The independence of the civil service – where did it all go wrong?

Yesterday we learned that the head of the UK's statistics watchdog has written a rebuke to Iain Duncan Smith over his department's handling of statistics in the immigration and benefits issues that Chris Grayling tried to make headway with last week. To those of us who have been following the Welfare Reform bill, and the DWP's attempts to shove it through Parliament, this will come as no surprise. The Department has a policy of deliberate, calculated and persistent misrepresentation of what they are trying to do with the “reform” of benefits. Francesca Martinez's phrase “morally disabled” was never more apt.

Specifically Sir Michael Scholar, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, questioned the way figures on immigrants claiming benefits were released last week, with a pre-release briefing given by ChrisGrayling and Damian Green, making it clear that the release was intended to whip up concern about immigrants taking taxpayers' money, without telling the full story, e.g. that immigrants are half as likely to claim as indigenous Brits.

Acomment piece by Mark Easton adds some context to this:

“The profound concerns of the UK Statistics Authority at this kind of ministerial behaviour are reflected in a lecture Sir Michael gave at Cambridge University last year. "There are strong forces at work," he told his audience at St John's College, "whose natural outcome is, I suggest, to demote rationality, analysis and the pursuit of knowledge within government."

Referring to "a new kind of departmental minister whose consuming interest is in what the next day's press will say", Sir Michael referred to Whitehall's "diminishing interest in analysis and enquiry, and, in the field of government information, a growing interest in the persuasive press release, with its careful selection of facts and numbers, designed to communicate as effectively as possible some predetermined message."

There was a time when we had a civil service that would give independent advice to ministers, including the kind they didn't like to hear. I'm not sure that that makes a great deal of difference to the ministers we have currently at DWP. I think Chris Grayling for one would dump on anybody he could find, regardless of any advice he got. But overall it does make a difference. Today's civil servants are less inclined to stand out for what's right in the face of what is politically expedient. They have been trained to do what the government of the day wants, and thereby I think we have lost something from government. It was not always like this. And I know when it changed.

It was in the first five years of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. Labour did more to bring in “advisers”, but the fundamental move was made by Margaret Thatcher, and it made a massive difference. The department then known as DHSS (Department of health and Social Security, aka Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity, nothing much changes) used to (maybe it still does) run a summer school for non graduate employees who had shown themselves to be potential high fliers. It was held over a week at a Cambridge college. It was organised by an academic with the help of senior civil servants. Lots of academics and lots of senior civil servant attended, gave seminars, took part in question and answer sessions, chatted over meals, and generally gave the participants a magnificent experience of academic analysis and political discourse. They had a habit of inviting a few social workers. The employees were divided into groups for seminar work and each group got a social worker. Very few social workers in those days were interested in welfare rights. I was one of them and I was working in Cambridge at the time when Cambridgeshire were invited to nominate someone so I got to go to it. That was in 1979, after Margaret Thatcher had come to power but before she had had time to have much effect.

That summer school was one of the three best learning experiences of my life. The atmosphere was electric. The academics were people who understood the real world. The civil servants were absolutely top class, bright as buttons, brilliant speakers, knew their stuff backwards and – this is the key thing – were completely honest about the political process and how the wheels of government actually work. I remember in particular two people, an academic and a civil servant, discussing the way new benefits were introduced, telling us what everybody knew but nobody ever confessed to. They got guidelines from the treasury as to how much money they could spend and then crafted the benefit to spend that much money. (Back in those days there was NCIP - Non Contributory Invalidity Pension, and a special one for housewives HNCIP. HNCIP was brought in separately and it tested a woman's ability to do housework as well as ability to work. Yes shot through with sexism etc. They got the calculation wrong however, and the benefit proved to be too successful so the then minister Alf Morris laid amended regulations before Parliament to tighten up who could get it. He laid the regulations before Parliament during the summer recess so Parliament was unable to debate the change. Neat trick. Reminds me of that unsuccessfulbusinessman Lord Freud.)

