May 7, 2011

It’s almost over. And by the time this goes to print, it will be. So, in advance, well done to the NO campaign and commiserations to the YES brigade. Never have so few misrepresented so much to so many.

In the last few months, both campaigns have descended into farce. On the YES side, ‘ordinary Joes’ shout through a megaphone at an understandably bewildered octogenarian, in a TV ad that would patronise a 3 year old. On the NO side, posters suggesting soldiers and new-born babies would die, compounded by images of defeated boxers reigning victorious have condescended to the public with such breathtaking sensationalism as to make the Daily Mail cringe.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. True to form the DM, paragon of even-handedness and tolerance, produced some fantastically misleading and just plain false anti-AV propaganda. Director of its NO campaign Matthew Elliott revealed that ‘Even the Independent Electoral Commission, who are overseeing this referendum, struggle even to explain the alternative vote’. The article also suggested that ‘the explanation of the current voting system is achieved in 59 words. By contrast, the passage on AV takes 351’.

Well, let’s test that out and see if your tiny brain can grasp this intricately complex concept. First things first, can you count? Excellent. (Don’t worry if not, most of the country hasn’t been credited with that ability either). Let’s begin.

‘List as many candidates as you want to vote for in the order of your preference. You can list only one if you wish’.

Well, I make that 24 words. Although, to be fair, I don’t have a PhD in Mathematics.

Incidentally, that’s exactly what you would need though if David Gower’s glib patriotism is anything to go by. The cricket commentator, championing the FPTP system analogously to cricket, explained that he is used to “a system in sport – in cricket specifically – where if you win, you win, and it’s as simple as that”. Not quite such a simple system if a match is called off for rain though, in which case the Duckworth-Lewis method is applied: Z(u,0,λ) = ZoF(w) λnF(w)+1 {1 – exp(-bu/[λnF(w)F(w)])}. “It’s as simple as that” with the FPTP system, apparently.

It’s this constant reaffirmation that the AV method could only possibly be understood by elite rocket scientists wielding a super-computer that has tarnished the whole campaign for both sides. Cameron’s constant rhetoric asserts that FPTP is “fair, simple and decisive”. Yet in the last 39 years, parties that have come second in the vote but first in the number of seats have twice come to power. For the best recent example, look no further than the 2000 American presidential elections: despite Al Gore polling one million more votes than Bush, George Dubblya still got in. Hardly a shining example of the fairness of FPTP…

As for it allowing unpopular parties to be booted out more easily, you need only look at the support for New Labour during their 13-year tenure – it dropped to 35 per cent – to realise it’s just not as “simple” as that. Even better, try watching an animated John Snow on election night with his techni-coloured political swing board, explaining how fractional swings of 1 per cent have massive knock on effects through majorities and hung parliaments. Simple indeed.

Not to be topped though, the YES campaign has done its best to match the outrageously excessive crying-baby-covered-in-placenta ad by going to the opposite end of the heart-string tugging spectrum. Set to a dark and gloomy backing track lifted straight out of an X factor audition, the YES campaign wheels out a WWII veteran who explains in an emotively quivering voice how, despite fighting Nazis for his country, he “may as well have died”. Let’s be very clear here: the man is a hero for fighting in WWII for his country, and has every right to his opinion. But your candidate not winning is not the same as a bullet to the head, and such spectacularly OTT campaigning is no better than the YES campaign’s poster baby. Or the defeated boxer miraculously, and impossible even by tenuous analogy, winning the match. Or the octogenarian politician hamming it up to the point of caricature.

The absurd sensationalism of both campaigns reflects an age where political rhetoric overshadows the truth. Yet (as difficult as it to believe on recent evidence) for every Gillian Duffy in the country, there are far more people who do know where eastern Europeans come from, and who can understand the debate without having it wrapped up in patronizing hyperbole.

The result may be a foregone conclusion, but it may have been very different had both sides of the debate given the public the information, respect and trust to make their own informed choice in the first place.

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April 2, 2011

Libya, Japan, Bahrain: the past few weeks have been about as funny as a lock-in with Gordon Brown and Gaddafi. In a year marred by blood-shed and natural disasters, subjects for satire have been, somewhat unsurprisingly, thin on the ground. Yet in this chaotic global climate it is more important than ever to rescue the absurd from the awful.

