-Tory MPs reassure their constituencies that the opposite is true. They’re lying.

Tony Blair’s NEW Labour tried to privatise Royal Mail. Their argument was that there was a deficit in the pension fund. I never really grasped that very poor argument. Any deficit would have be due To Royal Mail or the government dipping into it as promoted by Gordon Brown. The current government argues that Royal Mail needs investment despite it apparently turning a profit. Why not invest some of that profit? ]

Competition will make it impossible for a privatised service not to cut deliveries in rural areas, says Save Our Royal Mail

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Richard Graham, the MP for Gloucester, argued that privatisation would provide the investment needed to compete against the private sector. “I don’t want to save Royal Mail because I don’t think it’s a panda or a tiger,” he said. “I want to grow Royal Mail. I want to see it become a world- beating company. It’s got 150,000 employees. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if it had 200,000 and was running postal services under that great brand all around the Commonwealth?

“It needs to be able to compete against private-sector competitors, and it can only do that effectively if it has the investment it needs to get the technology that the competitors have,” he said.

The panel clashed over how privatisation would affect value for money for consumers. Dunn said Royal Mail had historically kept prices low across the market, but expected a sharp increase after privatisation that would allow its competitors to increase their prices, too. Graham, however, predicted that the new ownership would freeze prices after last year’s rises.

Ben Harris-Quinney, chair of the right-wing thinktank Bow Group, accused the government of “rushing out” the privatisation. “Research in July showed that almost half of the country were not aware of the privatisation of Royal Mail and 65% of those surveyed were against any notion of privatisation,” he said. “There has been no campaign. This has been a Westminster-bubble discussion that hasn’t engaged with the public at all.”

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Bill protects lobbyists while targeting civil society

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David Miller, Professor of Sociology at University of Bath

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The government bill on lobbying currently making its way through parliament has trade unions and most of the non-government organisation (NGO) world up in arms. But they are not complaining about the provisions on lobbying – focusing instead on the “gagging” clauses in the bill.

These – which are in the second part of the bill – bring in new restrictions on the activities of any organisation spending £5,000 a year on non-party-political campaigning on broadly defined “political issues”. The law will apply to campaigning that “may” influence an election and will be in force for a whole year before elections.

As Polly Toynbee notes, if charities “trip into electoral law they must send weekly reports of all their spending during the electoral period, when any slip risks criminal charges”. Part three of the bill also brings in new onerous regulations targeting trade unions.

Meanwhile the lobbying provisions in part one, promised in the Coalition agreement of May 2010, are seriously inadequate. Remember that David Cameron pointed to lobbying as the “next big scandal waiting to happen” in early 2010. This came after mounting lobbying scandals and stories of corruption in public life under successive governments. Who can forget Labour transport minister Stephen Byers and the “cab for hire” affair?

Since then the problems of the subterranean influence of lobbying and privileged access for corporate leaders has only got worse. To name a few: Conservative Party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas resigned over the cash-for-access affair; ministerial adviser Adam Smith resigned over News Corp’s lobbying on the BSkyB bid; retired “generals for hire” offered to lobby for arms companies; MP Patrick Mercer was caught out; as were two members of the House of Lords; and details emerged of Lynton Crosby’s clients.

Bill misses targets

In response to all this, the provisions of the bill would cover only lobbyists working as consultants, rather than in-house corporate lobbyists. This already excludes around 80% of lobbyists from registration.

But the bill is even worse, in that lobbying consultancies will only have to register if they meet with ministers or permanent secretaries. Meetings with special advisers and all other civil servants don’t count and nor does any other activity.

Thus, as the lobbying consultants’ lobby group, the Association of Professional Political Consultants notes, ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills had 988 meetings with lobbyists in 2012 – only two of which were with lobbying consultants. That is less than 1% of ministerial meetings, never mind the wider activities essential to lobbying and influence peddling.

It is not clear whether the gagging clauses have been put into the bill by fiendishly clever sleight of hand to distract attention from the lobbying register. Perhaps the hope is that the lobbying provisions will slip through unnoticed.