I lived off that summer school for months. In fact for years. It brought me all sorts of insights at the political level, the social level, the academic level, even the personal level. It was a burst of sunshine in what was then an otherwise quite mundane life. But that was it for 1979. Fast forward five years. By 1984 I had moved to Sussex to continue my career as a social worker. It was East Sussex's turn to nominate a social worker to go to the summer school. East Sussex had as few social workers interested in welfare rights as Cambridgeshire had had. I was asked if I wanted to go. I said yes, of course, but I've already been once, surely somebody else should benefit. “Don't waste my time, you're going”, was the answer.

So I went back to Cambridge with high anticipation. And got one of the biggest disappointments of my life. The college was the same, the participants were the same, the academics were the same. But the civil servants had changed beyond recognition. They had all been got at by Thatcher by that time. Their job was no longer to tell the truth, their job was to defend and justify government policy. And they did it so enthusiastically that nobody dared put a foot wrong. The openness, the intellectual rigour, the brilliant honesty of the 1979 summer school were completely destroyed. There was an atmosphere even of intimidation around. At the 1979 summer school, the participants felt completely able to say provocative things and to ask potentially embarrassing questions. I say “potentially” - none actually was embarrassing because none of the senior civil servants there were afraid to tell the truth. At the 1984 school I heard participants say they weren’t going to say anything out of turn in case it damaged their careers or even possibly them staying in their job. I still got something from that summer school - the academics were just as high calibre. But my chief memory of it is the chill laid over the atmosphere by the attitude of the civil servants.

It was a big lesson to me in two ways. The first is that my business nowadays is, mostly, teaching people. This was the perfect, spine chilling, illustration of how debate and the growth of ideas can be choked at birth by a simple lack of openness, refusal to accept ideas beyond your narrow range of acceptability, and worse active opposition to ideas that don't chime with your own. The second is political. While the civil service still claims, and tries to maintain, some sort of independence from political authority, I have no doubt that the quality of advice that ministers get now is not as good, not as real, not as balanced, and, crucially, nowhere near as innovative as it would be if ministers of successive stripes had not made it clear what they did not want to hear. There is nothing as intellectually stifling as orthodoxy. And in Whitehall nowadays we have a massive orthodoxy in favour of surveillance government and private provision, which serves nobody well apart from politicians and captains of commerce.

As a postscript to the business of creating benefits, I was interested to see Lord Newton of Braintree, who introduced DLA in the 1990s describing the process in exactly the same way. (Look a bit more than halfway down that link.)  “What we did on that occasion was to cobble together a slightly curious construction based on the existing benefits of mobility allowance and attendance allowance using the maximum amount of money I could extract from the Treasury...” I'm sure that they still do it like that today. There's nothing wrong with that process, as long as it is carried out with fairness and with some intellectual rigour. What is wrong with the current process is that it is being carried through with secrecy, lies and deceit, and its purpose is to save money regardless of who suffers, and to create profit for a private company, again regardless of who suffers.

Spartacus – what next?

How best to help people make their circumstances known
There is still a campaign to run and there are things we can still win and things we can avoid losing.

Lord Freud made a number of concessions last night, and technically he must hold himself to those. But we know already that he is a master tactician and will use any means he can to get his way. I expect no less of the rest of the DWP. I'm not by any means an expert on Parliamentary procedure but I know enough to know that there are many ways to abide by the letter of the agreement but not its spirit. For instance, it is possible to lay regulations before Parliament when Parliament is not sitting. Thereby any possible debate on the regulations is avoided.

Who's with us?
Labour were in power till May 2010. Labour were responsible for the bankers contract with ATOS (whereby ATOS, like bankers, get rewarded whether they get things right or not). This government has continued and endorsed that contract. Labour started, albeit ineffectually, the strategy of identifying IB claimants as illegitimate and getting them back onto cheaper benefits. But we don't get anywhere by blaming Labour for what they did then. They are in opposition now. It is their job to hold the government to scrutiny, and they are doing that job. (You can argue about their effectiveness.) In my case I will be allying myself with my opposition, while still working within the ranks of my own party to secure a better deal for disabled people. I think, by the way, that this is part of a longer and wider campaign. The DWP has declared war on benefits. Their tactics are underhand, their morals odious, the links with UNUM which they refuse to divulge are – well, let's just say, dubious. It's no coincidence that while the Lords were trying to defend the livelihoods of disabled people, UNUM were advertising their insurance schemes on TV.

