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current affairs

The bank bailouts were a rotten attempt at appeasement

As the stockmarkets go on a rollercoaster, and the US squeaks past a technical debt default, the world feels like an uncertain place. There are many difficult decisions ahead, but also some of the choices before national leaders seem pretty stark and obvious.

Using ‘the deficit’ as a reason to impose ideological cuts was a choice taken by the Conservative and LibDem coalition. They’ve had plenty of opportunities to re-consider, including the awful spectre of serious rioting in our capital.

There’s no excuse to go on the rampage, looting or arson. But growing inequality, declining social cohesion and fewer opportunities for many are known to have a devastating impact on communities. How many people with hope, with prospects of a decent job, go out rioting?

Perhaps cyncism over politics, such as Blair ignoring the massive Iraq peace marches, has accelerated the move in some minds from peaceful protest to more radical action. But rioting and direct action are not the same thing. There are motivations at work but there’s palpable anger at hand over inherent unfairness in the current system. Similar violent outbursts occurred in deprived parts of France but similarities drawn are at best inconclusive. Many argue there was little politics in these riots, just consumerism. Perhaps, but that has political ramifications too.

The situation, put simply, is this: The economy is weak, our education system is not fit for purpose, those who complete a degree find it won’t necessarily get them a good job and meanwhile we are vulnerable to rising energy costs as well as a massively indebted Western world.

In this context the bailouts of the banks, and the financial system as a whole, was in my view no better than appeasement in the worst sense of the 1938 Chamberlain-Hitler Munich Agreement.

Of course there were no painless choices, then as now. Politicians faced a set of bad-looking options. I can see why Brown and Darling in 2008 were desperate to avoid having to explain why savers and investors were suffering for the failings of banks.

But… are we really any better off now? We still see questions being raised about the financial viability of not just banks now, but whole countries. The system has not been fundamentally fixed, it just continues to unravel. How could it be different?

In the UK a Green-led action plan to right things would be:

  1. Reverse reductions to key areas of government spending including Police, NHS and local government.
  2. Close tax loopholes, clamp down on tax avoidance and ensure highest earners pay their fare share.
  3. Redirect massive government funding from defence and road building to preparing the UK for a carbon-free future: Wind power, electric trains & cars and a huge programme of energy efficiency for homes as well as offices. This will create jobs and skills.
  4. Reform the local tax system to use land value tax which encourages efficient land use and bringing empty properties into use. This will help to rebalance the UK’s runaway property market.
  5. Regulate banks far more strictly in terms of their risk exposure, how they lend and push for a ‘Tobin Tax’ on currency speculation transactions.

Those five points won’t right all wrongs, but will get us moving in the right direction.

At the moment much of the current government’s actions are taking us backwards, away from a better society and reducing our readiness to face the challenges we know are ahead.

Quality of life matters. I don’t think our current national political leaders are looking far enough ahead to fix what’s broken.

There’s lots of work to do and debating water cannons does not get us to where we need to be.

Categories
notes from JK

Letter in response to budget queries

I submitted this letter to The Argus in response to this spread of letters on the budget process. Unfortunately The Argus haven’t yet chosen to publish it, so here it is:

Sir,

How quick the Conservative and Labour councillors are to criticise, yet it is both their parties who argue the devastating budget cuts being imposed on us are necessary. Greens disagree and we are campaigning hard to change national policies which will harm the poorest and most vulnerable residents of our city. We face a 33% cut in the council’s formula grant over 4 years.

Conservatives are being disingenuous in claiming they had no plans for a 2.5% council tax increase. On 17th February 2011 the Conservative administration’s cabinet voted for a Medium Term Financial Strategy which included a 2.5% council tax increase for the next three financial years. Will Jan Young and Cllr Ann Norman withdraw their statements to the contrary?

Let’s be clear, the discussion currently underway is about the next council budget for the financial year 2012/13. It is highly misleading to suggest the underspend from the last financial year (2010/11), which in their dying days Conservatives had already programmed into the current year’s budget (2011/12), should have anything to do with the next year (2012/13)!

