Homes4People

New Labour dogma pervades Tony Blair’s biography. Bringing it into the leadership race is a depressing mistake

Nearly over now, then – so let us count the cliches used to decry the Labour leadership contest. “Interminable,” claims the Daily Telegraph. “The least inspiring contest ever,” says a columnist in the Independent. “A bunch of clueless clodhoppers,” reckons the characteristically emollient Mail. Now, the hysterically received Blair memoirs add another commonplace to the noise: that beneath the alleged tedium lurks grave danger – and if it isn’t careful, Labour will stray from the New Labour path, and lurch into irrelevance.

I dutifully bought my copy of A Journey today, and eventually reached the postscript, in which Blair sets out his vision of the future. What awaited was a mess of suggestions, most of which seemed to favour a model of debate that would effectively be meaningless. For Labour, the ideal path entails “remaining flexible enough to attack the government from left and right”. Even as the welfare state is hacked down and our few remaining social democratic institutions put under threat, “defining where you stand by reference to the opposite of where the other person stands is not just childish, but completely out of touch with where politics is today”. The “statist, so-called Keynesian response to the economic crisis” is a busted flush; even starting to rein in pay at the top would do “more harm than good”. Labour, as he sees it, “should criticise the composition but not the thrust of the Tory deficit reductions”.

Behind all this there is a mindset that is closer to a pathology than thought-through politics. Even after the crash, all that is contemporary, sensible and electorally advantageous is reduced to what Blair calls “liberal economic policies, market reforms in welfare and public services, and” – note the graceful use of language here – “engagement and intervention abroad”.

Anyone who questions this is is in danger of slipping back into the disgraced past. Under every bed, there lurks an “old Labour” red; even in the highest circles (witness an early reference in the book to Alastair Campbell: “much more old Labour” than some people, apparently) there is a constant danger of a return to a nightmare world of picket lines, nationalised everything, and serial Labour losses. In Blair’s rather paranoid account, even Lib Dems have “old Labour” instincts: and the coalition will prosper only if it squashes them.

Some salient facts. Between 1997 and 2010, Labour lost 5 million votes, of which 4 million went under his watch. In the eight years up to 2005 the party also mislaid over half its membership (often maligned as a rabble of unrepresentative anoraks – but still the chief means by which Labour actually wins elections). At his last general election, moreover, Blair led the party to a truly hollow victory: the support of 22% of the electorate, an outcome sufficiently chastening that he stood outside Downing Street and claimed to have “listened and learned”. In both the noise surrounding publication or the text itself, almost none of this has been mentioned.

A typical leader in one of today’s papers paid tribute to his three “emphatic” victories, and in his Andrew Marr interview Blair looked back on the 2010 defeat with the same black-and-white analysis. “If we departed a millimetre from New Labour, we were in trouble,” he said, as if he bore none of the blame. Far from what the memoirs call “an approach based on reason, on the abstinence from ideological dogma”, this is its complete reverse: the thinking of the zealot, as full of dogmatic stupidity as the hard-left politics Blair still sees round every corner.

Of late – as evidenced by warnings from Blair, Mandelson and those voices who share their view of things – this has resulted in one of the more depressing aspects of the Labour leadership contest: claims that “Red” Ed Miliband is a dangerous old Labour throwback. No matter that his handful of policy proposals – for the tentative roll-out of a living wage, or a graduate tax, or the high pay commission also supported by his brother – are modest and somewhat cautious. In the wake of an editorial claiming that even his brother was in danger of drifting too far to the left, one Times columnist – the venerable David Aaronovitch – compared him to Michael Foot.

On Monday, I turned on the Today programme to hear another pundit say: “He is properly leftwing. Really leftwing. He wouldn’t admit this now, but if you’d asked him a few years ago who his political hero was, he’d have said Tony Benn. And I don’t mean cuddly, modern Tony Benn, I mean Tony Benn in his pomp, in the 1960s and 1970s.”

The Labour party, I would imagine, has the sense to understand that this is the stuff of fear, voiced by people with no real understanding of either the real world, or the problems Labour has to address, and soon. At least twice in his book, Blair parrots a rollcall of English towns – “Hastings, Crawley, Worcester, Basildon, Harrow” – whose people, he seems to imagine, have experienced no downside of his beloved “liberal economic policies”, and even as the cuts bite, will not want anything significantly different. One is reminded of a priceless sentence, uttered circa 2008 by an unnamed Labour minister, seemingly convinced that the stockbroker belt ran far wider than once thought. “£150,000 isn’t much money in Reading,” he reckoned. Just to set the record straight, half the people who work in that town earn less than £21,000 a year.

No housing shortages in “middle England”, surely; no insecurity at work, or time poverty, or fretting about the debt that people’s children now rack up in pursuit of an education; come to think of it, none of the bundle of worries that always sit under all those concerns about immigration. Even with the application of work and imagination, Blair and his cheerleaders allege, modern social democracy has no hope in these places; and by implication, it has no realistic chance at all. This is not just a counsel of despair, but a desertion of Labour’s most basic mission. In A Journey, the basics of the party’s fate are summed up with the unbending simplicity of a dalek: “Labour won when it was New Labour. It lost because it stopped being New Labour.”

Towards the end of the book, its author says he has come back to the fray to find politics in disarray, and feels more motivated to impart his gospel than ever. “I find my old world in a state of despair and feel shocked and galvanised by this,” he says. “Perhaps that is because I am removed from it and so think I see it more clearly.”

The next bit is in parentheses, but it’s among the most telling sentences he writes: “This could be an illusion.”

It is, of course. It probably always was.

Originally published here

This week, somebody broke into Linda Carty’s replica death row cell in London, showing just how desperate many homeless are

Linda Carty is waiting to die on Texas’s death row, her appeals for the most part exhausted. She may face execution in the death chamber at any time. While she dreams of breaking out of her cell, on Wednesday someone broke in to stay the night.

The human rights charity Reprieve has a replica of the cell where Linda has spent the last decade. It contains her entire world: a narrow metal bed, a blanket, a metal sink and a metal toilet. The folk at St Martin-in-the-Fields have been kind enough to let us put the cell there until 5 September, so Londoners can experience some sense of Linda’s privation. I had hoped that languishing in the cell for an hour might inspire visitors to reach out and help save Linda’s life.

This week, someone reached in. Cracking the lock – to be sure, it is not the kind of electronic bolt that keeps Linda on Texas’s women’s death row – a homeless person used the facilities, and stayed the night.

Perhaps there was no more space at The Connection, the wonderful, charitable homeless centre round the corner from the church. No matter what the explanation, life must be grim for someone to break into death row.

