The current crisis at Southern Cross is a cause for great concern and has been the subject of much debate. It has come at a time when there is huge concern about the health and social care sector being opened up to more competition,concern about the quality of care in residential care and hospitals and concern about NHS Hospital Trusts in financial crisis.
Unfortunately (though predictably) much of the debate about these important issues involves simplistic arguments about the unsuitability of applying the 'profit motive' to social care. These arguments ignore the fact that the majority of people involved in private sector social care (including most of the managers) are employees and never see any profit. Like their public sector counterparts they are likely to be motivated by wanting to provide a good service to the people they care for. Certainly, they could forced to cut corners by owners to save money- but this is equally true of people working for cash strapped public services.
There ARE reasons to be concerned about the private sector involvement in social care. However, to examine them requires a much more nuanced approach than that on display in some parts of the media.
The current problems with Southern Cross would appear to derive from the business model which the company has been saddled with since 2007.
Southern Cross was purchased in 2004 for £162 million by an American private equity firm called Blackstone. It was floated in 2007 on the stockmarket with a valuation of £423 million. The business model was called sale and leaseback. The company would sell off its valuable property assets, (ie the buildings which housed the care homes) to property investors. These investors apparently include the Qatar Investment Authority and other wealthy landlords who were guaranteed steeply rising returns. The careccompany would then lease back the properties from their rich landlords with 30 year leases which required them to pay ever increasing amounts of money in rent each year. This arrangement assumed that the demand for residential care would increase year on year and that local authorities would be willing to continue to pay increasing amounts of money for residential care.
The money that the company made from the property sales was used as finance for the purchase of additional care homes which were then in turn sold and leased back. As long as property values kept rising and there was the ongoing income from new residents the flow of money continued.
Blackstone made a 300% return on investment from this deal.Four executives at Southern Cross sold their entire holding of the company in December 2007 when the share price was £5.50 per share netting them personally a combined £35 million. The share price plunged just 6 months later and stood at £0.063 per share on 3rd June 2011.
Now the company cannot afford to go on paying the steep rents and local authorities are facing the prospect of having to rehome large numbers of vulnerable older in the event of a collapse.
The Southern Cross collapse was a result of high risk business strategy which had reaped huge profits for a small number of people and a private equity firm. The model was vulnerable to economic and political changes. In any case it would have been cheaper to have funded expansion from loans than from sale and leaseback of peperty.
The long term fallout from this is going to place a great deal of anxiety for vulnerable older people and their relatives, local authorities, council tax payers and current investors.
This is likely to be especially felt in the north east where the care home chain has a strong presence. So far central Govt has shown very little leadership. Their localism agenda seeming to allow them to bail out of any responsibility for anything which they consider to be a 'local' issue. But Southern Cross is not a local issue. It is a regional and a national issue. It requires a national solution and new strategies in dealing with issues of private sector involvement in public sector provision.
I believe the lessons from Southern Cross are as follows:
1. Private sector involvement is not a panacea for the high costs of providing decent health and social care.Research by the Financial Times (4th June 2011 p2)suggests that PFI intiatives are imposing unstainably high costs on a number of hospital trusts accross the country. PFI was once thought to be an easy way iof raising money for capital projects but it is now being realised that PFI schemes have huge long term cost implications.
There is currently thought being given to new methods of funding of services such as social impact bonds. The advocates of these funding mechanisms suggest that they will offer reduced risk to the public sector and benefits for investors. However, all of these funding models seem to work on the assumption that it is possible to simultaneously save public money and generate good returns for investors. How these two objectives can co-exist has never been explained to my satisfaction and I challenge anyone to explain how this can happen.
2. Greater regulation and oversight is needed of private involvement in health and social care. This is needed not just in oversight of the quality of care but also in the business models used by providers. The Govt is rightly seeking to reduce some of the pre-qualification checks required of small and medium entrprises in bidding for public sector work. These checks on financial solvency etc. are often far too onerous for people bidding for small pieces of short term work. However, for the long term commitment required of companies who are going to care for vulnerable people, a higher degree of scrutiny is needed. Central Govt needs to act so that the interests of the city for short term profit do not overide the needs of vulnerable people for high quality and secure care. The Southern Cross business model should not have been allowed to operate.
3. A greater understanding of business models and finance is needed for all people involved in social care from social workers to senior managers. As long as local and central Govt are responsible for care of older people they will have to keep a careful watch on who is providing care and how it is being provided. It is not good enough just assume that existing regulatory mechanisms are sufficient.
4. Providing services to the public sector is a high risk endeavour. Many local authority staff are being encouraged to set up social entrprises and co-ops at a time when public sector bodies are cash strapped. These workers should be aware of the risks of being in busiess and the hazards which political and economic change hold for suppliers to the public sector. The Southern Cross business model was built on assumptions about the continued flow of new customers and year on year rises in charges. These have turned out to be ill-founded assumptions.
5. The old adage about not investing in anything you don't understand should apply here. I doubt that so many investors would have put money into the Southern Cross flotation of they understood the business model or just how risky it was. It is likely that the investors included pension funds. British institutional investors seem to be asleep at the wheel a lot. The fact that the executives sold their entire holdings shortly after the flotation should have raised some eyebrows.
6. A greater degree of financial literacy is needed amongst academics and social care managers. As this blog has hopefully illustrated the issues behind the Southern Cross debacle are complex. The need for debate is not served by reducing the issues to the level of public sector=good vs private sector=bad. Involvement of the private sector in health and social care is undoubtedly here to stay. Arguments about the viability of desireability of individual situations needs to be based on their own merits and not on prejudice towards the business sector. Neither are the needs of vulnerable people well served by the view that the private sector is always more efficient or better value for money than public sector provision. Whatever benefits have been achieved in the past by using Southern Cross as a provider are likely to be outweighed by the costs of a bail-out or a disasterous bankrupcy situation.
