Today it has been announced that Harrow Council (London) has dropped a Court case being brought against a mother who tried to get her child into a popular school by allegedly falsifying information (she claimed to be living at her mother’s which was in the School catchment area, rather than her family home, which wasn’t). The Council has called on the Government to amend the Fraud Act to allow such prosecutions. Continue reading “Rights and Responsibilities: the law and education”
Category: Politics
Building Britain’s Future II: the detail (well, some of it)
So, now we have the detail of the new “entitlements” approach – well, sort of. The government have published ‘Building Britain’s Future’ but frankly we’re not much more enlightened than we were before. Continue reading “Building Britain’s Future II: the detail (well, some of it)”
‘Building Britain’s Future’ or Forward to the Past?
A new Prime Minister takes over towards the end of a long period of his party being in power. He replaces a charismatic and controversial, but highly successful in electoral terms, predecessor. His government is becoming increasingly unpopular and an election is looming. What new policy wheeze can he come up with on public services to capture the public imagination? How about promising the public that public services will be made to set out exactly what standards of service they will offer and then giving the public rights to demand these standards are met? Continue reading “‘Building Britain’s Future’ or Forward to the Past?”
POLICY-MAKING CAPABILITY IN UK GOVERNMENT – A CHANCE TO HAVE YOUR SAY
Probably the most important role of Whitehall departments is giving policy advice to Ministers. It is therefore curious that policy-making did not figure directly in the Capability Reviews that central government departments have been going through in the past few years. Continue reading “POLICY-MAKING CAPABILITY IN UK GOVERNMENT – A CHANCE TO HAVE YOUR SAY”
Breakfast with Brown: What Should The Government Do?
After attending the Prime Ministers breakfast seminar in No. 10 on the future of public services my overwhelming feeling was that the government is still in thrall to the tyranny of the new. An underlying theme was that they needed something ‘new’ to offer. Continue reading “Breakfast with Brown: What Should The Government Do?”
Doing the BIS: Lord Mandelson’s New Empire
The two-year-old Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) has been merged with the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) to create a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS or is it just BIS?). Continue reading “Doing the BIS: Lord Mandelson’s New Empire”
Taking Dave Seriously
David Cameron’s rhetoric on reforming Westminster sounds great, but a dissection of his policies reveals a lack of substance. Instead of being an enemy of democracy, bureaucracy remains an essential friend. See Public Finance for the rest…
Breakfast with the PM – but who will it be?
Next Thursday morning (11th June) I am supposed to be attending a breakfast seminar in 10 Downing St. “hosted” by the Prime Minister on the future of public services – and I’m left wondering after the last 24 hours – which PM will it be?
This is supposed to be a blog-site about Whitehall (public administration) rather than Westminster (politics) but in the circumstances it’s simply impossible to ignore the febrile political situation. I cannot remember such an air of political crisis since the 1970s – for a government to lose 3 Cabinet Ministers in 24 hours is almost unprecedented.
One has to feel that we are faced with what the Americans say: “what goes around comes around”. Gordon Brown spent a decade undermining Tony Blair as PM and licensing his coterie to spin against him. Is it really a surprise that regicide breeds regicide – have none of these people read Macbeth?
Brown’s hubris has been of epic proportions. His claims to have abolished “boom and bust” suggests that although he apparently has a gargantuan understanding of economics, actually his grasp of the basics is pretty weak – capitalism has always had, and always will have, booms and busts. These may be ameliorated by policy decisions, but the idea that boom and bust can be abolished is cloud-cuckoo land.
His lavish, almost slavish, praise of the City of London during the “irrational exuberance” of the financial boom and championing of weak regulation in favour of financial innovation has proved to be disastrous. That he has been reasonably adept at preventing a total financial meltdown is a bit like an arsonist who is also a fire-fighter claiming to have ‘saved’ something they set on fire in the first place.
Whether Brown goes or stays, the danger in the present situation is we are going to end up having a completely dishonest general election in which the real issues are sidelined whilst a set of essentially peripheral issues are put centre stage. Reform of the political system; reform of our economic system; reform of public services and tax and spend; international policy (EU; Iraq; Afghanistan; Iran; etc) – these are the central issues but there is a real danger these will be sidelined by political Labour in-fighting and the moats and Tudor beams of MPs expenses.
Policy Hub (UK)
For those of you who have not seen it, the UK National School of Government’s ‘Policy Hub‘ is a useful resource.
The Death of Strategy in British Government
A flagship policy of the New Labour government was that it would introduce greater stability – no more ‘boom and bust’ as Gordon Brown loudly and frequently boasted.
A key component of this approach was more a ‘strategic’ approach to public spending – embedded in the new 3-year ‘Comprehensive Spending Review’ (CSR) process first announced in 1998. Continue reading “The Death of Strategy in British Government”
Colin Talbot - my blog 