1st March 2002

We should all be supporting the police in their current disagreement with the Home Secretary who is attempting to impose new pay scales which have been predictably presented as a necessary piece of 'modernization'.

It should now be obvious to everybody that the words Modernization and Reform are just being used to justify an attack on the public services and public servants, who can then be presented by the spin doctors as being obstructive and uncooperative maybe even opening the way for Securicor to be asked to undertake police duties and cut costs by paying lower salaries and providing a poorer service.

Will the Fire Service find that it too has to face competitors as happened in the old days when insurance companies provided fire cover and affixed plates to the houses they had insured, so that the company fire appliance could see which houses had to be saved and which were not covered and could be allowed to burn.

But when are we going to hear about Reforms to Company law to deal with the gross abuse of trust by some corporations whose Directors line their own pockets before an announcement is made that there has been a bankruptcy and thousands of workers are to be laid off.

The official view from Downing Street seems to be that everything the private sector is automatically better and more efficient, despite all the evidence that suggests the opposite is true for even where workers in a private company do well as the Dyson workers did with their excellent bagless vacuum cleaner, that did not protect their own jobs as the plant is to be closed, moved to Malaysia where the wages are far lower, making even more money for the company and leaving those who designed and built the appliance on the dole.

There seems to be no moral basis in New Labour Policy abroad, since both sides in the Congo civil war are receiving weapons made in Britain - a decision justified on the grounds that it safeguards British jobs, and after the prime minister appealed for Peace in Kashmir, on a recent visit, it turned out on his return, that a massive arms deal had been done there.

Nor is there much consistency since the Foreign Secretary demands sanctions against Zimbabwe on the grounds that their elections were not fair, but no word is spoken about sanctions against Saudi Arabia or Kuwait where they do not have any elections of any kind - but Britain cannot object because they have oil and Zimbabwe does not.

It is hard to believe that any of these decisions were fully discussed and decided by the cabinet, for no serious Labour minister could fail to understand all this - and the conclusion must be that the cabinet does not get to discuss these matters at all but sits there and is told what has been decided, or maybe only learns about it in the newspapers as we all have to do.

Indeed I am not sure that we have a functioning cabinet at all, since the prime minister has gathered around him a mass of so-called advisers who were neither elected nor have passed through the rigorous civil service selection system but have far more power than the cabinet itself.

Those MPs who have been made cabinet ministers have become mere advisers themselves apart from discharging the ritual function of heading up the departments and taking the rap if anything goes wrong, leaving policy to the real cabinet the prime minister has chosen from amongst his friends.

In short parliamentary democracy and cabinet government have been quietly abandoned in favour of a King and his courtiers, sustained by ministers and MPs who are expected to fall into line or get the chop, almost as if we have a President without even a House of Representatives to keep him in check.

There are, of course, a number of good MPs who are doing an excellent job in the Commons and many others who are uneasy about individual policies but those who do speak out are either ignored or denounced by a media that desperately wants to retain the confidence of those in Downing Street who control the flow of news upon which they themselves depend to retain their jobs.

Given that tight control of power and information the only way we shall ever achieve anything now is by mounting massive campaigns to bring pressure to bear on No 10 so that even the pollsters and spin doctors begin to notice and recommend a change of course.

Remote as all that may sound, those who have followed that line have succeeded in getting some policy changes made, as we saw this week with the new line coming from the top that taxes might have to rise to pay for the NHS.

For years that was dismissed as impossible and backward-looking but now the message has got across the tune is shifting and we may get what we have needed for years.

The environmental movement has already had some impact by following the same policy of campaigning and the principled and determined opposition to privatization by the trade unions could lead to a re-think on that too.

Indeed a determined peace movement might even frighten off the prime minister from supporting another war against Iraq which would be strongly opposed by many who are in no way political.

"Keep up the Pressure" would be a good slogan for May Day 2002 and if it is taken up we could start to make real progress.

1/3/02