There’s a difference between homelessness and rough sleeping. At least a quarter of a million people find themselves homeless each year, but they are often able to find shelter, sometimes in the houses of relatives. More than 3,600 people slept on the streets of London last year, up by a thousand since 2006. This English summer has been like many others – rarely warm or dry – but winter looms, when lying down in a doorway is a nightmare, whether you manage to snatch some sleep or remain awake. Rough sleepers have a life expectancy of just 42 years – Linda Carty and I would both have been dead for a decade – and take their own lives at 35 times the rate of the rest of us.

The coalition government has mouthed support for Boris Johnson’s goal: ending this crisis in London by 2012. Yet, when times get rough, the numbers rough sleeping inevitably rise. It is wishful thinking to suggest that charities can shoulder the extra load, as donors simultaneously feel they have less to give.

Our society talks about basic human rights. Politicians fall over each other to “ringfence” certain spending, such as on the NHS. I enjoyed the benefits of a free, excellent local doctor today, for some inconsequential ailment. How much more important is the right to sleep somewhere other than death’s waiting room?

Originally published here

The economic meltdown of 2007 shook the world – but financial reforms have failed to address fundamental problems

It was supposed to have been the day the world changed. The credit crunch “officially” began on 9 August 2007, and there were plenty ready to dance on the grave of capitalism and the free markets. But three years on, for all the hand-wringing, the economic upheaval and the promises of politicians, there is a whiff of business as usual in the air. The banks have returned to substantial profit, City bonuses are moving back to dizzying heights, international efforts for further co-operation have largely come unstuck, cranes are once more rising over the Square Mile and house prices are moving north.

Many are beginning to question whether anything has really changed at all; others maintain that things have simply got worse, that the old hegemony has been reinforced rather than loosened, widening the disparity between the wealthy and the rest.

Getting a mortgage has been put out of the reach of many people, savings are dwindling, high streets have become bleaker places and the expansion of public sector debt, partly to keep the world from plunging into a depression, means there will only be more painful austerity measures to come, affecting everything from arts funding to welfare. Politically, the shift has been to the right, particularly in Britain.

“Of course the credit crunch is leading to lots of changes and we haven’t seen all of them yet,” says Sir John Gieve, the former deputy governor of the Bank of England. “But in two big respects, I don’t think it did change the world. First, the speed of globalisation, the integration of the global economy, including finance, is continuing, and second, it is continuing around broadly a free-market model.

“There have been far fewer repercussions than there were after the 1930s,” he adds. “Then there was a real contest in the world about what was the right model for a modern society, and the crash convinced many people that capitalism and free markets were not the right way forward, but there has been no echo of that this time.

“Maybe India and China have slowed down on deregulating their financial industries, but broadly speaking, the direction the world had been moving in is continuing. It reflects an end of ideology. Capitalism is still the only game in town.”

Alistair Milne, reader in banking and finance at Cass Business School and the author of The Fall of the House of Credit, suggests there is still no willingness to change. “It is a way of life that we all enjoy. We are still locked into the mindset that rising house prices are a good thing. It will be a good sign that we are moving to a more constructive way of thinking when we don’t cheer every time house prices go up.”

The credit crisis had been brewing for a number of years, as rising interest rates in the US led an increasing number of low-income homeowners on sub-prime mortgages to default. But the pivotal moment arrived when a French bank issued a statement that most would consider arcane – but which would have profound consequences.

BNP Paribas told investors in two of its funds that they would not be able to withdraw money because it was no longer able to value the assets in them, due to a “complete evaporation of liquidity” in the market.

The money markets became petrified. Banks refused to lend to each other as fear spread about where the toxic debt obscured in complicated derivatives might be sitting – and the European Central Bank pumped more than €200bn (£166bn) into the system in a desperate attempt to thaw the freeze. Stock markets went into freefall.

For a time it seemed as if some commentators were right to predict a radical overhaul of the old world order that had existed for the 30 years since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had encouraged a laissez-faire approach.

Within a month, queues formed outside branches of Northern Rock in the first run on a high-street bank in living memory. A year after that, the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost brought the financial system to its knees, followed by the first truly global recession of the post-war era.

“The world did change and ultimately it will be seen to have changed for the better,” says Nick Parsons, head of research at National Australia Bank. “When the history of the past 10 years comes to be written, what will be surprising will be not the global financial crisis itself, but the financial conditions that preceded it – the excess and abundance of cheap money that was being lent without regard to borrowers’ ability to repay.

“Money was virtually free – in the case of Japan, where it had zero interest rates, it was literally free – and it was available in limitless quantities, which does not correspond to any definition of normalcy, so that created a bubble and bubbles burst.”

Heads rolled. Three years later, the politicians who steered Britain through the crisis, and arguably helped to cause it, have lost their jobs and many bankers moved on. Adam Applegarth, who ran Northern Rock and described that event in August as the “day the world changed”, was an early casualty. Chuck Prince, the boss of Citigroup, was gone by Christmas as was Jimmy Cayne, the Bear Stearns boss who reputedly played bridge as his bank neared collapse. Stan O’Neal at Merrill Lynch, Fred Goodwin at Royal Bank of Scotland and Andy Hornby at HBOS all followed.

The banks have since become more conservative – so much so that politicians are now attacking them for not lending enough.

“We have gone back to the type of conditions I was familiar with in the early- to mid-1980s,” Parsons says. “In order to get a loan, you need an income, you need proof of that income and you need to have a deposit – the very things that now appear to provoke outrage but are normal to anyone who is in their 40s. I think what we are seeing is a return to a banking industry as it was 25 years ago, which actually had many things to commend it.

“So capitalism has changed, yes, not in a huge cathartic way, but so that the owner or the custodian of capital is much more careful about where they use that capital,” he adds. “And this phase is going to be very uncomfortable for the economy. There is a lot of criticism that the banks are not lending enough, but that is a by-product of banks being more careful about capital – there is more emphasis on getting the money back than on pumping up assets that can be seized if the loan goes bad. The path we are on seems to be set for five or maybe even 10 years. It is not dissimilar to the way it used to be. We’ll just have to get used to it again.”

John Varley, chief executive of Barclays, underlined that point this week. From his point of view, banks are considerably less risky and more liquid.

In the year of the credit crunch, 2007, the bank’s crucial tier one ratio – a measure of its financial health – was 4.7%. Today it is 10%, showing that the bank is holding a larger capital cushion to support its business. In the same period, the bank’s leverage has fallen from 33% to 20% of that tier one capital, and the amount of liquid assets it holds – such as government bonds – has jumped from £20bn in the year of the credit crunch to £160bn now.

Capital, though, is still broadly in the same hands: “You have the same people making the most money, doing broadly the same thing, but – we hope – more sensibly and prudently,” says Gieve.

