AV, not PR

Writing for Briefings for Brexit, Ashley Walsh says the Labour Party should scrap its policy on the EU and abandon its call for voting reform in the form of Proportional Representation.

As a 'former Labour councillor' he is concerned to save the Labour Party. I'm not - and I also loathe the Conservative Party and the 'Liberals.' Political parties are what's wrong with politics. Like flesh-and-blood creatures, organisations have a will to live quite apart from any justification for their existence. The disconnect between Parliament and the people is owing to the absorbing, insular in-fighting in Westminster.

PR would worsen this: it turns voting for a representative into voting for a party, and the latter then decides on who will be your named representative. Many MPs are already too focused on what their Parliamentary bosses and pals want; we really don't need a system that makes the party the unit of political currency.

But as I wrote here long ago, First Past The Post is a terrible arrangement and suits the databank psephologists and strategy managers of the parties, for whom only 'the swing voter in the swing seat' matters. Though I have always voted, throughout my adult life, my vote has had effectively no power at all, with perhaps one exception when the constituency boundaries changed again (and by which time New Labour had thoroughly outworn its welcome) - thanks to the 'safe seat' where I live. The consequence for me and my fellow voters was to be taken for granted.

I suppose Labour likes the idea of PR because according to numbers of votes cast in the latest General Election the Tories would not have gained a majority and Labour would not have had the scale of cull that they have suffered. Result: a hung Parliament, again?

But I'm not convinced that AV would have had the same result. Under AV, you list your preferences so second and third options can come into play if there is not a clear 50%+1 majority in the first count (and two-thirds of seats in the Commons - including the one for my constituency - are gained on a minority of votes cast). The winning candidate is likely to be the one who has tried hardest to win over the centre ground - a centre that will be different in each constituency.

Had AV been the system ten days ago, I think the Conservatives would still have won, thanks to crossover voting from Brexiteers. Let's also not forget that there could be others for whom the Tories might have been a grudging second preference - after all, think of the Northern Labour voters who even held their noses and plumped for Boris as a first choice!

A version of AV is what MPs themselves employ when deciding on a new Speaker - in that case, it's done by a series of rounds in which the lowest scorer is eliminated each time, so the voting behaviour is influenced by who is left in the competition. It doesn't guarantee a great Speaker, but what could?

AV is also the system that the National Government wished to introduce in 1931; the Bill passed the Commons but the government fell before it could pass through all of the other stages. (The Lords wanted PR - why?)

In an extraordinary General Election, we've had the 'second referendum' that the subversatives wanted; perhaps the other second referendum we should have is a rerun of the 2011 one on AV - this time, with balanced media coverage for a change, as we had in 2016 (I still puzzle over how the latter happened). And this time, Labour might go for it.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Christmas Box, by JD

Bob Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" is not meant to be a Christmas song but it sounds as though it ought to be so I have included this excellent cover by Sarah Jarosz.

"The Holiday Blues" and "Longfellow's Yuletide Poem" come from Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour - https://www.themetimeradio.com The much maligned BBC used to broadcast this on Radio2 and I enjoyed listening to it; the Beeb is not all bad you know!

Longfellow's poem was turned into a Christmas Carol in 1872 with music by John Baptiste Calkin and there have been two other musical versions since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Heard_the_Bells_on_Christmas_Day

The NHS: an alternative, by JD

In response to the recent post on NHS failings, Nick Drew commented:

It's a ghastly story, Sackers, and very saddening. But my observation is, that the NHS is really only for delivering a broadly-based, rather undifferentiated 'mass average service', which on average will do quite a lot of good - a kind of "hygiene plus" - mass inoculations are a prime example.

If what's wrong with you can be (a) recognised fairly easily, and (b) improved or cured with simple measures - drugs for the most part, but other things like re-hydration and rest - then chances are, you'll see the benefit. Anything requiring subtle diagnostic detective-work, or a highly-trained eye, or an ultra-tailored course of treatment ... and you're back in the lap of the gods. Only the Queen is guaranteed to get the very best that medical science has to offer

The parallels with education are strong: take an illiterate population and impose compulsory, fairly decent basic schooling, and you'll raise the average level quite markedly - indeed, you'll effect a trnsformation. Will every child get exactly the customised teaching etc that would absolutely maximise their life chances? No.

To which I replied:

In principle, agreed; but the f-ups here were down to lack of basic skill (hoist usage), care and attention (reading X-rays, monitoring drug combinations, noticing when the patient isn't sleeping) and not following the sugeon's after-care plan (not the only case I've seen).

Ticking boxes is no replacement for vigilant, shop-floor-walking management.

Now JD offers his perspective, based on his own experiences:

**************

Have you heard of Henry Willink's 1944 proposal for a National Health Service?
https://www.conservativehome.com/highlights/2018/01/profile-henry-willink-the-conservative-who-proposed-a-national-health-service-before-bevan-created-one.html

As I understand it from various other references, Willink would have retained the many Cottage hospitals in the country. Most have now been closed in the name of 'efficiency' meaning 'customers' are obliged to travel to the nearest big shiny new hospital. This is an example of the 'bigger is better' approach to health care which in reality is nothing more than an extension of Henry Ford's production line with doctors and nurses instead of car builders. We already see it on a smaller scale with your local GP allocating ten minutes only to each patient.

