Nigel Stanley
David Cameron’s speech on quangos clearly wasn’t any kind of bonfire – as many have noticed. But it did have one clear policy commitment – taking strategic policy away from Ofcom to give it to a minister.
There is a debate to be had about accountability and quangos, but if there is one area of policy that needs maximum daylight because of the dangers of ministers doing things in return for political favours it is anything involving media magnates.
Adam Lent
It’s always a fair bet that an opinion-formers’ bandwagon is gathering pace despite all logic when columnists begin to openly contradict themselves in order to jump aboard.
Nigel Stanley
John Denham’s speech and the Fabian/Rowntree research has sparked an interesting debate. Whether this will be any compensation for John, given that he will probably pay a political price for the misrepresentation of his views by the Guardian, is a harder question to answer.
Tim Page
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, they surprise you! This morning’s FT article, ‘Former BP chief says industry can learn from Benn’, nearly had me choking on my cornflakes.
Lord Browne, the former Chief Exec of that company, believes Tony Benn’s work as industry secretary helped in the exploitation of the North Sea oil fields and assisted the UK industry building oil platforms. Such an approach could help to build UK engineering and technology companies today, he opines. Browne goes onto praise Peter Mandelson’s policy of industrial activism, which has some similarities to Benn’s approach of thirty years ago.
Adam Lent
The answer is: yes it can and it just has. Steve Bundred, the head of the Audit Commission, has called today for swingeing cuts across all parts of the public sector including pay while claiming that the only reason politicians won’t commit to a Bundred style austerity programme is because they are running scared of the electorate.
But the article, in which he makes the call, has one gaping hole at its heart – the recession. Nowhere does Bundred even acknowledge let alone analyse the fact that cuts in public services may have a detrimental effect on a very fragile economy which could, in turn, make the state of the public finances even worse.
Nigel Stanley
The Chief Executive of the Audit Commission, Steve Bundred, has called for a freeze in public sector pay. He makes no exception. Those on the lowest pay and those who earned £212,000 in the year to March 2008 (not including £36,000 contribution to a pension scheme with a transfer value of £916,000) should be treated the same.
I’ve read the article carefully, but I can’t find the bit that calls for those earning more than £100,000 a year to make their contribution to closing the deficit by paying more tax.
Owen Tudor
John Lloyd has written in this weekend’s Financial Times that “democracy is in trouble – in some versions terminal trouble”. He cites the disillusionment of UK voters with the expenses scandal, the reluctance of electorates to revolt against Berlusconi and Sarkozy, and, implicit throughout, the way that triangulation and the drive to the centre removes the scope for active politics, offering only a watered-down, lowest common denominator political ‘debate’. This is understandable dismay, but it’s (a) dangerous, and (b) wrong. Arguments that democracy is in trouble are, in essence, anti-democratic.