Three years on from the crisis, it is almost possible to forget that the banks, including those bailed out by the taxpayer, were loss-making. The major UK banks last week reported a combined £14.5bn of profit and a dramatic fall in impairment charges for loans that were not repaid on time. Certainly there is a sense of swagger returning to the City. Barclays, RBS and HSBC – just half-way through the year – have already set aside £6bn in pay and bonuses for their investment bankers.

The return of the bonus is likely to reawaken some of the public anger on show during the early days of the crisis and stoked by politicians. The crisis has “left a scar about banking and politicians” says Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs.

The return of the bonus is all the more unpalatable for many because of the wider austerity measures being pushed through. What started as a problem of private-sector debt has become a problem of public-sector debt. Governments spent and borrowed freely during the boom, and latterly to avoid turning the great recession into a great depression – and the cost to the public purse has been enormous. The UK ran up its biggest peacetime deficit of £155bn, about 11% of GDP. In Greece, the debt burden was more than 13% of GDP.

New banking regulations are being introduced at different speeds and in different ways in the main economies. The UK has been accused of moving too quickly by introducing a bank levy ahead of other main markets, while crucial changes being demanded by international banking regulators based in the Swiss city of Basle that require banks to hold more capital can now be implemented at whatever pace each country chooses. Economist Sir John Vickers is leading the banking commission report into whether the banks in Britain should be broken up.

Gieve says the broad package of measures agreed by the G20 and in Basle, requiring banks to hold more capital, increase transparency and defer bonuses, has broadly addressed some of the problems that led to the credit crunch. But, he says, two key issues remain to be addressed. “First the structure of banking. In the UK we are looking at the concentration of retail banking, but the more interesting question is about investment banking, which to me feels like an oligopoly and the extreme levels of rewards probably reflect that.

“The second is international co-operation. The really glaring thing about this crisis is that it was international. We were seeing people default on mortgages in California and Nevada, but the first banks that fell over were IKB in Germany and Northern Rock, which didn’t have any US sub-prime exposure but got caught up in this global financing market. One key lesson should be the need to co-ordinate policy, both macro and regulatory, more closely and I don’t see that happening.”

Lord Davies, a former trade minister and banker who was at the helm of Standard Chartered when the crisis erupted, agrees. “My worry is that the lessons of the crisis will be forgotten too quickly,” he said. “It was the first test of globalisation. The world did come together [but] we haven’t made a lot of progress since then – no global bank levy, everyone has gone back to business as usual. Compensation is still too high and the underlying factors that caused the crisis are still very evident.”

The banks are buoyant in part because the economy is stronger. The UK economy grew by 1.1% in the second quarter of 2010 – its fastest growth in four years. For all the talk of rebalancing the economy away from the City and commercial property, more than two thirds of the expansion came from the old bubble-era staples – construction and financial and business services. Retailers, meanwhile, have had their best month of sales growth in July since the spring of 2007.

However, politicians, claiming to have learned the lessons of the financial crisis, are still pressing for a rebalanced economy, with a new emphasis on expanding exports and manufacturing and a move away from an overreliance on financial services.

O’Neill says he is encouraged that increasing exports could be achieved by the low value of the pound – exports grew at 9% per annum for three years after Britain left the ERM – and heartened by the coalition government’s pursuit of better trade relations with the so-called Brics, Brazil, Russia, India and China. The credit crunch he says, has accelerated the shift to the new world order: “For the UK to rebalance, we have to have a serious export relationship with the Brics and it is something this government is talking seriously about.”

He says that the four countries together will create another $8 trillion of consumption this decade if they continue to grow at the current rate. “This is, clearly, three years on from the crisis, something which many companies are starting to see signs of,” O’Neill says, although western policymakers remain “pretty clueless”.

Others are more circumspect. “Establishing a leading position in any industry takes a long time,” says Gieve. “We shouldn’t assume it happens automatically and that if you squeeze financial services, somehow we will establish a lead in plastics. If you go around the world, most other countries would love to have a financial centre like London. From here we can see the disadvantages, such as the way it sucks talent from other industries and widens inequality, but London’s position in finance has been built over centuries and we would be foolish to undermine it.”

The reality, though, is that very few of Britain’s companies currently export to China, and the rest of Europe is coming up with the same plan. While more than 50% of Britain’s visible trade goes to other members of the EU, China accounts for 2% of UK exports and India under 1%, or about £3bn.

China and India, the world’s two largest emerging economies, have proven far more resilient to the global recession than many developed economies. Europe has struggled to haul itself back from recession, while in the US, one in four homes are suffering from negative equity and the faltering housing market risks dragging the world’s biggest economy back into a double dip.

Alistair Milne at Cass Business School says the world has fundamentally changed and it is less about the banks than about the way the world economy has got used to doing business. It is a change yet to be acknowledged by politicians and policymakers, but then, Milne maintains, the UK could be in for 25 years of stagnation – not something that wins many votes on the stump.

“When you get to the root of it, the crisis was not about the banks,” he says. “It was the result of credit-driven growth. That we all feel wealthier because we are borrowing bigger mortgages and house prices are going up is misguided. A country gets rich by producing things. The problem is the imbalance between countries producing goods, such as China and Japan, and ourselves and the US. They lent us money to buy things they make.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if banks hadn’t been gross risk-takers, this way of doing business would still have come to a shuddering halt. And no one has really addressed it. The world has fundamentally changed because we can’t go on by saying: ‘OK, China, lend us another trillion dollars so we can go on buying your stuff.’ I am deeply pessimistic about our society. We have papered over the cracks but things will get worse.”

Originally published here

A polemic that blames inequality for most troubles in our society has energised Labour

Last week, a group of academics decided that because of the debt he pumped into the economy and the poison he pumped into the Labour party, Gordon Brown was the third-worst British prime minister since 1945. To which the response from all sane onlookers was: “What, only the third?”

The charge list against him is long enough for a judge to send Labour to a dark cell for years. It would have been grossly negligent for any government to boast that its “light-touch” regulation had “abolished boom and bust”, while failing to notice that it was helping push the banking system towards the edge of a cliff. For a Labour government to set aside social democracy’s well-merited suspicion of finance capital was truly criminal. The Conservatives and Liberals can now use Brown’s failure as a plausible justification for spending cuts and tax rises. The party he left behind is torn by fratricidal strife – real fratricidal strife in the case of the Miliband family.

I would go on were it not for a paradox. Labour people are more energised than they have any right to be. Of course, the coalition’s recklessness explains much of the new sense of purpose. An alliance of Liberals and Conservatives ought to produce a moderate government, which would appeal to the British, who like to flatter themselves that they are commonsensical and pragmatic folk with no time for extremism. Instead, the coalition has produced a fanatical programme for deficit reduction and bureaucratic mayhem that demands opposition.