It will be up to all councillors to vote on what the next budget will be, including council tax. We understand the challenge everyone’s finances are facing: We are being careful with every penny. The proposed 3.5% increase is below inflation and will cost a Band D taxpayer 85p more a week compared with this year’s tax rate. Meanwhile the council needs to reduce its spend by up to 15% in the next two years.

Our whole budget approach will be to face that challenge in the most open, inclusive and sensitive way possible. I encourage all The Argus’ readers to participate in the consultation process when it starts later this year.

Sincerely,
Cllr Jason Kitcat
Green Cabinet member for Finance & Central Services
Brighton & Hove City Council

UPDATE: The Argus have now published the letter.

Categories
voting

UK’s central database of electors cancelled

The Cabinet Office today announced what has been pretty obvious for some years. The Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE) project is dead.

In some respects this project, previously known as LASER, was a classic government centralised database nightmare. At one point its business case depended on sales to marketing companies, but a legal challenge put an end to that (see for example page iv of this PDF), resulting in a complete rethink.

The risk of an online central database was not just of our privacy and error, but that this would become a convenient starting point for the slippery slope to online voting or an ID cards database.

On the positive side some of the work necessary would improve and standardise electoral registers across the country, potentially helping to reduce fraud and error – particularly multiple registrations and failure to notify when moving.

In my view the risks and costs outweighed the benefits. But even with CORE confirmed dead, we should still aim to standardise and improve the UK’s electoral registers, including through the use of Election Markup Language.

Categories
notes from JK

The truth is out there: Debating the council budget

The response from the opposition parties to our budget process proposals and associated press release has been… interesting.

Firstly the Conservatives have been denying they ever planned 2.5% increases in council tax. They’re now claiming they probably would have continued with a council tax freeze. This is not only financially improbable given the 33% cuts to Brighton & Hove City Council’s formula grant funding imposed by central government, but it isn’t true.

At a Cabinet Meeting on 17th February 2011 the Conservative administration approved a report which explicitly included plans for a 2.5% council tax increase from 2012/13 through to 2014/15. Noting this plan was part of recommendation 2 of the report they all voted for, details are online here. Will they retract their claims to the contrary?

Two other points the Conservatives are making also deserve clarification. They make much of the £2.5m underspend delivered in the year 2010/11. However this money isn’t just sitting in a slush fund waiting to be spent. Much of it was allocated by the Conservative administration in the 2011/12 budget before they lost power. What is left of it is there to deal with the risks involved in the huge changes and funding reductions we have to face in the current budget year. That historical, one-off, underspend has essentially no significant bearing on planning for next year’s budget to cover 2012/13.

Tories also are making noise about how much the council spends on funding Union representatives. Yet they were the ones who increased the funding (reasonably in my view) to support work on ‘Single Status’. This was a complex and fraught issue to resolve historical and current pay disparities between male and female employees doing similar roles. There are still a few matters to resolve in that area but any administration would need to have reviewed the union and HR provisions as this work wrapped up. What is notable is that the Green administration have chosen to be more open in spelling out those funding streams, whilst the Tories buried them in the whole HR budget pot.

Meanwhile Labour are banging a drum about how we have broken our supposed pledge to “resist all cuts” by even planning to deal with the imposed service reductions. We are strongly challenging government’s policies and we are the only party locally to be opposing the consensus that the cuts are necessary. However we recognise that central government can force certain things on us, so we did not pledge to “resist all cuts” – I’ve checked every Green leaflet I have a copy of, as well as our web site – as far as I can see we never said “resist all cuts”. Will Labour, specifically Cllr Gill Mitchell who keeps repeating the line “resist all cuts”, either show us the Green leaflet they are quoting or retract their statements?

What Greens did say was that we would “resist, to the greatest extent possible, the service cuts and privatisation imposed [on us]”. And we will…

UPDATE: Labour are also claiming we pledged to “stop the cuts” in a Huffington Post blog, again we never pledged that. I have checked all our publications and our website, the only time that term arises is in relation to the “Stop the Cuts coalition” who we worked with and our attending a “Stop the Cuts” march. Our manifesto is online Labour, so pick something that was actually in it to bash us with!

