Weblog of a liberal

Letter to the Richmond & Twickenham Times, 17th July 2007

Sir,

I note with interest that your publication was quoted on the back page of the leaflet left by Tories campaigning for the erstwhile leader of the council, Tony Arbour, who is, I understand, hoping that the local voters who so unceremoniously booted him out of office in Richmond will fail to make the same choice when choosing their London Assembly member.

The publication includes a photograph of the upper two thirds of a Richmond & Twickenham Times billboard which says “Richmond Arbour fights…”

Perhaps you might be kind enough to remind us exactly what Mr Arbour was fighting and why he was fighting it?

Many thanks in advance for your clarification.

Yours faithfully,

Cllr George Beevor

Liberal Democrat Councillor for Kew

On-line communities page: www.beevor.oncom.org.uk/

Weblog: http://www.georgebeevor.typepad.co.uk/

If I recall correctly, the truth is that the opponent Cllr Arbour was fighting was the Standards Board for LBRuT, to whom a case had been deferred from the Standards Board for England. Mr Arbour lost this 'fight' and was forced to apologise for divulging figures highly sensitive to the proper tendering process to journalists.

Cameron & Arbour - Happy Bedfellows?

One can not help but question whether or not David Cameron knows he has been photographed with the former leader of Richmond Borough Council, Tony Arbour.

Those of us with a genuine and informed concern for environmental issues have variously laughed, cringed and worried at Cameron’s transparent attempts to flirt with those voters with a green priorities, but to find on the latest campaign literature from Arbour, that Mr Cameron is apparently campaigning alongside the man who banned the very word ‘sustainability’ from an entire borough could only manage mirth!

Perhaps when David Cameron told The Forum Leadership for Sustainable Development Masters that “we need to create sustainability-literate leaders of the future” he had in mind that even the Conservative Party would have to move forward and reject the head in the sand culture of their recent past. What else could he have meant when he pledged that “just as Britain once led the world in industrialisation, I hope that we in the future will lead the world in sustainability?”

Surely being "sustainability-literate" and banning the very breathing of the word "sustainability" are two entirely irreconcilable positions? Can these men really be from the same party and stand on the same ticket?

Of course, in the London Borough of Richmond we are used to the split between national and local Conservatives, indeed the parties bear little relation to each other what so ever, but what worries me, is the question ‘who are the real conservatives’? Is it the likes of former public relations guru David Cameron? Or is it the man who banned sustainability Tony Arbour?

Perhaps the two might care to clarify the issue for us?

I am a wee bit scared

I have never read George Orwell’s 1984 and I suspect that many of those who will make the inevitable comparisons in the light of today’s announcement of proposals to introduce ‘talking CCTV’ wont have done either. This however, ought not to detract from the fact that we are well on the way to sleepwalking into a society which even ten years ago would have seemed the stuff of fantasy, of paranoid novel or at worst a far off second world dictatorship.

As things stand at the moment, very soon I will be followed around London on CCTV. Without any right of reply I can be publicly admonished, by someone I can not see or reason with, for my behaviour. I will be required by the state to carry papers (or a card) to identify myself. 

If the Police suspect me of committing an offence they will be able to prosecute without necessarily referring to the criminal justice system and if I insist on reference to the courts, I may not be entitled to be tried by a jury of my peers.

If I object to this, I can always protest on Whitehall, provided I apply to the police to ask their written permission to do so, however they will not be required to grant any permission or give reasons for their refusal.

My car will have a chip in it that will tell the state where I drive and how fast, although it should be noted that the technology is not that reliable.

Any details that the state gathers, even if they do so under a false premise or even erroneously, the state will record permanently, be that finger prints, DNA or anything else they wish to record.

Now of course my friends tell me that provided I do nothing wrong, I have nothing to fear. Well that is a relief. The same was said years ago about expert witnesses; whilst you can probably only name Sally Clark and Angela Cannings as parents who have suffered from over zealous expert witnesses, the list is, sadly far larger.  It is inevitable in any society that there will occasionally be miscarriages of justice, a hallmark of a truly liberal democracy should surely be that we work to reduce these?

