Ron is one of the contributors to The Journal’s Friday Forum column.  Here are the articles that have been published so far:

3rd December 2007 – GP Surgeries in Newcastle

By Ron Beadle, Lib Dem Spokesman for Newcastle North

Imagine a different news story to the one you have just read. Imagine one that said: ‘Today Northumbria Police announced that it was no longer to provide a service in Jesmond’ or which began ‘Newcastle City Council announced the closure of every primary school in Gosforth.’ Either would result in fierce opposition. ‘The Journal’ would pen fiery editorials, there would be demonstrations outside Police Stations, long-serving councillors would lose their seats and eventually Judicial Review would see the decisions contested in court. And quite right too.

So why should it be different when it comes to healthcare? Why is there no requirement for different areas to receive equal levels of service here? Lemington in Newcastle (population 10,000) has not had an NHS doctor or dentist for years. One local resident who wrote to me about this said ‘Why should I have to take a sick child on a bus which will make them feel worse, in order to go to a doctor’, others have told me that they haven’t gone to the doctor when they felt sick because they couldn’t face the journey. So the Liberal Democrats have begun a petition to get a new GPs surgery in Lemington. Hundreds have signed so far.

The Newcastle Primary Care Trust (PCT) should take notice. Their response to my Freedom of Information request last month turned up some shocking facts. Across Newcastle one NHS surgery in every four has closed since Labour came to power in 1997, down from 51 surgeries to 38. We have fewer GPs, there were 156 in the city ten years ago, now there are 148. Part of this is about closing single doctor surgeries concentrating resources to offer more services at each surgery, including minor operations. This is the right thing. But if there are going to be fewer surgeries the Primary Care Trust must ensure that they are in the right place. And here the PCT has failed. There are areas well served by GP practices and there are others without a GP. And which areas do you suppose are poorer and have higher mortality rates? I have asked the City Council to look into this.

This is not of course simply a Newcastle issue, exactly the same applies in Gateshead and I strongly suspect the pattern is repeated across urban areas in the North. PCTs may well respond that they cannot instruct doctors to move and this is true but local GPs have confirmed to me that there is nothing to prevent the PCT from negotiating with surgeries around linking investment to the provision of satellite services. In other words, if a surgery wants to expand, or needs new money to improve its building, then the PCT should require them in return to provide a service in an area that isn’t properly covered. This is something the PCT could do.

Part of the problem is that PCTs are not directly accountable to those they are meant to serve. We cannot vote to sack its Chairman (if we wanted to) or to change its priorities. Compare this to Denmark, the country with the highest approval ratings for health services in the world and where local service chiefs are elected. Would they dare not to have a GP in some parts of their cities? I don’t think so. The Liberal Democrats would bring the PCTs under democratic control so that people could have a genuine say over issues such as GP coverage, out of hours services and many other issues of which I want to mention a final one.

A constituent contacted me earlier this week. She wanted to see a woman GP but there are only two in her surgery, one works part time, the other is on holiday. The earliest appointment she could obtain was in eight working days. Now for all women there are times when only a woman GP will do and for some women religious obligation prevents them from seeing a male doctor. What is the PCT doing to ensure equal access for women? I am asking the question and wait for their reply.

If you have experienced similar things or are aware of similar issues then my advice is to make a noise. Demand information under the Freedom of Information Act, find out what is going on, ask why, write to your newspaper, ask your Council to review the issue, write to your MP, write to the Minister for Health, the only person in Britain to whom PCTs have to account. Health is a vital service. You pay for it. You should own it. So do something.

15 August 2007 – ‘What politics doesn´t question’

In a liberal democracy there are three central political questions. What should government do? How should it do it? How should it pay for it? I will argue two points. First, that current political debate is obscuring these questions and second that this is one cause of people’s alienation from electoral politics.

Let’s start with some examples. To build a new research and treatment centre for older people in Newcastle requires investment from a corporation; to regenerate the centre of Gateshead requires the permission of the same corporation and to establish a new academy school requires private sponsorship. Examples like these illustrate government’s increasing reliance on the private sector, particularly when it makes new investments. Trade unionists, campaigning groups, local traders and newspaper editorials in the North East all question aspects of this but it hasn’t surfaced as an issue which divides the three major parties. It cannot therefore be a reason to vote for or against any of them.

