Robert Reich hits against the spin

I have never read Robert Reich's blog before (and wouldn't have imagine he had one). But I clicked on it today because of he was said to be about to endorse Barack Obama (quite a surpising move from the man who was reckoned to the intellectual force behind the first Clinton administration).

He has endorsed Obama - but I found his previous article more interesting. It is essentially a meditation on the way reporting on politics has turned into reporting on the spin. Here's what he says:

Listen to this morning’s “Meet the Press” ...Tim Russert, one of the
smartest guys on television, interviewed four political consultants – Carville
and Matalin, Bob Schrum, and Michael Murphy. Political consultants are paid huge
sums to help politicians spin words and avoid real talk. They’re part of the
problem. And what do Russert and these four consultants talk about? The
potential damage to Barack Obama from saying that lots of people in Pennsylvania
are bitter that the economy has left them behind; about HRC’s spin on Obama’s
words (he’s an “elitist,” she said); and John McCain’s similarly puerile attack.
Does Russert really believe he’s doing the nation a service for this parade of
spin doctors talking about potential spins and the spin-offs from the words
Obama used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is Russert merely in the
business of selling TV airtime for a network that doesn’t give a hoot about its
supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to up its ratings by
pandering to the nation’s ongoing desire for gladiator entertainment instead of
real talk about real problems.

But I feel a little more upbeat than this. Certainly Obama's "bitter" comment has been used for endless analysis on the basis of how it will play, rather than what it means in terms of policy, and certainly there have been many incidents of this type.

Still it seems to me that electorates - here and in the US - are more alive to these issues nowadays. One positive sign is - I think - the way that momentum took a long time to establish itself as the key issue in the Republican race, and still hasn't in the Democrat race. Politics looks in bad shape, but it isn't dead yet.

Alix, Gwyneth, and a slur against Brian Paddick

It was good to see Alix in Comment is Free yesterday, with a piece praising Brian Paddick for his display of spirit in a Time Out interview.

There's no point in my trying to paraphrase Alix's elegant prose: here it is

I can understand why Time Out's reporter was upset when the Liberal Democrat's mayoral candidate questioned the validity of one of their questions. The cheek! Paddick talks about extending the award-winning DLR's concession model to the tube. Journo responds: "But the experience of Metronet has been disastrous. Surely having more private companies running the tube will not be popular?"

....

"You sound like Ken Livingstone's spokesperson," Paddick fired back angrily, before getting the unfortunate to replay her tape so that she can listen to herself asking a terminally stupid question.

Good stuff - but I would like Brian to take Livingstone on over the whole issue. Because it was Labour who signed up for the Metronet deal (and Gordon Brown, recently on the campaign trail with Livingstone, was in the thick of it).

Personally I don't see the devil's mark on every PFI contract. But Metronet was uniquely bad. The late Gwyhnth Dunwoody's Transport Select Committee recently published a report on the deal that makes compelling and alarming reading.

The worst part of the deal was (arguably) the fact that Metronet was owned by its suppliers, who were guaranteed non-competitive work over the years to come. The Dunwoody committee explained this as follows:

A significant part of Metronet's obligations under its PPP Agreements was intended to be delivered through contracts with its shareholders with some 60% of its projected capital expenditure in the first 7½ year period to be awarded to its parent companies—Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Bombardier, EDF Energy, and Thames Water. Other than for rolling stock work, which was managed by Bombardier, this was organised through another company, Trans4m, which was in turn owned by the remaining four of the Metronet shareholders. This structure has been widely recognised as having contributed to the inefficiencies of Metronet, a conclusion which the Arbiter reached in 2006.[18] Metronet's former Chairman, Graham Pimlott, conceded that

I think that there is little doubt that in the case of stations the contractual arrangements with the shareholders was a very negative factor from Metronet's point of view. Metronet had a contract with Trans4m, which was a contract that gave Metronet very little in the way of leverage over Trans4m. It had to pay money when bills were presented and it did not have the ability to withhold it, for example for performance failure.

So the Livingstone line is that Paddick might do the sort of thing that Labour actually did. But there is no suggestion in Paddick's prgramme that he intends to do anything of the kind.

So Brian should keep talking about it.

Here is how the Dunwoody Committee summed up the section of the report dealing with Metronet's tied suppliers:

When the bids for the PPP contracts were being assessed, it should have been possible for the Government and London Underground, then under national control through London Regional Transport, to foresee that Metronet's proposed tied supply chain model, which guaranteed the lion's share of work to its parent companies, did not include the necessary safeguards. The fact that such a management structure was judged to be capable of efficient and economic delivery seems extraordinary now that Metronet has collapsed but the ultimate recipients of the money which was paid to the company have walked away with limited losses. The Government must not allow this blurring between the roles of shareholder and supplier in future bids to carry out work by the private sector. Bids where competitive tendering for sub-contracts is proposed are likely to ensure that the best price is obtained.

The highlighted phrase has the authentic ring of Gwyneth Dunwoody. It is a condemnation of the way he own party has run transport in London - not of the way Paddick will run it.

The €uro at nine and a third.

Doesn't time fly? The €uro - arguably the greatest source of angst in UK politics in the last quarter century will (in its immaterial form) be ten at the end of this year. With the pound currently at record lows against it, it is likely to look in fairly good shape. But are we going to see any resurgence in enthusiasm for joining the €urozone? I doubt it.

In the most Europhile reaches of the Liberal Democrats you will find a few people who are aching to join. But for most of the party it is a non-issue, I guess. A UK housing crash and a return to boom and bust may lead a few people to look upon the €uro with more favour, but there is a pretty good chance that the Spanish, Dutch and Irish will find themselves going through a similar process. So don't bet on it.