Categories
notes from JK

The Case for Working with Your Hands

“We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power, with such devices as the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial functions. But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed).”

 

That is Matthew Crawford’s concise, and devastatingly accurate conclusion. There’s more in his final chapter, but these few lines are the inevitable climax of his warm and cleverly argued book “The Case for Working with Your Hands”, published in the USA as “Shop Class As Soulcraft”.

Crawford’s book ranges from childhood memories, motorcycle repair to philosophy. In retelling his own unconventional career, Crawford examines what Taylorism and now the ‘knowledge economy’ have done to working people.

He draws interesting comparisons between managers lost in a world of unmeasurable, soft tasks and tradesmen who can clearly see when their work is ‘good’ and when repairs actually fix something. Out of necessity generalisations must be used, but certainly there is some large kernels of truth in Crawford’s reflections.

When someone feels in command of their trade, there is an inherent satisfaction in their work being completed: The motorbike is fixed, the lights are working in the room that has been wired. Or, as I saw in Berlin last week where bartenders took great pride in their work, the drink has been served correctly.

Throughout my working life I have felt a deep sense of unease about corporate life. From my earliest work experience in the banks of the City of London there has been a sense that office work could be somehow dehumanising. This is not to point the finger at any specific employer, or colleagues, because most were undoubtedly kind. But there is a systemic issue in how the layers of corporate power affect the average office worker. Matthew Crawford addresses much of this modern issue.

It’s notable to me that in Brighton & Hove City Council there’s a different feel. Despite being a large organisation with thousands of staff, I think the common theme of public service motivates us all. So while Matthew Crawford’s arguments feel valid in general, a sense of mission can perhaps trump them.

Categories
notes from JK

Towards building the first Green city budget

Building a fair, balanced and progressive budget is one of my key responsibilities. The process for approving that budget has to be as open and inclusive as possible. That’s my personal preference, and also the best way to make decisions on the incredibly difficult choices ahead.

So at next week’s Cabinet meeting I’ll be presenting a report setting out our thinking on the budget process. In summary we’ll be seeking to invite cross-party involvement throughout the process, not just at the end; and we will be reaching out to citizens, unions and the third sector to feed into our thinking too.

We want to give council departments the space for longer term thinking and more sustainable changes than annual ‘salami slicing’ of budgets. So I’ve asked for them to present two year, rather than just annual, spending plans. I’d go for longer if I had greater certainty about what central government will do with our funding in future years.

The previous Conservative administration had budgeted on 2.5% annual council tax increases for the coming years. The Green administration are seeking to move that to 3.5% per annum. This is equivalent to 85p more per week for a band D property. At 3.5% the rate is below all the measures of inflation recorded by the Office for National Statistics.

Greens believe council tax is an unfair tax, but Government does not allow us to use fairer alternatives, such as land value tax. We do not take decisions to raise the tax rate lightly, and we are committed to spending the money raised carefully. That extra 1% will help us to protect key services from the cuts.

Meanwhile the council will be seeking spending savings of up to 15% over the coming two years, while also dealing with significant pressures from increased costs in a number of key services. Our principles in judging how to meet these challenges will be:

  • To prioritise services for the young, elderly and vulnerable
  • To promote efficient use of public money
  • To support partnership working with public, private and third sector organisations

I want to emphasise the importance of the public engaging in this process, as a first step to greater community involvement in budget setting as we begin to pilot more neighbourhood decision-making. I know it’s going to be hard, but I passionately want to see more citizens discussing and understanding the council’s budget.

We also will be seeking to publish carbon budgets of some form. It is early days but, as with our program of public involvement in budget-setting, we hope the carbon budgeting will improve significantly each year.

While we will inevitably disagree on some proposals, I hope all parties will work with us constructively to face the challenge ahead of us. The Coalition government have imposed on Brighton & Hove huge, unnecessary cuts to our funding. All councillors are united in their passion for this city and I hope we can collectively move from tribalism to constructive working to come up with the best possible outcomes.