Consider also that in deciding on the planning application for the treatment centre and supermarket complex in the West End, Newcastle Council is only allowed to consider planning technicalities – such as traffic impact and design, not the impact on local traders, the principle of the scheme or the involvement of Tesco. Even the traditional ‘needs’ test, which councils could use to determine whether a supermarket was warranted, will be removed under current government proposals. Whether it be supermarkets, lap dancing clubs or mobile phone masts, local politicians cannot rule in favour or against a planning application on principle. If they campaign on a planning matter they are not subsequently allowed to be part of the decision making about it. You may of course agree with this, many businesses do and there are good arguments for preventing arbitrary use of power by local politicians and planners. The point however is that these arguments have not been tested, the debate has not been had, at least between the political parties.

What connects these issues of private sector involvement in public projects and the limitations placed on the planning process is not just the assumption that the market is more efficient than the state, nor even the fact that neither of these developments has been the subject of party dispute. Rather, it is that the involvement of the private sector helps remove certain difficult questions, questions politicians would rather not discuss at all, from the political agenda.

The political fact of life whose avoidance is facilitated by this is that electors demand both better and greater services and lower tax and that they do so regardless of the state of public finance. Whether it be new drugs for treating Alzheimer’s patients, new faster trains on the tracks or the dualling of the A1, the demands for new expenditure increase consistently. At the same time parties proposing higher taxes such as Labour in the 1980s or the Liberal Democrats since the 90s, have suffered at the polls. This makes private sector involvement a seductive option. If ‘Tesco’ will pay for a new hospital, if the mobile phone operators will pay $22billion for telecommunications licenses, if construction companies will build a school and be paid rent tomorrow under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) rather than capital today showing up in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement then government can finance more projects, at least in the short term. In return the private sector gains long term and often lucrative contracts, commercial confidentiality clauses limit public and press scrutiny of their investments and the planning system is increasingly weighed to favour development of all kinds.

One result is that the true cost of government investment is not borne by today’s taxpayers, government can be seen to do more with less and some hard choices are kept off the political agenda. However, much like long term debt consolidation or equity finance schemes this choice makes short term sense but comes at a long term cost. Will any of the political parties raise their heads above the parapet on this?

There are signs that the Liberal Democrats are about to, certainly in relation to PFI. Liberal Democrats in the North should welcome this. It is time the consensus was challenged – politics should be about real choices, not about inventing schemes to avoid them. In the end it is only politics which presents genuine alternatives that can motivate people to vote one way or another.

31 January 2007 – ‘The Prisons Crisis’

Those whom the gods of politics condemn, they first make Home Secretary. From the offences of early released prisoners to those of former prisoners who should have been deported; from the failure to collect the passports of those with travel bans to the failure to prevent the breeding of banned dogs; from the resignation of the chair of the Youth Justice Board to the Police failing to find a legal reason to stop people looting beached ships, each new morning brings a new disaster. A government that pursued headlines better than it pursued criminals is now running away from both.

But I have it in my heart to feel sympathy for John Reid, for the biggest Home Office failure is not his own fault. This is the failure to build enough prisons to house the extra prisoners that the government’s policies have created. It is this that has allowed judges to free convicted paedophiles and sees the Home Office scurrying about the country in search of oversized cells to divide, old ships to hire, unused barracks to furnish and even creating waiting lists for prisoners to deal with the crisis. As he now calls himself the DIY Home Secretary perhaps John Reid will end up building cells himself from a flatpack.

In fact DIY is an appropriate metaphor when you consider how quickly previous Home Secretaries have fallen apart. However, Messrs Blunkett and Clarke aren’t directly responsible either. They didn’t pass their time thinking up new ways to be kind to the offensive; they argued for the resources to build more prisons. But in deciding on these bids, Gordon Brown’s Treasury failed to question their forecasts for the rise in the prison population and not enough places were created. It is with the future Prime Minister that ultimate responsibility lies.

At this point however you may be wondering what the alternative is. The only options actually available are to build more prisons or reduce the number of prisoners. So let’s look at some facts. Britain sends a higher proportion of people to prison than any other country in the European Union. Each costs £41,000 a year, roughly the same as employing a police officer. Only 12% of prisoners work each day and only 10% enter employment on release. Only a third of prisoners receive education and training in prison but this third are three times more likely than the rest not to go back inside. One result is that 8 out of 10 teenage boys released from prison are convicted again within two years. As the Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary Nick Clegg puts it: ‘This is the revolving door of the madhouse’.