I have just been reading a Bruegel pamphlet on the Euro (Coming of Age: report on the euro area). The story that emerges is one of a tremendous undertaking that has had a limited impact.

Depending on your point of view, the €uro was either going to be a tremendous risk, and a one way street to federalism, or an engine for growth and economic reform and the motor of further political integration.

In practice it has neither been as good as hoped or as bad as feared. It was set up smoothly; and has not experienced any great crisis. But it growth has been sluggish, and the speed of economic reform has been - arguably - slower than before its creation, and than outside the zone. Bruegel put it like this

At the start of EMU, the hope was that the loss of the exchange rate instrument to respond to shocks would increase the incentive to carry out economic reforms and broaden their scope. The [economic] cost of not reforming would be much higher than the [political] cost of reforming. Instead, the euro so far seems to have insulated member economies from acute crises and the question arises whether monetary union may actually have slowed the pace of reform.

(None of this means that it is impossible to reform within the Euro, of course: one of the points the report makes is that most of the benefits of economic reforms accrue to the country making them.)

But it is also clear that that federalism has not happened as a result of the creation of the Eurozone, and is not about to. In the foreword, Jean Pisani-Ferry writes that "federal union is today a more remote prospect than it was in the late 1980s. For all practical purposes, the assumption must be that no federal government will emerge in the forseeable future."

I don't think many will argue with this assessment.

Political Compass a l'italiana

Looking for opinion polls on the Italian elections I found a political quiz instead.

It runs out that - in Italian terms - I am secular and progressive.

So now you know!

That GQ interview again.

Piers Morgan:

Well, you're a man of the world, squire.

Clegg:

Yes...

Morgan:

I mean, you've been around a bit, you know, like, you've, uh... You've 'done it'...

Clegg:

What do you mean?

Morgan:

Well, I mean like,... you've SLEPT, with a lady...

Clegg:

Yes...

Morgan:

What's it like?

(With apologies to Monty Python).

Obama: empiricism of the left and the search for a narrative.

There is an excellent article on the Democratic nomination contest by Jonathan Raban in the latest edition of the London Review of Books. The meat of his analysis arrives towards the end of the article - and it goes without saying that I think there is a lesson for us in it.

He contrasts the policy wonkery of Hillary - for whom all ills can be tackled by the State - with Obama's very different philophy:

"Obama is that exotic political animal, a left-of-centre empiricist. The great strength of his writing is his determination to incorporate into the narrative what he calls ‘unwelcome details’, and you can see the same principle at work in the small print of his policy proposals. Abroad, he accepts the world as it is and, on that basis, is ready to parlay with Presidents Ahmadinejad, Assad and Castro, while Clinton requires the world to conform to her preconditions before she’ll talk directly to such dangerous types. At home, Obama refuses to compel every American to sign up to his healthcare plan (as Clinton would), on the grounds that penalising those who lack the wherewithal to do so will only compound their problems. Where Clinton promises to abolish the Bush education programme known as No Child Left Behind, he wants ‘to make some adjustments’ to it (like moving the standardised tests from late in the school year to the beginning, so that they are neutral measures of attainment, and don’t dictate the syllabus like an impending guillotine)."

Raban argues that this philosophy (which seems to owe something to Hume, but probably owes a lot more to the African-American 'self-help' tradition) is the source of a great deal of his appeal.

There is little point in paraphrasing this. Here's Raban again:

"Traditionally, such empiricism (Obama's) has been associated with the political right, and such rationalism (Clinton's) with the left. Michael Oakeshott liked to blame Rationalists (always spelled with a capital R) and their ‘politics of the book’ for every benighted socialist scheme from the Beveridge Report and the 1944 Education Act to the revival of Gaelic as the official language of Ireland; and his description of the Rationalist as someone who ‘reduces the tangle and variety of experience to a set of principles which he will then attack or defend only upon rational grounds’ rather nicely fits Clinton, with her dogmatic certainties and simplifications. Although their specific promises are so similar as to be often indistinguishable, Clinton always stresses the transformative power of government, while Obama’s speeches are littered with reminders that government has strict limits, as when, every time No Child Left Behind comes up, he segues into a riff on the importance of parenting. That’s why so many Republicans and independents have turned out to vote for him in the Democratic primaries: for a liberal, he speaks in a language that conservatives, to their surprise, instinctively recognise as their own: a language that comes partly straight from the living-room and the street and partly from the twin traditions of empiricism and realism."

At the beginning of the year - well before Iowa - Nick Clegg picked Barack Obama as the politician to watch in 2008. I hope he is still watching.

Promises and the election that never was.

The moment we knew that Gordon Brown was serious about holding an election last autumn was when he made his promise about "deep-cleansing" for hosptials. You needed to be fantastically optimistic to believe this was ever going to work: MRSA is carried around on people and so the benefits were always going to fleeting at best.

So it proves. The Independent reported this morning that:

Thousands of patients will remain at risk from superbugs, despite a £57m "deep clean" of hundreds of hospitals, because a vital screening programme will not be put in place for at least a year.


One of the world's leading experts on hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) warned yesterday that every one of the hospitals cleaned under Gordon Brown's flagship health policy will be back to square one as soon as the cleaners finish, because no one is stopping bacteria such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile from coming into the buildings.

Professor Hugh Pennington of Aberdeen University said the deep-clean programme would be "an expensive waste of resources".

Eastern Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb descibes the operations as "an expensive example of gesture politics" and says it was "flawed from the outset". He's right.