Categories
notes from JK

Meeting with local government ministers Grant Shapps and Greg Clark

This morning I attended a round table discussion with Communities & Local Government Ministers Grant Shapps and Greg Clark. At the meeting were a cross-party mix of councillors and former councillors most of whom had experience of holding an executive portfolio. I believe I was the only Green there, I guess with a month under my belt as Cabinet member for Finance & Central Services I just about qualified!

Grant Shapps asked us what barriers there were to achieving our ambitions in local government. He wanted to brainstorm ideas that his department could help us with.

My input focussed on giving councils more money, using open data to improve partnership working with other public sector agencies and improving support for councillors through childcare and allowance schemes.

Whilst there were quite a few suggestions I strongly disagreed with, for example Tory councillors wanting to reduce pay and conditions for council staff, there was consensus on a few issues. Strongest agreement was on the highly variable quality of councillors with more needing to be done to encourage a diverse, quality set of candidates to serve. Several argued for higher allowances, but Grant Shapps made it clear the government wouldn’t countenance this. He felt councillors should be considered volunteers, more like non-executive directors than chief executives, and that he personally felt even MPs shouldn’t be paid. Which would hark back to the undesirable days of only wealthy aristocrats and merchants playing politics. But at least we know where he stands.

There was also general agreement that lack of money was a problem for councils, though no agreement on why this was or how it should be solved. I also sense some common desire to be rid of council tax and find alternative funding models. But whilst nothing was explicitly ruled out I got the sense from ministers that this was not on the cards. (And no he wouldn’t give Brighton & Hove any more funds, I did ask!)

Shapps recalled my YouTube tribunal case, having tweeted his support when things were getting heated. We agreed the standards regime was sometimes preventing councillors from performing their roles. That regime is soon to go, thankfully.

We spent some time discussing the growing role there could be for local councils in providing leadership, what this meant in terms of planning and the changes to the business rates system of funding. There were also concerns voiced that new bodies like local Police commissioners risk creating bodies of local influence in parallel to councils.

Ministers were clear that there would be no sudden shock changes to council funding when they push ahead with reforming local authority funding through business rates. Grant Shapps was vocal that year one of the new funding regime would be based on existing formula grants so minimal changes to our budgets should be expected. Which is in one sense reassuring but then begs the question of what the point of the reform is?!

All in all a mixed bag of views, but a common sense that local government has huge potential and so should be trusted and empowered by Westminster to do more for local communities.

 

Categories
notes from JK

The first ever Green council cabinet meeting

It wasn’t until I started drafting this post that yesterday’s events really sunk in. Thursday 9th June 2011 saw the UK’s first ever Green-led council start making formal decisions. We had our first cabinet meeting at Hove Town Hall.

The Green administration has been in power for roughly 20 days – the formal transfer didn’t happen until the annual council meeting of 19th May. Still we have managed to push some decisions forward in that time.

I’m especially pleased that we’ve been able to approve installing solar panels on up to 40 council buildings across the city. It’s the largest ever solar project in the city which will save a huge amount of carbon emissions, save energy and create new revenue to help offset the central government cuts to our budgets.

Other positive stories were a new vehicle procurement programme which will save the council money and reduce emissions from our fleet. Work is underway to welcome the Olympic torch to our city. We’re also seeking bidders to bring the vacant listed buildings at Patcham Place back into use. Full details on all the reports and decisions are online.

What several of these reports highlighted to me, especially with my Finance & Central Services portfolio, was the tensions between front and back office. The story of protecting frontline services is not always so clearcut. If our “back office” central services functions didn’t have experts on energy and procurement (for example) we wouldn’t have been able to save or generate money with some of the reports we approved. That money will be put back into services, frontline services. But if we only squeeze “back office” budgets it may be a short term saving for a longer term loss. Yet I don’t want to see frontline services reduced one inch.

What’s the alternative for what seems like a zero sum game at first glance? Twenty-odd days in it feels to me that we need to do things differently, and more efficiently. That can sound trite but it’s true and eminently possible. Look at how some companies such as Dyson or Apple leap over the rest. They’re by no means perfect but they chose to do things a bit differently and we have all benefited from their innovation either directly from the products or how they push others to up their game.