The alternative includes compulsory education and training for prisoners and making them work, with much of the money raised going to victims. At the same time non-violent offenders including shoplifters, fine defaulters and even former royal journalists simply should not be in prison. They should receive ‘Public Service Sentences’ requiring them to do tough and visible community work. This could be run by a new Community Sentence Enforcement Service, freeing up the Probation Service to concentrate on monitoring released prisoners. Similarly, those convicted of anti-social behaviour should face local residents and businesses and agree do to real work to put right the damage they have caused. When I outlined these ideas on Radio Newcastle, Mike Parr called them ‘chain gangs without the chains’ – far wittier than I would have come up with but essentially the same idea.

Alongside the employment of thousands of extra police it also happens to be a central feature of the opposition’s policies on crime. The Liberal Democrat opposition, that is. Over the next few months the Liberal Democrats are going to campaign on crime because we believe it can be cut, not always by being tougher but always by being smarter. And compared to a party whose policies result in releasing paedophiles because it has nowhere to put them, being smarter isn’t difficult.

24 October 2006 – ‘Trust’

When former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont wrote in his memoirs that his employee David Cameron was ‘a brilliant Old Etonian with a taste for the good life’ he probably didn’t mean the 1970s sitcom. Yet in the first year of Cameron’s leadership the party of Jerry and Margo Leadbetter has claimed to be the party of Tom and Barbara Good. But that’s not all. In his repositioning as a Liberal Conservative Mr Cameron has even criticised American foreign policy, albeit in a whisper. And we now have the bizarre spectacle of a Tory Leader, a Tory Leader (!) claiming that his philosophy can be summed up in three letters: N H S. The problem is that the Tories’ record on the NHS can be summed up by another three letters: C U T.

So the party that voted against the formation of the NHS, the party that opposed the increase in National Insurance that paid for its recent growth and the party that spent the last election trying to woo middle England to opt out of it, is now its firmest friend. If David Cameron is to be believed however, we should forget the Tory past. His new cuddly conservatives, the hug-a-hoodie, be tactile with a tree Tories are now the nice party.

What a pity then that no-one mentioned this to the Tory Tax Commission which reported yesterday. Their proposals involve £21 billion in tax cuts. That is a Tory policy you can trust. A Tory policy in line with Tory tradition, a Tory policy that real Tories believe in. And you should also forget that the Tory Commission tells us nothing about the cuts in expenditure that will follow from this cut in tax. After all, what could they say? £21 billion is just a little bit more than the cost of all government expenditure in the North East, it is nearly a quarter of NHS spending and about two thirds of the Defence budget. Where would Mr. Cameron like to start on that lot? Or perhaps he would just borrow money to finance current expenditure and raise interest rates to 15% in the process, after all he was Norman Lamont’s special advisor in the Treasury when rates were last at that level so he would at least be used to it.

But I shouldn’t mock because David Cameron won’t touch these policies. His gamble today is the same as Tony Blair’s gamble in the mid 90’s, namely that to win the country he must first defeat his own party. He believes he can gain the centre by being moderate and that all he needs to do is let Boris Johnson out of his box once in a while to maintain the loyalty of his right wing base. Although this mirrors Blair’s strategy as opposition Leader, there is a difference. Blair managed to convince people, even some opponents, to trust him. People believed Blair’s modest optimism in 1997. But will they believe Cameron in 2007?

This is Cameron’s first problem. Electors are more cynical now than they were in 1997. Will Cameron persuade them that the Tories have changed, that a party whose Shadow Cabinet contains 15 old Etonians will be more committed to public services than people who actually use them? Electors’ cynicism appears endemic and the more that both Tories and Labour try to be things they are not to secure the political centre ground, the more cynical electors will become. The second problem is that there are now other parties on the right which represent anti-European, anti-immigrant, low tax Toryism and even some Tory newspaper columnists are arguing for a split in the Tory party so that the right can speak freely.

His third problem however is that if people want to vote for a liberal party which will raise environmental taxes and lower personal taxes, which will support public services and decentralize their delivery and which has consistently opposed George Bush and Tony Blair’s foreign policy, well that party is called the Liberal Democrats. Across the UK there is two party politics, but the two parties are as likely to be the Liberal Democrats and Labour as they are to be Labour and the Tories. Just look at Newcastle, Durham, Blaydon and Redcar.

Albert Camus once wrote that ‘Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without even asking the question’. David Cameron has this sort of charm. At some point soon however people will start asking him questions and his charm won’t be enough to answer them.