What do we do?
As I said, there are things we can win and things we can avoid losing. We know we have a deadline for consultation on PIP. We must work to that deadline. That involves starting as soon as possible and doing the following.

We should encourage as many people as possible to respond with individual accounts.
We have to be sensitive to what people are capable of doing, but I think that what is most useful at this stage is not statements of disagreement (which the DWP will just discount) but detailed statements about the effect the proposed arrangements for PIP will have. Template letters as such are a bone of contention. The DWP has admitted that they ignored the 2500 template letters they received. So would I. You don't measure template letters by the individual sentiment, you measure them by volume. If the DWP had received 100,000 template letters, they would have thought more. So the template letter as such may still have a role to play.

What might be more useful is a to offer people a template process. Disabled people should respond to the PIP consultation with the following:

a) an account of their disability and the effect it has on their life
b) if they have a fluctuating condition, an account of what they're like when high and low
c) their own assessment of what benefit they would get under the published PIP rules
d) a statement as to whether they would lose money and how much
e) a statement of the effect that would have – as specific as possible - what activities they would lose (in particular whether giving up - work might be forced on them), what opportunities they would have to forgo, exactly how their life would be made more difficult or more miserable.

The aim in my mind is to destroy the DWP's rationale that they will concentrate the benefit on what they call the most needy. If we can demonstrate with account after account that the 500,000 they plan to deny benefits are just as needy as the others, then their rationale disappears.

Anyone who does submit evidence should be encouraged to copy the evidence to their MP, thus building up a head of pressure.  Any action that results is likely to be behind the scenes as much as in front. We saw that in action last night. Officially the DWP won the debate. But they had been frightened enough by the reaction and the publicity that Spartacus gained to make a number of mollifying moves in order to head off rebellion. If we apply enough pressure, if we have enough MPs whispering, look this is a bit much, then the same sort of thing will happen again. The DWP will claim massive support for the proposed measures while quietly amending them in our direction.

People who submit evidence should also be encouraged to copy it to Spartacus – for which Spartacus will need a central collection point. The aim of this is not only so that we can see what is happening, but so that we are ready to contest any claims the DWP might make that the consultation was overwhelmingly in favour of the proposals. The figures will not add up, but if DWP say they've got 80% approval from 5000 submissions, and we say, well, we've got 95% disapproval from the 2000 we know about, then they'll be in difficulties.


Timetable
We need a timetable, to work backwards from the 15 week deadline.
Last date for submission of responses
Deadline for preparing a report on our experience of the consultation process
Deadline for preparing press releases – calculating when the most effective day to release them is: it's not a day before the end ot the consultation. (I'm not criticising what has been done – I think it's great that so much was achieved, and with such effect. I just think there are things we can improve.)

Collation
Will somebody have the time, I would say around week 10, to collate the responses we see and pull out general points which can form the basis of a sort of meta-submission, or a press release?

Other issues
List the journalists who gave us favourable coverage and keep them informed of developments. We don't need to bombard them with details, but a note or two with case studies and actions so far keeps us in their mind.

The press release I saw about the original Spartacus report was great, but it was far too long. The DWP has become expert at writing press releases in such a way that its favourite tabloids can just lift the copy straight out of the press release onto the page, preferably with headline. We need to do the same. Write the press release they way you expect the paper to write it. Supporting documentation goes in notes or on web pages to which the press release gives links.

I have other ideas but I think that will do for now.

Back to the 80s: #spartacusreport

Reading Responsible Reform today was like going back to the 80s, to the days when the government did its best to give a kicking to any poor, marginalised people it could think of (think Norman Tebbit). I have felt until now that this government is better than that, particularly with the LibDems in it to curb the worst excesses of right wing fervour. In some ways we have been pretty successful at that. We have won some and we have lost some. Unfortunately for some of the most marginalised people in the country, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has been one place where we have failed – and it is becoming apparent that we have failed badly.

