‘The Commission has made clear to the trustees their legal and regulatory responsibilities and that the Charity’s current activities must cease immediately.’
– Charity Commission Regulatory Case Report: The Atlantic Bridge

Regular readers will be well aware of my one man campaign against the Atlantic Bridge, a charity established by defence secretary Dr Liam Fox to promote the ‘special relationship as exemplified by the Reagan-Thatcher partnership’ that includes on its advisory council William Hague, George Osborne, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, and other senior Conservatives.

The Charity Commission published its report earlier today. The good news is that the Atlantic Bridge was found guilty of being party political. It also failed the public benefit test because its work was found to be insufficiently educational (promotes a pre-determined point-of-view) and its events are not sufficiently open to the public. Despite this it retains it charitable status. Its punishment is to be given twelve months to get its act together.

That’s a great outcome for Liam Fox who registered the Atlantic Bridge as a charity in 2003 and has made no attempt to hide its political affiliations. The Atlantic Bridge achieved charitable status by claiming to be an educational trust, but in place of education has sponsored predominantly private events at which senior Conservatives – including present cabinet ministers – and their US allies may bond behind closed doors.

Throughout this period, it has enjoyed tax exempt status and so its activities have been subsidised by the taxpayer.

These activities have included promoting a book by William Hague, subsidising a dinner for Tory MPs with a Fox News film reviewer in LA and sponsoring trips by Tory MPs to neo-Conservative think tanks in Washington DC.

The Charity Commission has now agreed to turn a blind eye to all of this, if the Atlantic Bridge agrees to comply with the law within the next 12 months. In no other arena would such a blatant disregard for the law go unpunished.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

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The Lib Con coalition has now published its proposed wording for the alternative vote referendum – ‘Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the “alternative vote” system instead of the current “first past the post” system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?’ – and we may all breathe a sigh of relief that it does not mention proportional representation.

Nick Clegg has so far handled the Lib Con constitutional reform programme about as competently as his first PMQs, where he caused a constitutional crisis of sorts by claiming to speak for himself rather than the government. (One wonders why Labour should bother taking part next time.) Faced with allegations of gerrymandering Clegg has already been forced to significantly amend his proposals for fixed term parliaments.

Thankfully the wording for the AV referendum is nice and simple, but many voters will surely wonder why they are not being offered some form of proportional representation. As discussed on LabourList before, AV is not PR. But it is a system thought likely to favour the Lib Dems while keeping smaller parties like the Greens and UKIP locked out of parliament.

The coalition government has so far cherry-picked half-hearted constitutional reforms that serve its narrow interests without regard to any long-term consequences; fixed-term parliaments that the coalition could curtail, the alternative vote but no PR, fewer MPs in Scotland, Wales and the cities (where Tories can’t win). Meanwhile they seem too busy to deal with the West Lothian question or reform the Lords.

In Scotland reform was hard won after years of negotiation in a constitutional convention to which all the parties and important figures from outside party politics were invited (even if some chose to stay outside).

The United Kingdom urgently needs to go through a similar process and the Lib Dems were in a unique position to bring that about. Instead Calamity Clegg’s programme has an air of the quick-fix about it, his reforms no more sustainable than the present coalition. He appears desperate to gerrymander our political system now for fear that this parliament will dissolve too soon and the Lib Dems will be sent back to backbenches for another 100 years.

If opponents of reform can effectively explain to the people that they are not being asked to endorse PR but a system that suits only the narrow interests of one party – a party 75% of them voted against last time – the Lib Dems might easily lose. They will then be finished.
This article was orginally published on Labour List

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On Monday, LabourList carried Bob Piper’s call for any NHS organisation privatised by the Lib Cons to be brought back into public ownership without compensation. Such populism may be cathartic, but in the end amounts to empty rhetoric because it fails to recognise that GPs are – and have always been – located in the private sector having refused to join the NHS right from the start. Nye Bevan complained that he had ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’ only to persuade them to supply services to the NHS as independent contractors.

Handing control of the NHS to GPs is a form of privatisation, but it is privatisation by stealth with NHS organisations being disbanded rather than sold off. There will be nothing left to nationalise. And if Nye Bevan couldn’t nationalise general practice, its unlikely any future Labour PM could overcome the GPs’ trade union, the BMA.

Moreover Labour – and would-be leader Andy Burnham in particular – should acknowledge that its own reforms were directed at diversifying the health economy and at giving fattened GPs some competition. A couple of years ago I worked for a primary care trust introducing polyclinics. A couple of NHS organisations bid for this work as did some private sector organisations, including local GP consortia. Had the NHS organisations won the work, GP services would have come under public ownership for the first time.