Southern Cross, the problems associated with PFI and the fragile state of many social care providers in the current austerity period suggest that private sector involvement in social care involves high levels of risk for both Government and investors alike. It is certainly not a panacea or easy solution for covering the rising costs of social care. Critically, it can involve high risks for the most vulnerable people in our society.
Factual information for this post was obtained from articles by Simon Mundy, Sarah O'Conner, Sally Gainsbury, Nicholas Timmins, Sarah Gordon, Jim Pickard and Elizabeth Rigby in the Financial Times on 1st and 4th June 2011. Opinions are my own and do not necessarilly reflect those of any body whom I have worked for or been associated with now or in the past.
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Data in Today's FT reveal that reduction in health and social care spending is a serious threat to the economy as a whole
A report in today (11/05/11) reveals that the UK economy is in more serious danger of stagnating than was earlier thought. This is because the most productive sectors are the one's which are contracting the most. Notably the financial services sector is deleveraging at a rapid rate due to the current risk averse climate and the need for retrenchment.
Of interest, however, is the role of the health and social care sector. The report on p3 shows that this sector grew at 28.9% in the 2000-2008 period. Although this slowed to growth of 8.6% in the last quarter of 2010 it was labelled by the FT as the most recession proof area of the economy. This will now however, have changed markedly in the light of public sector cuts with very rapid reductions in spend in social care and reduction in health care in real terms.
Signs that the service sector improved in the first qurter of 2011 are now thought to be due to last minute run off spending from Govt depts before the cuts.
Allied to this is the policy of reducing central control on how public services are managed, organised and measured. Many experienced managers have been lost from health and social care during recent rounds of cutbacks. Another article on p4 of the same FT raises doubts about whether a Govt can bring about rapid service transformation and cost reduction in an environment of reducing management infrasturcture. Service transformation and intelligent cost reduction (as opposed to indiscriminate salami slicing) require skills such as project management and lean management. They need good accurate data and good managers to drive forward innovation and change.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that waiting lists are increasing in the face of the removal of targets.
KPMG are quoted on p4 in a separate article as saying that companies which supply the public sector are on a 'knife edge'.
The Govt is in serious danger of failing in its programme of public sector reform and seriously damaging the economy in the process.
Of interest, however, is the role of the health and social care sector. The report on p3 shows that this sector grew at 28.9% in the 2000-2008 period. Although this slowed to growth of 8.6% in the last quarter of 2010 it was labelled by the FT as the most recession proof area of the economy. This will now however, have changed markedly in the light of public sector cuts with very rapid reductions in spend in social care and reduction in health care in real terms.
Signs that the service sector improved in the first qurter of 2011 are now thought to be due to last minute run off spending from Govt depts before the cuts.
Allied to this is the policy of reducing central control on how public services are managed, organised and measured. Many experienced managers have been lost from health and social care during recent rounds of cutbacks. Another article on p4 of the same FT raises doubts about whether a Govt can bring about rapid service transformation and cost reduction in an environment of reducing management infrasturcture. Service transformation and intelligent cost reduction (as opposed to indiscriminate salami slicing) require skills such as project management and lean management. They need good accurate data and good managers to drive forward innovation and change.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that waiting lists are increasing in the face of the removal of targets.
KPMG are quoted on p4 in a separate article as saying that companies which supply the public sector are on a 'knife edge'.
The Govt is in serious danger of failing in its programme of public sector reform and seriously damaging the economy in the process.
Monday, 21 March 2011
A Very Middle Class Recession
There is a very interesting article in today's (21st March 2011) Financial Times. It is about the so called 'squeezed middle' of the U.K. Specifically it uses the term 'Austerity Britain's ultimate losers'to describe middle class public sector workers in the north of England. It gives a case study of a Newcastle City Council worker who is having to re-apply for her current Policy job. Sadly I am very familiar with the situation of people like her. I am doing a regional job and daily meet people who are losing their job, having to re-apply for their job, having their job downgraded or who are simply worried and uncertain. Some local authorities have put all their staff on redundancy notice so that they can later decide who to actually make redundant. As you can imagine this will not be doing much for staff morale or indeed sonsumer confidence- more on that later. It is not just local authority jobs which are being lost.Regional bodies are going or shedding staff including most of the staff at Government Office North East (G.O.N.E.). Agencies are awash with highly skilled middle age public sector workers. There are few new private sector jobs which can mop up all these public sector employees. A public sector manager is going to be overqualified for a job at Starbucks.
Most of these workers will be people who have devoted their whole career to public service, some because it was the best use of their talents or seemed like a good career and many because they also care passionately about public service. Unfortunately their job worries are being compounded by a campaign in rags such as the Daily Mail to characterise such people as bureauocrats with 'non jobs'. This tactic- together with the campaign against 'gold plated' public sector pensions are part of a deliberate strategy by the coalition and thge right wing press to poison the general public against public sector workers and soften people up to prevent them resisting job cuts.
There is a particularly nasty element to it. In the early days of the colaition Norman Tebbit wrote a sinister piece in The Times (I think) in which he said that front line nurses and social workers who read The Express had nothing to fear. Rather it was The Guardian reading classes who should be afraid of the coming cuts. This is of course not altogether true. All parts of the public sector will face massive cuts in pay, stafffing and conditions. However, the present Government seems to reseve a particular scorn for the the white collar part of the public sector workforce. I am not a huge fan of The Guardian but I probably fit into the demographic that Tebbit wants to tackle- bleeeding heart middle class liberal types who are interested in social issues and who work in Government or not for profit. There is an element to this which is of a kind of class war of the right wing upper classes against the left wing middle classes.
If one was inclined towards conspiracy theories one might wonder whether these workers need to be eliminated because they represent an intellectual buffer zone between the front line and senior management and therefore could be a barrier to rampant privitisation. However, I think the real reason is proabably that the present Government are incredibly niaive and don't realise how difficult it is going to be to achieve the widescale reforms and transformation they want to bring about in the public sector without any kind of middle management and without many of the senior managers who are going.
