(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
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Tittle-tattle 2
Robin Ramsay
Crime fighting?
There must many candidates for the title 'The most damaging thing I have read about this government'. My current candidate is a piece by Simon Jenkins, 'A Keep Police off the Streets Strategy Unit' (The Times 2 February 2002). After reminding the reader that in the UK the police are a local service, administered at country or - as in the case of Humberside, for example - quasi-county level, Jenkins listed all the units currently working under the Home Secretary David Blunkett on policing, 55 in all. Some of these sound legitimate but the list includes a Corporate Communications Business Support Unit, a Marketing Communications Unit, an Internal Communications Unit, and a Business Support and Communication Unit. Without making 55 calls to the Home Office switchboard, I have no way of knowing how many of these existed before Blunkett became Home Secretary; nor, indeed, how many of these preceded the arrival of the Labour government in 1997. But if he didn't create them, Blunkett hasn't scrapped them and it is hard to disagree with Jenkins' comment:
'This is bureaucracy gone mad. It embodies the over-regulated, service-quantified, risk-averse, publicity-obsessed style of government that has come to typify new Labour in government.'
Mad or bad?
Jenkins' piece raises the central question about this government: are they corrupt cynics or are they really the dummies they appear to be? Take the decision to change Britain's gambling laws to allow American-style casinos. Do they know nothing about the social consequences of that kind of gambling? In Tribune Ian Aitken asked: 'Who in God's name actually authorised the Government's damn-fool scheme for Las Vegas-type casinos in Blackpool and suchlike places?' Aitken commented: 'Alas, some deplorably cynical people are already asserting that the big gambling firms have been making donations to "New" Labour, and that there may be a link.' (Tribune 5 April 2002) Simon Jenkins expressed the same thought in his column in the Evening Standard (28 March 2002) this way: 'If I did not know ministers to be incorruptible, I would see the hand of the mob.'
Delusions of something
The Observer (7 April 2002) published a long extract from an essay originally published by the Foreign Policy Centre, by Foreign Office wallah Robert Cooper, 'Why we still need empires'. (1) In this Cooper argues, inter alia:
'What is needed is a new kind of imperialism, one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values..... multilateral institutions [such as the IMF and World Bank which] provide help to states wishing to find their way back into the global economy and into the virtuous circle of investment and prosperity.....' etc etc.Cooper's vision is of the 'civilised' world setting to rights the uncivilised via a 'co-operative empire' and an 'imperial bureaucracy' which 'must be as dedicated to liberty and democracy as its constituents'.
Cooper is said to be Blair's favourite mandarin. This I could believe for he offers the same mixture of sanctimonious self-delusion and mind-boggling ignorance as our Bible-reading leader. A splendid raspberry was blown in Cooper's direction by Jared Israel at http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/cooper.htm
Faking it
One of the plagues of contemporary life is the endless ticking of boxes and filling of forms as bureaucracies try to invent way of measuring, monitoring and increasing the performance of human beings. All God's children got performance targets; and, of course, many of God's children find ways to fake them. An absolute classic of the genre was reported by AP on 6 June 2001:
'The Pentagon agency charged with rooting out fraud destroyed documents and substituted fakes to win a passing grade in an audit of its own operations, according to an internal inquiry.'Inspired by this I began cutting stories describing attempts to fake it by this government and other official bodies. And even in my fairly casual search there were quite a few of them. I present them here in the order that they appeared.
- The Observer 26 August 2001: In his 'Accountants' words that shame a whole strategy' Will Hutton listed a series of wheezes - 'a mendacious gerrymander' - concocted to make it appear that the London Underground Private Public Partnership will be better value than public ownership. Essentially the accountants who did the report, Deloitte and Touche, assuming that the public sector is inefficient and bound to fail/belate/have cost overruns, attempted to quantify this; i.e. they made some figures up, and added them to the 'cost' of public ownership.
