And now for the good news

It’s about cancer. Notably the brand spanking new cancer centre in Leeds, keys handed over today and first patients will be in on Christmas eve. Curing cancer is pretty much a good thing in my book.

 

Not a lot else to say. I’ve noticed I’ve been sounding quite grumpy since my defence of Dolly Parton. But the blog is being marked for my journalism course and I’m supposed to do over 400 words per entry. Somehow moaning uses up more words and makes me sound smarter. I could talk about the funding streams for the hospital, or moan that Sheffield hasn’t got one better.

 

Well I’m not that clever. I’m clearly a bad student.

 

Improving cancer treatment is good. And it’s better if people read it.

 

Word count : 126.

Disgusted of Broomhall Park

Perhaps I should declare an interest in this one. This story, from today’s Sheffield Star, features Barry, my parent’s neighbour in the house I grew up in. He’s a reasonable man. But the behaviour his video shows really is constant, and I just wonder if the attitude towards it is misled by the fact that it’s done by University students.

What’s happening is young people bringing chaos and in some cases fear to a residential area. The fact that they are students is neither here nor there. It is a problem to be managed, and increasingly so. It is serious too – my parents have had people coming into the garden, breaking up garden furniture and hitting each other with the pieces while they frantically called the police. The discarded takeaways attract rats and poison local dogs.

It’s great that more and more people are going to University. I went. It must have done me some good. It is without doubt a good thing. Only a small proportion cause this kind of distress, but a small proportion can be quite a large number. Like immigration, we want it and it brings countless long term benefits, but we have to be prepared for the numbers. It’s not unusual to have 30 000 students living in a few square miles. If that was younger kids on an estate they would all have ASBOs. My friend’s elderly parents are one of only three households left on a street otherwise occupied by hundreds of students. They have to put up with the noise, pools of vomit and mattresses left in the street between academic years.

But we seem to do something different with students – they’re a different category neither adult nor child. I lived for a while in Washington DC as a student and it was implicit in what we did and how we lived that we were more children than adults – we were too young to drink (this was in our third year), we shared rooms, the sexes weren’t allowed to mix between set hours, and the atmosphere was more like teenagers having a sleepover than anything else.

The last thing I want is for students to be ‘educated’ on that model, but by segmenting such a large group away from the rest of the world we seem to be encouraging a genuine social problem interfering with the lives of residents. When I was a student (in Leeds) the accommodation for students was largely separated off from the city, and had its own distinct shops, club nights and pubs. The main ‘political’ issue ‘tackled’ by the students was getting a plaque made banning Jack Straw from the Union building.

Sheffield is not like that. Yet. But any number of people needs managing, as does how they interact with the rest of the city. The small minority who make life a misery for residents can’t be allowed to cause a backlash against the considerable benefits they bring, nor can they be allowed to put people off studying for its own sake.

My question is how do we manage alcohol in this situation? The poll on ‘boozenight’ last night suggested people would largely support raising the minimum age for drinking to 21. Having been around people turning 21 in America I cannot quite imagine that that would help. But what should we do? There are deals in bars and shops clearly designed to attract students. If they explicitly targeted football fans or under age drinkers in the same way there would be an outcry.

Why should students be any different?

The twenty year plan

Apologies for the delay between posts. I’ve been in Spain and am technologically not as good as I think I am. Or perhaps municipal Wi-Fi is still a way off.

Found some interesting stuff here concerning ways of boosting turnout in local elections, including the rather eye-catching proposals from the Councillors’ Commission to issue voters with lottery numbers at a polling station to encourage them to turn out and ‘redundancy’ payments for council leaders who lose their seats. This may be eye catching but it would perhaps be a brave man who implements it.

I’m in favour of virtually anything that engages more people in the political process, but I can’t help feeling that the councillors are barking up the wrong tree with some of these. I read this having just come from a seminar about whether the media and politicians treat the public as consumers or citizens. I have spend more hours than I care to think about in persuading people to physically vote, whether by post or in person. It seems to lead active politicians to wonder if the process is hard, and academics to obsess over declining turnout as an example of fractured communities.

