Britannia Radio

Some trenchant views here on the politics of the moment.

Alice Miles has had quite enough of the Brown regime and assserts 
that not only have the public at large the same opinion but so hac=ve 
government ministers.

The next up is a blistering attack on the probity of Shriti (now 
Baroness)  Vadera and Darling and the government's attitude in 
general to the sanctity of agreements and promises, and tells from 
his own experience as former Rail Regulator just how unprincipled the 
government is when its promises are inconvenient to it.  Vadera is 
perhaps Brown's closest adviser

Then the Guardian's Freedland, clearly a Labour supporter at heart, 
delivers a telling dismemberment of Brown's situation.  True, he 
waves a wand of hope around but doesn't even convince himself!

Christina
========================
THE TIMES 4.3.09
1.  Humiliated, hopeless, paralysed. Time to go
Even Cabinet ministers are finding it hard to contemplate another 14 
directionless months. We need an election now
Alice Miles

So, let me get this right. The Prime Minister has flown to Washington 
to celebrate what is now to be called Britain's "special partnership" 
with the US.

Gordon Brown and Barack Obama will hold a press conference and have a 
working lunch, No 10 announced. Oh no, they won't. the White House 
said. There was no formal press conference. And the lunch wasn't even 
an hour long. Except it wasn't actually lunch. It was "talks". With a 
photo opportunity attached.

Given how the itinerary was changing by the minute yesterday, with No 
10 desperately scrambling to salvage at least part of a press 
conference after the White House cancelled it, you could have been 
forgiven for wondering if President Obama actually knew that Mr Brown 
was coming to see him at all. It began to look like one of those 
embarrassing situations when somebody you don't particularly like 
invites himself to dinner.

You have only to imagine how Mr Obama would have been treated had he 
flown across the Atlantic to visit us, to see how ridiculous is the 
idea that this is a "partnership" - or "a partnership of purpose" as 
Mr Brown put it, in one of those baffling phrases he is fond of. 
Diaries would have been cleared, banquets organised, the Queen 
standing to attention. Never mind lunch or a 30-minute chat, the 
Obamas could have stayed a week if they chose.

I wonder whether the White House was irritated by No 10's attempts to 
make it sound in advance as though Mr Brown and Mr Obama were somehow 
equals - worse, as if the British Prime Minister was en route to give 
Mr Obama instruction in how to handle the economic crisis.

The shenanigans yesterday dredged up unpleasant memories for Labour 
of another trip to Washington by a party leader, Neil Kinnock, in 
1987. Then, in the run-up to the election, the Labour leader was 
humiliated by Ronald Reagan's failure to spend even the full allotted 
half-hour with him.

But the Obama snub yesterday was arguably worse: Mr Brown is Prime 
Minister, not just leader of the Labour Party. And in 1987, the White 
House snub, including a briefing that undermined Mr Kinnock further, 
was intentional: the President wanted to support Margaret Thatcher by 
making the Labour leader look like a twit. More embarrassingly the 
humiliation of Mr Brown yesterday appeared to be simple carelessness. 
I think unplanned insult is worse.

Like Mr Kinnock in 1987, Mr Brown is now in the run-up to a general 
election. Everything that the Government does from here until the 
poll will be with an eye to judgment day. With the Tories roaring 
into the lead - in the latest polls they have overtaken Labour as the 
party most trusted to handle the economic crisis - at best Labour is 
engaged in damage limitation. At worst, it is engaged in navel-gazing 
and factionalising for the forthcoming leadership contest.

A consensus has emerged that the election will not be held until the 
last possible moment, May or June of next year. But it would be in 
everybody's interests, even Labour's, if it was held much sooner than 
that.

Can the country really bear another 14 months of this? Not even 
ministers are sure they can endure it: one member of the Cabinet told 
me recently that, despite the hell of being in opposition, he could 
hardly wait for the election to get away from the misery and 
directionlessness of the Brown regime: "Gordon doesn't start from a 
position of conviction, he just wants to create dividing lines with 
the Conservatives."

Defeat will only loom larger the longer Mr Brown waits. The Prime 
Minister could even win back a little bit of support by being seen to 
act in the interests of the country and not of himself. For every day 
that passes, ministers sound sillier and more lost, and Labour's 
reputation slips a little further. Harriet Harman's claim last 
weekend that Sir Fred Goodwin would be forced to give up his pension 
was a case in point: it was totally, transparently rubbish. And you 
knew that it was as soon as she had said it.
Is there anything but rubbish left now blowing around Whitehall? 
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, announced yesterday a national 
advertising campaign to raise public awareness of the "policing 
pledge", a list of things that we are entitled to expect from the 
police, such as visible policing and response times, and how to 
complain if they are not provided them. It's a silly charade of 
accountability. The advert promises that if you text your postcode 
and the word PLEDGE to 66101, you will be sent the phone number of 
your local neighbourhood policing team.