- The Guardian 5 September 2001, 'Sickness claims mark jobless rate', reported from the British Association for the Advancement of Science that around 7% of the British work-force is now registered as long-term sick, compared with 2.1% in Germany and 0.3% in France. This enables the government to claim that the British economy has lower unemployment and is more dynamic and much better at job creation than its 'sclerotic', dirigiste, EU counterparts. It is on this central lie - or self-deception - that most of the New Labour project rests, for it tells them to copy the American model of the economy, not the European.
- The Guardian 24 November 2001, 'Rough Sleepers Unit "is fixing figures"', reported that the government's homelessness unit fixed its figures on the night it counted the homeless. 'Homelessness workers - include those who carried out the count - allege that the Rough Sleepers Unit moved rough sleepers off the streets for a single night, threatened others with arrest if they refused to go to hostels and falsified results.'
- The Guardian 5 December 2001, 'Climb down puts schools policy in doubt' reported that the government had admitted using 'inaccurate figures to support a claim that specialist schools were improving much faster than other schools'. When the government looked at the exam results of specialist schools - this government's favourites - the data was 'adjusted for exclusions and refugees'; ie factors tending to diminish educational performance. When they examined the ordinary schools no such 'adjustment' was made.
- The Guardian 21 December 2001, 'Oxbridge dons in funds row', reported that colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were faking their research figures - one of the main measures of universities - by including in their totals the work of scholars who, while not actually on the staff, are attached in various tenuous ways to Oxbridge colleges.
- The Sunday Telegraph 20 January 2002 in 'Can you spot when the election was held?' reported (a) that there was a mysterious and short-lived dip in the number of patients waiting for operations just before the election in June 2001 and (b) that a report by the National Audit Office found that the government had created a 'waiting list to get on the waiting list to reduce the statistics' - something confirmed by many anecdotal reports and my own experience. (2)
- The Sunday Telegraph 7 April 2002 carried a letter from a surgeon who had resigned from the NHS in Darlington. He said, inter alia, 'I discovered that patients marked to be seen quickly because of clinical urgency were delayed so that routine patients could be seen first. This was because waiting times are calculated on routine appointments.'
- If you know a teacher you will have heard - probably heard over and over again - claims that since the introduction of 'league tables' virtually all such tables and results are faked in one way or another. The Daily Telegraph of 11 May 2002 reported concrete evidence of this. The government trumpets ever-improving results in reading standards: official figures tells us that the proportion of pupils reaching the required standard in reading rose from 48% in 1995 to 74% last year. However a Durham University team has been giving the same reading test to 11 year-olds in 122 primary schools for the past five years and has found no improvement. Explanation? Prior to the reading tests for 11 year-olds schools simply spend weeks doing nothing but rehearsing previous tests. Pupils are taught to pass the test.
Have we met our quota, Comrade Commissar? Of course we have!
Toe-curling
Jeff Randall is a rather hard-nosed financial journalist who was appointed the BBC's Business Editor by the current D-G, Greg Dyke. Randall writes a column in the Sunday Telegraph's Business section. In the issue of 13 January 2002 he gave us this account of Baroness Symonds, the Trade Minister, lecturing a group of senior British business executives at a conference in January:
'Her ladyship's style is that of a junior-school teacher addressing a classroom of thickos and it was hard to take so early in the morning........Her patronising approach to top-notch business folk was toe-curling enough, but when she digressed into a lecture about trade being good for Third World nations, some of us nearly passed out. Symonds obviously mistook these hard-nosed executives for people with a social conscience......'
The CIA and the 1975 Referendum on EEC membership
Sir Richard Body's encounter with purported CIA personnel prior to the 1975 Referendum on British membership of the EEC has been referred to before in Lobster 33 and Lobster 34. A new and more detailed version is in Body's recent memoir and the relevant extract was carried by EU-observer.com. The bit I think is new has been italicised.