These all seem to be missing the point. Voting is all important but it is only a symptom. You can tell this by the difference between the age groups in persuading people to go and vote. You can get older people to say that they are Labour or Conservative etc, and then your job is to get them out to vote. People I meet who are closer to my age (26, for those that don’t know me) tend to say things like ‘I’m not political’ or ‘I don’t follow politics’. I have spoken to plenty of young people who have opinions but express that they do not feel qualified to engage with party politics or voting.

Politics has always been to some degree separated from the rest of public life, and news in particular. I can’t see any evidence that there was a golden age when the public were excited about politics and thought it was all about their lives. Politicians and journalists have both kept this illusion, participating in points scoring and the soap opera of political life.

But perhaps what the low turnout figures show is that we have professionalised politics to such a degree that we are alienating people. Especially when we only communicate within the political bubble. We know that turnout is considerably higher in marginal seats where people are communicated with regularly. Increasingly, my generation of politicians have the opportunity to study politics and work in politics, (becoming part of the political world at a younger age than the previous generations would have done) and we need to be bringing other people in to central and local government if we are going to be in any way relevant.

Perhaps the key point the Councillors’ Commission need to look at is not how to make people physically vote, but how they maintain their relevance. I know some truly excellent councillors and what the good ones all have in common is the ability to lead in their areas, and to be pro-active in what their areas need. Academics can end up obsessing over the meaning of decreasing turnout and the professionalisation of politics, but really the root of the problem is keeping that relevance.

So the suggestion the Councillors’ Commission make which might be on the right track is that councillors should get more help (financial and otherwise) in continuously communicating with people in their area. That’s the only way they can lead, and make local democracy relevant.

It’s also the way for the political parties to fulfil their function of finding a preparing the next generation of politicians, with a mixture of policy expertise and skill in making judgements. Whichever party is running the country in twenty years time, I hope that a good proportion of the cabinet is currently doing something to help them learn these skills, rather than obsessing over the latest intrigues of the political system.

I love Dolly Parton

There, I’ve said it. Probably not the best title for a post, but I’m sure it is at the root of why I am wound up about this, the attempt by an opposition councillor to attack Rotherham council for promoting a new literacy scheme.

Apologies for stating the bleedin’ obvious, but I’d have thought it was a great idea for kids to get a free library of books, and at an early age. Also, it’s a pretty good idea to publicise it, and by getting an international star to come to the Magna centre is about as much publicity as you can get in Rotherham. Even Look Leeds (sorry, North) have ventured south of the M62.

But what’s even more ridiculous about Councillor Mannion’s comments is his implication that Councillors are letting the town down by delaying a council meeting by one hour. Because of course the best way for councillors to improve the town is to spend as much time as is possible sitting in the town hall. I’m sure there is proof of that in election results across the country.

However what really irritates me about this story is the snobbery. It’s not the fact that councillors might miss something because they are off meeting a celebrity. It’s that they are meeting a country music star. For goodness sake she is blond and 5ft 2, how could she be worth meeting. The leader must of course be an idiot if he likes her.

Councillor Mannion is missing the really great thing about Dolly Parton – she combats every type of snobbery. From helping beat literacy problems, which after all is one of the most serious types of social exclusion there is, to not giving a damn what people think of how she dresses, Dolly Parton is a prime example of how idiotic and pervasive snobbery is. She tells a story about when she was young seeing a woman (who she was told was a lady of ill-repute) and loving the way she dressed. Dolly didn’t care what people thought, she thought she looked great and wanted to grow up to look like that.

 

The really worrying thing is that snobbery, whether it’s cultural, aspiration or educational (also at this time of year, just being snotty about other people’s Christmas lights) is that it is one of the means of excluding people which is hardest to combat, and needs to be spoken up against. Even by Dumb Blondes.

 

What’s not to like about Dolly Parton for this? Congratulations to Councillor Stone for liking Dolly Parton, and taking a lead in improving literacy in Rotherham, even if it does mean leaving the town hall now and again.

Party funding or party spending?

This was going to be a piece explaining my experience as a former member of Labour party staff, but I find that Hopi has already done so far more eloquently than me. I’ll just say that the people I worked with went into politics for the best of reasons and maintained their loyalty to the party and its principles even when times were very hard for all of us, and it was very hard to leave those people. I’m sad that they are being used to create a sense of crisis when there are better things we could be thinking and talking about.