Partly the bad news emerging from the DWP is made worse by the fact that Iain Duncan Smith is in charge. Rightly or wrongly I have always felt that, although he's very right wing, he is a fundamentally decent man, and unlikely to emulate the worst habits of some of his predecessors. But that view is being rudely disturbed by the antics of his department.

For the entire length of this government Mr Duncan Smith and his department have been repeating that work is better than welfare, and that people who are in work are happier and healthier as well as better off than if they are on welfare. Nobody really disputes that. But they seem determined to make everyone work whether they are capable of it or not. And they also seem to think that the way to get people into work is to take their benefits away. (And that is even more remarkably silly when there is no work to be had.)

But the rhetoric has gradually (or perhaps not so gradually) shifted into a campaign of demonisation. People who cannot work are being labelled as scroungers. The language of the media and the language of politics has shifted subtly but definitely into a language of hatred. And the effects of this are evident in people's behaviour. Scope's press release last May “Deteriorating attitudes towards disabled people” shows that public attitudes to disabled people have worsened and even become more violent in recent times.

Not so long ago the DWP were roundly criticised by the Work And Pensions Committee for issuing misleading press releases which emphasised the number of people being found fit for work in Work Capability Assessments, despite the overall figures showing increasing numbers of people being found eligible for support and not for work. Mr Duncan Smith appeared to be quite unapologetic about effectively writing the Daily Mail's news items for it. He and his ministers claim that they can't be held responsible for what the press write – yes they can, if they are as selective and misleading as they have been about the statistics and cases they report in their own press releases. That is bad enough but the department's behaviour has worsened.

The report Responsible Reform was released today by a group of disabled people who used a Freedom Of Information Act request to obtain all the responses to the government's consultation on Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and the proposed move to Personal Independence Payments (PIP). The move is a thinly disguised attempt to save 20% of the DLA bill by simply removing people from eligibility for it. The government issued its own summary of the consultation, which was highly selective about the way in which it reported the responses it had. Responsible Reform shows just how misleading the government's published response was. “Misleading” is almost the most used word in the forty page report. And we know that “misleading” is Parliamentary language for “lying”.

I urge you to read the report for yourselves. It can be downloadedhere. It may look like deathly boring statistical stuff but the accumulation of evidence about the responses themselves and about the government's systematically misleading response to the responses is, quite frankly, devastating. Forty pages takes quite a while though, so here are the main points:

• the government asserts that disabled people support and are in agreement with their plans to replace DLA with PIP; analysis of the responses shows only 7% of organisations that took part in the consultation were fully in support.
• There was overwhelming opposition in the consultation responses to nearly all of the government’s proposals for DLA reform.
• The government claims there has been a 30% rise in DLA claims between 2002 and 2010. It uses this figure to justify the need to save money. Detailed analysis in Responsible Reform shows that this figure is entirely misleading. The government has actually admitted that it is misleading, and yet it continues to use it.
• The report shows that nearly all of the recent increase in working-age claimants of DLA has been associated with mental health conditions and learning difficulties. Between 2002 and 2010, the number of working-age DLA claimants – excluding those with mental health conditions and learning difficulties remained remarkably stable
• 98% of those who responded opposed plans to change the qualifying period for PIP from three months (as it is with DLA) to six months
• 90% opposed plans for a new assessment, which disabled people fear will be far too similar to the much-criticised work capability assessment used to test eligibility for employment and support allowance (ESA)
  
  

There is a lot more, but what is most disturbing about the issues dealt with here is the systematic way the DWP set out to misrepresent the responses to it from disabled people and organisations. It is a modern manifestation of the nastiest Thatcherism of the 80s. Probably the nastiest part of the government's response has been in their attempt to find a "DLA factor". They claim that just having DLA inclines people not to work. (Find victims - then blame them.)  This starts from the observation that fewer disabled people in work claim DLA than disabled people out of work. (pp13 - 15 of Responsible Reform) So in the DWP's mind that must be because they are receiving DLA. It never occurs to them that disabled people receiving DLA might be more disabled than the disabled people who are not receiving DLA. It also never occurs to them that getting a job automatically triggers a review of DLA, with the possibility that it might be taken away; the way to get rid of that disincentive is to stop automatically reviewing DLA when a recipient takes up work. There are some cases where people believe that DLA is automatically removed if they get a job - it is not. DLA is awarded for disability, not for working status. The way to deal with that is to educate people not to blame them.