'After I became joint chairman of the Get Britain Out Council two Americans came to see me in 1975 with a large bundle of papers. They were, they claimed, CIA agents who deplored their country's methods in interfering in the affairs of a good ally. What they had brought were copies of documents which showed that a dedicated federalist, Cord Meyer, jnr. was to become head of a CIA station in London for the duration of the Referendum "to do what it takes" to secure a "Yes" vote in favour of Britain remaining in the EEC. The papers showed that the CIA had already given the European Movement considerable sums of money, but now multi-national corporations which had been assisted by the CIA were to be persuaded to fund the "Yes" campaign through indirect channels.'
Ho hum
In his column in The Sunday Telegraph on 6 May 2001 the Fortean Times' Paul Sieveking reported the existence of the latest of those mysterious low-frequency hums which crop up from time to time.(3) This one has been affecting people on the west coast of Scotland. Inquiries, Sieveking reported, had ruled out low-frequency submarine communications. Maybe so; though how that could be 'ruled out' is unclear to me. It is an interesting coincidence that Richard Norton-Taylor reported in The Guardian 21 August 2001 that the Royal Navy was testing a new powerful low frequency active sonar off the Shetlands. That the US navy is testing similar equipment was reported a fortnight later. (4)
The sonar has the unfortunate effect of destroying the sonar systems of whales, dolphins and porpoises. Is the death of aquatic mammals likely to prevent the deployment of the new naval gear? Not if the Pentagon gets it way. The Washington Post reported on 14 April:
'the Pentagon is circulating within the Bush administration a draft of a proposed bill that would greatly limit the reach of environmental laws on military training and deployment -- formally prohibiting the federal government from placing the conservation of public lands or the protection of endangered species above the needs of military preparedness.' (5)
BBC block staff access to www.bilderberg.org
Tony Gosling reported in an April edition of his PEPIS newsletter (http://www.bilderberg.org/bilder.htm#pepis) that the BBC have blocked access for their staff to his www.bilderberg.org website.
'A researcher at BBC Bristol attempted to access pages containing information for a forthcoming programme when he received error messages. After referring the matter to technical support he was told it was not a routine error but that the website had been permanently blocked to all BBC staff.'
The Gordon Logan story
In Lobster 41 I referred to some articles on the Cryptome website by Gordon Logan. Another has appeared on Cryptome since then, 'MI6, Bush and Foot and Mouth.' (6) This begins with one of Logan's most striking and most implausible claims:
'The author, Gordon Logan, triggered the premature Moscow Coup of August 1991, that led to the downfall of the Soviet Union.'Well, not according to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, he didn't. In an interview published in the Los Angeles Times on 20 August 2001 Gorbachev attributed the coup to a wire-tapped conversation he had with other Soviet politicians in which he proposed removing the head of the KGB and Minister of Defence. (7) Which sounds a good deal more like the world we know.
Remarking on the reports that John Smith's widow had been put on the board of the MI6-front organisation, the Hakluyt Foundation, Logan comments 'it is difficult not to conclude that Mrs Smith was placed there for purposes of surveillance'. Actually it is easy not to conclude this; and since Logan appears to know no more about Lady Smith than the rest of us - that is, virtually nothing - drawing no conclusion would be a more rational response.
Later in his piece Logan complains that Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) has declined to take up his claims. Liberty's Director John Wadham wrote to him thus:
'We are forced to decide how to target our resources in a matter [sic] that is most effective and which our members approve of. We have considered the information you gave us but feel the issues involved would be too much to take on at this time.'This Logan interprets as 'a clear indication of penetration and manipulation by the secret police'. Actually it indicates only the limited resources of the Liberty/NCCL. They have to decide which of the many appeals they receive should actually be worked on.
Notes
1 Cooper and his thinking was discussed by Hugo Young in the Guardian 2 April 2002.
2 That report is listed on the NAO website but I have been unable to access it. Something wrong with the site - or my computer - when I tried.
3 On the same subject see also Laura Barton 'What's that noise?' in the Guardian 19 October 2001.
4 See report by Rebecca Mahoney of AP in the Washington Post of 6 September 2001. At http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010906/aponline012042
5 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48150-2002Apr14.html
6 http://cryptome.org/mi6-bush.htm
7 http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/2001/08/20/FFX6EP55LQC.htm
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