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The Oxford Mail today reports that a Second Councillor Quits Lib Dems:

Sajjad Malik has thrown Oxford City Council's ruling Liberal Democrat group into chaos after becoming the second councillor to quit the party in six weeks.

My first reaction on hearing the news yesterday is probably unprintable, but after seeing the Mail's report today and Malik's statement that:

"I don't owe them anything, they owe me everything I am the man who made them alive in East Oxford. They were dead and buried before I joined them.

...I nearly drowned on my morning mug of tea. The astounding arrogance of the man! But then that seems to be the way with defectors, in the main. The world seems to revolve around them in their smug self-important way. Malik should perhaps be reminded that before he arrived on the scene we had won his ward both at city and county levels (albeit with one defection of our own after we had started to win the ward in our own right) and had taken one of the two seats in the 2002 all out elections, and pretty well reckoned, by another Labour member opining to me, without reliance on any Asian vote that he might have brought with him.

On the other hand, this is also the man who schedules month long holidays in April - perhaps not realising that the campaigning teams that got him elected are at their busiest then. The man who so wanted to be a Lib Dem MP that he organises to go on a new candidate development course and then fails to turn up (wanting to be an MP whatever one's abilities is a sure sign to me of an overdeveloped ego - then not turning up is just downright rude and disrespectful!)

And then it seems his new friends' New Labour spin machine takes over, because what follows is just so much bollocks it could only be concocted by a committee of crowing colleagues:

"I have been shocked by the way in which the Lib Dem minority administration has quickly turned their back on the city council's commitment to build much needed affordable homes in an urban expansion and on the agreed scheme for recycling plastics and green waste. I believe these new Lib Dem policies do not represent the interests of the community in my ward and I will continue to oppose them strongly from within the Labour group."

Malik knew when he was elected, indeed when he joined the party (because I explained it to him) that we were against Labour's knee-jerk response to Oxford's housing shortages of just piling more new housing on the edge of Europe's biggest council estate. He has never, it appears, taken the trouble to try to understand how the party's policy on affordable housing, such as the Community Land Trust project I'm involved with, might address the same needs more sustainably.

Equally he will also have been as involved as he liked in discussions about why Labour's unilateral plan for extending recycling, which prompted many negative comments on the doorsteps in May, should be reviewed and properly consulted on before imposing what for many people seemed impractical on the householders of Oxford. If he didn't understand that point of view, perhaps he should have said something at the time to his colleagues.

These were part and parcel of the messages that made us gains in May and landed him in the administration group (the notable exception being his own ego-riven ward amidst the fiasco he helped to orchestrate). If he's so spineless as to have to run away from "infighting" instead of standing his ground (and after all, the first anyone knew about this was yesterday so he clearly hadn't taken the trouble to take his worries to colleagues), Labour are most welcome to him - again.

But the Mail concludes with perhaps a salutory lesson from previous Oxfordshire defectors, and ones who will be remembered long after Malik is just a footnote, that even the rich and famous ones seem not to be able to hold onto their seats for the party they defected to:

Nationally, Shaun Woodward was elected as a Conservative MP for Witney at the 1997 election, but later defected to Labour.

And in Wantage, former MP Robert Jackson switched to Labour before retiring at last year's General Election. The seat is now held by Tory MP Ed Vaizey.

In the longer run, Oxford's Liberal Democrats will, I am sure, be better off without such pompous-arsed hyper-inflated egos - there aren't many more to winkle out!

Technorati Tags: oxford, politics

The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published on 2nd December, 1942, in the depths of World War II. The committee, under its chair, the liberal economist Sir William Beveridge, had been established by the wartime government to plan ahead for the challenges of reconstruction of the national fabric after the war.

The report identified what it called the "Five giants on the road to reconstruction: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness". Each was to be enjoined in battle by a major plank of the post-war welfare state - social security, the NHS, expanded state education, the nationwide house building schemes that would produce "homes fit for heros" and Keynesian style economic stimulus programs to maintain high employment respectively. That National Health Service Act of 1946 brought into existence, sixty years ago last week on 5th July 1948, what has become Europe's largest employer, the NHS.