There is a huge brain drain currently going on in the public sector with many experienced people leaving the workforce for good. Some are taking early retirement. I know of one council manager who is buying a newsagent and another who is buying a sandwich shop. Interestingly, I don't know any who are setting up businesses to supply the public sector.
In the north east the public sector crisis has major implications for the wider economy. In some North East towns public sector workers make up almost 50% of the workforce. People who think they may lose their jobs become very risk averse about big purchases such as a new car or recarpeting their house. When I work at home I get a new type of hawker round the doors- People from up-market kitchen showrooms, roofing contractors, you name it - selling door to door with special offers. They deserve points for trying to make sales but it also smacks of desperate times. In the north east much of the middle class is accounted for pubclic sector managers. As these people become worried about their finances it will spell bad news for the housing market and falling house prives will erode confidence even more.
The Thatcher Government devastated the working class communities of the north east. The coalition are hell bent on detroying the North East's middle class.
This is my first blog in about a year. I am going to write another soon about my experiences in the local Govt. sector over the past year. I promise it will be a lot more chearful than this one. I am going back to the higher education sector on 1st April and I am going to try to blog daily from then.
Most of these workers will be people who have devoted their whole career to public service, some because it was the best use of their talents or seemed like a good career and many because they also care passionately about public service. Unfortunately their job worries are being compounded by a campaign in rags such as the Daily Mail to characterise such people as bureauocrats with 'non jobs'. This tactic- together with the campaign against 'gold plated' public sector pensions are part of a deliberate strategy by the coalition and thge right wing press to poison the general public against public sector workers and soften people up to prevent them resisting job cuts.
There is a particularly nasty element to it. In the early days of the colaition Norman Tebbit wrote a sinister piece in The Times (I think) in which he said that front line nurses and social workers who read The Express had nothing to fear. Rather it was The Guardian reading classes who should be afraid of the coming cuts. This is of course not altogether true. All parts of the public sector will face massive cuts in pay, stafffing and conditions. However, the present Government seems to reseve a particular scorn for the the white collar part of the public sector workforce. I am not a huge fan of The Guardian but I probably fit into the demographic that Tebbit wants to tackle- bleeeding heart middle class liberal types who are interested in social issues and who work in Government or not for profit. There is an element to this which is of a kind of class war of the right wing upper classes against the left wing middle classes.
If one was inclined towards conspiracy theories one might wonder whether these workers need to be eliminated because they represent an intellectual buffer zone between the front line and senior management and therefore could be a barrier to rampant privitisation. However, I think the real reason is proabably that the present Government are incredibly niaive and don't realise how difficult it is going to be to achieve the widescale reforms and transformation they want to bring about in the public sector without any kind of middle management and without many of the senior managers who are going.
There is a huge brain drain currently going on in the public sector with many experienced people leaving the workforce for good. Some are taking early retirement. I know of one council manager who is buying a newsagent and another who is buying a sandwich shop. Interestingly, I don't know any who are setting up businesses to supply the public sector.
In the north east the public sector crisis has major implications for the wider economy. In some North East towns public sector workers make up almost 50% of the workforce. People who think they may lose their jobs become very risk averse about big purchases such as a new car or recarpeting their house. When I work at home I get a new type of hawker round the doors- People from up-market kitchen showrooms, roofing contractors, you name it - selling door to door with special offers. They deserve points for trying to make sales but it also smacks of desperate times. In the north east much of the middle class is accounted for pubclic sector managers. As these people become worried about their finances it will spell bad news for the housing market and falling house prives will erode confidence even more.
The Thatcher Government devastated the working class communities of the north east. The coalition are hell bent on detroying the North East's middle class.
This is my first blog in about a year. I am going to write another soon about my experiences in the local Govt. sector over the past year. I promise it will be a lot more chearful than this one. I am going back to the higher education sector on 1st April and I am going to try to blog daily from then.
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Remembering Skippy
If you are my sort of age then you may have watched the adventires of Skippy the Bush Kangeroo as a child. Apparently there was a kind of Skippy the next generation in the 1980s. However, I think that version was short lived and quickly forgotten. The 1960s Skippy was about a boy and his pet kangeroo who lived with his father (a park ranger) on a nature reserve in the Australian bush.
I got a nostalgic reminder of Skippy a few weeks ago when I was channel hopping (no pun intended) absent mindedly. One of the BBC channels was showing a Skippy documentry. I tuned in and was immedialty engrossed. They talked about how Skippy strange vocal clicking language was developed. Apparently real kangeroos don't make any kind of noise like this but they felt some sort of vocalisation was needed to imply that Skippy was communicating to and listening to humans interactions. Before shooting 'talking scenes' Skippy would be fed somethign which would require chewing and was then her 'voice' was dubbed on. Then they explained Skippy's amazing dexterity. Apparently a pair of kangeroo legs were used for close ups where Skippy apeared to be lifting or manipulating objects. Skippy did a fair bit of animal sleuthing and sometimes had to secrete important evidence in her pouch. Most amazing of all was a clip showing Skippy sitting in fronty of a set of drums- the artificial paws were manipulated in front of her to make it look like she was playing the drums.
The documetry did dig up some dirt on Skippy, however, -well on the pervy camera crew. Apparently during breaks in filming they would shoot up-skirt shots of the female guest stars. A compilation of this footage was shown sugggesting that did rather a lot of this.
The documentry went into some deep psychological and sociological territory. It was banned in some scandanavian countries because they thought that seeing animals with impossible levels of intelligence would be psychologically harmful for children.
For Australians Skippy was remarkable because it wasd the first Australian programme to be shown widely across the world and it showed the beauty of the Australian countryside to the worls with some excellent cinematography.