It is a bitter truth, but perhaps inevitable, that where there is a database, there will be misuse. Whether it’s DNA, fingerprints or forensics, there are frequent occurrences where the police have identified a suspect simply from the database and sought to build a case from there. It is a shocking indictment of both the police and the criminal justice system that on occasions, these have led to trials and even convictions (which have subsequently been overturned).

Apologists wave off cases like that of Patrick Malloy with a clichéd ‘oh but it couldn’t happen now’, but it happens all the time, look at Thomas Rooney. The methods may be more subtle and less messy than they might have been in the past, but they are no more valid, no more reliable and no more just.

We need a robust system of justice in this country just as much as we ever did. Our government doesn’t just preach to the world about freedom, liberty and democracy, we invade other sovereign nations with the stated aim of apparently enforcing it [sic]. Yet we strip away at our own freedoms on a false premise that it will make us safer. Under the banner of protecting us from fear, we cast a shroud of fear and suspicion over the entire country. Everyone a suspect. If I feel like this as a white middle class man in Kew, what must a young British Asian Muslim feel? Are we creating an inclusive society? I hardly think so.

A sad irony is that really, we should not be too surprised. The links between New Labour and the authoritarian old Labour left are actually not as great as you might think. When David Blunkett led the self styled ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’ regular letters of congratulation were sent to the leaders of the Soviet Union. There are similar cases across the very heart of New Labour and it’s ‘Third Way’.

As a nation, we are heading into trouble, division and fear. The government now seek to approve past times or ban them. The influence of government over the BBC has never been greater in the post war era, and neither has the politicisation of the police.

Ever since his rise to prominence in the mid nineties, one has always got the impression that Tony Blair was so sure that he was right, that he thought that proving it was a tiresome chore rather than a duty. It was this arrogance that led to the sexing up of the Iraq WMD dossier and an illegal war. Where else can it lead?

If democracy does not rein this in soon, it may be a lot harder to undo the damage that has been done. Fear is a powerful force, but history shows that it has all too rarely never been a force for good. Today you might be able to call me paranoid or melodramatic, let’s hope that if you do, you are right. The country will breathe a huge sigh of relief when Blair goes. I am fearful that we might just end up with more of the same, be it Gordon Brown, John Reid or David Cameron. All of them have publicly supported the assault on freedoms and justice, albeit in deeds but not words in the case of Cameron.

A not terribly well strung together rant about the budget

If you take straight forward cash handouts out of the equation, child poverty has actually got far worse in the last ten years. That is disgusting for any government but surprising too for a Labour one, or at least it should be. The problem is, the labour movement has always been so obsessed with handouts that it has never understood how to really get people out of poverty. Increasing benefit is all well and good but what this budget actually does is decrease the motivation to work. If you are in a position where you could go back to work for a salary of £15k then this budget swings the balance towards staying away from work. If you never enter the labour force, you will never work your way up it onto a better wage.

It is disgusting that my niece is getting a tax hike on her pittance so that Gordon Brown can attempt to bribe me on my decent salary into thinking he is the a great guy to be the next PM. She lives in a rural area with very poor public transport and earns very little as the government has legalised her sub-minimum wage wages as part of a training scheme. The government have continually chipped away at public transport whilst pushing up living costs by continuing to subsidise second home owners coming into the area.

It is clear to me that Gordon Brown's motivation with this change in tax policy is simply to screw the politically disenfranchised generation he has worked so hard to create, in order to feather his bed with the rest of us. It is despicable. But then that is the sort of man he is. His policies have consistently been born out of distaste and disapproval, that, sadly, is why so many who are still in the Labour Party like him.

Raising Aspirations

To watch the speeches of Tony Blair in reaction to the recent shooting of fifteen year old Billy Cox in Clapham bought home just how little Blair understands of the lives of ordinary Londoners. As we all should be, the Primeminister was genuinely shocked and yet one got the impression that those voxpopped to distraction by the media had seen it coming. Shocked certainly, but sadly, not surprised.

Where a government has been in power for ten years, should they not see this sort of thing coming too? What I believe shocked Tony Blair and his government was another very public demonstration that what ever they try to do, gun crime only gets worse.

Like many people in power, Tony simply doesn’t understand why not everything he has done works. Let’s not pretend that any government could rule this sort of thing out. They couldn’t and they should never expect to be able to, but where the New Labour project has failed is in raising aspirations on estates such as North Clapham. All the extra police (although they are really Community Support Officers and not proper Police at all), do not seem to have made a difference.