These are just my thoughts, probably not very well informed and I’d welcome any comments from people better placed to find solutions to the problems. While this is very important to me, I’m not convinced that people are as concerned about it as the press and politicians in Westminster are, and we need to move on to the things that are so we don’t surrender to a news cycle which will portray a permanent crisis.

It is worth mentioning that without the Labour government passing legislation to monitor donations and to set up an independent body to oversee it none of this would ever have seen the light of day. Likewise, if the Tories could be persuaded to even entertain the idea of spending less, we would be able to sort it out for good.

But there is still a job of work to change the way party finance is viewed, because there is a danger of seeing the issue standing alone. In fact, there is only a problem with how money is raised (whether that problem is real or cosmetic almost doesn’t matter, if it damages trust it damages politics) when that money is essential to keep up with spending. This is related to how the whole organisation works, because it impacts on how we communicate, how we develop policy and how we keep refreshing ourselves to bring through new generations of politicians and opinion formers. These after all are necessary functions of political parties.

The political parties can end up in a chase to do more and more, bigger and bigger things to get attention. The more expensive things are mainly commercial advertising space (billboards, newspaper advertising space etc) and are done on a national basis. The cost of these is prohibitively high for most voluntary organisations. There is an important legal difference between money spent nationally (to put it crudely, it says ‘vote Labour’ without mentioning your local candidate) and that spent locally on candidate-specific materials. There may be nothing we can do about the cost, but if parties worked together I’m sure we could do something about the chase.

For obvious reasons, national spending is high profile and high cost, and if one party falls behind the others it is noticeable. The simple fact of the matter is that it is hard for any party to keep pace with the Tories on this, and no party can dare not to try, even if the benefits of the spending are difficult to quantify. So, most of the attempts to get funds to keep up with the spending are a sticking plaster rather than a solution, so it is no wonder if they are sometimes imperfect.

Political parties need money in order to communicate with voters. I was taught to ask of everything I did as party staff ‘how will this help to win the general election?’ I think this is the same question as ‘Does this help communicate with voters?’ Whether it was a case of me spending money on projects or just my time as a paid employee, I like to think I usually remembered to ask myself this question. Sometimes that meant literally producing leaflets for a candidate or a policy. Sometimes it meant organising a media event or ministerial visit. And sometimes it was about developing and training members to communicate themselves as campaigners and party advocates.

These are the things that party staff want to concentrate on and by and large do so. But there are distractions and frustrations which make demands on the paid organisation that might be better served elsewhere.

The professional staff of the party have made an enormous contribution in the run up to 1997 and since in keeping up with campaign techniques and making sure our messages get out where they need to get out. But there is a danger that this de-skills the activists as campaigners and more importantly as leaders on their own campaigns. This is not always the case, and I know that attempts are being made to reverse the trend, but it needs to be a high priority for the next regime running the organisation.

Some of this is about members themselves and officers in particular, deciding to take a lead and responsibility for local politics. I would estimate that around 80% of the problems in local parties which came through to me were things which officers could resolve on their own, and indeed the party would be stronger if they did. But the organisation sometimes found it hard to encourage that leadership as it weakened our position of influence and would cut us out of the loop of what was happening.

I’ll probably get hung for saying this, but there are some members who seem to think that the party is at best a discussion forum for them. Actually that’s just a small part of it. Being a member of a party committed to social change means taking responsibility for the change the party brings. Yes you state your views. But the most important thing a party does is communicate with the outside world or it can’t change anything. If members are responsible for this, I think this would bring a new perspective to the politics that is fed through to the leadership.

Another factor which takes up a lot of staff time when they would otherwise be communicating with the electorate is their roles as NEC representatives, for example in parliamentary selection procedures. Party staff have had to do this as we are familiar with fairly complex rules as procedures as set by the NEC. But should the NEC itself carry out some of this function? Being out there and among members could strengthen its role and make all members more engaged with the views of members. If not the NEC themselves, then the NEC could presumably find people on Regional Boards or with plenty of party experience to help out.

As well as just freeing up time for voter contact, this will also mean the staff arriving in an area to help are viewed with less suspicion and would be able to develop member skills in a more straightforward way.