21 July 2006 – ‘The Sale of Honours’

There is an old joke about a wealthy young man who invites his parents to his newly bought yacht. Donning a peaked cap he says ‘Look folks, I’m a captain’ to which his father replies ‘Yes, to your mother you are a captain; to me you are a captain; but to a Captain, you are no captain’. The point of course is that there are certain things that money can’t buy. If the allegations that led to lord Levy’s arrest last week are substantiated we will know that a seat in the House of Lords isn’t one of them.

As one of their political opponents it is all too tempting for me to use this column to make cheap points about the way the Labour party appears to have sold honours for cash. That would however miss the wider point which is about what these allegations suggest about our political and economic elite as a whole.

Think of the word at the centre of this issue - honour. Honour only works as an idea within a culture which regards a stable set of virtues as honourable and regards those who exhibit them as worthy of some public recognition. Without such a shared content it is a useless idea for if do we know what actions, attributes and excellences are honourable, we cannot know what or who to honour.

Where honour exists it helps us teach the young what is expected of them and this includes helping them understand what they should regard as honourable and what they should not. It is moreover an aspiration open to all. Unlike status it does not require inequality, everyone could be honourable, everyone could be honoured.

If the allegations of the sale of honours are correct then they suggest as much about those who want to purchase them as those prepared to sell. The would-be purchasers have sought to claim, so it is alleged, both honours and an entitlement to govern the rest of us through an exchange whose very secrecy negates the idea of honour itself. Just like the student who copies another’s work, the manager who gives or receives promotion through social ties and the footballer who pretends to have been fouled to get a penalty they have sought an award which they know to be undeserved.

But here there is a proviso for the notion of desert is similar to honour in requiring some content and there are those for whom the cunning required to achieve such awards provides this content – they are those who take pride in convincing the Captain that they too are captains. If the allegations are proven then this will be shown to have characterized at least an element of our country’s so-called elite.

The trick only works if it remains secret. Once the association between payment and award is revealed then it is not only the claims of those who have been honoured (or who attempted to gain an honour) but the honour itself that is undermined. The bottom may well fall out of the honours market and party fund-raisers will have to go elsewhere. There is of course a certain justice in this.

When the froth of the political storm has died down perhaps it will have had one benefit. Perhaps it will make us think again about what sort of country we are, not only one in which privilege still bestows the right to govern but also one which appears has honours but lacks honour.

5 May 2006 – ‘New Labour and Decentralisation’

Foreign prisoner releases, health service redundancies, sex scandals, electoral defeats – the past ten days have been less pass the buck than pass the bucket for New Labour.  Much of this is media hype.   But some of it, particularly in health, reveals some fundamental tensions in the New Labour project.   One of these is its confusion over centralisation in public services.

In many ways New Labour has decentralised power.  Devolved parliaments, regional development agencies, foundation hospitals and trust schools move decision-making closer to the point of service delivery.  Equally New Labour’s commitment to competition within public services is evidenced by the private provision of up to 15% of health services and the requirement for councils to partly or fully privatise social housing before they receive any significant capital funding.

Exemplifying this is Local Government minister David Miliband’s vision of councils commissioning rather than delivering services.  Political hacks know that his father was the leading Marxist Ralph Miliband whose book ‘Parliamentary Socialism’ argued that Parliament couldn’t deliver socialism.  I sometimes wonder whether David’s political career provides proof of his father’s proposition.  It is certainly the case that his view of local government is not far removed from Thatcher’s local government Minister Nicholas Ridley who argued that councils should only meet once a year in order to sign contracts.  

However, at the same time as this market – friendly, decentralising agenda has prospered so has its opposite and public sector bureaucracy has grown.  So–called ‘joined-up’ government has created endless partnerships, action zones, forums and committees, each serviced by armies of clerks and managers.  New Labour’s plethora of targets, gimmicks and sanctions has undermined decentralisation and in one area in particular, public sector pay, its commitment to a centralised model leaves it vulnerable to the problems that beset old Labour. 

Consider this year’s strikes by local government workers, university lecturers and now threatened by health workers and civil servants.  Consider the overspend in the budget for GPs of £300 million, part of a wider overspend in health that has added £7billion to the black hole in public sector pension liabilities.  Consider the dentists leaving the NHS because of problems with their new national contract.  In each of these areas New Labour has maintained one-size fits all, national pay bargaining   And what has this delivered for recipients of public services?  Does the new GPs contract increase the likelihood of being able to see a GP in the evening?  No.  Does it enable you to see an NHS dentist at the weekend?  No.