You know a number of things immediately, don't you? The first is that 
the policing pledge will not make a scrap of difference to how 
quickly the police answer, or fail to answer, your call. The second 
is that that the text service will not work. To save you checking, I 
tried it, and was sent a text message in response telling me that I 
had a voicemail message that turned out not to exist.

It's a minor example but this is happening day in, day out and we are 
paying for it: wasteful (£3.5million, that policing pledge campaign) 
and incompetent government that substitutes stunts for action. Why 
attack Sir Fred's £16million pension when the Government has done 
nothing to tackle the estimated £900 billion cost of public sector 
pensions - or even tell us the true size of that liability, which it 
no longer publishes?

If this administration is bereft of ideas and paralysed by fear, it 
is also cloaked in dishonesty. Ministers scratching their heads at 
the failure of consumer confidence to rally behind their financial 
bailouts must realise that the voters do not trust them, and 
therefore they will not start to spend.

Nothing will get better on Mr Brown's watch. Not even with the Pope 
on his side. Not even if he visits Mr Obama every week. Not even with 
a "partnership of purpose". We need an election.
==================AND-------->
2. Government by vendetta: I remember it well
Labour has been guilty of rewriting the law to punish 'enemies of the 
State'. Now it's happening again with Sir Fred Goodwin

Tom Winsor

Today Sir Fred Goodwin is perhaps the most vilified man in Britain, 
in the light of his refusal to give up any of his £690,000 annual 
pension from the Royal Bank of Scotland. His defenders are mute, and 
I am not one of them. But the implications of what ministers may now 
do about this could inflict enormous harm on the British economy, a 
zillion times greater than Sir Fred's £16 million pension pot.

The Government is furious that the former chief executive of RBS 
almost certainly has a rock-solid contractual right to the money. The 
Prime Minister has been harrumphing about taking legal advice on a 
possible clawback, and Harriet Harman, a former law officer who 
should know better, has said that it will not stand. Old Labour 
warhorses are saying that ministers should use their majority 
shareholding to direct the RBS board to break Sir Fred's severance 
contract. The media is hot with the notion of a special Act of 
Parliament to extinguish his contractual rights.

Unless it has the effect of persuading the man voluntarily to give up 
the money, this is all dangerous sabre-rattling. Ministers cannot 
direct RBS to break this contract. The Government is obliged to 
uphold the law, including the law of contract, and the RBS board 
would be perfectly entitled to refuse to comply. Even if the bank 
were to withhold the money, its former chief executive could sue and 
would win. Contracts are binding on the parties to them, yes, even if 
you are Her Majesty's Government. How inconvenient.

Legislating wouldn't work either. The European Convention on Human 
Rights says that a state cannot expropriate private property without 
paying adequate compensation. Even if a British court were to enforce 
this special legislation, Sir Fred would win in Strasbourg.

Trying to legislate to annul an inconvenient contract binding on the 
State (or a state-owned bank) would do massive harm to Britain. What 
company in its right mind would place reliance on a contract with a 
Government that is prepared, after the contract has been signed, to 
use its legislative pen to strike out the clauses it later decides 
that it doesn't like? If we go down this route we get close to the 
status of developing countries, such as as former Soviet republics, 
where foreign private companies need special protection against 
political interference in their contracts with host governments. 
Their technique is usually to set up enforcement of the contract in a 
neutral third country, with direct recourse against the foreign-held 
assets of the state in question. Is that really where the British 
Government wants to take us?

Unfortunately, the present Government has form. In 2001, the 
Government's No1 hate figure then was Railtrack. Ministers decided it 
had to be taken out, and a cunning plan was devised in the Treasury 
to euthanase the company and get its assets for nothing. To do this, 
in the words of Mr Brown's closest adviser then, Shriti (now 
Baroness) Vadera, they decided to "engineer the solution through 
insolvency". If they could persuade the High Court that Railtrack was 
insolvent, the plan would work.

But Railtrack was not insolvent, because of indemnity clauses in 
franchise contracts between the State and the private railway 
companies. Those companies had separate contracts with Railtrack, 
under which they paid track access charges. If the politically 
independent Rail Regulator increased the sums the franchisees paid 
Railtrack, they had back-to-back contractual rights to get the extra 
money from the State. Very awkward.

