No leadership, childishness and deception - how MPs are destroying the trust that's central to democracy

Trust. That's it, the central, essential requirement for democracy to work. People have to trust that their friends and neighbours will behave responsibly and that the people who we send to parliament as our representatives will do, more or less, what they said they'll do. I know, I know, I can hear you: "Simon, what are you drinking, people never trust politicians...": or words to that effect. I suspect, however, that this probably ain't so - there's always been a loud minority who thought politicians were selfish, on the take, charlatans but most people, if they ever gave the matter thought, saw politicians as grand but essentially decent folk.

Yesterday I concluded that we're pretty close to the point where this trust, always a fragile thing, collapses. Three things led me there - watching "Brexit: the uncivil war", seeing interviews with Harlow residents on Sky News and reading Dominic Grieves 2017 election statement. And before we start this isn't about Brexit right or wrong but about whether the people feel able to affect change in a democracy - can trust those they elect to respect how they vote.

I won't go into a whole review of "Brexit: the uncivil war" - suffice it to say that I enjoyed it but felt it was (other than a truly dire scene supposedly set in Jaywick - it's always Jaywick isn't it) too focused on the battle between teams of Westminster insiders rather than on an amazing campaign mostly conducted by regular voters without reference to politicians. It was also spoiled by a silly bit of text at the end suggesting the leave campaign did something evil and malign (it didn't).

Anyway, the important bit isn't the accuracy or otherwise of the drama but the final minutes set in a future inquiry where Dominic Cummings played by Benedict Cumberbatch rants about how nobody had the intelligence, initiative or aspiration to take hold of the 2016 vote and shape it into a real change for Britain. The Cummings character, close to camera, says that a vote to change how we did politics was seen as just something to be managed within the existing political culture. Politicians - leave and remain - were unable to grasp that voters, including scruffy ones in ramshackle shacks by the Essex seaside, were telling us the way we do politics needs to change and that maybe we'd get better government if we paid them some actual attention.

Meanwhile, Sky News had toddled off to Harlow - Essex again as it's not too inconvenient as they can get back to West London to take Jocasta to dance class - where they did vox pops with voters. Sophie Ridge, the presenter, shared clips on social media and these told the same tale as we heard from that end piece in "Brexit: the uncivil war". Politicians are useless buffoons, they need to get on with the job and stop behaving like children. And (trust me on this one) this sentiment is repeated everywhere by leave and remain voters alike. It's accompanied by a growing view that, not only will Brexit not happen but that people will have less power in future because they had the audacity to vote for something their lords and masters didn't want.

Yet despite this, MPs have, time and time again, voted (by slim majorities admittedly) to stop any resolution to Brexit that didn't conform to their view - incidentally, given they are mostly remain supporters, a view that is directly contradictory to the way the majority of the people voted. Every possible variant of legal and procedural sophistry has been employed, all with the intent of stopping the government from implementing the result of the 2016 referendum. And this brings me to the third thing from yesterday because it features Dominic Grieve, one of the leading confounders of that democratic vote in June 2016. There are plenty of others to choose from but I happened to read what Grieve had said to his electorate in the 2017 General Election - here's a chunk:

As someone who has always advocated a close relationship between the UK and the European Union, I accept the result of the 2016 Referendum. I therefore strongly support the Prime Minister’s determination to secure a negotiated arrangement for leaving the EU and for forging a new trading relationship for the future, providing certainty for trade and business whilst giving us control of migration and releasing us from the direct effect of EU Law. I also believe that the people of our country will benefit from a close continuing relationship with a strong EU and I will work to help build these important links for our future. I very much hope, therefore, that the Prime Minister will be able to achieve something close to the goals she set out in her speech at Lancaster House in February.

I challenge anyone to find in this, or indeed in the rest of Grieve's message, anything that justifies how he has behaved in parliament since that election. The address in question - especially given how clear the Conservative manifesto was on the matter - is a colossal act of deception because, as subsequent events have shown, Grieve had every intention of spending the forthcoming parliament manipulating rules and procedures to try and prevent Brexit.