Yet there is something else: The Spirit Level, a book which is turning into a cross between a manifesto and a call to arms. At one leftwing meeting recently, a speaker wished everyone in the country could read its argument that societies more equal than Britain enjoy better physical and mental health, lower homicide rates, fewer drug problems, fewer teenage births, higher maths and literacy scores, higher standards of child wellbeing, lower obesity rates and fewer people in prison. If they could just grasp that, he said, then they would see that combating inequality was good for everyone. His was not a lone voice. David Miliband has declared his admiration for its authors. So has Ed. I expect to hear them disputing soon about who read The Spirit Level first and who admires it the most.

If you follow the rule of thumb that no book on a matter of political controversy is worth buying until it has been roundly denounced, then The Spirit Level is an essential purchase. The Taxpayers’ Alliance warns that it legitimises a fleecing of the middle class. David Cameron’s favourite thinktank, Policy Exchange, published a book-length condemnation which claims that The Spirit Level’s authors had produced a shabby, shallow work which threatened to “contaminate” our presumably honest political debate, as if it were an oil slick heading towards a pristine coast.

I know writers who would pay for the attention epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have received, but the authors themselves are politely baffled. Wilkinson is 67, a retired professor from Nottingham University. Pickett teaches at York. When I spoke to Wilkinson, he was still recovering from the shock that their book had made them the targets of raging polemics. Their arguments, buttressed by decades of research from around the world, seem self-evident to him. Once countries reach a certain level of wealth, what affects the citizenry is not the growth in GDP but the level of inequality. Man is a social primate and people who worry about their status and feel too keenly the humiliations their superiors inflict on them become anxious, mistrustful, isolated and stressed. This pattern holds whether you look at inequalities within different countries or between more equal or unequal states in the US or counties in Chile.

Although I disagree with their rather Panglossian conclusion that the rich would be happier with less money, their broad thesis strikes me as incontrovertible, as it must strike anyone who has been unemployed or worked in the private and public bureaucracies run by the overrated and overpaid management bullies New Labour so adored. Since the 18th century, liberal and a few conservative thinkers have believed that a sturdy and autonomous citizenry that does not need to bow, beg or scrape before its alleged superiors produces the strongest society. For the record, Wilkinson and Pickett do not claim to explain “everything” – suicide, they freely admit, does not fit their pattern. They patiently and rather devastatingly answer their critics on their equality trust website – and, well, if I worked for Policy Exchange I would think carefully before throwing around accusations of shallowness in future.

In short, their book seems reasonable and fair, but that isn’t the point. The phenomenon of its success is more interesting in its way than its authors’ ideas. I went to see Andy Hull, a Labour councillor in Islington, who, like most local officials in London, is confronting vast inequalities. On the one hand, he has the Islington of popular stereotype: chi-chi restaurants and boutiques catering to City bankers and the diminishing band of liberal intellectuals who can still afford to live there. All around is the London of housing estates with terrible levels of mental illnesses, teenage pregnancy, crime and premature death. Hull has established a fairness commission and it is attracting healthy crowds to its Spirit Level meetings . The participants’ ideas are becoming very radical, very quickly. Suppose the owners of the chi-chi shops, serving the croissants or fitting the Frost-French dresses, are not paying their workers a living wage, which in London stands at a minimum £7.60 an hour. Should Labour name and shame them? Should it organise demonstrators and tell them to test the liberalism of upper-middle-class consumers by asking them to shop elsewhere?

The panic about Wilkinson and Pickett on the right suggests to me that just because we have a Conservative government does not mean we live in conservative times. For years, the right could argue that there was no alternative to an economic order that mandated dizzying and ever-expanding chasms between rich and poor. Now its order has been brought down by the wealthy men conservatives in all parties so feted, I think it realises that from now on it will not be able to shout down and shut up egalitarian arguments so easily.

Originally published here

A generous billionaire is preferable to a mean one. But Bill Gates et al could make pledges that mean more than just charity

It is surely admirable – isn’t it? – that 40 US billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have signed the “giving pledge” to donate half their fortunes to charity. Far better that they open their wallets to deserving causes than that they spend yet more money on yachts, carbon-emitting private jets or garish mansions. Well, yes. Salute Gates, whose foundation has already saved perhaps five million lives through the development and delivery of vaccines against diseases such as TB. Salute Buffett who says his children won’t inherit “a significant proportion” of his wealth. The filthy rich, or some of them, have shown they have a heart.

But let’s be clear. Money paid to charity is exempt from tax; the US treasury already loses at least $40bn (£25bn) a year from tax breaks for donations. So billionaires, not the democratically elected and (at least theoretically) accountable representatives of the people, get to decide on the good causes. Those who already wield enormous economic power can determine social priorities too. Of course, the poor also contribute to charity but most don’t get the tax breaks because they don’t pay income tax.

As Michael Edwards, a former World Bank adviser, asked in a study for the thinktank Demos, Small Change: Why Business Won’t Change the World: “Why should the rich and famous decide how schools are going to be reformed, or what drugs will be supplied at prices affordable to the poor, or which civil society groups get funded for their work?” And even if they give away half their money (or 99% in Buffett’s case), billionaires will still be rich. Their generosity, however, helps to legitimise inequality and head off political protest. Some of them may become even richer, because charitable giving is good marketing and, sometimes, can be used to tie recipients into buying the donors’ products and services.

You may think, if we’re talking about mosquito nets to stop children dying from malaria or drugs for HIV, that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. In the short term, it probably doesn’t. But rich business people tend to bring their own values to charitable giving, and there’s a danger they will undermine those of the voluntary sector. One billionaire who signed the “giving pledge”, the Oracle founder Larry Ellison (worth $28bn), has said: “The profit motive could be the best tool for solving the world’s problems.”

Wealthy benefactors usually want efficiency, clearly defined targets, measurable outcomes, quick results. They tend to select charities as they would select suppliers of goods and services to their companies. Some bodies provide data that help donors decide which charities to support: in the US, for instance, GiveWell records effectiveness according to “the most lives saved for the least money”. These things aren’t necessarily wrong – many charities would benefit from more rigour – but they don’t always translate easily to the voluntary sector. They are not readily applicable to the more diffuse, long-term aims of civil society organisations, nor to their more transparent, less top-down decision-making processes. Just as market approaches carry dangers when applied to public services, so they do when applied to charities. The emphasis on “rates of return” and “value for money” may exclude people in great need who happen to be difficult to reach or, even if made fit and healthy, would be of marginal economic utility.

“Philanthrocapitalism“, as it has been called, veers towards tackling symptoms of poverty and distress rather than underlying causes. Gates has done admirable work against TB, malaria and Aids, and begun work against diarrhoea and pneumonia, which are much bigger killers. He and his wife Melinda have started to talk about clean water supplies, inadequate housing, public health infrastructure and agricultural productivity.