Another example of New Labour’s centralisation is the instructions given to supposedly local Learning and Skills Councils on the funding of courses at Further Education Colleges.  As a local councillor my post-bag has been filled recently with correspondence from parents of students with learning disabilities whose college courses are being cut.  The reason is that the Learning and Skills Councils have been ordered by central government to fund only those courses that are linked to employment or result in a recognised educational qualification.  This would not have happened had funding decisions been taken locally.

In the same way that learner drivers must understand that gripping the wheel too tightly can be disastrous, so governments must learn to relax their grip on the delivery of public services.  In many ways New Labour understands this but in its commitment to public sector plans, targets and monitoring and in its maintenance of public sector bureaucracies and centralised pay it is making the same errors as its Old Labour predecessors. 

One of the many ironies of this is that as the public sector becomes larger and micro-management from the centre increases, so the room for genuine policy alternatives narrows – even to the point where the Tories can no longer offer tax cuts.  One of the results is that people no longer believe that voting can change anything and hence increasingly fail to vote.  The response of one New Labour think tank last week was compulsory voting but this is the wrong answer and not only because this too would take an army to administer.

The right answer is that less government and more decentralised government creates real policy choices.  Real policy choices create real political competition and real political competition  ignites people’s interest.  New Labour must learn this quickly or its project will end with Blair’s premiership.

10 February 2006 – ‘Freedom of Speech’

It has been an odd few weeks for Liberal Democrats.  With our front bench doing their best to impersonate the cast of the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ we have provided our opponents with easy gags.  Too easy.  Even my friends have asked me whether I am going to try alcoholism, homosexuality or both to prove my Lib Dem credentials.  Then on Thursday we win a by-election in a safe Labour seat and perhaps the joke is now on someone else.

Yet in the same month a liberal issue - freedom of expression - has dominated political debate.  Government defeats in the Religious Hatred Bill, demonstrations over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, the trial of BNP leaders and the jailing of Abu Hamsa have focussed attention on the limits of political debate and the importance of ideas.

For whilst the froth of politics – scandals, leadership elections, even by-election victories take up column space (this included) it is ideas that draw people into politics.  Here however we find a paradox.  As Clement Attlee observed, it is only when people know when to shut up that the exchange of ideas can take place. 

It seems to me that this gives us an important clue about the type of good that freedom of expression is and that the manner of its defence is also the manner of its limitation.   For freedom of expression is not absolute, its exercise by us requires others to observe the rules of conversation - knowing how to listen, knowing how to look, knowing how to question, knowing how to make relevant observations and so on.  Indeed the value of free expression, the reason why it is both good and worth defending is learned through participation in practices – conversations, entertainment, experiments and so on, which require observation of these rules. 

In other words, the practice of freedom of expression requires us to value the rights of others to their freedom and in consequence to accept limitations on our own behaviour.  Fundamentally freedom of expression does not extend to those who would deny it to others – to carry a placard or to make a speech calling for an act of murder is just such a denial and existing legislation is right to prosecute for it.  The failure of the authorities to act more quickly in the Abu Hamsa case appears much more like neglect than tolerance.

Freedom of expression does extend however to those who may offend us.  Being offended can in fact be good – it can cause us to reconsider our own position, thus strengthening or altering our views and most importantly it can cause us to learn.  Pictures of decaying cancerous lungs may be offensive, but they also persuade people to stop smoking.  The burning of the American flag may encourage Americans to question why their country is often hated, the negative depiction of Mohammad may encourage Muslims to question what is happening in their communities.

For this reason my liberalism tells me that the defeat of clauses in the Religious Hatred Bill that would criminalise those who offend religion is a victory, the right of those offended by cartoon depictions of their Prophet to demonstrate, whether they know it or not, depends on the same right that protects those who published the pictures and that legal action against those who incite violence should be used quickly and consistently.

It also tells me that as offensive as I find the BNP, the prosecution of its leaders for statements short of incitement to violence was wrong.  My suspicion is that the jury who acquitted them questioned whether the laws under which the prosecution was brought were appropriate in a liberal society.  I question that too.

Liberalism is not an easy politics, even when its party is properly led. My voting papers arrived this week and my freedom to vote in our leadership election is another aspect of freedom of expression. As the Liberal Democrats emerge from the leadership contest I hope that our new leader will make a consistent if difficult liberal case in an era which will severely test us.