Germaine Greer considered the fact that the child companion of Skippy lived in completely adult domiated world at the ranger station and had no friends his own age to interact with. This experience was paralleled by the young actor who played him. There was also discussion of the the treatment of women in the show. Generally girls were the but of jokes, getting frightened by bush animals and not very competent.
Skippy did show some very progressive social credentials however, in relation to aboriginal people. At a time when Aboriginies were fighting for basic civil rights, they were portrayed realistically and sympathetically in a number of episides of Skippy. There were some positive messages about valuing diversity and equality between peoples.
No mention was made of what hapopened to the original Skippy though I understand that she was stuffed and can be seen in a Skippy museum somewhere. If you really want to experience the Skippy phenomenon first hand then it is available on a set of dvds packed with extras. Even I amn't nerdy enough to have them but they could be a good pouchfiller for someone you know.
I got a nostalgic reminder of Skippy a few weeks ago when I was channel hopping (no pun intended) absent mindedly. One of the BBC channels was showing a Skippy documentry. I tuned in and was immedialty engrossed. They talked about how Skippy strange vocal clicking language was developed. Apparently real kangeroos don't make any kind of noise like this but they felt some sort of vocalisation was needed to imply that Skippy was communicating to and listening to humans interactions. Before shooting 'talking scenes' Skippy would be fed somethign which would require chewing and was then her 'voice' was dubbed on. Then they explained Skippy's amazing dexterity. Apparently a pair of kangeroo legs were used for close ups where Skippy apeared to be lifting or manipulating objects. Skippy did a fair bit of animal sleuthing and sometimes had to secrete important evidence in her pouch. Most amazing of all was a clip showing Skippy sitting in fronty of a set of drums- the artificial paws were manipulated in front of her to make it look like she was playing the drums.
The documetry did dig up some dirt on Skippy, however, -well on the pervy camera crew. Apparently during breaks in filming they would shoot up-skirt shots of the female guest stars. A compilation of this footage was shown sugggesting that did rather a lot of this.
The documentry went into some deep psychological and sociological territory. It was banned in some scandanavian countries because they thought that seeing animals with impossible levels of intelligence would be psychologically harmful for children.
For Australians Skippy was remarkable because it wasd the first Australian programme to be shown widely across the world and it showed the beauty of the Australian countryside to the worls with some excellent cinematography.
Germaine Greer considered the fact that the child companion of Skippy lived in completely adult domiated world at the ranger station and had no friends his own age to interact with. This experience was paralleled by the young actor who played him. There was also discussion of the the treatment of women in the show. Generally girls were the but of jokes, getting frightened by bush animals and not very competent.
Skippy did show some very progressive social credentials however, in relation to aboriginal people. At a time when Aboriginies were fighting for basic civil rights, they were portrayed realistically and sympathetically in a number of episides of Skippy. There were some positive messages about valuing diversity and equality between peoples.
No mention was made of what hapopened to the original Skippy though I understand that she was stuffed and can be seen in a Skippy museum somewhere. If you really want to experience the Skippy phenomenon first hand then it is available on a set of dvds packed with extras. Even I amn't nerdy enough to have them but they could be a good pouchfiller for someone you know.
Meeting David Hewson
We all have preconceptions about what our heroes will be like in real life. Sometimes they are just what we expect- Harlan Ellison was just as argumentative, opinionated and feisty as I imagined, Isaac Asimov had the gravitas which you expect from a distinguished scientist and author, Todd Rundgren was as fun to chat and chill out with as you would expect. David Hewson was another matter, however. If you are not familaiar with his work -they tend to be dark, violent, fast paced and sometimes gory novels set in historic tourist cities such as Rome, Venice and Madrid. Hewson clearly relishes his research. He spend weeks living in apartments in the centre of Rome or wherever his next novel is to be set, finding out about local life and local legends. We often recognise bars and places which he refers to because we also like chilling out in apartments in Rome and doing things off the beaten tourist trail. Hewsons novels resemble our holiday settings, apart from the brutal murder scenes of course- although we did see a motor cyclist knocked down by a car on one holiday- it took the ambulance 40 minutes to get to him. If this is how they deal with an emergency in downtown Rome I would not like to see the response to a deadly snakebite in the Tuscan countryside.
Anyway I am digressing. Hewson's novels are real page turners and once started they cannot be put down. When I went to see Hewson last month on a 'meet the public' event in Gateshead I expected hewson himself to be a dynamic, driven individual like hs characters. In person, however, he was rather dry, downbeat and a bit crusty. I got the impression that he was very ill at ease meeting his public. He did a bit of reading from his latest book and answered some questions from the audience. Most of the questions were rather ill inspired and I don't think the questioners had actually read any of his books. An example as 'Do you uase the internet for research?' Hewson's answer was equally uninspired, trotting out the usual cliche that you have to be careful about the validity of things on the internet. Just once I would like someone to say that you can't trust half of what is in mainstreamn books and newspapers and at least the internet levels the playing field for ordinary citizens to share their voice with the world. I managed to get a question in about his use of the pagan deity Mithras in one of his novels. poor Mithras had all his best bits stolen by Christianity and is all but forgotten now. There are some excellent Mithraia in Rome at San Clemente and Osita Anticca (the latter can bst be appreciated by scrambling over bits of ruins and descending into underground chambers- bring a torch out and watch that no custodians are on the look out
Hewson did tell an amusing anecdote about a writers convention which he attended in America. This involved meeting other writers (which he probably thought there were rather too many of )and the public and reading between the lines I think his US publisher probably twisted his arm behind his back to get him there.
What really disgusted Hewson, however, was an incident which took place in a lift at the convention. He got into a conversation with a woman in the lift who clained to be a writer. Hewson asked her what sort of stories she wrote and she said 'cat mysteries'. Hewson had apparently just about fallen over. However, his agent was later to tell him that apparently cats who solve crimes are becoming a very popular sub-genre especially in the USA.