A quick glance over the papers doesn’t bode well though: Japan continues to be hit by everything bar a Biblical plague, whilst Colonel Crackpot Gaddafi has stepped up his pan-Atlantic crazy-off with Sheen-dog and Mel Gibson. Bleak reading indeed. At least it was until Conservative MP and former GP Sarah Wollaston – lauded by The Telegraph as Cameron’s ideal MP just 18 months ago – laid siege to the health reforms.

Wollaston’s lambasting of the bill – likening them to lobbing a “grenade” into the NHS and labelling them “doomed to fail”– essentially tomahawked already fragile ConDem proposals in the foot. The reforms will see the allocation of £80bn of the NHS’ £100bn budget to new GP-led consortia and, as Cameron proudly proclaimed, the “abolishing of the bureaucracy of the NHS”. Yet after a week which saw Ed Miliband unprecedentedly better David Cameron in PMQs and revelations of health secretary Andrew Lansley suppressing reports revealing current record-high levels of satisfaction with the NHS, Wollaston’s article could prove the sack of bricks that breaks the camel’s back.

So what is the problem? Well, as Miliband explained, the reforms would remove the sector-specific status the NHS currently enjoys and open it up to EU competition law alongside all other sectors. This means that GPs would have to tender contracts out first for fear of anti-competition prosecution from private corporations instead of turning to local hospitals, prompting widespread fears that large private corporations would undercut NHS providers, crippling local units and compromising care quality for cost. Such a compromise would, according to Wollaston, also threaten the NHS’ core structure: “this vast organisation can[not] be managed by a commissioning board in London with nothing in between it and several hundred inexperienced commissioning consortia”. Indeed, while the government insists it will put “doctors in the driving seat”, the bill will still allow the Health Secretary to impose any conditions upon consortia without consultation – despite Simon Burns’ insistence about reducing “the discretion of ministers to interfere in the NHS”. Such a reduction will clearly have to wait then until after the bill has been forced through – at “the discretion of ministers”.

Yet it is crucial to remember that the bill promises substantial savings – right?

Well, not necessarily. In reality, the reforms offer short term dividends offset by long term losses as the NHS struggles to maintain service levels and simultaneously save billions, effectively gravitating towards an American style privatised healthcare system so that Cameron can wage war on those pesky “bureaucrats”. And therein lies the problem: Cameron’s dogma that “bureaucrats” are the “enemies of private enterprise” and progress. The PM – cape fluttering in the wind – has vowed to fight those “bureaucrats in government departments who concoct ridiculous regulations that make life impossible for small firms”. Or, as they would argue, those bureaucrats who simply enforce, albeit officiously sometimes, government-imposed regulations, and without whom there would be no ‘Big Society’ or other The Thick of It-esque policies. It is one thing to attack bureaucrats – now little more than a byword for inefficacy – but it is another to abolish the necessary mechanisms for running an institution. For while the bill’s proponents assert GPs’ desire to get more involved in high-level decision making, it is crucial to distinguish the difference between on one hand directing care quality, and on the other hitting fiscal targets set by an economic regulator (Monitor) that renders “top-down government organisation” a proverbially tepid frying pan. Cameron may be bent on “abolishing the bureaucracy of the NHS” but this is a pyrrhic victory if private management and consultancy firms replace it soon after at astronomically higher costs. And the irony will not be lost on those “distant bureaucrats” either when their redundancy packages are followed by an offer to oversee, say, a GP consortium or healthcare consultancy firm…

And while the PM may dismiss the BMA as a disgruntled labour union, it will be harder for him to ignore the Nuffield trust report, noting that it would take “exceptionally skilled and focused management” to maintain the current operating levels of the NHS – most likely not the kind doctors would be willing/qualified to provide – whilst simultaneously cutting £15-20bn: “a mammoth task”. Moreover, another report questioning 800 GPs found that less than 25% believed the reforms would improve care quality, with many voicing concerns over the impacts on local hospitals. And should the Conservalition seek precedent to support the bill then the outsourcing of NHS cleaning contracts or the unmitigated failure of Railtrack – the crowning jewel of Tory privatisation – should suffice.

With Cameron working overtime to lump all of “Broken Britain’s” problems on the “bureaucrats” and Andrew Lansley busy giving public healthcare a buggering it won’t soon forget, rumours of Jamie Oliver opening his own ‘Dream NHS’ starring the cast of Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy are yet to be confirmed by ministers. If this prospect leaves you despairing though, then take heart in Agony Aunt Clare Rayner’s dying words: “Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I’ll come back and bloody haunt him”. Here’s hoping…

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