Responsible Reform has already been dubbed the Spartacus Report. Its reception on twitter can be followed with the hashtag #spartacusreport. There is a petition to sign:

Stop and review the cuts to benefits and services which are falling disproportionately on disabled people, their carers and families.

Please let family, friends, colleagues, anyone you can think of know. Please write to your MP. Please do whatever you can.

The traditional Boxing Day hunting debate

It looks as if the Boxing Day hunting debate is becoming as traditional as the Boxing Day hunt. We have conservative minister Jim Paice taking care to go on record and say the act is unworkable and needs to be repealed. From my point of view it's only unworkable because hunters insist on breaking it. (I look forward to Paice saying the drugs laws are unworkable and need to be repealed, but I'm not holding my breath.)

Meanwhile the Telegraph reports that David Cameron is pushing back the point at which there will be Parliamentary time for the debate that pro-hunters want. The headline is inflammatory "David Cameron to ditch foxhunting U-turn", but we're used to that from the Telegraph now; they've been driving standards down for some time. Cameron still hopes to detoxify the Tory party, despite the active endeavours of some of his backbenchers to retoxify it, and he knows that it will be seen as the Tory party in favour of the toffs again. Say what you like about Cameron, and I often do, he is a skilful politician. He knows what he wants, and has been very skilful and in my view surprisingly successful at heading off pressure from the, shall we say, less socially liberal members of his party. (He doesn't always get it right; walking away from the EU negotiating table was his first big right wing inspired mistake. I hope there won't be any more.) More interesting is the Telegraph's reporting that Parliamentary mathematics are against the pro-hunting lobby winning the vote, with quite a few of the new intake of MPs being anti. Good for them. They're in tune with the public on this issue, though the Telegraph has an odd way of putting it: "A poll today suggested just nearly half of people believe a vote to repeal the Hunting Act should not be a top animal welfare priority for the coalition Government". It's the other way around (I think - if I've got their complicated negatives right): retaining the ban *is* a top animal welfare priority.

For what it's worth, let us rehearse the arguments for and against hunting animals with hounds. There are three questions that need to be answered, in my view:
1. Is there a question of civil liberties?
2. Is there a question of animal welfare?
3. If the answer to the first two questions is yes, which should outweigh the other?

For question 1 the answer is clearly yes. People should be able to do what they want, even if that is distasteful to other people. if that were all there is to it, then hunting would fall for me into the same category as Morris dancing. It's not for me, but if you want to dress up in silly clothes and prance around the countryside making fools of yourselves, then I will defend to the hilt your right to do so. I will even celebrate it.

For question 2 the answer is less easy to arrive at. There is conflicting evidence about how and how much pain and fear animals feel. But one of the reasons there is so much doubt is that the hunting lobby over the years has been vociferous in supporting and parading any evidence for their point of view. They have also been economical with the truth about their own behaviour while out doing their thing. In my view the weight of the evidence falls on the side that animals do indeed suffer both pain and fear. Hunting with hounds is not designed to be cruel, but is designed with complete carelessness as to how much pain and fear are inflicted. Proponents of hunting say that other methods e.g. shooting, sometimes leave the animal wounded and in pain. Yes that's true. But here it's a question of intention. A marksman intends to kill the fox and to do so as quickly and humanely as possible. Hunters with hounds intend to pursue the fox for as long as possible,  because they want to enjoy it, and they don't give a stuff about what the fox suffers meanwhile.