Bizarrely Respect/SWP led an anti-privatisation campaign in support of local GPs who were concerned for the profitably of their practices. What the Trots didn’t know was that those same GPs had formed a consortium to bid for a polyclinic contract, which they won. Those GPs remain in the private sector and continue to make a decent profit.

Today’s GPs most commonly organise themselves into profit sharing partnerships, the model the BMA believes is most sustainable. Single-handed practices – sole traders – are less common today and some GPs find it beneficial to establish limited companies or follow other business models.

But Labour knows all this. Labour knows that the NHS sustains a diverse health economy because Labour largely encouraged it.

There is much to be concerned about in the Lib Con white paper, without Labour being disingenuous in its opposition. The so-called post code lottery will be far more acute, patients may register with GPs several hours from their homes if those GPs offer rare or expensive treatments like IVF and then fall ill, GPs may decide it’s more profitable to treat patients themselves rather than refer them to specialists, local authorities may need encouragement to invest in public health, GPs will be tempted to try cheaper treatments, there will be many opportunities for corruption and so on.

This debate will not be won by a Labour Party that behaves like those Trots who don’t understand the NHS at all. It will be won by a Labour Party that offers a real vision for the NHS and a clear route map for achieving that vision that starts from where the NHS is today.
This article was orginally published on Labour List

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Pandora and the Flying Dutchman gets a DVD and Blu-ray release next month and that should certainly delight fans of hammy old movies, for this is the most delightful of hammy old movies.

Originally released in 1951, you can’t help but notice that it is in glorious Technicolor, the heavily saturated colours reminding the viewer of a young lady who’s overdone the fake tan. The contrast must have been so much greater for the audience of the day, which was still used to seeing so much in black and white. That’s not to say that star of the show Ava Gardner isn’t looking wonderful (if a little out of focus); she is the the most wonderful femme fatale, for whom absolutely every man must fall.

The film is very much of a time before film acting had really taken off and depends heavily on its narrator. So we feel we are having a story read to us and are continually told what the characters are thinking and feeling rather than shown.

So its curiosity, but a curiosity worth spending a couple of hours with.

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George Osborne has good reason to sound smug following his budget, especially as he has the Lib Dems’ popular Vince Cable working ever so hard for him and the darling of the Lib Dem left, Simon Hughes, claiming its a budget for the ‘needy and vulnerable’.

But what must particularly please Osborne is that he’s been able to push his ideological agenda, setting a course to shrink the size of state, claiming there are some functions the state can no longer perform.

The Tories have proved adept at exaggerating the country’s economic woes in order to achieve a level of reform of which Thatcher could only dream. The Institute for Fiscal Studies ran the numbers and found that the VAT rise is not unavoidable. But the Lib Dems appear to be in awe of their Conservative partners. Nick Clegg claimed the budget was progressive.

George Osborne is an ideologue and there is nothing wrong with that. Politicians should have a clear idea of the kind of society they’d want to create. They should have an ideal and have a route in mind.

But the Lib Dems have lost their way. They have become a party of pavement politicians, building a movement of oppositionists by pounding streets with ‘crumble sheets’ to find out what people don’t like and playing their whinges back to them. In this way any core beliefs have diluted to such an extent they have lost all their influence.

Thrust into power they are delighted and relieved to be allied to a Conservative Party brimming with ideas. But they need George to reassure them that he’s just a pragmatist who doesn’t really believe in anything too.

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It may not have made any great headlines, but Nick Clegg’s defeat on new rules for a fixed term parliaments is a real victory for democracy.

Nick Clegg’s original proposal for fixed term parliaments was a blatant gerrymander and I’ve outlined my fear that his proposals for the Alternative Vote are another gerrymander on Labour List.

The coalition government has so far cherry picked half-hearted constitutional reforms that serve its narrow interests without regard to any long-term consequences.

The revised proposal is a genuine reform. Setting the threshold for a dissolution vote at two-thirds, makes it very unlikely the prime minster of the day would be able to call an election to suit his or her own agenda, while the two-week time limit protects against a zombie parliament.

This also shows that if pressure is applied in the right way, the coalition government can be forced to democratise its proposals.

The Alternative Vote is not a system of proportional representation. It may create more Lib Dems, but Electoral Society projections show it won’t help smaller parties. And the Conservatives obviously like the idea of reducing the number of MPs in places they can’t win like Scotland, Wales and inner cities.

Yet the Take Back Parliament campaign, a coalition of groups that have supported constitutional reform for many years shows no sign of lobbying for a system of proportional representation. When I challenged Unlock Democracy’s Peter Facey, it was clear he hadn’t thought any of this through. They seem strangely content to sign up for a reforms specifically designed to benefit the coalition parties alone.

A great, once in lifetime opportunity to democratise our electoral system is about to missed.

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