These three examples all speak to the relationship between the electorate and their representatives with the public justifiably exasperated by what's gone on, irritated by the childishness of MPs (and their friends in the mainstream media) and desperate for somebody to grasp the opportunity of reframing the relationship between voter and politician in favour of the voter and away from the tribal elites in the Westminster bubble.

As I said at the start, trust is central to democracy. It seems that, unless something dramatic happens pretty soon, politicians in Westminster, by repeatedly ignoring voters concerns and interests, will finally have lost the last vestiges of respect as well as the public's trust. What will happen at this point isn't clear - I'm not expecting thousands to take to the streets as they have in France but I do expect a new sort of politician - blunt, cynical and populist - to arrive. And the first place they'll arrive is in local Conservative associations.

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The culture of social work (and the arrogance of the law).

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None of us know the whole truth about the tragic case of the woman forced into a caesarian only to have her baby taken into care and put up for adoption. We will have seen the original story, the related comments from Christopher Booker and John Hemmings MP, assorted clarifications from within the system including Essex County Council and a selection of writings from legal bloggers explaining why those criticising the system are wrong (or even suggesting, without evidence, that the facts are so very different from those printed in the newspapers). Plus latterly the interviews with the woman herself.

Because I don't know the whole truth, if I comment as a non-professional (i.e. not a child protection social worker or a specialist lawyer) then what I say can - and will be - simply dismissed by the system's defenders. Indeed, the easiest option for such defenders of the system is to attack the writer's credibility. You know how this turns out when the author (who is no more able to assess the "facts" than others but believes, also without evidence, that they are more able in this regard) starts with this sort of line:

So who are Christopher Booker and John Hemming?

This is followed by criticism based on unconnected matters (Booker's views on climate change, for example) and selective quotations from cases where either Booker or Hemming - or both - had been involved or had made comment. This isn't to say that Booker or Hemming are right or wrong but to observe that using anecdote (and a selected quote, albeit from a judge, is just anecdote) to destroy credibility is a classic tactic in ad hominem attacks.

The problem here is that the writer in question is, for all his attempts at being right-on, essentially an insider to the system - a government lawyer:

I’m a barrister, and worked as a government lawyer for twelve years, advising ministers and government departments on a wide range of public law issues from tax to terrorism, from freedom of information to pensions, from discrimination to health and from defence to broadcasting. My career in government included stints at the Cabinet Office, where I advised on the EU Constitution negotiations, and at the Attorney General’s Office where I advised Lord Goldsmith on a wide variety of legal issues. I have advised nearly every government department, from the Home Office to Health and from the Treasury to the MoD.

I note with interest that the author is emphatically not a specialist in family law, social work or issues relating to mental health. Rather he is concerned to defend the system whereby social services, health and the courts were able (again whether this is right is not the question) to force a woman into a caesarian section, take her child into care and subsequently put that child up for adoption.  And when journalists, MPs or other lay people challenge or question the system it is imperative that it is defended - and especially that the cultural assumptions of, in this case, social work are not opened up for examination.

I've written before about the ideology of social work - the assumption of societal guilt, non-judgementalism and rejection of heterodox, or seemingly hetrodox, choices - but here it is the culture that is more important. In one respect this is a culture of self-protection, closing ranks and hiding in process and paper trails - things that are not surprising in a large bureaucratic organisation of any sort (and child protection systems such as closed courts make this much easier). However, there is a broader cultural factor - social work, like the law and medicine, presumes that only it is qualified to decide on a course of action and that any options from non-professionals are quite simply wrong.

Moreover, the culture is reinforced by the very familiar form of words in response to enquiries about specific cases: "(name of organisation - usually a local council) does not comment on individual cases". Thus the organisation can plead protection of privacy (for the subject of a case) in order to prevent any questioning of its decision-making. Indeed, in nearly all child protection cases, the actual decision-making process is not subject to any lay scrutiny and the secrecy of the courts inevitably leads to problems for reporters - such as Christopher Booker - in reporting concerns.