Now that I am old I have had the opportunity to enjoy(?) the experience of our sanctified NHS. It doesn't work, it serves only to hand out coloured aspirins (my grandfather's phrase for the pills and tablets handed out for anything and everything).

The medical profession accept the reality of psychosomatic illness. Why then do they not encourage the equally valid concept of psychosomatic well being?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychosomatic-Wellness-Candace-Pert/dp/B0010R3ZR2

"Candace Pert, Ph.D. is a research professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Pert is best known for her discovery of opiate receptors in the brain. She was a featured expert in the highly acclaimed Bill Moyers PBS series Healing and the Mind. In addition to her research efforts, Dr. Pert lectures and teaches about how our minds and feelings influence our health and well-being. She is the author of the bestseller Molecules of Emotion."

I read about Dr Pert a long time ago and I have discovered for myself that psychosomatic wellness does work after doing the opposite of what my epilepsy doctor told me to do: instead of increasing my tablets, I reduced them. She was not amused when I told her which is understandable but I have had no seizures since that time. It's all in the mind!

....and yes, it is the management which is in urgent need of reform, starting in Whitehall!

Boris Johnson: are we in trouble already?

This morning the news is that PM Boris Johnson intends to get the Article 50 deadline enshrined in law - but Classic FM also reports that he is referencing the Political Declaration as the basis for the dealmaking he is to do.

I discussed the changes to May's (or rather, Barnier's) version of the PD in this article on The Conservative Woman - and at the end there's a spreadsheet of the alterations in it.

Unless BoJo goes through his revised version with a thick black censor's pen we will (in my view) continue to be horribly entangled.

More haste, less speed?

My latest on 'The Conservative Woman' - can Boris fight globalism?

In which I argue that Boris Johnson has short time to start changing the system or it will go down:

https://conservativewoman.co.uk/get-cracking-boris-theres-no-time-to-lose/

Boris Johnson's 'One Nation'

A landslide victory is not enough. Tony Blair had one in 1997 and even many of those who hadn’t voted for him were prepared to give him a chance; a chance he threw away with both hands, preferring to fight the next election from Day One. His student-ignorant ‘eye-catching initiatives’ didn’t tackle the roots of our economic malaise – for a touchstone, just remember the meretricious stupidity of scrapping the Royal Yacht, that floating trade mission for the UK.

Johnson doesn’t have the luxury of a honeymoon period: the malcontents have already started their civil disorder in London. He’s ‘on appro’ and we’ll need more than fast talk to retain the nervous new Conservative voters in the North and other long-suffering working-class areas. Mess this up and it’s ‘après soi, le deluge’.

In fact, it could already be too late, if the banking debt in the Eurozone brings the temple down around everyone’s ears before we can get out. BoJo’s vow to work around the clock had better be sincere. And he’ll have to work at the right things. It’s no good fixing the roof when the foundations are cracking. It’s structural and it’s not going to be a quick job, so he’ll have to start straight away.

The late Sir James Goldsmith clearly saw the threat back in 1994, at the time of the GATT talks – the first part of the interview is here. His argument was that sweeping trade liberalisation sets workforces across the world against one another and tips the capital-labour seesaw savagely in favour of the former, inevitably causing growing social tensions in the developed world. It may seem odd that a billionaire should make such a case, but that is to forget that his moral roots were in one of the three Abrahamic religions, all of which impose an obligation to care for the less fortunate.

We are in a secular doctrinal crisis, because the two principal political parties have long since become institutionally globalist. For the party of the CBI, Institute of Directors etc there was just too much money to be made from undermining the British workers (many of whom now have to claim benefits even when working); for New Labour it was too much fun being ‘intensely relaxed’ feasting with oligarchs and too easy to get votes for flinging bones to the dogs under the table while pursuing the neoliberal agenda. Man, what a party that was, and ‘I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left.’

What a stroke of luck it was for the Tories this time to face Corbyn, who traduced his own beliefs about the EU and tried to win popularity with a commitment to providing more bones; that, and his propensity for rubbing shoulders with people who shoot dogs. For I’m far from convinced that the life experience of our latest Etonian, though he is undoubtedly bright, has equipped him to understand the need for radical reform. I fear he feels it’s just a matter of ‘think pos’ and another dose of what’s made us sick, get it down you, mate.

If Boris is to prove me wrong, he needs to aim at what Sir James intended when setting up the Referendum Party: getting us completely free of the Lilliputian entanglements of the Berlaymont. If Gray May  and Bullneck Robbins had negotiated with the French after Waterloo we’d have ceded Kent and Essex and paid compensation to the Grande Armée; yet Johnson still clutches the awful Withdrawal Agreement and the even worse Political Declaration (that love-letter from Josephine to Napoleon) with only a few of the more compromising passages redacted.

The current system, globalism, is designed to enable a concentration of wealth and power, which is deflationary: the money boosts asset values rather than being recycled within the economy. So the velocity of money slows, ordinary people find it harder to make a living, the tax base shrinks even as the demand for financial support increases, and austerity eats itself like the worm Ourobouros. It’s great for the winners, until suddenly it isn’t – where are the rich Mayans now?