Local government is a different tale altogether – dedicated to service and the public – but that’s not to say we can’t innovate. Let’s see what we – residents, council staff and councillors – can achieve together.

Papers for the Cabinet meeting
Webcast from the Cabinet meeting

Categories
notes from JK

My priorities for finance & central services

I’ve been in post as Cabinet member for Finance & Central Services on Brighton & Hove City Council just over a week. In that time I’ve had to absorb a huge amount of information from the range of areas my portfolio covers and meet some of the officers responsible.

Last Thursday I met most of my heads of departments to introduce myself and set out my key priorities for the portfolio.

I have three top priorities for Finance & Central Services:

  1. Openness & Participation
    I want to push the council to be as open as possible in everything it does, and significantly improve citizen participation in our decision-making.
  2. Excellent Customer Service
    Expectations for customer service are, rightly, higher than ever. I believe the council can rise to the challenge and give our service users excellent customer service. In doing so we won’t just deliver great service, will improve people’s faith in the council.
  3. The Budget
    We need to meet the challenge of the central government funding cuts being imposed on us, whilst staying true to the Green Party’s ambitions and principles. No easy task.

In terms of things I’ll be doing to deliver those principles, the local manifesto is my starting point. This actually surprises some people, but yes party members democratically approved the manifesto and we plan to work to it!

There are already loads of great ideas bouncing around the council offices, and I’ve got plenty of things I’d like to see put in place. We’re going to get stuck in, and I look forward to keeping you updated here on my blog.

Categories
voting

OSCE flag concerns with Estonian e-voting system

Emilis Dambauskas writes:

I have noticed that OSCE published final assessment report for Estonian Parliamentary Elections that happened on 6th March 2011:

http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/estonia/75382

Executive summary states:

Voters could cast their ballots via the Internet during the advance  voting period from 24 February to 2 March. Despite concerns raised by some interlocutors, the OSCE/ODIHR EAM in general found widespread trust in the conduct of the Internet voting by the National Electoral Committee (NEC). However, there is scope for further improvement of the legal framework, oversight and accountability, and some technical aspects of the Internet voting system.

However there are some details which make the situation smell strangely:

(page 11): During the counting, one vote was determined invalid by the vote counting application since it was cast for a candidate who was not on the list in the corresponding constituency. The project manager could not explain how this occurred – the investigation was still ongoing at the time of issuing the report.

A student demonstrated that the client-side voting application “was flawed and could make it possible for a virus to block a vote without the voter knowing that any interference had occurred”:
http://news.err.ee/Politics/bbb598aa-586b-4981-9f7e-88273b5a25c0

The report mentions various other questionable practices by the i-voting vendor (called “project manager”). I want to re-read the report, but it seems like Estonians may have privatized their elections…

Indeed privatisation is another reason to resist the introduction of e-voting, as it is much harder to scrutinise the processes and systems used. Another quote from the report rings alarm bells for me:

The vendor, Cybernetica AS, handed over the internet voting software to the NEC in December 2010. The OSCE/ODIHR [election monitoring mission] was informed that the [privately contracted] project manager was able to update the software of the Internet voting system until right before the elections started, and without a formal consent of the NEC. This was done without any formal procedure or documented acceptance of the software source code by the NEC, which limited the information on which version of the software was ultimately used.

More concerns:

As in previous elections, and despite the recommendation made by the OSCE/ODIHR in 2007, the time of casting a vote was recorded in a log file by the vote storage server along with the personal identification code of the voter. This could potentially allow checking whether the voter re-cast his/her Internet vote, thus circumventing the safeguards in place to protect the freedom of the vote.

…

The project manager accessed the servers for daily data maintenance and backup breaking the security seals and using a data storage medium employed also for other purposes. This practice could potentially have admitted the undetected intrusion of viruses and malicious software.

There were also weak disaster recovery processes in place and source code for the client application (only) could only be inspected after signing a non-disclosure agreement. In other words highly unsatisfactory and if anyone seriously challenged  the results it would be nigh on impossible for the Estonian election commission to prove that no tampering had occurred.

Read the full OSCE report [PDF]