When I met Hewson individually at the end I explained that the crime busting animal genre has antecedents such as DC comics' Detective Chimp. I don't think I succeded in raising his appreciation for the form as he ranted a bit more about how ridiculous the idea of crime solving moggies was.
Anyway I struck a blow for cat lovers everwhere. Wehn I asked DH to sign his books I got him to sign them to Liz and Jim and their super-sleuthing cats. I don't know if he saw the funny side or just thought we were cranks.
An interesting evening but lighten up a bit David!
Anyway I am digressing. Hewson's novels are real page turners and once started they cannot be put down. When I went to see Hewson last month on a 'meet the public' event in Gateshead I expected hewson himself to be a dynamic, driven individual like hs characters. In person, however, he was rather dry, downbeat and a bit crusty. I got the impression that he was very ill at ease meeting his public. He did a bit of reading from his latest book and answered some questions from the audience. Most of the questions were rather ill inspired and I don't think the questioners had actually read any of his books. An example as 'Do you uase the internet for research?' Hewson's answer was equally uninspired, trotting out the usual cliche that you have to be careful about the validity of things on the internet. Just once I would like someone to say that you can't trust half of what is in mainstreamn books and newspapers and at least the internet levels the playing field for ordinary citizens to share their voice with the world. I managed to get a question in about his use of the pagan deity Mithras in one of his novels. poor Mithras had all his best bits stolen by Christianity and is all but forgotten now. There are some excellent Mithraia in Rome at San Clemente and Osita Anticca (the latter can bst be appreciated by scrambling over bits of ruins and descending into underground chambers- bring a torch out and watch that no custodians are on the look out
Hewson did tell an amusing anecdote about a writers convention which he attended in America. This involved meeting other writers (which he probably thought there were rather too many of )and the public and reading between the lines I think his US publisher probably twisted his arm behind his back to get him there.
What really disgusted Hewson, however, was an incident which took place in a lift at the convention. He got into a conversation with a woman in the lift who clained to be a writer. Hewson asked her what sort of stories she wrote and she said 'cat mysteries'. Hewson had apparently just about fallen over. However, his agent was later to tell him that apparently cats who solve crimes are becoming a very popular sub-genre especially in the USA.
When I met Hewson individually at the end I explained that the crime busting animal genre has antecedents such as DC comics' Detective Chimp. I don't think I succeded in raising his appreciation for the form as he ranted a bit more about how ridiculous the idea of crime solving moggies was.
Anyway I struck a blow for cat lovers everwhere. Wehn I asked DH to sign his books I got him to sign them to Liz and Jim and their super-sleuthing cats. I don't know if he saw the funny side or just thought we were cranks.
An interesting evening but lighten up a bit David!
Monday, 1 February 2010
Why I wasn’t ‘misled’ by Tony Blair -Not even for 45 minutes
Last week Blair’s the Chilcot Enquiry dominated the news media. Those ‘lucky’ enough to get winning raffle tickets had actually attended and some had tried to demonstrate near to the enquiry. Apparently, one attendee said very loudly that he couldn’t stand it any more. This was probably the only honest thing said all day by anyone present. The Times has compared the whole thing to an episode of the Muppet show.
As anticipated there were no new revelations. Tony Blair’s raison d’etre for the war, however, went through another metamorphosis. Before the war Tony Blair claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could be launched in 45 minutes. Later he claimed that he just had weapons of mass destruction stowed away. When no weapons were found he claimed that he Saddam had been engaged in a ‘programme’ of weapons construction. Now at Chilcot he was more or less saying that Saddam had been thinking about having weapons of mass destruction. To Blair’s impressive list of talents we must add clairvoyance.
Many people are annoyed about Blair for having misled Parliament and the country. However, I didn’t believe the justification for war for a minute and I don’t think that that anyone who took time to think about the issue should have done either.
One does not need insider knowledge to critically examine Tony Blair’s claims- only the application of logic.
It is impossible to disprove a negative. None of us could ever absolutely disprove an accusation which has been made against us. This is why the burden of proof in criminal cases is on the prosecution. They would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that we had committed the crime we were charged with. Saddam was expected to prove that he did not have weapons of mass destruction. An impossible task for anyone. Quantities of materials for chemical weapons were unaccounted for. However, this is hardly surprising. Even the UK loses hazardous material and we have a record of losing confidential data on memory sticks.
The important fact about Iraq was that in the run up to war it was crawling with weapons inspectors. If the west had reliable intelligence about weapons then the sensible thing would have been to feed this information to the weapons inspectors who could then ask to visit the sites. If they found weapons then it would have given Bush and Blair convincing grounds to secure a new UN resolution. If they had been refused access to the sites then this would have convinced the rest of the world that Saddam had something to hide.
In fact, information was passed onto weapons inspectors. Hans Blix speaking on radio 4 two weeks ago said that he visited a number of sites after being tipped off by the intelligence community. On these occasions he got full co-operation from the Iraqis but found nothing. He said that he assumed that the intelligence community would have given him their best intelligence. The lack of weapons ought to have caused scepticism about the rest of the intelligence. Some of these false starts were reported in the press in the run-up to the war. Examples of claims by Iraqis were also reported in the media. One was by a man who claimed that he had been told that he had seen a giant warehouse which someone had told him was full of weapons of mass destruction. The man making the claim had not actually seen inside the warehouse himself. Hardly a very convincing piece of information. The fact that many of those making the claims had an axe to grind (even if that was just getting out of the country) did little to add to their credibility.
There were other bizarre stories being circulated such as the infamous ‘human shredder’ story which was widely reported in the Guardian. Apparently Saddam had dispatched some of his enemies using a giant shredding machine normally used for shredding plastic. Anyone who has experience of using a paper shredder will know that these devices don’t take kindly to you putting anything in then that they are not designed for. Where would all the blood and gore go? Do plastic shredders exist? Can you buy one on ebay? Why do we not have the names of anyone who was shredded? Would their relatives not have objected? At that time anyone who asked for those sorts of details was castigated for being insensitive. Yet like the WMD- no shredders were found.
