Three reasons why the PM should resign

This may be jumping the gun somewhat ahead of Rebekah Brookes’, James Murdoch’s and Rupert Murdoch’s appearance ahead of the Culture and Media Select Committee later this afternoon, but I’ve compiled a quick note-form guide as to why the PM should resign, for my own reference. Excuse the short hand:

• He employed Andy Coulson as his press officer while he was leader of the opposition knowing that phone hacking had gone on under Coulson’s watch as editor of News of the World. He did so because he wanted to get ‘in’ with Murdoch and News International, so they would support him in the general election, among other things. In other words, party interest and personal ambition were put above good judgement and unimpeachable integrity, which should have told Cameron that hiring somebody associated with News International’s more unscrupulous practices for electoral benefit looks bad.
• Cameron then took Coulson in to No. 10 as his ‘spin doctor in chief’ despite being warned that Coulson had known about and was therefore complicit in criminal activities at News of the World that were of a much greater scope than the mere celebrity phone-hacking scandal for which Mulcair had been sent to gaol and for which Coulson had resigned as NOTW editor (e.g. Peter Oborne article in the Observer, which Cameron has admitted to having read but discounted as a piece of Guardian muck raking, even though Oborne is allegedly a friend of David Cameron’s – so Cameron was in fact ignoring a piece of friendly advice). This is more serious: this is Cameron retaining a Murdoch man as the person in charge of his office’s PR despite knowing the serious and credible charges against him, + probably sensing there was a lot of truth to the charges, because everyone in the political game really knew what kind of skulduggery the NOTW, other News Intl publications, and other newspapers regularly got up to. Cameron could have asked the Met to begin a fresh investigation but he didn’t, because, by now, Coulson was a good ‘friend’, as were many in Murdoch’s inner circle. He obviously thought: ‘better let sleeping dogs’ lie and is thereby complicit in the News Intl abuses continuing un-investigated.
• Finally, despite the fact that he really knew what Coulson had been up to, and what was still going on, he’s tried to cover up his involvement by pretending – and still claiming – that he knows nothing about Coulson’s illegal activities when he was editor of NOTW and knew nothing about the extent of the phone hacking that had been going on, and by being silent about the extent of his personal connections and intimacy with Murdoch’s inner circle, including Rebekah Brookes, who had been editor when some of the worst instances of phone hacking went on (e.g. Millie Dowler). This has all the appearance of lying and cover up.
• So the PM should go because he’s been guilty of:
  • Extremely poor judgement out of electoral and personal ambition
  • Been complicit in News Intl’s past and ongoing abuses not being investigated adequately
  • And lied about the extent of his knowledge and involvement.

Open Public Services white paper: the one thing it’s not open about is England

The UK government’s ‘Open Public Services’ white paper was published last week. This sets out the government’s vision for public-service reform in England. Except you’d be hard put to realise from the text that it relates almost exclusively to England.

The white paper does, however, include a helpful explanation about its ‘scope’ right at the beginning, just after the title page and before you get to any content. It’s worth quoting this in full, as it’s a masterpiece of the double-speak involved when official language contorts itself so as to avoid saying ‘England’. Here’s what it says:

“We believe that more open public services can benefit everybody in the UK and that finding ways to deliver better services for less money is a challenge that is common to all four nations of the UK. The scope of this paper is UK wide, but in devolved areas of policy it is for the devolved administrations to determine their own approach to public service reform. The three devolution settlements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all different although, in general, services such as health, education and those provided by local government are under devolved control. If you live or work in any of the devolved territories and are in any doubt as to which of these reforms would apply there, the relevant territorial office will be able to advise you.

“We are committed to working in partnership with the devolved administrations to share good practice and to explore whether our approach would suit their particular circumstances and need.”

WHAT THE F***! – if you’ll excuse my nowadays increasingly intemperate French, or rather Anglo-Saxon. There’s a much clearer and more concise way of explaining the ‘scope’ of the white paper. It’s this: “This paper relates in its entirety to England, and, owing to devolution, only limited parts of it apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”. But that would be far too much like ‘plain English’, in both senses: the same ‘plain English’, in fact, that the white paper itself says will be used for “explaining the scope and purpose of every [government spending] transaction”. On this basis, they presumably won’t be bending over backwards to explain to English people the ‘scope and purpose’ of the higher per-capita levels of public spending in the ‘devolved territories’ compared with the rest of the UK, i.e. England!