The Beveridge Report indeed made much of its wartime heritage. The war was a turning point in history that deserved revolutionary measures afterwards to ensure peaceful and equitable reconstruction. The battle ahead was couched in terms of a "war on want" (and the others of the "Five Giants"). But as my former university chancellor (as of Friday), news anchor Jon Snow, often says, you cannot win a "war on a noun".

So how has the NHS, and the other key planks of the welfare state mentioned, fared in this "war"? It seems obvious that we have not, sixty years on, beaten any of those giants:

Want: we have a society in which the least well off are dependent on the state. If you believe such things matter, and I do, still a fifth of children grow up in relative poverty and the gap between the wealthiest and poorest is larger than ever. Not only that, but as as with "idleness" many are actually trapped in that dependency, facing the highest penalties if they actually manage to find themselves work that might remove them from that dependency in the form of punitive benefits withdrawals rates. None of the myriad benefits in the system are sufficient on their own to sustain life (particularly the pension, now in its hundredth year), so people are often on multiple benefit regimes.

Disease: whilst quite obviously the range of ailments that are now routinely cured or treated is a huge step on from 1948, there is still a six month waiting list for almost any kind of surgery, hundreds of people denied drugs even their own NHS doctors believe may help them, and the whole headless structure is running around trying to meet centrally set targets, which are fundamentally opposed to the founding principles of the NHS - that it should be responsive to particular local needs. In parts of Glasgow East constituency male life expectancy is lower than in some developing countries for example, which, whether it is an improvement on the state of play in 1948 or not is a pretty terrible indictment.

Ignorance: the state education system has become more comprehensive and more centralized. Students are of course now paying for tuition fees in tertiary education, and we see a constant stream of stories from universities and business leaders saying that many people leaving school are functionally illiterate. The most well off are still using private education and the least well off, as Nick Clegg has constantly complained about, seem condemned to inner city sink schools often with little aspiration planted in their heads.

Squalor: this one was primarily about housing. Sure, we had a post-war building boom but now that's looking quite hollow. In fifty years, the UK's housing has become smaller; the only developed nation on the planet where that is the case - elsewhere increased affluence has seen larger, more comfortable homes. If you are stuck on a sink estate, you probably have as much chance as in 1948 of escaping it. Even the right to buy has often failed to give people who were persuaded that buying their fifties built prefabricated type semi (such as the Orlits design currently being demolished all over Oxford) a meaningful asset. And we are in a situation where those who aspire to ownership currently have little hope of being able to afford it.

...and finally Idleness: it is very difficult for work to help the poorest when getting a job can mean lots of hassles with your various benefits and a punitive regime of clawing back those benefits such that you are often effectively earning very little indeed for all the effort of getting a job in the first place and going out to work once you have. And actually I would argue that we want more "idleness". I realize that in the report "idleness" is something either down to the laziness of the individual, or more likely a state enforced on one by lack of work opportunities in the economy. However as we get closer to the ideal of having many menial jobs and tasks done for us by machines, the idea that the only way of gaining purchasing power with which to participate in the complicated world economy is through work should be rethought in any case. It is nothing to crow about that people still have to remain wage slaves in order to achieve some measure of financial security.

So, on a purely cursory glance, these five "wars" are not going well sixty years on. Some battles have been won, and clearly some things are better in so many ways than it would have been at the end of World War II. But some of the problems are as intractable as ever, others are almost victims of their own successes; for example some of the problems of the NHS of course stem from them now being able to treat far more problems than previously and so creating more demand for itself. But I'd go one step further, and say that the weapons deployed in these various wars have in fact entrenched dependency, reduced choice, stifled innovation and competition. Not only that, but they are hugely expensive, now between them consuming not far off half of all our national income and may be suffering from the law of diminishing returns.

It is time we realized that the approach is itself wrong. That, as Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".

...so, what can we do ...?

...in this leadership contest anyway. Barrie Wood in Progressive Politics: Our Voters Want Simon for Leader ! suggests that Chris Huhne is "grey in every sense of the word" that the Tory membership probably realised that whilst they might want Davis, their heads told them to vote for the electable one and so on.