This may sound like a trivial issue. However, the appearance in the media of stories which don’t hold up to any kind of critical scrutiny (when there ought to have plenty which would), ought to have raised people’s suspicions. Of course Saddam Hussein did commit atrocities- but mentioning the real ones would raise the important question of why we were intervening now rather than when they had originally occurred. It would also raise the awkward question of who had sold him the weapons that he had used on his enemies and why it was once considered okay for the west to sell him WMD.
If we were sure that Saddam had weapons that he could use in 45 minutes then there would have to have been very detailed information about what the weapons were and where they were held. Otherwise, how could we possibly know the precise amount of time needed to deploy them? Why was this information not released to the public? Where were the satellite pictures of weapons installations? How could Saddam have large caches of weapons ready to trundle out without us having high definition satellite images of them?
So what was Tony Blair’s motivation? My scenario is like this. Blair believed that the US was going to attack Iraq anyway. By siding with Bush Blair, thought that Britain would be on the winning side and therefore well placed to share in the spoils of war. Britain would also share the credit for bringing democracy to a former rogue state and Rupert Murdoch would have another country to broadcast his satellite tv to. Saddam was bound to have some weapons stashed away for a rainy day somewhere or at worst have some that he had forgotten about. This would retrospectively provide a justification for war. If even only a few weapons had been found then people would accept that war was justified. It was ‘no-brainer’ a ‘slam dunk’ and a ‘win-win’ for someone with enough hubris and no moral scruples. By actually obeying international resolutions, Saddam had spoiled it all and exposed the war for the con that it was.
Then we come to whole issue of the events after the invasion. Bush and Blair had banked on the idea that they would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi’s, that they would embrace democracy and western values. This was also extreme hubris and showed a complete failure to understand the relationships between different peoples and cultures at even the simplest level. The criminal failure to establish proper security in the post war period resulted in a terrible wave of destruction of property. Hospitals and homes were looted, businesses were destroyed, priceless artefacts were stolen, infrastructure was damaged and unguarded weapons stores were raided by the terrorists of the future. Soldiers, politicians and newsreaders said that this was simply the sort of hi-jinks that we should expect when people are freed from an oppressive dictator. I saw it for what it was- an act of extreme negligence perpetrated against a whole society. The fact that this was allowed to happen spoke tellingly of the value which the invading forces placed on the culture and heritage of the country they had come to ‘liberate’.
Lastly we should examine the political backdrop to the war. Blair recently said that he saw the conflict in Iraq has part of a wider battle for Islam. Why Blair, as a Catholic thinks he has a right to have an opinion on this is not clear. Why he thinks it should have anything to do with war is even less clear.
Even last week, Blair was conflating Iraq with 9/11, when in fact Saddam had no truck at all with Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, he had a secular outward facing view of the world and women had greater freedoms and rights in Saddam’s Iraq than they do in may the countries the region.
By stating that only his maker can judge him (ridiculous when it was the British electorate that gave him is position of power), Blair is showing that he is the real religious fanatic.
In conclusion, Blair did fool part of parliament and part of the country- but only the parts who wanted to be fooled or who didn’t care about the issues enough to critically examine what they were being told. Politicians who voted for the war probably belong to the first category. It was easier for them to convince themselves that it was okay than think about the consequences of what they were doing. Like Blair, they probably thought that it would all come out alright in the end and that they would risk losing their seat if they voted against war. Rupert Murdoch, (one of real holders of power behind UK and US politics) apparently said at the time that the main benefit of the war would be cheap oil. That is the real elephant the room that Chilcot hasn’t considered, but even that was not achieved.
Years later, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s are dead. International terrorism is more of a risk than ever and Britain’s esteem in the world is greatly damaged.
Iraq is a criminal matter. We don’t need to go over what the intelligence said or did not say. In any case, Blair has now said that he would have invaded Iraq whether he thought there was WMD or not. At the end of the day it was a judgment call by the Prime Minister and Parliament. With a few honourable exceptions they made the wrong decision morally, ethically and strategically based on the information in front of them. We don’t need any more enquiries to establish this. We never have done.
The real lesson which should come out of the Chilcot enquiry is that we all have a responsibility to think about what is being done around us- by our politicians and in our communities. We can’t afford to just sit by and assume that those in power know what they are doing or that things will turn out for the best. We have duty to be mindful of consequences of our actions in every moment of every day.
As anticipated there were no new revelations. Tony Blair’s raison d’etre for the war, however, went through another metamorphosis. Before the war Tony Blair claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could be launched in 45 minutes. Later he claimed that he just had weapons of mass destruction stowed away. When no weapons were found he claimed that he Saddam had been engaged in a ‘programme’ of weapons construction. Now at Chilcot he was more or less saying that Saddam had been thinking about having weapons of mass destruction. To Blair’s impressive list of talents we must add clairvoyance.
Many people are annoyed about Blair for having misled Parliament and the country. However, I didn’t believe the justification for war for a minute and I don’t think that that anyone who took time to think about the issue should have done either.
One does not need insider knowledge to critically examine Tony Blair’s claims- only the application of logic.
It is impossible to disprove a negative. None of us could ever absolutely disprove an accusation which has been made against us. This is why the burden of proof in criminal cases is on the prosecution. They would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that we had committed the crime we were charged with. Saddam was expected to prove that he did not have weapons of mass destruction. An impossible task for anyone. Quantities of materials for chemical weapons were unaccounted for. However, this is hardly surprising. Even the UK loses hazardous material and we have a record of losing confidential data on memory sticks.