What an incredibly insulting, patronising way at once to explain and avoid explaining to “everybody in the UK” who is and is not affected by the proposals in this white paper! It talks of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as if they were imperial dominions begrudgingly granted a minor degree of administrative autonomy while remaining fundamentally beholden to Whitehall: “devolved administrations”; “devolved territories”; “relevant territorial office”. Meanwhile, which “territorial office” is going to explain in plain English to people who “live or work” in the non-devolved territory (England) that when the white paper says “UK wide”, it really means “only in full to England”? At least, this explanation of the white paper’s ‘scope’ refers to “all four nations of the UK” – but then why is England the only one undeserving of mention? [Sorry, Cornwall, you get even less of a look-in.]

Needless to say, the rest of the paper continues in the same vein and goes out of its way to avoid reminding its English readers that most of its proposals affect them only. The words ‘English or ‘England’ are in fact mentioned 12 times in the document; but only two of those references directly evoke a policy that applies to England, or England and Wales, only: “directly elected city mayors in England’s largest cities” (p. 31), and “communities across England and Wales are able to see where crime and disorder is happening in their neighbourhood” (p. 36). There are also two cases of ‘England’ being mentioned in the context of statistics, without spelling out that the reason those statistics relate to England only is that the relevant government department is responsible for England only: “In England today, people living in the poorest neighbourhoods will, on average, die seven years earlier than people living in the richest neighbourhoods” (p. 7: public health); and “the Department for Education has published a new dataset showing the funding and spending per pupil in each school in England” (education: p. 20). I suppose you could say the three references to the “English Baccalaureate” very indirectly acknowledge the fact that the white paper’s proposals on education relate to England only. Most of the other references are to ‘English’ as a language or school subject.

By contrast, there are 27 instances of ‘national’ together with one of ‘nation’ and two of ‘nations’. This government has a distinct predilection for the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘national’ along with ‘we’ and ‘our’ (320 and 101 occurrences respectively) as the subject and possessive pronouns that stand in variously or simultaneously for ‘the government’ and ‘the nation collectively’, and are equally a way to avoid saying ‘England’ where the matter in hand relates to England. E.g.

“We rely on the police to patrol our streets to deter crime. If we get seriously injured we expect an ambulance to come when we ring 999. When we take our children to school, we look to teachers to pass on to them the best of human knowledge. We demand that our bins are collected regularly and that parks are well maintained” (‘we’ = ‘the nation’, i.e. in all of these instances, the English nation or ‘English people’);

“when times are tight and budgets are being cut to stabilise the economy and reduce our debts, opening public services is more important than ever – if we want to deliver better services for less money, improve public service productivity and stimulate innovation to drive the wider growth of the UK economy” (“we” and “our” = ‘the nation’ as the government, which wants to get more for less and “drive the growth of the UK economy”).

The whole of this white paper is encapsulated in this tension between the ‘we’ that are the individuals, and local groups and communities (and locally focused social and private enterprises), that are at one and the same time the users and providers of public services, and the ‘we’ that is the government that has to set a ‘national’ policy and funding framework for those locally produced and consumed services. But nowhere within this model is there any scope for a ‘we the English people’ that might be given national-level responsibility for designing and allocating public funding for those services that affect English people as a whole. That would be a true convergence of the ‘we’ of government and the ‘we’ as the public the government is supposed to serve.

Indeed, the white paper sets up a curious tripartite division of responsibilities in respect of public-service provision. There are, and I quote:

• Individual services – These are personal services – for example in education, skills training, adult social care, childcare, housing support and individual healthcare – that are used by people on an individual basis.

  • Neighbourhood services – These are services provided very locally and on a collective, rather than an individual, basis – such as maintenance of the local public realm, leisure and recreation facilities, and community safety.

  • Commissioned services – These are local and national services that cannot be devolved to individuals or communities, such as tax collection, prisons, emergency healthcare or welfare to work.

So, according to the white paper, there are services that ‘we’ require and consume as individuals; and for these, the government’s idea appears to be that ‘we’ will be given a personal budget to be used up, where we can choose which provider to spend our money on: effectively, privatisation / marketisation of these services. Then there are services that ‘we’ as small local communities are to both use and provide for ourselves. And finally, there are ‘commissioned’ services where it is up to ‘us’ in government (local and ‘national’) to set policy and commission services, whether those services are provided by publicly or privately owned organisations.