For all its talk of brotherhood, the EU is a scale model of globalism. Its ‘four freedoms’ allow companies to trade goods and services within the Union, challenging smaller businesses with both the costs of universal regulation and also their bigger competitors’ economies of scale (though, so I understand, discriminating against the financial services where the UK has an advantage); the free movement of capital allows companies to incorporate in the cheapest tax regimes while smuggling out profits from their foreign subsidiaries under the guise of internal transfers to pay for training and other services; and the freedom of movement of people is their liberty to go wherever work is to be had, racing to underbid their fellows.

We have to escape both the frying pan of the EU and the fire of unfettered global ‘free trade’. We can’t abruptly start a trade war with the developing world, but we have to manage the rate of change, compensating via tariffs and trade agreements for the unfair disparities in hourly wage rates that have turned the British working class into claimants.

Perhaps then we can become once again what Napoleon so despised, a nation of small shopkeepers; a nation of modest prosperity, self-reliance and the love of liberty.

Is Johnson’s mercurial mind up to such a detailed and sustained campaign?

Saving the NHS

Retail is detail, as the great shop managers say. So is medicine, but I’ll come to that in a moment.

In the latest GE campaign, the Left tried beating the Tories over the head with the NHS, again. That photo of the boy on a hospital floor was a good one, wasn’t it? Accusations of fake news from one side, of trolling on the other. All I’d observe from this report is that the hospital only apologised for having nothing but chairs to sit on rather than a trolley, so why the lad was on the ground is a puzzle.

I am also mystified by the empty gravity-feed drip bag lying uselessly across him - and tubes not attached to the nose in the second photo:

... especially since he was still waiting to be seen?

Yes, the NHS is under intense pressure. Partly because it can do much more than it used to; partly because demand then rises even faster than supply; partly because of drugs, drunkenness, quarrels ‘getting stabby’, self-harm and all the other symptoms of a country in moral crisis. And I certainly hold no brief for the chirpy Jeremy Hunt or his hapless successor, but the job description of Health Secretary appears to include ‘scapegoat’, as the Bethany case shows.

And yet, however much you spend, you still have to mind the shop. Let me give you an illustrative case history.

My good friend Jim (name changed) was driving a couple of family members somewhere when an idiot in a window-darkened fast car shot out of a side street at him. Having quick reflexes, Jim swerved clear but then hit a series of three unfilled potholes, jarring his spine. Though in his late seventies, Jim was fit and active – a keen archer – and so it was some time before the back pain intensified to the point where he was X-rayed and vertebral displacement discovered.

When you are old, the system writes you off. Jim told me his GP gave him three plan options, all of which amounted to palliative care. He was to slide bedridden down the helter-skelter into the slot, with painkillers to ease the way.

But Jim wasn’t a quitter, and was highly intelligent. He scoured the internet and found a surgeon able to do the operation to fix his back. It succeeded; now for the physio program to get him back on his feet. Jim was moved to another hospital for the recuperation phase.

The first thing was, Hospital Two took his bed – a highly specialised one – and swapped it for another that was shorter, so that his feet were constantly pressing against the end. There was a hoist next to him, to get him to a chair for a couple of hours each day as part of the rehabilitation program. A couple of times, the staff managed to bump his toes painfully in the process; and increasingly it seems, they just didn’t get him out of bed at all.

Jim had suffered from sleep apnoea for many years, and had a CPAP machine to pump air at night. But nurses tidying busily disturbed the mechanism, which then got blocked with its water. So when I first visited him in hospital he hadn’t slept for four nights. The nurses, often clustered around the workstation outside the ward, hadn’t noticed. I got that sorted, and in subsequent visits kept Jim supplied with newspapers and magazines to keep his active brain occupied; and a squeezy ball to exercise his slowly wasting arm muscles.  They were eventually tidied (thrown) away.

Jim didn’t feel safe there, and wanted to go home – and no, he wasn’t demented. So a fresh home care plan was made and he had an adjustable bed delivered, plus a hoist. But soon after that the family were told not to use the hoist, since they weren’t expert and his wife was about his age. Flat in bed he lay, muscles weakening and even a slight angling up becoming more challenging for him.

Then there was the drugs program. The first painkillers tended to have constipation as a side effect, so Jim was also given laxatives to counteract this. But then the pain prescription was changed yet the laxatives continued, causing constant and strength-sapping diarrhoea until the foul-up was realised.

Speaking of pharmaceuticals, there were some he had never had, and should have had. Jim’s X-ray from the year before had also shown a shadow on his liver; but the technician hadn’t noticed. This was the ‘cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’ that was heading his way. I asked Jim what they were giving him to fight the cancer: nothing.

I last saw him in the hospice – he lasted only a few days there. His passing was peaceful. But long premature.

I don’t think money alone would have solved all this. It needed the close attention of a Stuart Rose, or a Philip Green; detail managers. Semi-ignored plans and responsibility sign-offs aren’t enough.

Money, of course; but money employed to best effect.