They are undoubtedly among the most sophisticated of the new philanthropists. But it seems doubtful they will move into considering issues of, say, land ownership and distribution. The Gates Foundation wants to “give where we can effect the greatest change”. But the greatest change is likely to come from transforming the economic system and the pattern of property ownership. Will Gates fund projects that undermine his own power and economic status?

There is another danger: that the poor are written out of their own story, that business tycoons, accustomed to getting their own way, do things to the poor, rather than with them. As Edwards sees it, business leaders threaten the distinctive values of civil society: commitment and co-operation. Great social causes, he points out, are not mobilised by the market or led by billionaires. “The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the New Deal, the Great Society – all these were pushed ahead by civil society and anchored in the power of government as a force for the public good. Business and markets play a vital role in taking these advances forward, but they are followers, not leaders.”

I repeat: we should welcome the Gates-Buffett initiative and applaud those who have joined it. Generous, public-spirited billionaires are preferable to mean ones. But remember that two-thirds of US corporations contrive to pay no federal income tax at all and that transfer pricing alone – a legal device, used, for instance, by Ellison’s Oracle Corp, that converts sales in one country to profits in another where tax liabilities are low – deprives the US treasury of $60bn annually. Such sums, which pile more taxes on the poor and reduce funds for government projects that advance the public good, dwarf what the 40 billionaires propose to give away.

If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection and working conditions; to make goods and use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment or make people ill. When they put their names to that, there will be occasion not just for applause but for street parties.

Originally published here

We’re told we’re in a new age of austerity, yet top pay and bonuses still rise astronomically – heedless of public disgust

The new age of austerity means “we’re all in this together,” according to David Cameron. But has no one told Britain’s bosses yet?

Boardroom pay continues to ratchet up even for companies with lacklustre performance. Stuart Rose, Marks and Spencer’s outgoing chief executive, saw a 140% increase in his rewards for last year – even though profits were only up by 5%.

While most employees have seen their salaries frozen or even cut, those at the top continue to reap the lion’s share of the benefits. The ratio between the salaries of the boardroom and the shop floor has doubled in the past 10 years. Chief executives of Britain’s largest companies now receive 81 times the rewards of their employees. Even where companies are in trouble or posting a loss, executives manage to justify a boost to their income.

It is hard to follow the justification offered in many cases. It usually focuses on “benchmarking” others in the same industry. That industry is almost always global and the bosses to imitate are usually in America. Leaving aside the rarity of a British exec crossing the Atlantic and making a go of it, remuneration committees always use the comparison argument as a reason for raising executive pay, never for cutting it. There must be some companies out there in the same sector who pay their bosses less, but they are never mentioned.

This makes executive salaries a giant merry-go-round of pay increases. Not just pay, but also the offer of gold-plated pensions, housing allowances and generous expenses. Maybe Britain’s bosses just do not care that they stand out as greedy and grasping to fill their own pockets. Maybe they think they are worth it.

But there is a serious issue at stake. The vast gulf in salaries and wealth has led to an unprecedented wave of distrust for business among the British public. And it’s not just us. UK companies are not covering themselves in glory on the world stage right now.

BP’s boss Tony Hayward has become a hate figure in the US and the Pru’s foray into Asia has turned into a debacle. Our companies are not enhancing their reputations worldwide – and if we don’t trust them, who will?

This also comes at a time when the employers’ organisation, the CBI, has started special pleading for rich people to be let off the increase in capital gains tax and for the top rate of income tax to be reduced back to 40%. Do they just not get it?

We are entering a period of extended belt-tightening in this country where many people will end up losing their jobs and those that don’t could see their purchasing power eroded by a rise in inflation and a freeze in pay. For company bosses to be lining their pockets with wads of cash is the height of selfishness. Cameron has suggested that top people in the public sector should not be paid more than 20 times the average wage in their business. It is about time this was introduced for the private sector, too.

Originally published here

Former London mayor needs to exorcise his past mistakes

To a degree unusual even among politicians, Ken Livingstone gives a wide berth to the words, “I was wrong”. I guess he has his reasons: over decades he’s proved himself right by confounding conventional wisdom, from “fares fair” and gay rights in the 1980s to winning the London mayoralty as an independent in 2000 and introducing congestion charging in his first term. It’s no surprise, then, that displays of contrition over his defeat by Boris Johnson in 2008 have not been a feature of the start of his campaign to take back the mayoralty in 2012. Look closer, though, and there are signs that certain lessons may have been learned.

Exhibit A is a launch piece he wrote for the London Evening Standard, which is once again a newspaper, as opposed to the unofficial Boris propaganda organ it had become. “I will speak for the whole of London,” he declared, criticising Johnson for shelving transport schemes for Dagenham and Croydon. Both are examples of the outer London areas that swung behind the Tory candidate two years ago – and that Livingstone needs to woo back.

His peroration asked all non-Tory Londoners to get behind him and for “black, white, Jewish, Asian, straight [and] gay,” to work together. The composition of that list is worth dwelling on: many Jewish Londoners have become furious with Livingstone over the years and while the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland was prepared to set aside the reasons for that fury two years ago, many others were not; a lot of gays (and Jews) have not let him forget his very public embrace of the Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Where Islam is concerned, Livingstone sometimes plays with fire.

Warm words about unity and protecting ordinary Londoners are only a start, of course. Livingstone will need imaginative yet practical policies too, especially on the core areas of mayoral responsibility and power. He should be careful about what he promises and has been so far. In his Standard article he pledged to “hold down” public transport fares, rather than freeze them. Transport for London’s strained finances would make such a promise reckless. How, though, can he significantly resist the huge upward pressure on fares?

Linking his revived plan for an extra-high congestion charge for gas-guzzler vehicles to the wellbeing of voters in the outer London boroughs of Bromley, Barking or Barnet is a cute ploy, but can he be sure that the policy “would raise millions to protect the fare-payer”? If the higher charge deterred those motorists from entering the congestion-charge zone in substantial numbers, revenue would reduce accordingly. Would Livingstone bring back the C-charge zone’s western extension, which Johnson is (reluctantly, if truth be told) seeking to abolish by Christmas Eve – a move that will cost £75m a year in precious revenue? Back in January he said he would.

In his Standard article he says nothing. That might be sensibly cautious for now, but the question will require answering before long. The issue of roads and road congestion in London is divisive and fraught, largely along inner-outer lines. The wrong move could cost him or any other Labour candidate dear.

On policing, Livingstone pledges to protect all safer neighbourhood teams, but while calling for a “halt” to the coming reductions in Metropolitan police numbers, he doesn’t say how he’d secure one: doing so would mean getting more money from a budget-cutting government (unlikely) or raising the mayor’s share of Londoners’ council tax (unpopular). He is measured in a different way on a third core mayoral responsibility of housing, promising to seek powers from the government to raise money on the bond markets to build more homes. With housing minister Grant Shapps announcing that the public money for affordable house building has run out, Livingstone wouldn’t be alone in looking for finance from such sources.