So in my view the answer to both question 1 and 2 is yes. In that case which should outweigh the other? It is philosophically possible to say that human liberty should outweigh animal suffering. In some ways anyone who is not a vegetarian must hold that position to some degree. And I do accept a minimum of animal suffering in order to have meat to eat. But I insist that there are clear and unequivocal rules about the amount of suffering that can be inflicted. Most of that is done for me by the law, but, for instance, I don't eat chicken if it is not free range. So for me eating meat is a fact of life (though I appreciate that that viewpoint is arguable), and a minimum of suffering is allowable to achieve that. Similarly a minimum of suffering of vermin is allowable to protect stocks and flocks. But hunting with hounds does not go for the minimum - if anything it goes for the maximum. And we do curb civil liberties for animal welfare. People like cock fighting, people like dog fighting, people like bear baiting, people like bull fighting. But we don't let them do it. In the same way the welfare of animals outweighs the civil liberties of those who wish to hunt them with hounds. If they want to dress in red and ride around the countryside, their liberty is only very minimally affected if they don't have a fox to chase while doing it.

Liberal Democrats and boardroom pay

This started out as a comment on somebody else's post, but it grew and grew. Nick Clegg has signalled the possibility of government action on high pay, and Charlotte over at DigitalPolitico says he's being “worryingly illiberal”. I don't see that. I think we need to be clear about what the issue is and about what a liberal response to it would be. Then in terms of a strategy there are two questions to answer. The first is does government have a right to interfere; the second is will it be effective.

As for what Nick Clegg has actually done, this is what the BBC website says: “The government is to publish new proposals to curb "unjustified and irresponsible" pay rewards in the private sector, Nick Clegg has said. The deputy prime minister said ministers would announce plans to "get tough" on excessive boardroom pay in January and may legislate if necessary.”

And this is what Robert Peston says: “... it is highly likely that companies will be forced to publish the numerical relationship between senior directors and other staff pay.

“But I would be staggered if any Tory prime minister and chancellor - even those who have repeatedly said that "we're all in this together" - would legislate a legal maximum for bosses pay.

“As for the other two proposals, on giving investors the formal power to block pay awards and on forcing the remuneration committee to have a workforce rep as a voting member, goodness only knows whether they will be enacted or squished.”

What problem is this action answering? It is not just high boardroom pay and a growing divide between top and bottom pay levels. If it were just that, I would be with Charlotte – there is no need to interfere and no rationale for interfering. (Just tax the rich buggers more and the poor buggers less.) It is more that boardroom pay, and traders pay in the financial sector, has become divorced from performance. People are paying themselves and their friends large sums of money which they have not earned. I have no objection (and I doubt very much if Nick Clegg or Vince Cable does either) to people earning very large sums of money. What I do object to is them being paid sums that they have not earned.

Should a Liberal interfere in such a case. Well, if it were just that I find it objectionable, the answer is no. People are free to do what they want provided it doesn't harm other people – the usual liberal principle. But this activity does harm other people. It puts money in directors' pockets at the expense of employees, shareholders and customers. Logically, employees, shareholders and customers should do something about that if they really care, but the history of this recession demonstrates, if it needed demonstrating, that they are not able to (and those that are able to, namely the representatives of large investors like pension funds, have been unwilling to, probably because those representatives benefit from the same gravy train).

It goes wider than that as well. This is not just a matter of distribution of spoils between a few people directly concerned with specific companies. These practices led to, or at the very least contributed to, the recession from which the majority of us are now suffering. This is actually a market failure, and it has become a prolonged and persistent one. In an efficient market, people get paid what they're worth. If people are paid more than their worth, their business loses competitiveness. The company loses market position, or those people lose their jobs and more effective managers come in. But this is not what is happening. People were being paid vast sums of money for poor performance before the crash – Fred Goodwin one of the most notable examples. (I would really enjoy being able to drive my company off a cliff and walk away with a pension pot the size of his.)