Well, there’s another word that encompasses almost all of these services: ‘English’. Indeed, apart from ‘welfare to work’, there are none of these services that “cannot be devolved” at a national-English level, just as they have in fact been devolved to a variable degree to each of the three existing “devolved administrations”. But the white paper’s model for English ‘devolution’ is that while ‘we’ as individuals and communities are to have greater choice of and responsibility for the public services that can be “decentralised to the lowest appropriate level” (as the document puts it), nevertheless ‘we’ as the UK government are determined to retain control over all the ultimate levers of economic and political power in England: taxation, spending, work and welfare; law and order; and national security and public safety. But absolutely nowhere is there any scope for a ‘we the English people’ who might take over responsibility for the macro level of national policy as well as the micro level of individual and local service delivery. There is no ‘we’ that is at once the English nation and English government.

So it’s no wonder that the description of the white paper’s ‘scope’ does not mention ‘England’, because there’s no scope for anything we might recognise as England in the government’s ‘open public services’ model for England. In fact, this is all about opening up English public services to a market place of competing providers, and turning the public into consumers and, indeed, consumer-providers. So the government is opening England up to its private-sector chums; but it’s not really ‘open’ to the idea of the English people as such seeking to design and run their own services – and, indeed, owning those services – at a national level, despite the white paper’s assurances that the British government is going to carry out a ‘listening exercise’.

The agenda has been set and is going ahead. The English nation will be privatised. It’s a fait accompli or, as we English like to put it, we’re screwed.

Britishness may be about pop and fish ‘n chips – but it’s not about to discuss Englishness

I wrote a comment yesterday on an interesting ‘Labour Hame’ article entitled ‘Britishness is about pop and fish ‘n chips’, which argued that there are many aspects of Britishness that are about a shared national culture that we would miss if the UK was broken up by Scottish independence. The comment lingered in the ‘awaiting moderation’ holding bay for a few hours then disappeared: presumably, deemed unsuitable.

Well, it’s nice to see that Labour has a new spirit of openness towards engaging with the English Question! Ironic that ‘moderation’ was one of the qualities that the article touted for Britishness, and which my comment reclaimed in part for Englishness! I don’t think my comment was that immoderate or objectionable, but judge for yourself below (lucky I kept a copy):

The definitions and evocations of Britishness in the Newsnight programme are nothing new. In fact, the New Labour governments tried to cultivate a sense of Britishness around precisely the values you list, which are in reality mostly English values (fair play, moderation, tolerance etc.).

Your argument is inconsistent in that you say that Gordon Brown’s Britishness crusade failed because it was linked to national (political) institutions and achievements, which implies that these things no longer hold as much sway or appear as relevant as they once did; and you also maintain that the principal ‘case’ for the Union is embodied in the cultural characteristics and expressions we share.

Accordingly, there’s no reason why we can’t retain all those cultural attributes of Britishness while dismantling the political Union and giving expression to the aspirations towards self-government in each of the UK’s nations – as expressed in the figure from the BBC / ComRes poll that Newsnight conveniently chose to ignore: that 36% of English people now favour independence (independence, let alone an English parliament, which a majority supports) for England, not Scotland.

By contrast, the relentless efforts by the media and political establishment to promote Britishness are intended, among other things, to suppress English-national identity and culture as something distinct from Britishness – the better to try and suppress any civic and political expression of Englishness such as an English parliament.

The Demography and Economics of England and London: Time for a separation?

This week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) produced its estimates for the UK’s population for the year to June 2010. This revealed that the number of people living in the UK rose by a staggering 470,000 over this period, to 62,262,000. Net migration (the difference between the number of people immigrating into the UK and the number of those emigrating) in fact accounted for less than half of the population growth: 230,000. (Well, that’s OK then.) The majority of the growth resulted from increased birth rates (797,000) – including from more inward migration of women of child-bearing age – and a reduced death rate.

What the headline figures and the media headlines didn’t comment on was the distribution of the population growth across the different countries and regions of the UK. However, these figures are available from the ONS, and they paint an interesting picture. According to the ONS, the estimated resident population of England rose by 424,300 (or 0.8%) to 52,234,000 in the 12 months to June 2010. This means that 90% of the UK’s estimated population growth in the year to June 2010 occurred in England, whereas England’s population as a whole constituted 83.8% of the UK’s population at June 2009. In other words, England is bearing a disproportionate share of the UK’s massive rise in population. The ONS does not break down England’s population growth by ‘natural’ causes (i.e. births vs. deaths) and net migration. But it’s a fair bet that as 90% of the UK total relates to England, around half or just under half of England’s population growth resulted from net migration.

This has clearly been a long-term trend as another set of data from the ONS suggests (this set looks at permanent residents and excludes those who are here only temporarily). Here, the English population at September 2010 is put at 51,363,000. Of this total, 6,472,000 people were not born in the UK: 12.6%. By comparison, only around 6.4% of the population of Scotland is estimated to have been born outside of the UK, while only 5.7% of the N. Irish population (much of whom presumably come from the Republic) and 5% of Welsh residents were born outside of the UK.