Even where there is a formal opportunity for lay enquiry within the system (such as is afforded to me as a local councillor), we are strongly advised that our remit is with the proper administration of the system not with the decision taken. A councillor is able to question whether the council has conducted the process correctly (and there are routes for action if this is not so) but, in essence, if the paperwork is correct, we are unable to challenge the basis of the decision.

Finally, the system of non-identification is used to protect the names of the decision-makers as well as the names of social services clients. This makes it more difficult to have adequate lay scrutiny at a departmental level and provides a strong incentive and opportunity to cover-up. Here in Bradford, the full Hamzah Khan serious case review is so redacted as to provide little practical value to us as councillors. We are forced to rely on the report summary  - and the assumptions it inevitably makes - rather than have the ability to review the actual data upon which that summary is based.

It may be (although I doubt it) that the actions taken in the Essex case were the only reasonable options available to the Council and other agencies. But so long as we cannot know (and 'we' does not have to mean full disclosure to the public merely disclosure to individuals or organisations that are not instruments in the decision-making itself), there will remain doubts about why certain decisions are made, the professional ideology of the decision-makers and the secretive organisational culture that engulfs social work.

Perhaps, rather than engage in ad hominem attacks on those struggling to expose possible flaws in our care systems, great legal minds - the full arrogance of the law - would be better directed to finding ways of allowing proper scrutiny of social services' decision-making and the operation of the family courts without unduly compromising the necessary protection of client identities.

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Wednesday Whimsy: Your Place, My Town, The Land

Beckenham Road (a long time a go)


Listening to the poignant evocation of Cornwall, “Cousin Jack”, I had something of an epiphany – recognition of why the spirit of place is so important to us. And why its emotion so often trumps rationality. I’m not from Cornwall, have no Cornish heritage and no Cornish connection of note – but the emotion of the song gets to me just as do the feelings in Springsteen’s “My Hometown” or even Billy Bragg’s take on Essex in “A13”.

If you write, speak or sing with passion about your town, your country, your hills or even your street, you will bring out those emotions – the associations with place, with roots, with where we belong. These are some of the most powerful ties and we never lose them even when thousands of miles from that place. The ties that make tough old New York cops stream with tears at “Kathleen” or “Danny Boy”. The ties that make me stop, catch my breath and think a little about the things that really matter.

For me Kipling is the great poet of this feeling and in “The Land” he summed it up about his native Sussex. Here are the last couple of stanzas:

“His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.

'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.”


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Swans at Mistley, railway bars and a little bit of Essex

If you've never seen the swans at Mistley on the Essex marshes, you've missed a treat. Indeed a treat that's fast disappearing. The basin at Mistley used to feature one of Europe's largest herds of swans - in the 1950s well over 1000 swans regularly gathered to enjoy the treat of a food rich location. The swans gathered at Mistley because of the maltings on the river - the water used in the works was rich in the residues from the malt making for a great feeding ground.

Today the swan numbers are down to a couple of hundred - when the picture above was taken a couple of years ago, there were only around 50 or 60 pairs in the basin. Some of this is down to the management of the river but it is mostly, I suspect, because the maltings have closed and the swans get get better pickings elsewhere. The sight of a sea of white birds from bank to bank that I saw on my first visit in 1980 is no more and will likely not return.

The Essex marshes are a pretty special area (although they get more workaday and less special as you head towards Harwich) with places like Mistley and Manningtree making for an attractive location - Manningtree used to have a great railway bar - privately run and serving maybe the best range of beers in the town. A bit like the maltings and the swans this is now gone - replaced by a plastic cafe.

Essex gets a bad name - one of the last places, the people of which can be bad-mouthed, made a joke of and ridiculed with seeming impunity. Not that they mind of course - after all they made up most of the jokes themselves. And what's wrong with 5-in stilettos and a soft-top motor anyway? At least Essex folk are honest about aspiring to these things! Anyway, the area around Mistley is lovely and worth a visit where the locals will, of course, remind you that Constable country is mostly in Essex rather than Suffolk. And that it's perfectly OK to shoot and eat ducks!

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