Needless to say I disagree. Just look at this leadership election itself - people seem to have gone and sought out the "outsider", the "unknown", Chris Huhne, to find out what he has to say so they could make up their minds about him. And in that he has come across well. The others, the familiar faces, Simon and Ming, they think they already know what they stand for and what they're going to say.

If we are to carve out a new political-economic landscape and present innovative ideas to the public, we don't want people switching off because the know and recognise Simon or Ming and think they know what they're going to say. We need someone who can take the new challenging ideas and put them in words for everyone to understand. And we want people to think "oh, he's new, what has he got to say".

On both fronts, Chris has it. With the others, "Mandy Rice-Davis Applies".

If we constantly decide where our party is going by trying to second guess the wider electorate, no wonder there's poverty of ideological discourse in UK politics. Are we to select our leader via a focus group of pebbledashed mondeo owners from the dead centre of the UK somewhere?

The Oxford Mail/Times reports today that the New Westgate [shopping centre is..] Vital For City

Confidential documents have revealed that Oxford would suffer serious economic damage if a hash is made of the Westgate redevelopment.

Plans for the £300m scheme to transform the shopping centre are due to be considered by a specially-convened planning committee later this month.

But papers leaked to the Oxford Mail show real concern at the consequences of the project failing.

When I was on the council I was wary of confidential documents that only councillors were supposed to see. If one were leaked there was always an outrage and often a bit of a witch hunt to try to find out who did it if it weren't already obvious. But most of the time, they did not relate to the specific wellbeing of an officer, as perhaps would details of a pay or disciplinary issue, but that much wider catch-all of "protecting commercial confidentiality" for the council's business affairs.

Well bugger that. It sounds to me from what little is in the Oxford Mail report that this is exactly the sort of information that is needed to help inform the public debate about what will be a massive disruption to our city for many years and which we are now led to believe could have more devastating long term efects on not just the city council's finances, in which we all have an over-riding interest since it is our money they are looking after but the general economic wellbeing and vitality of Oxford's city centre.

So. What precisely was confidential about these reports that the Oxford Mail got hold of? Perhaps the cabinet member for a better value Oxford could shed some light?

This project is already contentious. Has been in the air for, what, six years now already and has yet even to get planning permission. Frankly, I'm sceptical about the whole thing still and I hope they don't roll over and accept an application just because it might prove least worst for the city council, but local people have got to have a fully informed debate, which now cannot happen before the planning hearing happens if there really are such far reaching potential consequences for the city.

Yes, it's not a planning matter. they can still give planning consent and then pull out of the contract as landowner, but that is the bit we, the people, need to give a steer to our servants in government on.

...who seems as appalled as I am at the relish with which our party has taken to banning a four hundred year old "pleasure": Forceful and Moderate: Smoked out....

Now, I accept the public health arguments, and I accept in particular (as a member of UNISON how could I not) the arguments about the dangers to staff. Yet still there are ways round having to illiberally ban something. Many people take on jobs that have risks to their health or personal safety. Health and Safety legislation tries to get employers to minimise those risks in most cases (for example with protective gear) but in some cases, when all that's done and risks still remain, employees can command a premium.

If 80% of people really want to eat and drink in smoke free places this is plenty incentive for the industry to give them that option. Since more than 20% of people smoke anyway (and it's higher amongst the young adult population), isn't there a good chance that only those who do would be prepared to work, for more money if possible, in an establishment that permits smoking - I know almost everyone in my SU bar are smokers - they get extra breaks!

As a party we have, or had at least, policy in our "abolish regulation" stuff to replace the national minimum wage with a more flexible arrangement negotiated and enforced thropugh trade and workers associations on a region by region basis so it could reflect the costs of living in different places. We could add into this premiums for working in smokey bars perhaps. A real liberal response to this would be to try to level the playing field in favour of the workers, not outlaw something (especially something that is still so very, even if inexplicably, commonplace).

Incidentally, does anyone know how this affects hotel bedrooms? I have a get around in my mind already. Small hotel, bedroom suites rented by the hour with more settees and tables than beds, room service delivering booze. Get the picture? The wealthy can get round anything.