A judiciously pitched start then, shall we say. Importantly, it’s one that seems to recognise while not, of course, admitting – perish the thought – that candidate Livingstone needs to replenish those parts of the voter coalition that carried him in to city hall in 2000 and 2004 and shrank on him in 2008. These crucially include the middle classes in general, many white working-class voters (whose four-year revolt against London Labour politicians was, encouragingly, ended at in the recent general and borough elections), and of course the residents of those outer London boroughs in general, a point well made by his campaign chair David Lammy.

Much of this looks fixable: some big reassurances about any future stewardship of public money, clear policies to show that his commitment to fighting inequality is not limited to London’s ethnic minorities and a sustained love-bombing of the suburbs in partnership with Labour activists on the ground would go a long way to repairing Livingstone’s appeal.

But there’s another issue too: attitude. Perhaps the biggest barrier Livingstone faces is the feeling among London voters that he’s old news and has “had his time”. This is related to his being on the crinkly side of 60 but mostly, I suspect, it’s a perception that he’d got ratty and weary inside Norman Foster’s glassy orb. He needs to keep a sharp eye on his angry side.

Oona King’s decision to play the age card has not gone down well with him, but the senior politician needs to keep smiling alongside her through the coming hustings. He should suppress any remaining urge to continue pointless feuds with critics – he gains nothing from them but trouble and avoidable strife.

The toxic parts of his history need to be remediated by Livingstone if he’s to fully rebut King’s case that it’s time for a change and maximise his chances of a remarkable comeback in 2012. He should embrace this as an opportunity. That may be the sort of thing conventional politicians say, but in this case that wouldn’t make them wrong.

Originally published here

Some Labour people have settled on a daft strategy: outflank the Lib-Cons from the right, and so satisfy the proles

One week into the Labour leadership contest, all is atonement and apology. Andy Burnham reckons the last 16 years found his party being “too cautious and controlling”. Ed Balls offers a reductive version of a conversation he endlessly heard on his campaign rounds: “You have lost touch with us, you are not our side, you are not in it for us.” David Miliband says much the same, while his brother builds a modest bonfire of New Labour vanities: “The New Labour combination of free markets plus redistribution got us a long way, then reached its limits a few years back,” he reckons. “Saying globalisation is good for you … is a good answer for economists but it is no answer for the people of Britain.”

One element of New Labour theology, however, remains securely in place. You hear it in the pronouncements of the supposed leading candidates, and in anxious chatter around Westminster. The C2s – skilled manual workers, whose loyalties play a crucial role in so many marginals – have deserted Labour in droves, particularly men. Their key complaints are about supposed welfare malingerers, and new arrivals from abroad; and this is where Labour must focus that time-honoured ritual known as “listening and learning”. So it is that the future of centre-left politics occasionally threatens to come down to kicking the dispossessed, and parroting the early summer’s big Labour mantra: immigration, immigration, immigration.

All this is currently a matter of broad-brush rhetoric (strange how men so steeped in the forensic stuff of policy seem so hesitant about coming up with ideas of their own), but the signs are clear. When announcing his leadership bid on Wednesday, Ed Balls mentioned the “I” word endlessly, and praised a politician whose sour countenance and self-styled toughness have long embodied the most dried-up school of Labour politics: Phil Woolas, this week heard bemoaning the fact that Labour failed to make more of the policy whereby benefits are refused to those seeking indefinite leave to remain (which would have made for very uplifting posters).

As well as obligingly claiming that Labour has been deaf to worries about immigration, Andy Burnham has admiringly cited voters who thought that “money and help was going to people who were not, like them, trying to do the right things” – and he didn’t mean your Bob Diamonds and Fred the Shreds. The Milibands, to their credit, have been much quieter on this stuff, though Ed saw fit to leaven his first leadership bid speech with the obligatory mention of an unidentified working-class voter who thought his benefit-claiming neighbours were swinging the lead. “We have hard thinking to do,” he concluded, ominously.

Elsewhere, plenty of Labour people are truly ablaze. At a meeting of the parliamentary party at the end of last week, voices who last had their chance when Hazel Blears made her doomed bid for the deputy leadership reportedly piped up, talking about benefit claimants getting “something for nothing” and the need to sound strong notes on immigration controls. One myth is already doing the rounds: that Margaret Hodge’s victory over the BNP in Barking was down to her strident line on somehow putting “indigenous” people ahead of new arrivals in the queue for public services, whereas Jon Cruddas’s failure to romp home in Dagenham and Rainham came from his refusal to do anything similar. In fact, Cruddas’s narrow margin of victory was down to boundary changes. Moreover, Cruddas’s is actually the whiter of the two seats, which makes his achievement all the more remarkable.

Whatever, all this ugliness has a long and lamentable Labour pedigree. For a flavour of how the party responds to defeat, think back to the Crewe byelection, its witless class warfare and its maligning of the Tory victor as someone who opposed “making foreign nationals carry an ID card“. Now, with Clegg and Cameron looking like the embodiment of bourgeois bleeding-hearts – all “Big Society” promises and strong talk on civil liberties – some Labour people seem to have come to a truly stupid conclusion: that the Con-Dem coalition has to be outflanked on the right, because the proles demand it. This takes us to what might prove the biggest problem of all: that four ex-wonks with limited life experience may not be the best people to divine what exactly it is that the fabled white working class is after.

This much is clear. After so many years of ever tightening welfare entitlements, and with the City elite seemingly as untouchable as ever, to focus any argument about distributional justice on welfare claimants is borderline obscene. And before any former minister starts to hold forth about the damaging effects of immigration on the social fabric, we could do with contrition that goes deeper than a new drive to “listen”, or fuzzy matters of philosophy.

Immigration and welfare have become hot-button issues largely because of the insecurities made worse by New Labour’s recurrent refusal to depart from the usual neoliberal script. What of the Blair and Brown governments’ long history of resisting European moves on the white-hot issue of agency workers? To securely propel the workless back into employment, what about some meaningful moves on low pay? Why did Labour fail so miserably on social housing? To be fair, some of this may be stirring in the debate: Ed Miliband’s claim that “immigration is a class issue” demands real follow-through, as does Burnham’s claim that Labour was “in denial” about the impact of immigration on wages and housing. Unfortunately, the latter has also seen fit to talk up immigration’s effect on antisocial behaviour: more dog-whistle stuff, and all the more miserable for it.

Yesterday, one more leadership candidate came up with a no-brainer quote, though this one cut to the heart of this week’s unpleasantness. “One of the things that made me run was hearing candidate after candidate saying that immigration lost us the election,” said Diane Abbott, who is starting to take on a very unlikely air of saintliness. “Rather than wringing our hands about the white working class and immigration, we need to deal with the underlying issues that make white and black people hostile to immigration: things like housing and job security. We need to be careful about scapegoating immigrants in a recession. We know where that leads.”