Ministers knew that if they simply refused to pay, the franchisees 
would sue and win. And so the Government decided that it would 
neutralise these inconvenient contractual indemnities. Emergency 
legislation was drafted to enable ministers to order the regulator 
not to increase Railtrack's income. The indemnities in the franchises 
would, therefore, never be triggered, and ministers would not have to 
pay out. Railtrack would be bust.

But hold on, the regulator might not acquiesce. The legislation would 
be extremely controversial. It couldn't be passed quickly enough to 
stop him raising Railtrack's charges before the door was bolted. Just 
before the Government revealed this supposed fait accompli to me, 
Shriti Vadera anxiously warned her colleagues that if I were to 
resist, "it could make the compensation claim huge".

When I was told at the very last minute about their great scheme, I 
was struck not only by the fact that the Government was prepared to 
do this, but by the information that it had been cleared by both the 
Prime Minister and the Chancellor.

Despite these very improper threats, I told Railtrack I was prepared 
to use my powers and race the legislation to the finishing post. But 
Railtrack had given up, and didn't fight back. The legislation was 
ready, but it wasn't used. Railtrack regarded the threat of it as 
enough, and went quietly into that long dark night. Threatening 
companies with legislation to extinguish their contractual rights was 
obviously a desperately clever thing, and it was kept for the next 
time some enemy of the State with an inconvenient contract had to be 
dealt with.

On October 24, 2005, having repeatedly insisted that the independence 
of the economic regulator for the railways was sacrosanct, Alistair 
Darling tabled a Commons motion congratulating the Government on the 
legislative threats it had made to me. So now we know what he thinks 
of contracts that government later wishes it hadn't signed. The 
damage caused by the Government's handling of Railtrack was severe, 
and it took years for confidence to recover.

If Ms Harman's harangues are to be translated into special 
legislation to reduce the value of one wealthy banker's severance 
contract in an act of political vengeance, we will revisit the place 
of Third World governments whose promise is suspect. Are the word of 
the State, the sanctity of contract and the rule of law really worth 
so little that they should be undermined in this way to pursue a 
political vendetta? Sir Fred Goodwin can afford to give up the money, 
and perhaps he will, but the British Government will pay an 
exponentially higher price if it tries to legislate it out of his grasp.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Winsor was the Rail Regulator, 1999-2004
Christina
========================
THE GUARDIAN 4.3.09
Brown can again come back from the dead. First, he needs to accept fault
The refusal to take any blame was repeated yesterday at the White 
House. But Labour needs its moment of catharsis

. Jonathan Freedland

While Gordon Brown takes the stage on Capitol Hill today, perhaps 
auditioning for a future role as the head of a new global financial 
institution, some of his colleagues are doing some auditioning of 
their own. I'm told one cabinet minister recently approached a 
leading figure in British business armed with a pressing and personal 
question, one he admitted he wanted to ask before his fellow 
ministers got in ahead of him: "How do I get a job in the private 
sector?"

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Labour spectrum, there's admiring 
chatter about the German left party, Die Linke: perhaps, mutter a 
handful of trade unionists and their allies among the Campaign group 
of MPs, we should think about a new socialist party here too.

The latter proposal has few serious backers: under Westminster's 
first-past-the-post system, such breakaway parties are doomed. But 
what this search for a parachute - whether in the corporate boardroom 
or a leftist groupuscule - tells you is that many in Labour are now 
resigned to defeat in the general election, no more than 15 months 
away. Some in the cabinet go further, convinced that an electoral 
wipeout looms.

It's not just that the polls are gloomy and the economy at such a 
nadir that any government would expect a whipping from the 
electorate. It is rather the conduct of Brown and his lieutenants 
that has these Labourites preparing for opposition.

"There's a big sense of drift," says one former cabinet minister, no 
knee-jerk opponent of Brown's. He cites June's elections for the 
European parliament. He has no doubt that the result will be 
"terrible for us" (and, he worries, good for the BNP), but that is 
not what's getting him down. "There isn't a campaign," he says. 
"There's no sign of anyone doing anything." He's asked his colleagues 
if they are detecting any signs of activity. "No one seems to know 
who's in charge."

All of which might be tolerable if it were obvious that Labour does 
not, under any circumstances, stand a chance of winning a fourth 
term. In 1996 it was probably rational for Conservatives to conclude 
that they were destined for disaster, and that nothing could save 
them. Labour enjoyed a poll lead that was large and sustained; 
Britons seemed to have fallen for Tony Blair, as surveys awarded him 
high marks for trust, respect and even affection.