Generally speaking such a crash would be seen as a wake up call, the directors responsible for the bad decisions made that led to the various crashes around the world would lose their jobs, with little compensation, and new managers would come in and would manage better. But that is not what is happening. Directors are still getting paid very large sums, with little evidence that they have earned those sums. Directors pay in the UK went up 50% on average in the last year. The companies they work for are not performing 50% better than they were a year ago. You might argue that actually seeing 50% increase in profits is unreasonable in a recession, and what these directors have been doing is helping their companies ride out the storm better. I have not examined the figures in detail, but I will take a bet that if you compare companies that have given their directors large increases with those that have given their directors small increases, you will not find any difference in performance. No, they have not suddenly become 50% more valuable than they were last year, they have just waited for a decent interval before turning back to their old ways. The market has not worked in this case and is not working.

We often forget that markets actually rely on governments. Without government rule making, markets would not exist. Without the enforcement provided by national and international law, nobody would be able to trust that a contract would be honoured. Excessive rule making squeezes markets; effective rule making enables them. When markets fail, governments not only have a right to intervene, they actually have a duty to intervene, to enable the market to work again. The rules by which directors pay are set have become ineffective and unsustainable – they are very sustainable for directors, but not for the rest of us. And they need to change, so that the people to whom the money belongs, primarily shareholders, get the primary say in who is paid what.

So Nick and Vince are proposing changes to the rules. They are not proposing legal caps on directors' pay, which would be illiberal and ineffective. But they are proposing to change the balance of power by three possible measures. This summary comes from Robert Peston's blog quoted above.

to make shareholder votes on remuneration packages for directors binding, rather than advisory (as is the case now);
 to force big companies to include an employee representative on the committee that sets directors' pay (the remuneration committee);
 to force companies to publish the ratio of senior directors' pay to the typical or median pay in the company, and even (perhaps) to prohibit pay rises that bust a mandated threshold for that ratio.

These measures seem to me to be eminently sensible and liberal. I hope all three get enacted. I hope they will be enough to bring boardroom pay under control, and to see that directors earn what they are being paid. Boards, though, have been so careless and intransigent throughout the recession that I fear they will need their heads knocked together before their behaviour will change.

The carelessness of government

I have broadly supported this coalition through all its vicissitudes so far. As a Liberal Democrat I have had to swallow hard over some issues – student fees, the NHS, the enthusiasm for cuts, particularly to services for the vulnerable, the continued velvet glove treatment of those responsible for the economic crash. But I have regarded all of these as a necessary price for providing the stability of government that the country desperately needed to get out of the hole that the bankers and Labour between them put us in. Particularly on cuts to benefits, I do not like them, I do not regard them as necessary, but I recognise that there is a limit to what we, as the minority party in government, are capable of enforcing.

But there is one issue that has given me cause to hesitate, and finally to decide that LibDems in government have not served well themselves, their party, their country, or one particular individual. That is the case of Gary McKinnon.

Let us be as clear as we can about the facts. Gary McKinnon has Asperger's Syndrome. This was only diagnosed in 2008. He is an expert in computing. He also believes that the US government is holding data on UFOs that he thought should be made public. In 2002 he began tracking down computers in the US military system, and discovered that many had very poor password and firewall protection. So he found his way in (it's hard to call it hacking when it involves getting into a Windows computer with inadequate protection). He found his way into dozens of computers and networks. He was eventually identified and arrested by the British authorities. That, I remind you, was in 2002, nearly ten years ago. The US authorities soon demanded his extradition to face trial there, despite the fact that he carried out all his activities on British soil, using British equipment and British connections. He faces a penalty of up to 60 years in prison in the USA. The USA may count as one of our more civilised allies, but when it is prepared to do what it has done to Bradley Manning, one can only be cynical about the prison conditions that Gary McKinnon might face. In addition, as a sufferer from Aspergers, Gary would be so disturbed by life in prison that suicide would be a real possibility. (Simon Baron-Cohen’s Report.)

There is a lopsided extradition agreement between the UK and the US. The tests are for the US authorities they only have to say what the alleged crime was, what the punishment can be, and who they suspect. They have to provide no evidence. But for the British authorities to extradite an American citizen from the US they have to demonstrate that they have good reason to believe that the suspect is the guilty party. They have to show evidence. The Baker report released this week states that there is no unfairness in the actual implementation of the agreement between us and the USA. There's something very unjoined up going on in our public processes at the moment if Baker felt it was necessary to consult the Americans over what to put in his report. And he may be historically accurate in so far as British citizens have not so far been unjustly treated, but the tests remain lopsided, and it is possible that British citizens may be unjustly treated in the future.