Way back in 1997 we were promised that New Labour would not just be tough on crime, but they would be tough on the causes of crime. We have seen plenty of inititatives to tackle crime but the aspirations of those in our inner cities seem to be lower than ever. It is hard to fathom, but social mobility is lower in Britain than it has been for decades. How can that be after ten years of continuous Labour government? 

What was the point of ten years of labour government if at the end of it, 70% of Britain’s wealth is now held by 5% of the population? More than at any time in my lifetime.

Where Tony Blair and New Labour deserve credit is the issue of poverty. The huge increase in Gordon Brown’s tax-take has lifted people out of poverty, simply by direct transfer of tax from some to benefits for others.  Indeed such has been the success of New Labour in throwing benefits at the poor that we learn this week that they have entirely overstretched themselves, (well us really) and have little choice but to cut back.

It was always the view of some on the left that to achieve real progress in social equality, a period of high public spending on social security would be required to achieve breathing space, in which time the building blocks could be put in place for a broader based economy of real ‘opportunity for all’.

For the government to have succeeded in this aim, not only would those opportunities have to have been created but they would also have to be appreciated by those that need them most. If we look at the recent trouble spots in London, Peckham, Clapham, Streatham and many others are all within easy commute of what is currently the World’s financial capital, the City of London.

Perhaps it is contrary to popular opinion, but most of the three million jobs in the square mile do not require a university education. There are good jobs with good salaries available on the doorsteps of these communities and yet somehow the youth of this these estates do not see the opportunity and do not seem to be able to break through. Why? Is it race? Is it culture? Why is it that instead of heading across the Thames supplying a much needed boost to London’s labour market, huge swathes of the community see the openings as being for someone else, not for them? Why would so many of the young rather stick to crime and gang culture?

Many will blame the media. Little credit or kudos is given to a good days work for a good days pay. If you can’t be as brilliant as Beckham or as cool as Kate, you might as well just be bad, which lets face it, is far easier to achieve.

Unions too seem to want to poor scorn in the value of work. No matter what the earnings are, they are seemingly not enough and the value of work is constantly called into question, even for what would seem in the real world of the private sector to be really quite reasonable, and certainly provide a better standard of living than many could have dreamed of twenty to twenty five years ago.

Another attack on the value of work of course comes from Gordon Brown himself. Who can forget the election pledge “we wont raise income tax” which was cruelly complied with by a doubling of national insurance. The tax burden on the low paid is ludicrously unfair and must be tackled. In short, we must I increase the real value of work, as well as the perceived value.

The truth is of course, that for someone like me who has been lucky enough to be born into a very secure middle class family and spend my life in areas such as Cornwall, the Cotswolds or Kew, Despite my pretty average qualifications, I don’t really know what makes these communities work and I don’t know why the young feel they are barred from jobs such as mine. I suspect that in this way at least, Tony Blair and I have something very much in common.

This is precisely why we need to empower local communities to find real solutions that work for them. It is perhaps natural for any Labour Party of any generation, to wish to control things from the centre.

Paramount to their self image is the idea that they can create the solutions and any devolution of this is a threat to this. The truth is however, that white middle class men and women in Westminster are not the people to solve the issues, it is simply their job to facilitate local communities to do this for themselves. Well I say simply… 

Surely we need to get into schools and sell the benefits of a good education there. Believe it or not, the purpose of doing well at school is not for the benefit of the school in the league table, not is it to impress Ofsted, yet that is what our school children are faced with. Teachers talk of the pressure put on pupils to do well in SATS tests. This pressure is entirely bogus. The SATS test are not there for the pupils, they do not take the results into the world, but the pressure is passed on to the pupils by the school and it’s teachers because they are required to meet the targets. It seems that a place up the league table is so important that it obscured the very reason the school is really there, to give youngsters the best opportunity of success in life after they leave.

It seems obvious to me, that it would be far easier to engage our young people with their own education, if we were able to communicate that the motivation of the school and of the teachers is to help them achieve, not vice-versa. To do this, we surely must free our teachers of the burocratic millstones they carry as well as the ridiculous amount of testing that has built up to test teachers rather than to help them assess their pupils needs.

