Randomly Selected Article or Link

Just floating an idea prompted slightly by a throw-away comment at the Not-the-first-hustings on Saturday about the dark days of the dual leadership of the two Davids...

Why not have two leaders? Many people have commented that Chris is good on policy and strategy and Nick on presentation. On a personal level I find Chris has the sort of presence that would lend itself to armchair conversations persuading groups of our ideas (not unlike CK) and Nick the big platform speaker. We need both roles. And I still think that one weak area for Nick is economic/fiscal policy where Chris outshines most others and, whilst any new leader will be ably assisted in this area by Chris and Vince, fiscal policy in particular is going to be absolutely top of the agenda for a while to come so would benefit from being within the leadership.

Granita isn't quite the right analogy of course, as there it was about succession. But out of it came Gordon Brown the strategist and Tony Blair the front man. And, whether we like them or not, it was quite a successful double-act. Maybe we could have a double act too. I think the era of the two Davids was hampered by the fact that we weren't quite one party and they were still jostling for the upper hand. Now we are matured as a single party (and even attracting some like Michael Meadowcroft back into the fold) maybe we would have the ability to pull it off nowadays.

As James Graham and I note there is a big job of work to be done to bring the wider party into the policy making process and strategic direction of the party. One leader could specialize on that and the other on selling the results to the wider world.

Over the years the government's regional governance strategy has been a complete and utter shambles. The Regional Development Agencies are QUANGOs unaccountable to anyone other than within what was then the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions. Then a layer of pseudo accountability was added in the form of not directly elected Regional Assemblies(most members were at least appointed by local authorities to which they had themselves been elected). Their attempt to give the regions more "autonomy" by setting up directly elected assemblies foundered at the first attempt in the North East referendum. And justifiably - there was very little additional power being devolved to them and to all intents and purposes they appeared to be designed to accrete more power from lower level tiers of government like counties and districts.

So when they abandoned that idea they decided to replace the half-democratic Regional Assemblies with a minister and parliamentary select committee for each region. So what a surprise to see the results of yesterday's Commons' debate on the establishment of the regional committees. Yup, you guessed it, they have somehow contrived to make a practically undemocratic system somewhat less democratic and accountable.

The government has decided that, unlike with local government or even the half-bakedelected Regional Assemblies, they are going to keep a majority on every committee, irrespective of the proportion of MPs each party holds at Westminster for each individual region. Not only that, but they will allow the importing of MPs from other regions whose constituency responsibilities have nothing to do with the region they are going to be deliberating about.

So, a region in which the party of government holds the fewest number of Westminster seats will have a committee with a majority of members from the governing party scrutinizing the decisions and plans of a minister from that governing party which that region rejected when given the chance.

Democracy eh? Dontcha just love it! Here's the story from the Lib Dem newsfeed:

The Liberal Democrats yesterday accused the Government of abusing the opportunity to provide decent regional accountability by imposing its parliamentary majority on new regional Select Committees, even in areas where they have the fewest MPs. Shadow Leader of the House, Simon Hughes MP, challenged the proposed make up of the new committees in a House of Commons debate, as MPs voted in their favour yesterday. The need for the Committees to reflect voting patterns was, he said, a "central obligation" of devolution and something the Government had "failed to grasp". Simon illustrated the problems with the proposal by highlighting the situation in the south-west region...(read more)

...or "we should shackle the permanent secretary of the Treasury along with a clutch of Treasury ministers to the derelict barge in the stinking Hackney cut. And throw away the key."

In today's Observer Will Hutton comes out for Land Value Tax to fund the potential gap in capital funding for the Olympics. Okay, he doesn't actually understand it - why should you issue bonds when you can instruct the money to be created and then retired as the tax comes in but hey - it's a step.

"Tickets, television rights, sponsorship, the lottery and even an Olympic surcharge on London ratepayers have all been stretched to the limit. More is needed. The Treasury refuses additional help. Without some imagination, the Olympic vision will be the casualty. The answer is obvious. If the games go as planned, there will be a huge increase in land values and property prices throughout east London. If the government could capture just a fraction of the increase in those land and property prices, then it could more than repay any bonds it issued today to pay for the games.

"The Chancellor praises entrepreneurs; now is the moment for Treasury officials to practise what they preach. What they have to do is invent a way the government can capture some of the wider gain that its own development is creating. We could copy the Americans and tax the incremental gain. We could insist that private developers form public-private partnerships, with the development gains earmarked to repay Olympic bonds. What we cannot do is to penny-pinch and roll back the ambition.

"It is a pivotal moment. We have to find a way of breaking out of the self-defeating logic that all Britain can afford in any public development is what the taxpayer stumps up, while private developers pocket the benefit. That way, we always build small. You only have to smell the sewage at Old Ford locks and gaze at the desolation to see the results.

"The Olympics must be funded as imaginatively as the project has been devised and the precedent then used across the country. If not, we should shackle the permanent secretary of the Treasury along with a clutch of Treasury ministers to the derelict barge in the stinking Hackney cut. And throw away the key."

I find the story of Farepack's collapse heart-rending. Whilst I'm none too fond of the notion that Christmas is something that should put such a burden on families that they feel they have to save up for a whole year to give their families a decent time (I believe a decent time should depend on the people and the spirit of the festival not the material goods that go with it) those who have chosen a savings scheme, rather than a spend-now-pay-afterwards credit card Christmas, have been doing the really responsible thing. And they've been left completely in the lurch.

Not only that but Farepack also allowed people to become their "agents" and collect from friends and other family members, so there's bound to be a bit of resentment in some households.

Presumably Farepack would have to have been a licensed deposit taker? And regulated as such by the Financial Services Authority? Their collapse should I hope, be dealt with as firmly by those authorities as any - Barlow Clowes springs to mind. I know running a business can be a fine balance between keeping the confidence of your customers and dealing with what might have seemed at the time - in June or July when they knew they had some cash flow issues - like little mid-year difficulties that they were confident they could get over. But it's not as if we are talking about sophisticated investors here who might have been watching for signs of trouble, just people paying into a relatively simple conceptually savings scheme that would guarantee them some fun over Christmas.

So it seems to me that HBOS do have some responsibility here. They were issuing warnings months ago to Farepack, and must have known the nature of their business and their customers. To allow it to go on till mid-October, when there's really little chance of people being able either to get what payout from an insolvency they might end up with before it was needed for Christmas or rustling up the same amount of money to replace what they had paid in and now lost, seems almost callous.

Farepack and similar schemes started life seventy and more years ago as mutual savings schemes. Maybe they've got too big to have the kind of care about their customers and the local savings club did of its members. Would that we had more credit unions that conscientious savers could have used instead. After all, how difficult can it be - you collect money over a year, put it all on deposit, even make a little interest for the members in doing so, and then all club together and go shopping in bulk, and start again the following January.

I hope someone steps in and offers these hapless but responsible people some material comfort at what promises to be a pretty miserable time of year for them.