Perhaps this government was delaying on its response to the McKinnon case in the hope that Baker would get it off the hook. But Baker is actually irrelevant to the treatment of Gary McKinnon. The political noise coming from the other side of the Atlantic is that, in his case, our decision will be respected, and will not cause a problem between our governments. (I leave aside the issue that if I were the US government I would, far from wishing to prosecute McKinnon, be very grateful that he had shown up how pathetically inept US military security was, and enabled me to knock heads together to get it improved.)

The various legal issues about the treatment of vulnerable people are outlined very well here, and I need not go into further detail. The tools are in the hands of our government to take the decision and draw to an end the ten year – I repeat that, the ten year – limbo of a sick man. And yet we still delay.

So far, McKinnon has been treated as an object of a bureaucratic machine. Bureaucracies do not care for individuals. Bureaucracies are not designed to respond to the desperate needs of a lone person. Instead bureaucracies slowly and efficiently over long periods of time squeeze that individual round peg into a square hole. They have no humanity. That is not a criticism of bureaucracies. They do what they are designed to do - administer efficiently. But it is a criticism of governments, which represent the people, if they do not rescue individuals from the slow torture of bureaucracy.

It is over issues like this that governments lose their soul. It is not in the big policy decisions and announcements, crafted for party conferences, or news conferences, that the temper of a government is truly discovered. It is not in the well practised, monotonous cut and thrust of Commons debate, or the pas de deux of Newsnight or Sky TV interviews. Still less, Heaven forfend, in the cloyingly ritualised tangos of Question Time. It is in the effect that governments have on the treatment of individuals by an administration that is not built to care for individuals. At the moment the temper of this government is wanting.

Both Nick Clegg and David Cameron spoke about McKinnon's case when they were in opposition. They are quoted here.

David Cameron - “It should still mean something to be a British citizen – with the full protection of the British Parliament, rather than a British Government trying to send you off to a foreign court”….(July 2009)

Nick Clegg - “If he boards the plane to the U.S., it is almost certain he will never set foot on British soil again, doomed to pass out the rest of his days in shackles on a foreign shore. This is nothing short of a disgrace” ….(August 2009)

And yet they still do nothing.

Nick Clegg in August this year, now in government, compared Britain to Libya. Libya has in fact shown us the way. The Transitional National Council has made it clear that al-Megrahi, convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, will stay in Libya. There is no question of him being returned to the UK. They do this because he is a Libyan citizen, and they stand for all Libyan citizens. Yet we still do nothing for McKinnon.

In the same article Nick Clegg says: “those who need to make use of human rights laws to challenge the decisions of the authorities are nearly always people who are in the care of the state: children's homes, mental hospitals, immigration detention, residential care. They are often vulnerable, powerless, or outsiders, and are sometimes people for whom the public feels little sympathy. But they are human beings, and our common humanity dictates that we treat them as such.” Gary McKinnon has not been in the care of the state, but he has been under its thumb for nearly ten years. He is vulnerable and powerless. With every day that passes without Gary McKinnon being told he will stay in the UK, the government that Nick Clegg represents loses another piece of its soul.

One rule for people on benefits....

... and another rule for everybody else.

In one corner, the government plans to remove benefit from claimants with a spare room. They will lose up to £11 a week in housing benefit.

In the other corner, there is a proposal to give tax breaks to older people to downsize their housing. The government's response is given by housing minister Grant Shapps: "Whilst this report makes interesting reading, we do not agree that people should be taxed or bullied out of their homes." Perhaps he should talk to Lord Freud, who is pushing through the housing benefit plan.

I'd also be really interested to know what on earth his next sentence actually means: "Instead we will work with families to ensure that housing becomes more affordable over time." As far as I can see, his only plans are to take over the green belt and / or to trash the economy enough to cause a crash in house prices.