Education has always been a political football, it always will be. We will never be more than a couple of years away from the next ‘Great Education Debate’. This government saw very early that if they were to maintain power, they must find a modus operandi where by they could prove themselves successful. They chose targets and statistics. After all, we do live in an accounting age. Sadly, the whole point of education is not to prop up the egos of government, real success is probably invisible.

Real success is when someone gets so much out of the start they get from education that they achieve their potential in life. Not just by getting good results or attending university, but by actually being the best adult they can be, the one they really want to be.

This of course, is vitally important across the whole spectrum of society, however it is the only way that we are going to tackle long term poverty and social exclusion. There might not be much of a political prise in that, but there is something far more valuable.

Letter to the Richmond & Twickenham Times

Our local Conservative Party have excelled themselves in the field of historical fantasy recently, by claiming that we had promised not to increase council tax in our 2006 election campaign. Sadly they have a record of this sort of silliness. Here is my letter to the local paper in response.

Sir,

How disappointing to learn the Conservative Party in the borough have learned nothing from their four years running the council, nor from their heavy defeat in May 2006.

Once again they have taken to treating voters like idiots. No wonder voters booted them out at the first opportunity.

The pathetic attempt to re-write history by suggesting that the Liberal Democrats had promised to cut council tax, should, perhaps, not have come as surprise, but it is somewhat offensive to the residents of the borough that the local Tories really believe that if they spout this fiction enough, the voters will be duped. It did not work in 2006 and it will not work now.

Last month, Conservative MP Caroline Spelman attacked the Labour government for forcing councils to raise council tax. This month, local Tories are attacking the Liberal Democrat administration for doing so in Richmond. Is it the case that the party who have turned the split into a performance art, are completely ignoring their leaders desperate plea to the Conservative Councillors Association last week, that they “need to be one party - not separate little parties of MPs, MEPs, peers and councillors.”

There is certainly evidence here to suggest that whilst Mr Cameron’s claim that “councillors sometimes feel ignored by the national party” is probably true, he has failed to spot the fact that the local party are pretty keen on joining the rest of Britain today in ignoring him and his Conservative colleagues at Westminster.

We have seen clearly, that the local Tories are ignoring their own recent history, they are ignoring their own party, they clearly ignored the Liberal manifesto at the last election and now they are ignoring the intelligence of the voters in Richmond-upon-Thames. Those same voters will remember that when the Conservative took control of the borough in 2002, they put up Council Tax by over 15%. They did not do this to improve services; you only have to look at the state they left our secondary schools in to see that, they did it so that they could bribe the electorate with a 0% rise in 2006.

Happily, the voters of Richmond-upon-Thames were not so naive as the Tories thought. Last year they showed that they could not be bribed and would not forget the truth amongst the Tory spin. What a shame that a year down the line, the Conservatives locally have learned nothing. Thank goodness for the intelligence of the electorate in the borough.

Trident - I fear we have got this wrong

John Tricket MP today stated on BBC2s the Politics show that there was no need to replace Trident submarines because both the submarines and the missiles will still be around in up to seventy years time.

Whilst I can broadly support the Labour rebels and most of the content of motion passed at last weekends Liberal Democrat spring conference in Harrogate, I am concerned that those opposed to renewal of the submarines are overlooking the safety and wellbeing of the submariners of the Royal Navy.

Politicians of all sides can, perhaps, be forgiven for being unaware of the enormous physical pressures under which the boats operate, but perhaps less so for not taking into account the pressures on their crew.

The Submariners of the Royal Navy are probably the best sailors in the world. Make no bones about it, I have spoken to some of Britain’s top commandos who have told me flatly that they would not put themselves through the rigours of a submariner. They train even more intensively than their colleagues in the surface fleet and they spend months at a time under the surface without fresh air or daylight.

I am quite sure that most politicians are quite ignorant of the fact that on any patrol, only the skipper and navigation officer are aware of their craft’s whereabouts. Officers and ratings alike are totally cut off from sending any message to family back home for fear of revealing the vessel’s position, not just for a few days or a few weeks, but for over three months at a time.

We can not send these crews to sea in anything other than the best equipment that we can possibly afford. Pressures at the depths in which of SSBNs operate are so intense that the hull is constantly crushed and flexed. As the Russian’s found out to their painfully tragic cost in August 2000. The Kursk was sunk with the loss of 118 men. Boats of this nature have a limited lifespan.