We certainly do. And on these most fundamental of issues, Labour’s danger is not that long-imagined lurch to the left, but an ugly and reactionary step in the opposite direction.

Originally published here

With the new government promising to respect our civil liberties, I think now is a good time for me to bow out

This is my last post for liberty central, a moment of greater regret than I expected. But it’s time to go. The number of ways to express concern about civil liberties, intrusion and the legislative process are finite. After a while you begin boring yourself, a sure sign that you are already boring others, and besides I think the point has been taken by most people.

Two weeks ago, quite suddenly the sun burst through the clouds. There was no other election result would have produced the favourable conditions for Nick Clegg’s constitutional speech on Wednesday and to my astonishment and pleasure it now seems certain that they are gong to start righting the liberty deficit left by Labour: ID cards are gone; surveillance will be controlled; the ContactPoint database is dead; the vetting and barring database is to be reduced. These things will be done. I know Nick Clegg a bit and am sure that this all at the core of his political being.

Labour was an utter disaster for civil liberties and also for parliament, where it reduced scrutiny and debate while vastly increasing the number of pages of legislation and unscrutinised statutory instruments. It made use of Christmas tree bills to smuggle measures into law and so-called Henry VIII clauses to pass ministerial edicts and showed disdain for almost everything in parliament other than the exercise of power. I couldn’t be more pleased that that era is unequivocally over – it does seem the right moment to move on. I will continue to write regularly for the Observer and occasionally here when I have finished my book.

Writing a blog is much more intense than writing a regular column. I’ve become intrigued by the relationship the writer has with his readers, which seems to me both oddly intimate and remote. I have problems with the anonymity of most Ciffers but accept that you get a raw, if sometimes rather contemptuous honesty when people are not required to use their own names. I’ve enjoyed your company and even the sharper exchanges with pungent critics such as speedkermit, PeterGuillam and peterbracken. Thank you stevehill, peitha, HarryTheHorse, LordSummerisle, JSMilitant and many others, for getting the point so often. I have had my mind changed on certain issues but never my conviction that we needed to fight for our rights and liberties under Labour and that there are still fairly autocratic forces in the woodwork.

I set out to write a campaigning blog rather than simply to comment. To my surprise, I found that that while I frequently ran the risk of banging on (a car alarm going off in the street is how one of you charmingly put it), campaigning really does work. Look what has been achieved by End Child Detention Now and lone individuals like the novelist Clare Sambrook, who fought the atrocious practice of seizing thousands of asylum seeking children from their beds and locking them up in places like Yarlswood detention centre; by Phil Booth and Guy Herbert at No2ID, Shami Chakrabarti and her team at Liberty, Josie Appleton and James Panton at the Manifesto club, which did so much to expose the absurd Vetting and Barring procedure; by Terri Dowty at Action on Rights For Children, and by Chris Williams at the Register, one of the really essential websites out there. These are truly remarkable individuals and they’ve done a really important job over the last few years. Liberty’s campaign against 42-day detention without trial was exemplary.

I was on stage with some of them the other night in Brixton and looking along the line of speakers it struck me what an extraordinary effect a few determined people can have. So don’t let anyone tell you – or, more importantly, your children – that nothing can ever be done.

I haven’t any doubt that much of the programme announced by Nick Clegg yesterday came together at the Convention on Modern Liberty, set up by my friend and collaborator Anthony Barnett with a little help from me and the backing of the Guardian last year. What the convention achieved was to do the thinking for politicians on all sides who had not grasped the scale of the attack on liberty, rights and privacy, nor understood the rogue mutation responsible for it. Lord Bingham, David Davis MP, Lady Kennedy, Sir Ken MacDonald and Philip Pullman helped greatly to give the event credibility and to make people realise that concern was not limited to a few obsessives.

When the event was over, Anthony and I worried that we had lost impetus. That was wrong because the message had sunk in and we are now miraculously seeing the results in what Nick Clegg promises by way of political reform and rolling back Labour’s attack on civil liberties.

The liberty central blog was a part of that effort. I was grateful to those who suggested new lines of inquiry in the thread and emailed me with information. But the greatest thanks go to the brilliant Georgina Henry, the comment editor until last week, who set all this up and gave me wonderful support, to Natalie Hanman, Emily Butselaar and Jessica Reed, who edited my stuff, and my incomparable researcher Hannah Lease who sent me thousands upon thousands of stories. This blog would not have been possible without her really keen sense of justice and ability to spot a good story, and if there is one person in the country who has a complete picture of this particular part of our history it is Hannah. Just now I opened emails from her to find that Kent police are using the Obscene Publications Act to prosecute someone for a private online chat he had with another individual, that Tesco is asking people in their 30s and 40s for proof of their age when they buy alcohol, that a women in the Isle of Wight who suffered depression found that her health records had been accessed by the local housing department with whom she was in dispute. I am not going to comment on them, but someone should.

Thanks to you all.

Originally published here

Five Cif commenters, five perspectives, one issue: readers share their experiences and advice on mental health

Readers of our You tell us series have asked us for more articles written from a personal perspective. In this series, we’ve commissioned Comment is free commenters to write above the line about their own experiences. Each person will tackle a subject from a distinctive angle, and make policy recommendations, in the hope that they will inspire others to comment below the line. We’re starting the series by looking at mental health issues.

Due to the delicate and personal nature of the debate, moderation will be strict and personal abuse will not be tolerated.

Alison Klose (aka EvaWilt)

My story: Now that I’m recovering from illness, I’m able to see just how good my treatment has been over the past year. In the depths of it, things seemed very black. My GP was lovely, but there were a few “call yourself a (insert expletive) doctor” moments with my psychiatrist, although we now have a very relaxed and open relationship. Due to the severity of my illness, medication was vital to stabilise my mood and it took several distressing changes over a number of months to find the appropriate drug. Things gradually began to improve. I was then able to start to get out (after months of being virtually housebound), and received the help of a community psychiatric nurse (CPN). Mine has been a key part of my recovery – an emergency counsellor for bad days and mate for coffee on better ones. Both doctor and nurse have also provided informal support for my husband, who was my full-time carer for a time and faced his own challenges.

I’m now starting with a clinical psychologist; this seems about the right time to deal with the challenges of therapy. I’m going to the hospital gym, where physiotherapists run classes to help with both relaxation and fitness. Overall, a very holistic approach to my health – for me, the system works. I am only too sadly aware that others may not be so lucky.