In terms of UK citizenship, of the 51.36 million English residents, around 4.02 million (7.8%) are estimated to be foreign nationals. (The difference, obviously, is that the remaining 4.8% of the English population that were not born in the UK have subsequently become UK citizens.) By comparison, 4.9% of the Scottish population comprises foreign nationals, versus 3.9% of Northern Irish residents and 3.2% of Wales’ inhabitants.

These figures clearly demonstrate that England has been impacted by population growth and net migration to a much greater extent than the UK’s other nations, and over a long time span. People will draw their own conclusions from these figures and use them at the service of their own agendas. But they at least put English people’s concerns about immigration into a clearer context: we actually have more grounds for concern than our neighbours in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Having said that, these perceptions are distorted by the situation in London – of which, more below.)

England is already one of the most densely populated countries in the world. I make it that England’s resident population of 52.2 million gives it a population density of 1,038 people per square mile. According to Wikipedia’s list of countries by population density (which curiously does not break down the UK figure by its four main nations but does include separate figures for Jersey and Guernsey, for instance), that would put England in 31st place. However, most of the countries or dependent territories with greater population densities are either small islands or territories that mainly comprise a single dense urban conglomeration, such as Macau, Monaco or Singapore, to name the top three. The only countries with any significant land mass ahead of England are Bangladesh (2,919 people per square mile), South Korea (1,261) and the Netherlands (1,041). And the Netherlands has only 32% of England’s land mass: so we’re as densely populated as the Netherlands but on more than triple the scale.

By contrast, according to the same Wikipedia, Scotland‘s population density is a mere 171 people per square mile, Wales‘ is 361, and even little Northern Ireland‘s is only 315 – which would make them (if you add them in as separate countries to Wikipedia’s list), the equal-142nd-, 80th- and 94th-most populous countries / territories in the world respectively. (Just for inclusiveness, Cornwall‘s population density, according to Wikipedia, is 390 per square mile: 79th.)

Population density is all well and good, but it’s not in itself harmful, at least not to economic prosperity, as the territories towards the top of the Wikipedia list are generally among the most wealthy and fast-growing in the world (Bangladesh excepted). The same might have been said about England a few years ago. Perhaps it’s not so bad, after all, to be a densely populated small island dominated by a single urban conglomeration. But it would probably be more accurate to say that even in the ill-fated ‘boom-without-bust’ New Labour years, it wasn’t so much England that was the prosperous small-island territory overshadowed by a single metropolis, but that London, the South-East and the M4 corridor on their own were the ‘island of prosperity’ that should be compared with the likes of Singapore and Hong Kong. Indeed, the economy of ‘Londengland’, should we call it, was and still is rather similar to those of Singapore, Hong Kong and indeed Monaco: dominated by international finance and global trading links; a playground of the mega-rich; and a local economy fuelled by property speculation, and propped up by easy access to tax havens (which are also, strangely, among the most densely populated territories in the Wikipedia list) and other tax-avoidance scams.

According to the ONS, the permanently resident population of Greater London at September 2010 was 7.76 million. Of these, a staggering 34.4%
were not born in the UK, while 21.7% were non-UK nationals. And bear in mind, these figures relate to longer-term residents (i.e. people living in London for a year or more) and therefore exclude London’s transient population, much of which is also non-British. No wonder that whenever I go to London, which is quite frequently, I feel as though I’m in a foreign country: to a great extent, I am.

If we use the 7.76 million population figure, I calculate that Greater London has a population density of 12,792 per square mile, which would put London as a stand-alone entity in fifth place in the global league table, behind Hong Kong but ahead of Gibraltar. [Funny how so many of the most densely populated territories are present or former British colonies – including, arguably, England itself.] Conversely, if you exclude the population data for London from the English totals, you find that the proportion of the population not born in the UK declines to 8.7% (versus 6.4% in Scotland). Similarly, excluding London, the proportion of England’s population that are not UK citizens drops to only 5.4% (versus 4.9% in Scotland). And in terms of population density, without London, England’s total drops to 877 per square mile. This is still relatively high (it’s on a par with Japan) but a lot lower than the total including London. But bear in mind that this latter figure excludes shorter-term, very often non-UK-national, residents.