The important fact about Iraq was that in the run up to war it was crawling with weapons inspectors. If the west had reliable intelligence about weapons then the sensible thing would have been to feed this information to the weapons inspectors who could then ask to visit the sites. If they found weapons then it would have given Bush and Blair convincing grounds to secure a new UN resolution. If they had been refused access to the sites then this would have convinced the rest of the world that Saddam had something to hide.
In fact, information was passed onto weapons inspectors. Hans Blix speaking on radio 4 two weeks ago said that he visited a number of sites after being tipped off by the intelligence community. On these occasions he got full co-operation from the Iraqis but found nothing. He said that he assumed that the intelligence community would have given him their best intelligence. The lack of weapons ought to have caused scepticism about the rest of the intelligence. Some of these false starts were reported in the press in the run-up to the war. Examples of claims by Iraqis were also reported in the media. One was by a man who claimed that he had been told that he had seen a giant warehouse which someone had told him was full of weapons of mass destruction. The man making the claim had not actually seen inside the warehouse himself. Hardly a very convincing piece of information. The fact that many of those making the claims had an axe to grind (even if that was just getting out of the country) did little to add to their credibility.
There were other bizarre stories being circulated such as the infamous ‘human shredder’ story which was widely reported in the Guardian. Apparently Saddam had dispatched some of his enemies using a giant shredding machine normally used for shredding plastic. Anyone who has experience of using a paper shredder will know that these devices don’t take kindly to you putting anything in then that they are not designed for. Where would all the blood and gore go? Do plastic shredders exist? Can you buy one on ebay? Why do we not have the names of anyone who was shredded? Would their relatives not have objected? At that time anyone who asked for those sorts of details was castigated for being insensitive. Yet like the WMD- no shredders were found.
This may sound like a trivial issue. However, the appearance in the media of stories which don’t hold up to any kind of critical scrutiny (when there ought to have plenty which would), ought to have raised people’s suspicions. Of course Saddam Hussein did commit atrocities- but mentioning the real ones would raise the important question of why we were intervening now rather than when they had originally occurred. It would also raise the awkward question of who had sold him the weapons that he had used on his enemies and why it was once considered okay for the west to sell him WMD.
If we were sure that Saddam had weapons that he could use in 45 minutes then there would have to have been very detailed information about what the weapons were and where they were held. Otherwise, how could we possibly know the precise amount of time needed to deploy them? Why was this information not released to the public? Where were the satellite pictures of weapons installations? How could Saddam have large caches of weapons ready to trundle out without us having high definition satellite images of them?
So what was Tony Blair’s motivation? My scenario is like this. Blair believed that the US was going to attack Iraq anyway. By siding with Bush Blair, thought that Britain would be on the winning side and therefore well placed to share in the spoils of war. Britain would also share the credit for bringing democracy to a former rogue state and Rupert Murdoch would have another country to broadcast his satellite tv to. Saddam was bound to have some weapons stashed away for a rainy day somewhere or at worst have some that he had forgotten about. This would retrospectively provide a justification for war. If even only a few weapons had been found then people would accept that war was justified. It was ‘no-brainer’ a ‘slam dunk’ and a ‘win-win’ for someone with enough hubris and no moral scruples. By actually obeying international resolutions, Saddam had spoiled it all and exposed the war for the con that it was.
Then we come to whole issue of the events after the invasion. Bush and Blair had banked on the idea that they would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi’s, that they would embrace democracy and western values. This was also extreme hubris and showed a complete failure to understand the relationships between different peoples and cultures at even the simplest level. The criminal failure to establish proper security in the post war period resulted in a terrible wave of destruction of property. Hospitals and homes were looted, businesses were destroyed, priceless artefacts were stolen, infrastructure was damaged and unguarded weapons stores were raided by the terrorists of the future. Soldiers, politicians and newsreaders said that this was simply the sort of hi-jinks that we should expect when people are freed from an oppressive dictator. I saw it for what it was- an act of extreme negligence perpetrated against a whole society. The fact that this was allowed to happen spoke tellingly of the value which the invading forces placed on the culture and heritage of the country they had come to ‘liberate’.
Lastly we should examine the political backdrop to the war. Blair recently said that he saw the conflict in Iraq has part of a wider battle for Islam. Why Blair, as a Catholic thinks he has a right to have an opinion on this is not clear. Why he thinks it should have anything to do with war is even less clear.
Even last week, Blair was conflating Iraq with 9/11, when in fact Saddam had no truck at all with Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, he had a secular outward facing view of the world and women had greater freedoms and rights in Saddam’s Iraq than they do in may the countries the region.
By stating that only his maker can judge him (ridiculous when it was the British electorate that gave him is position of power), Blair is showing that he is the real religious fanatic.
In conclusion, Blair did fool part of parliament and part of the country- but only the parts who wanted to be fooled or who didn’t care about the issues enough to critically examine what they were being told. Politicians who voted for the war probably belong to the first category. It was easier for them to convince themselves that it was okay than think about the consequences of what they were doing. Like Blair, they probably thought that it would all come out alright in the end and that they would risk losing their seat if they voted against war. Rupert Murdoch, (one of real holders of power behind UK and US politics) apparently said at the time that the main benefit of the war would be cheap oil. That is the real elephant the room that Chilcot hasn’t considered, but even that was not achieved.
Years later, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s are dead. International terrorism is more of a risk than ever and Britain’s esteem in the world is greatly damaged.
Iraq is a criminal matter. We don’t need to go over what the intelligence said or did not say. In any case, Blair has now said that he would have invaded Iraq whether he thought there was WMD or not. At the end of the day it was a judgment call by the Prime Minister and Parliament. With a few honourable exceptions they made the wrong decision morally, ethically and strategically based on the information in front of them. We don’t need any more enquiries to establish this. We never have done.