My recommendation: I would like to see community psychiatric nurses used initially in primary care for cases of “mild” depression. They would have time to spend with patients and possess the experience and skills to provide reassurance and support. A harassed and overstretched GP may miss the more serious yet “quiet” cases which a nurse might pick up. In Scotland, around £36m was spent on antidepressants in 2008-09 – even a small amount of that sum spent elsewhere could surely make a positive difference.

Violetforthemoment

My story: One thing that struck me when reading this recent thread about Allison Pearson was the near-consensus in favour of talking therapies as treatment for depression. Many held that medication should be a “last resort”. But allowing therapy to become the orthodoxy that medication once was would be a mistake in my view – one that could delay potentially life-saving alternative treatment.

When I started taking anti-depressants around four years ago, I felt guilty and lazy, as if I was going for the “quick fix” when the hard, painful journey of therapy was what would really do the trick if I only had the courage. The main “trick” therapy had accomplished thus far was helping me recall irritating and inconsequential episodes from my adolescence to mull over pointlessly for an hour, as there wasn’t a great deal to say about the truth: that I felt I’d had a malignant black cloud over my head and a stark, empty vacuum where my heart and soul should have been since about the age of seven.

Within a short time of starting medication, I stopped feeling like that. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made. Well-meaning friends and doctors had me believing I must have something to un-repress, that I needed to heal and hug and learn and grow. I’ve seen this attitude influence many of my clients in my work as a probation officer, all of them female. But I’ve also known desperate, damaged men for whom counselling wasn’t pushed hard enough.

My recommendation: We all know the stereotype that women solve problems by talking: that we love to pour our hearts out while men are naturally taciturn. Such assumptions are about as helpful in treating an illness as squeamishness about “chemicals” leading some to dismiss medication. Yes, we should be cautious about treatments’ origins and potential vested interests, but that isn’t applicable only to pharmaceuticals. The right balance needs to be struck between promoting a treatment when it seems appropriate, and presenting it as a universal cure.

Englishhermit

My story: With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder how much of this I brought upon myself. I mean, stress is for wimps, isn’t it? Metaphors abound: show some backbone, stiff upper lip and all that. If I had known about the effects of long-term stress 10 years ago, I would have sought help much earlier. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Day in, day out, for months, rolling into years, the blows descended with little respite, and my fight or flight mechanism was suspended until my nervous system finally gave out with full blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Only it wasn’t PTSD: the label didn’t fit because there wasn’t a single major trauma, although my symptoms were remarkable similar. No surprise then that the drugs didn’t work, nor did self-medication with alcohol. Unable to work or deal with the baying hordes of creditors (some sympathetic, some not and some exploiting my condition), I finally succumbed and started screaming my head off.

I was lucky. I could have ended up sectioned, imprisoned or worse. I was rescued by social services who found me a place in a hostel with a buffer between me and the pressures with which I could not cope. Once “safe” and with support from trained staff, it took me a full year to recover. I was ready to leave once housing could be arranged. Without support, especially with seemingly minor things like shopping in crowded places or dealing with bureaucracy, I might have relapsed.

My recommendation: The economy is in a mess and there will be few funds available to provide residential care. The one policy that could be introduced that would cost very little is to give respite from the financial pressures that only exacerbate stress related conditions. A “protection from creditors” certificate signed off by one or more medical professionals and legally enforceable in the courts, if necessary, would give that respite and help prevent people from crashing out as I did.

Rin Simpson (aka Rin008)

My story: I’m amazed at how long it took me to go to the doctor and admit that I was pretty sure I had depression. After all, my father was manic depressive (he committed suicide when I was eight years old ) and my sister has lived with the illness for most of her life. But it was only after months of suffering that I finally faced up to the fact that I was more than just a bit down. My diagnosis was borderline moderate/severe depression.

I was put on medication, then stronger medication, then essentially left to it. It was only through my own efforts that I discovered the benefits of exercise and a balanced diet. It was family who urged me to get plenty of sleep, and friends who helped find a counsellor. A depressed woman I met through work told me how she’d learned to cope by setting herself one small goal each day, even if it was something as simple as having a shower. That strategy kept me functioning, but I didn’t get it from the doctor.

Eventually I decided to come off the pills. Perhaps foolishly, I didn’t consult my doctor; I didn’t even tell her. That was last summer. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the surgery to get antimalaria tablets for a holiday. Imagine my surprise when I was handed two prescriptions – one for the antimalarials, one for antidepressants. In the intervening months no one had tried to contact me, wondering why I’d not attended my next check up.

I’m not interested in criticising the NHS or the medical profession. My GP was kind and treated me with respect. But when it comes to depression, diagnosis should be the first step of a much longer process. From there a patient should be referred onwards – to counselling, exercise classes, nutritional advice. People with depression need to be shown how to change their lives, not just accept their fate and rely on medication indefinitely.

My recommendation: Some may require long-term drug treatment, but the majority don’t. There are numerous coping techniques, like the goal-setting one I learned and still use today. There are counselling practices like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) which, put simply, help the patient change the way they react to their circumstances and their illness. The method itself isn’t important. What is important is that patients and doctors shift their mindset from “managing on medication now” to “living without it in the future”. Only then can we hope to recover.

Penileplethysmograph

My story: In many ways, I enjoyed my time on a mental health ward in the NHS. I like people, find them interesting, and have lots of professional interest in the area. But I did not get much in the way of care beyond being fed three square meals a day. I did, however, experience ongoing pettiness. For instance, my shoelaces were taken away from me in order to avoid a suicide risk. But had I wanted to commit suicide – and I didn’t – I would have easily been able to do so. The lack of laces simply left me with an increased trip hazard – so much for the rules. To this should be added the small humiliations (for example, always having to wait for nurses to respond to requests), the eruptions of shouting and banging, and the depredations of severely ill patients, the urine stench of the incontinent and the possible risk of cross infection.

Mental health rests on much less secure theoretical footing than does physical health. The particular categories of illness are much debated, and yet consultants and psychiatrists appear sure of their diagnoses. Despite spending little time with their patients, they express absolute confidence in their judgments. However, none of those I met showed any awareness of how they reached their diagnosis, nor did they alter their confidence consequent on changes in the information.

Nurses were generally better placed to make assessments of the patients as they had more time to develop a mental model of the patient across time (baseline data is vital to assess change). Unfortunately, much of their time was dedicated to filling in crude behavioural checklists and on administrative tasks.

My recommendation: Care could be improved if more faith was placed in people. Across the system, trained and experienced individual judgment is distrusted while simplistic rule-following and record-keeping is enforced. This may suit accounting and target reaching, but is not satisfactory. Nurses should be spending more time with patients and be given more responsibility regarding their management. More actively therapeutic behaviour ought to be encouraged during everyday interactions, rather than be left for very occasional scheduled sessions. The duty and practice of care should be emphasised over that of control.

• From more information about mental health, visit mind.org.uk. Their national helpline number is 0845 766 0163

Originally published here