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Child poverty UK

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http://www.cpag.org.uk/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

Child poverty facts and figures

  • There are 3.5 million children living in poverty in the UK today. That’s 27 per cent of children, or more than one in four.1
  • There are even more serious concentrations of child poverty at a local level: in 100 local wards, for example, between 50 and 70 per cent of children are growing up in poverty.2
  • Work does not provide a guaranteed route out of poverty in the UK. Two-thirds (66 per cent) of children growing up in poverty live in a family where at least one member works.3
  • People are poor for many reasons. But explanations which put poverty down to drug and alcohol dependency, family breakdown, poor parenting, or a culture of worklessness are not supported by the facts.4
  • Child poverty blights childhoods. Growing up in poverty means being cold, going hungry, not being able to join in activities with friends. For example, 61 per cent of families in the bottom income quintile would like, but cannot afford, to take their children on holiday for one week a year.5
  • Child poverty has long-lasting effects. By 16, children receiving free school meals achieve 1.7 grades lower at GCSE than their wealthier peers.6 Leaving school with fewer qualifications translates into lower earnings over the course of a working life.
  • Poverty is also related to more complicated health histories over the course of a lifetime, again influencing earnings as well as the overall quality – and indeed length – of life. Professionals live, on average, eight years longer than unskilled workers.7
  • Child poverty imposes costs on broader society – estimated to be at least £29 billion a year.8 Governments forgo prospective revenues as well as commit themselves to providing services in the future if they fail to address child poverty in the here and now.
  • Child poverty reduced dramatically between 1998/9-2011/12 when 1.1 million children were lifted out of poverty (BHC).9 This reduction is credited in large part to measures that increased the levels of lone parents working, as well as real and often significant increases in the level of benefits paid to families with children.
  • Under current government policies, child poverty is projected to rise from 2012/13 with an expected 600,000 more children living in poverty by 2015/16.10 This upward trend is expected to continue with 4.7 million children projected to be living in poverty by 2020.

 

  • 1. Households Below Average Income, An analysis of the income distribution 1994/95 : 2011/12, Tables 4.1tr and 4.3tr. Department for Work and Pensions, 2013
  • 2. Child Poverty Map of the UK, End Child Poverty, March 2011
  • 3. Households Below Average Income, An analysis of the income distribution 1994/95 : 2011/12, Table 4.3db. Department for Work and Pensions, 2013
  • 4. For example, G Hay and L Bauld, Population estimates of problematic drug users in England who access DWP benefits, Department for Work and Pensions, 2008, suggest that 6.6 per cent of the total number of benefit claimants in England were problem drug users. While drug misuse may prove to be a key reason this group of people finds it hard to escape poverty, it clearly has no explanatory power for the other 93.4 per cent of claimants.
  • 5. Households Below Average Income, An analysis of the income distribution 1994/95 : 2011/12, Table 4.7 db. Department for Work and Pensions, 2012
  • 6. GCSE and Equivalent Attainment by Pupil Characteristics in England 2009/10, Department for Education 2011
  • 7. Life expectancy at birth and at the age of 65 by local areas in the UK, 2004-6 and 2008-10, Office of National Statistics, October 2011
  • 8. D Hirsch, Estimating the costs of child poverty, 2013
  • 9. Households Below Average Income, An analysis of the income distribution 1994/95 – 2011/2, Department for Work and Pensions, 2013
  • 10. J Browne, A Hood and R Joyce, Child and working age poverty in Northern Ireland, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2103

 

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Syria! Syria! Syria!

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The UK government has been recalled to discuss Syria tomorrow (Thursday 29 August 2013).

Not much has changed in the news that I’ve seen in the past few hours. There may have been or not use of chemical weapons in Damascus a week or so ago. Corr I almost spelled it out the UKUSISr.

The trouble is that there is an absolute absence of proof. Was there a chemical attack? Who did it?

I am very disturbed at these terrorist ‘rebels’ that USUKIsr is supporting. They seem to like these terrorists. Let’s have it straight then. Let’s get down to the terrorists that USUK support and finance and the terrorists that USUK doesn’t support and finance.

Looks like USUK have got a lot of explaining to do about the terrorists that they support in Syria.

 

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