But the reverse does not hold true today. Yes, the Tories have 
maintained their lead for a long while, but not on a scale that 
guarantees victory. And an uncertainty remains about David Cameron: 
voters seem unsure what he stands for, and questions linger about his 
authenticity (though it has to be said "phoney Tony" faced similar 
doubts).

What's more, Brown, so badly in the doldrums last summer, was given 
what every ailing politician yearns for: a second chance. Then, the 
conventional wisdom said that "barring an earthquake, David Cameron 
will be Britain's next prime minister". Well, the earthquake came, an 
event so massive it razed the political landscape, allowing Brown to 
start as if from scratch. The financial crisis let Labour climb back 
into contention, a surge of energy that carried them from September 
to Christmas.

In that period, Brown could play the man of action, the international 
firefighter earning global plaudits for his bold, decisive action to 
rescue the banks. Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel prize for 
economics, asked: "Has Gordon Brown saved the world financial 
system?" The Tories were left floundering, repeatedly changing their 
position, opposing Brown's emergency remedies, leaving themselves 
branded as the "do nothing" party.

But that spurt of activity could only take Labour so far. In the 
Thatcher years ministers would respond to attacks on policy by 
confessing they had not done enough to get their message across. It 
was disingenuous then because those who were protesting understood 
Tory policy all too well: they just didn't like it. And yet today the 
Thatcher-era cliche is true: what Labour is suffering from above all 
is a communication problem.

The individual moves the government is making to cope with the 
financial crisis are, judged one by one, probably sound: Alistair 
Darling's asset protection scheme, for instance, seems a wise 
alternative to the creation of a "toxic bank" to mop up bad debts. [I 
part company with the journalist's economic intelligence here.  
Almost all that is being done postpones the day of recovery and makes 
the task of that recovery infinitely more painful -cs]  "But all this 
appears as initiative-itis," says Jon Cruddas, the former deputy 
leadership candidate rapidly emerging as the leader of Labour's soft 
left, "unless it's wrapped in a narrative about how we got here and 
how we get out."

Impeccably Blairite ministers offer a similar diagnosis. 
"Hyperactivity is less important than telling a story," says one. 
This, surely, is what Brown has to do. He needs to persuade voters to 
see beyond the mind-boggling numbers that surface each day and offer 
an account of what he is doing to steer us through the storm. It 
could be a televised address to the nation, using the visual grammar 
of wartime: my fellow Britons, we all know this is a dark moment - 
but it will end.

There is one passage, however, such a speech would have to include. 
It is the passage that would stick in Brown's throat. Indeed, it 
already has. It is the paragraph in which the prime minister admits 
that this crisis did not land like an asteroid from outer space but 
was man-made - and that he, as chancellor, was among the men who made 
it.

It needn't be a sackcloth and ashes apology but an admission that the 
entire political and financial establishment erred when it believed 
in the infallibility of the market, and that New Labour's love affair 
with the City was part of that error.

Brown needn't make this all about him; there is plenty of blame to 
spread around. Indeed, he could use his speech before Congress today 
to turn a mea culpa into a nostra culpa, emphasising that London and 
Wall Street marched down this dead end together.

But so far Brown is struggling to find the right way to say it. As he 
sat with Barack Obama in the Oval Office yesterday, the BBC's Nick 
Robinson invited him to apologise: he declined. Darling's call for 
"humility" on Monday struck a fellow minister as "looking weak". 
There's no need to "commit political hari-kiri", this cabinet 
colleague told me. Better to be specific, he said, admit Labour's 
regulation of finance was not tough enough - and move on. However 
it's phrased, such a moment has to come. It will be cathartic when it 
does - and Labour won't get a hearing if it doesn't.

If anyone doubts whether it's worth it, they should talk to Cameron's 
shadow cabinet. That smarter members of that group can make a 
compelling case for why the next election is wide open. First, they 
say, it is surely a centre-left moment when untamed markets are the 
problem and active government hailed as the solution. Second, Cameron 
does not like being forced to talk economics. "He preferred 
discussing health or schools, to show he was a different kind of 
Tory." This crisis has shoved him right back into his discomfort 
zone.  [THIS is very true -cs]

But most important, says a leading shadow minister, "Brown has proved 
that he can come back from the dead once. He can do it again."

That's what thoughtful Tories believe. Now the prime minister has to 
tell a story that makes his own party believe it too.