To summarise, if you look at England without London, the share of the population that is either non-UK-born or non-UK-national is much lower than the overall England totals, and is nearer to the levels in the other UK nations. Similarly, population density is also a lot lower: still high but not at the crisis level it appears to have reached if you include London. Looking at this the other way round, London is quite exceptional for England, and for the UK as a whole, in terms of the level of immigration it has absorbed and its population density.

In the light of the demographic and economic differences between London and the rest of the UK, it is not really surprising that the idea of London becoming ‘independent’, or at least more fully devolved, from the rest of the UK has recently been voiced (see here and here). Would it in fact make sense to make London a sort of semi-autonomous city state whose relationship with the rest of the UK would be akin to that of Hong Kong with China, or Monaco with France? We could let London do what it does best and be what it wants to be: a global city and magnet to finance, creative industries and people from all over the world, with a unique international culture – and a haven for super-rich tycoons seeking to avoid taxation in their countries of origin?

One of the articles outlining the case for London’s ‘independence’ even suggested that the rest of England could keep the royal family while London became a republic. On the contrary, I think it would be much more to London’s advantage to retain the monarchy and the Palace of Westminster as the seat of its government, while the rest of England could opt to become a republic if it wished to. Those old trappings of empire are a massive draw for the global travelling classes; and it would be fitting as a symbol of London’s transition to a fully ‘non-English’ British territory, inhabited by people from across the world, if the city retained at its heart some reminders of the former Empire that had first conquered the world in order subsequently to be taken over by it. London would become just another of those small but super-rich territories to whose confines the former riches of Empire had shrunk – leaving England free from British-imperial and Westminster rule to pursue its own destiny. The British royal family would then be one of those cardboard cut-out monarchies from diminutive European principalities and duchies such as Monaco and Liechtenstein. Indeed, London could even become the ‘British Kingdom of London’: the one territory in the former UK that retained Britishness as its national identity – leaving England to be England at last.

Of course, this is all a bit of a flight of fantasy, but there’s a serious point behind it: the economy and demographics of London and the South-East do distort those of the rest of England, which is a very different country from London. And London not only distorts the economic and demographic realities but also the perception of them, which is shaped by a London-centric politics and media. London is multicultural, international ‘Britain’ in a way that no other part of England or the UK is. And because London thinks of itself as the capital and centre of a continuing, and indeed continuous, British realm and historic legacy, it cannot get its head round the idea that, beyond London’s confines, there is in fact a diverse land of several nations that do not always look towards London as the template for their society, as the embodiment of their values or as the legitimate seat of power.

As a node of international trade, travel, culture and finance, it is inevitable that London sees itself as the capital of a country called ‘Britain’, because ‘Britain’ is the UK’s international brand: it’s the way ‘this country’ packages and markets itself across the world. And the UK state fosters a ‘British’-national identity for its – and even more so London’s – ethnic minorities in part because of the internationality associated with the British tag. This means that ‘British’ can serve as the label for the civic national identity of UK citizens, while ‘English’ (and ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ and ‘Northern Irish’) is relegated to the status of ‘ethnic Britishness’. In this way, London is the capital of a civic, multi-ethnic Britain of which the ‘English’ or the ‘ethnic British’ are only one ethnic group among others – admittedly still the majority population in London, but for how long?

My point is that London, at least in official parlance, does not see itself as the capital of a country called England: it may be a part of England but it is also apart from England. And if the capital city that rules England increasingly neither sees itself, nor is seen, as ‘English’, how does this affect the way England is governed? Shouldn’t London’s rule over England be severed? And is that a condition for England to be free to govern itself?

I do seriously think that England will not be able to break free from the British political and cultural establishment’s stranglehold on government, the economy, values and perceptions of national identity until the ties between London and the rest of England are radically loosened. Quite what form this separation would take is hard to predict; plus it is up to the English people, not the British government, to decide what should happen to its historic capital. One possible solution is a London devolved from within England, which in turn would be part of a UK of federal nations, if not an independent state. Alternatively, London could become to all intents and purposes a separate federal UK nation (the site of the continuing ‘British nation’, as I suggested above), generating wealth and commerce that would contribute income to the UK’s coffers for reserved matters such as defence and macro-economics, but with most of its tax revenues retained for its own public services and investment. In short, London could become England’s, and the UK’s, Hong Kong.

I’m not sure that many Londoners would particularly like their city’s transformation into a capital for global trade and business – but that’s the way it’s going, and that’s the way many in the City, the media and the corridors of power would like it to go. But should England continue to be dragged along in London’s wake and thrall? Can we define a different path for England if the agenda is for ever dictated by London’s perceived and vested interests?

England is a different country from London. Is it time for London to be a different country from England?