The real lesson which should come out of the Chilcot enquiry is that we all have a responsibility to think about what is being done around us- by our politicians and in our communities. We can’t afford to just sit by and assume that those in power know what they are doing or that things will turn out for the best. We have duty to be mindful of consequences of our actions in every moment of every day.
Does airport security make you feel any safer?
BBC Breakfast had for once interesting item this morning about full body scanners which are being rushed into operation at Heathrow along with sniffer dogs and doubtlessly other methods of terrorist detection. I have to say that I m not a fan of BBC Breakfast. At any other time of the day BBC News 24 is a very good source of news. In the morning, however, it is full of fluff and my preferred choice is Euronews or CNN. But getting back to the item- Lots of people were interviewed and they all without exception were happy to have scans of their nude bodies examined provided hey did not show up on the internet. The only dissenter was a man in the studio from a civil liberties organisation who asked the pertinent question of what liberties are we actually defending if we need to have pictures taken if our genitals to safeguard it.
No doubt the majority of the audience thought he was a crank and will fall back to the usual rhetoric of ‘If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ and ‘The more security we have the more secure we will be’.
However, let’s examine some of these ideas in more detail. First the idea that people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear. Try telling that to the people who have been incarcerated for years I Guantanamo Bay without any rights and in most cases without any charges being made against them. Or the people who have been kept under house arrest in the U.K. without being told who their accusers are or what evidence there is against them. Or the alleged perpetrators of the chemical vest plot who had their whole house systematically demolished looking for materials that have never been found. Could this happen to you? If you think that it couldn’t then why?
How many of you reading this would think twice about putting up a blog posting like this in case it put you on the security radar or upset somebody who had power over you? If it would give you a moment’s pause then you must realise that you no longer live in a society as free as you used to. If terrorists are trying to undermine our way of life then we seem to be hell bent on making sure they succeed.
Similar justifications are used in the increasing use of police checking of people who work with vulnerable people. The terrible murder of Holly and Jessica was used as a justification for increased use of police checks for people who work with vulnerable people and children. However, Holy and Jessica’s murderer did not have a Police record. In fact, he would have been prevented from getting a job as a school janitor by a much more low tech form of checking. If his new employer had asked for a reference he would not have been able to obtain a satisfactory one. Similarly, the person who tried to blow up a plane over the holidays could have been stopped using existing intelligence. He had been reported to the authorities by his own father who was concerned by his extreme views and behaviour. Conversely, the equipment being installed at Heathrow may not have been able to detect the type of explosives he was carrying. The intelligence that this man was dangerous was already there but was ignored. On Christmas Eve the Pope was attacked by a woman suffering from mental illness at the Mass at St Peter’s. Apparently the same woman had attempted this last year. Why was she allowed into the church? Surely security staff would have seen her photograph as part of their briefing. Why didn’t she get the psychiatric help she needed after she did it the first time?
Police checking and body scanners are appealing because they turn security into a procedure. They look good because we appear to be doing something. Something magic will happen inside the computer which will keep us safe provided we have faith in the technology. If it doesn’t work we just need better technology or better Police checks.
Here’s a better suggestion for making us more secure. Lets try changing how we engage with rest of the world. Redeploy the money spent on war in the middle east into helping people there and in countries like Haiti. Use the information we have at the moment wisely rather than abdicating our responsibilities to computer databases and new forms of snooping. Try to make the image we convey to the rest of the world in synch with how we would like to portray ourselves.
Now, wouldn’t that make you feel more secure?
No doubt the majority of the audience thought he was a crank and will fall back to the usual rhetoric of ‘If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ and ‘The more security we have the more secure we will be’.
However, let’s examine some of these ideas in more detail. First the idea that people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear. Try telling that to the people who have been incarcerated for years I Guantanamo Bay without any rights and in most cases without any charges being made against them. Or the people who have been kept under house arrest in the U.K. without being told who their accusers are or what evidence there is against them. Or the alleged perpetrators of the chemical vest plot who had their whole house systematically demolished looking for materials that have never been found. Could this happen to you? If you think that it couldn’t then why?
How many of you reading this would think twice about putting up a blog posting like this in case it put you on the security radar or upset somebody who had power over you? If it would give you a moment’s pause then you must realise that you no longer live in a society as free as you used to. If terrorists are trying to undermine our way of life then we seem to be hell bent on making sure they succeed.
Similar justifications are used in the increasing use of police checking of people who work with vulnerable people. The terrible murder of Holly and Jessica was used as a justification for increased use of police checks for people who work with vulnerable people and children. However, Holy and Jessica’s murderer did not have a Police record. In fact, he would have been prevented from getting a job as a school janitor by a much more low tech form of checking. If his new employer had asked for a reference he would not have been able to obtain a satisfactory one. Similarly, the person who tried to blow up a plane over the holidays could have been stopped using existing intelligence. He had been reported to the authorities by his own father who was concerned by his extreme views and behaviour. Conversely, the equipment being installed at Heathrow may not have been able to detect the type of explosives he was carrying. The intelligence that this man was dangerous was already there but was ignored. On Christmas Eve the Pope was attacked by a woman suffering from mental illness at the Mass at St Peter’s. Apparently the same woman had attempted this last year. Why was she allowed into the church? Surely security staff would have seen her photograph as part of their briefing. Why didn’t she get the psychiatric help she needed after she did it the first time?
Police checking and body scanners are appealing because they turn security into a procedure. They look good because we appear to be doing something. Something magic will happen inside the computer which will keep us safe provided we have faith in the technology. If it doesn’t work we just need better technology or better Police checks.
Here’s a better suggestion for making us more secure. Lets try changing how we engage with rest of the world. Redeploy the money spent on war in the middle east into helping people there and in countries like Haiti. Use the information we have at the moment wisely rather than abdicating our responsibilities to computer databases and new forms of snooping. Try to make the image we convey to the rest of the world in synch with how we would like to portray ourselves.
Now, wouldn’t that make you feel more secure?
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