When a submarine goes wrong, there is no escape and as good as no hope of rescue from the current generation of submarines. Whilst submariners are still trained in how to attempt an escape from a submarine in 100ft of water, the Vanguard class can not operate in these shallow waters and it is far more likely that if something should go wrong, it will be at a far, far greater depth.

Whilst at this stage, the oldest of the SSBNs is only fourteen years old, by the time we have designed and built replacements, they will at the outside be at least ten years older. Naval procurement was ever thus and therefore I regret that the claim of a lack of urgency is desperately naïve.

The arguments for and against a strategic nuclear deterrent are many and various, warranting further discussion elsewhere, but whilst ever we accept that we should have this weapon, we owe it to the men who operate the submarines to put their safety and wellbeing at the top of our priorities. Most of us would not be prepared or able to do their job as it is, we have no right to make economies with their lives.

Thumbnail Autobiography

I was elected to represent Kew in May 2006 with 1932 votes. Since then I have combined my work as a ward councillor with a full time career in the London Insurance market, handling marine claims for one of the oldest Lloyds of London brokers.

I was born in Saltash in Cornwall on 10^th May 1979. Although I still have strong links with the Duchy (my parents live Penzance where they run a small business), I was bought up in the Cotswolds and have since had spells living in Sunderland, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Bromley. I moved to Kew in January 2005.

Shortly after the election, I was appointed to the Overview and Scrutiny Committee for Education and Children’s Services. It sounds obvious to say it, but it is a hugely important part of what we do, getting the very best for young people, both in and out of school is a great opportunity to have a genuinely important and positive impact on their lives, a great opportunity and a great responsibility. I was also appointed to the Regulatory Committee.

Prior to being elected I spent three years as a member of the Royal Naval Reserve; I am a member of London Cornish RFC although I am currently playing for Salisbury Barbarian Exiles for the remainder of the 2006/07 season.

My non political passion is sailing and I have a (very) small yacht based in Chichester Harbour.

It is perhaps not surprising that my appointments to outside bodies include the London Reserve Forces & Cadets Association, Countess of Derby Charity, Father Thames Trust, London Youth Games, River Thames Alliance and the Thames Rescue Service.

As my father was chair of what was then South East Cornwall Liberal Party, you could say that I was born both into politics and the old Liberal party. Our house doubled up as local party HQ and early life was punctuated by the comings and going of activists and campaigners, not to mention endless leaflet delivery.

The family dining room was, much to my chagrin, the venue for many of the party meetings and some of it must have sunk in. Although, like my four siblings I resented being banished upstairs, I remember sitting half way up the stairs and listening in.

Like most middle class teenagers, I toyed with many different political ideas, but by the time of the 1997 general election, I was a committed Liberal Democrat. During my student years I was an active member of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Liberal Democrats. In those days we were a minority party on the City Council but we did form a five year plan.

Although I was long since gone, it gave me great pleasure to see that the Liberal Democrats did achieve control of the Council in 2004. Interestingly Greg Stone, who scared the life out of Jim Cousins in what was once the safe Labour seat of Newcastle Central at the 2005 general election, was the candidate in the first election I was involved with on joining in 1998 when he was elected to the City Council. If another general election comes soon, we might well see a Lib Dem in Newcastle Central yet.

On returning south, I lost touch with politics for a number of years, but when a long term back injury forced me to pack in the Royal Naval Reserves in early 2006, I decided to divert my energies back into politics. On a national level I was sick of Tony Blair and New Labour. Angered by the illegal war in Iraq and fearful of the consequences of policies such as ID cards and imprisonment without trial (to name just two),

I also felt that I had a contribution to make on a local level. Kew is a fantastic place in which to live, but there are challenges here as in any ward. Night flights and the expansion of Heathrow Airport have a very real impact on people in the ward. Living on what is basically a muddy peninsular jutting into the Thames, we are at the mercy of local as well as global environmental damage. So many commuters rely on our transport links to London, but both the District Line and the mainline railway services are competing for investment with the rest of the region.

I was selected as a candidate for the Liberal Democrats in 2006 and was elected in May.