The other people of course who need to take on more of a role in the politics of organisation are the elected politicians. Mainly, they are fantastic and hard working and I really mean that. The good politicians are consulting and communicating all the time. But perhaps we need to systematise their role to ensure that all politicians communicate and listen in the way that the best do, so that when elections are called we don’t need a party staff to do all the communication for them.

Again some of this is happening, but I’d welcome anyone’s views about how we keep communicating without spending the sums that the parties are to keep an election machine going. There is no denying we are in a difficult place at the moment, but if we get the changes right, we could improve the politics of the party as well as the organisation. I’m quite prepared to be wrong, but the way party staff are used seems to be crucial to communicating within the party and to the outside world, so maybe we should be a little bit clearer about what we as a party want to use them for.

Platell’s People (Not for the likes of you)

I see that Ms Platell has been using her column in the Daily Hate to pour scorn over Jacqui Smith this week. Particularly she has been labelling her performance as looking like a ‘bog standard comprehensive teacher’. I’ll gloss over the fact that Platell is more concerned with it looking like that than that than about that actually being the case, and move onto the insult itself and how it ties in with the rest of her column.

It just proves that basic snobbery is at the root of the views of a large core of Conservatives in the media and in politics. She is not writing about the education system, so this is not a reasoned argument about the best way to educate kids. She has not chosen to have that discussion. She is simply using the term to denote the kind of person any self-respecting Daily Mail reader should despise. Why should they despise them? The answer is here and in the rest of her column. If she has links to comprehensive schools, she may have become contaminated by the great unwashed, in fact she may even have once been one of them.

Now I am a product of the comprehensive system. By contrast, my mother grew up 30 years before me, passed her 11 plus and was sent on a scholarship to a fee-paying girls school. We both grew up in the same city and were both bright. We got almost exactly the same grades at A-level, and have roughly the same ultimate level of education. But the process of getting there was very different, and is still important.

I mixed with people from all sorts of backgrounds from across the city.My mother mixed with rich girls who had all the accessories you were required to buy in order to mark you out from the scholarship girls, and who participated in the special Prayer’s for the continuation of their way of life following the election of Labour in 1964. I did a wide range of subjects, and while I ended up doing arts subjects I still understand enough science to get by in discussion of it. My mother was forced to choose one or the other at an early stage. Most importantly, I enjoyed school.

Now I accept that comprehensives can’t be the answer to every problem, and in a sense the argument about them has moved on to one of pure delivery rather than the ideology behind them, which is fine by me. But what worries me more is that the experimental nature of comprehensive schooling is repellent to modern conservatives not because of the academic outcomes, but because of the mixing of people and distaste for the people who have to attend them. They all too often fall into the trap of disliking a policy because of a dislike for the people involved, rather than the outcomes in social terms. Perhaps those of us in progressive politics need to be less shy about pointing this out.

Inactive with the activists

Apologies for the lack of posts this week, active with the activists is undergoing a period of inactivity, in fact at the moment perilously like one of those dreadful women who take no exercise. In fact this is due to a lurgy which is not easy to categorise except to say she no longer believes the doctor who told her he had taken her tonsils out. Normal service will resume shortly, with further diatribes on random matters.

How to win friends and influence people

At the risk of offending fans of motor racing, I would like to take issue with Lewis Hamilton. Now I like to see young British sportsmen and women doing well for themselves, whatever the sport. I’m also not completely heartless when it comes to intrusion into the lives of celebrities, so long as they don’t conduct divorce proceedings from the GMTV sofa. But listening to Hamilton explaining his reasons for moving to Switzerland, I am concerned that he is in danger of losing public support.

For one thing, it is reminiscent of the spate of ‘celebrities’ who stated that they would leave the county if Labour got in in 1997. I’m not sure if any of them ever went, but I am pretty sure than none of them enjoys great public affection now. In fact, if we had made our sixth pledge the statement ‘Paul Daniels, Jim Davidson and Phil Collins will all leave the country if Labour is elected’ I wonder if we might have done even better.

I don’t imagine for a moment that this is because people want to defend the party that a great many of them voted for. But by making yourself a tax exile, you cut yourself off from being one of your fans. They all know you are not one of them, even if you have come from the same place they have. It not just draws attention to how rich you are, it also makes you look pretty mean spirited. To do it so soon in your career just looks petty.

The other problem, that could affect the popularity of this promising young man, is that it is highly unlikely to be his idea. 22 year olds seldom have a preoccupation with tax, making him look not just money grabbing but also like something of a brat. This would be really sad, and I can’t help wondering if his success could be found to be pretty hollow if he spends it counting his money in Switzerland.

Also, if anyone has news on why it has taken 10 years for some other celebrities to leave the country, answers on a postcard please.

 

The last Tommy

As a child of the 1980s, with no family history of church attendance, I have always experienced remembrance Sunday through television, and it has always been compelling, the more so as I studied the history of the 20^th century. But the last few years the really interesting thing for me is the accounts of the final veterans still alive. In particular, the fact that Harry Patch, who fought at the Battle of Passchendaele, did not discuss his experience with anyone until he was over 100 years old. He now speaks eloquently, and particularly strikingly about his views and experiences spanning the 20^th Century.

This, along with the campaign from the Royal British Legion campaign to Honour the Covenant between the armed forces and the general public, has led me to think about the other aspects of collective memory that we might be allowing to die out. For instance in Spain, until very recently only a fraction of accounts of the Spanish Civil War have been written by the Spanish themselves, as forgetting was both what people wanted to do and was encouraged by the government. It’s only now as people who were involved are dying out that there is renewed interest in making sure that the war is understood.

It is not just wars where this is the case. It is often only the situation of people in my grandparents generation that is forgotten. Growing up in Sheffield as I child I remember you would often see old and even middle aged men lacking many of their fingers from working in the steelworks, and I remember visiting my great uncle in hospital shortly before he died, and seeing his feet without toes from an accident in the thirties. That generation is dying out, and with them an understanding of the lives that were lived among constant danger, and a reason for representation in the workplace.

So I’m really glad that Harry Patch is becoming, for want of a better word, a celebrity, and that he or whoever is the final serviceman of WW1 to die will be commemorated by the government and the whole country. The government and the press are, I think, doing a great job together here, in keeping that personal history alive. I’d like to hear what anyone thinks about how both could engage more people in promoting understanding of real history before the last witnesses are quite out of reach.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I am Harriet Anderson, a party political activist in northern England and Postgraduate student at the Sheffield University school of Journalism. I have been active in politics since I was 14, and have worked in Westminster, in Washington and most recently for the Labour party. In between I have occasionally had a life, but then a by-election has always come and taken it from me.

 

As this is a crossover between my polemical scrawl and some disciplined commentary, I might as well be open about the underlying assumptions of this blog. For a start, I am sure that politics is the answer. It is the only thing that has intentionally changed the world for the better, because it is in everything people do to relate to each other.

 

But sometimes we forget what it is and how it affects us. It is not what those of us who work in politics do, or what people do only when they are elected to do it. It is everything people do which interacts with their neighbours, wherever they are. It is involved in nearly all the decisions people make, large and small, from what they eat for breakfast and where they buy it to who they mix with, who they decide to marry and what they decide to do with their lives.

 

It’s all politics because it has an impact on other people. It may not all be party politics, but the chances are that at some point a party politician has made a decision that affects it, and they will have been informed in that decision by their general view of how people should relate to each other and what power base should define it. This probably isn’t the temperate language I should be using to describe political activity, perhaps it will put some people off, but we are doing people a disservice if we present politics as an area of life which some people do and others don’t.

 

So this blog will try to emulate some of the best blog writing out there. There are some excellent blogs in politics and by journalists, and I will be linking to those that I think best. Most of my political views will be the same as those of other bloggers, partly because I have a strong belief in party politics and have grown up in the Labour party. But this one has a slant of looking at whether politicians and journalists are, mainly with the best of intentions, boxing themselves off from the people they both need to engage with. I will be commenting on both these areas of public life, but I will also be thinking about how we both need to communicate better to bring people inside the tent. And just so that I am sure it’s really unscientific polemic, I’ll be spending at least one day a week knocking on doors to see what people really think!

 

PRESIDENT BARTLET: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world. Do you know why?”

WILL BAILEY: “It’s the only thing that ever has?”

PRESIDENT BARTLET: “Go figure”.