The Lib Dems have not been quiet about their position on the NHS bill. While the coalition agreement makes assertions, the bill produced is outside of our ideologies.

I cannot put it any better than the Social Liberal Forum does here;

“You will have seen that the long-running debate over Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill has again come to a head.

The Social Liberal Forum has had grave concerns about this Bill from the beginning. Our motion suggesting major changes to it was overwhelmingly supported at the Spring 2011 Conference in Sheffield, leading to some improvements to the Bill.

While Liberal Democrat peers have managed to secure some further concessions, we remain concerned that the Bill is a mess, full of dangers – and unnecessary anyway to deliver Social Liberal outcomes, such as better responsiveness to local needs.

We therefore, with regret, no longer have any confidence that the Bill can be redeemed. We are now calling on the Liberal Democrat leadership to withdraw support for the Bill, while preserving those liberal elements that do not require legislation. Our full statement is here.

Here, here.

Sign the petition

Coeliac disease can be a very debilitating condition where the person cannot consume wheat gluten, items which can be found in the majority of Western food substances. As a result, the NHS in the UK has provided free prescriptions for those suffering from coeliac disease to get their food.

However, in the age of austerity, and the entire reform of the National Health care system, Oxford Primary Care trust are looking to ban prescriptions for people suffering from coeliac disease.

There has been what may seem to be a completely justified outcry. The disease affects approximately 1 in 100 people, and such a decision by the PCT will have a detrimental effect on this percentage of people in Oxford.

However, the petition to Parliament is not going to resolve the miscellaneous problems that this issue raises.

First and foremost, it should be considered the coeliac’s not the only people to suffer from dietary specifics have a detrimental effect on their life. People who suffer from lactose, milk allergies, gluten intolerance (separate coeliac disease), wheat intolerance and sugar intolerances, are all affected. Then there are people that suffer from IBS, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and other life changing bowel conditions who are forced to change their entire diets.

However, it is only people that suffer from coeliac disease who are effectively given their shopping for £10.40 A month.

(£10 a month refers to the NHS Prepayment Prescription card which is a godsend to people with long-term conditions were required to get regular prescriptions. Where a normal prescription costs £7.40, the Prepayment card allows you to make a payment of £10.40 a month and therefore covers all descriptions that you need for yourself for 12 months. For want of better terminology, it simply isn’t fair that one particular bowel diseases entitled to a shopping for £10.40, and all other types of bowel disease are not.)

Given that “we are all in this together”, and coeliac disease is not automatically preclude someone from working, one must wonder why they are allowed such financial considerations when all of the people are not. I don’t like peas, does this mean I’m automatically allowed to get my food on prescription?

Joking aside, there is an inconsistency in application that must be addressed.

Rather than putting a petition to the government to challenge one small area’s Primary Care Trust decision to address the issue directly, we should be actively campaigning to reduce the costs of specialist dietary food and bringing them in line with “normal” purchases.

If you look at the growing range of free-from foods, you will notice that they are generally priced at 120% minimum of so-called normal foods, not freely available and there is extreme difficulty in buying in bulk. This is largely due to manufacturers’ inability to apply economies of scale due to lower numbers of accessing specialist dietary foods. In the event that we campaign for local stores to hold more ranges of dietary foods, other than Mrs Crimble’s Macaroons (which most people don’t realise is a dietary specific biscuit anyway!), Manufacturers would be able to increase their production methods assupply increase therefore reducing the cost of their food, bringing it more in line with so-called “normal” purchases.

All the time we allow people suffering from Coeliac Disease to get items on prescription, we are allowing companies to include charging ludicrous prices as the Government is effectively paying them.

If governments can look at having an minimum alcohol price cap, why can they not look having a maximum price limit on dietary specific foods?

All the sympathy I had for the Occupy movement dissipated the moment they started to occupy buildings. Not only are the current wave of protesters behaving in a sanctimonious manner, they also lack an appreciation of the difference between crime against the person in crime against property and an understanding of value in the consumer-based society they so keen to protest against.

Rather like Laurie Penny assessing during the student protest riots that criminal damage is a victimless crime, I get vexed by people that do not understand that property, like possessions, belong to people. It’s one thing to occupy public land to demand recognition of the significant public problem, the extent of social divide, it is a completely different thing to occupy privately owned building space whether or not that building space is owned by a rich corporation.

The ipaper says today covers a brief story of “protest-bashing incitement” as has become the trend in left-wing media. Seen since the beginning of the demonstrations against the coalition, such lazy journalism is as predictable and mundane as the right wing media is the vilification and vindication of parents over varying levels of punishment.

However, in this particular article, protesters complained about the untoward behaviour of a bailiff. It seems that it is perfectly acceptable for Occupy protesters to squat in a commercial building owned by banking Corporation is a former demonstration, thereby harming the corporation, harming the employees and harming the owners and maintainers of the building. However, in contrast, it is not acceptable for anyone protesting to receive any harm.

The continual inability to identify between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in the eyes of the protest is not only produced my sympathy for the protest. More and more people are coming out against it, from all range of political spheres, to complain about sanctimonious left wing protesters who feel justified in causing harm to other people.

Another of the key problems with the rapidly politicised youth, from UK Uncut to Occupy is that they seem to have everything yet know the value of nothing. Just as they are keen to protest about things not being fair, they are equally likely to protest against treatment of a similar kind towards themselves.

The article in the ipaper presents an argument made by one of the protest as he was photographing those nefarious bailiffs when one punched him. That’s harm against a person. That’s illegal. It completely legitimate to follow up charges against a bailiff. However, choosing instead of this to moan about damage to your £600 camera lens is something of an irony.

In effect there is a contradiction between you harming other people’s property being acceptable, but completely unacceptable with its damage to your own.

And that’s without examining, alongside the “we are all in this together” message, who runs around with £600 worth of camera equipment on a daily basis. Certainly the people living on £50 jobseekers allowance a week after being made redundant by the financial crash couldn’t imagine owning £600 worth of camera lens. But as we know, the protesters are particularly anti- buying things from Starbucks and other ubiquitous commodity-based activities, so why should owning a vast amount of camera equipment matter?

Perhaps, alongside Gove’s odd proposals on the education system, we ought to be teaching this so-called radicalised and anti-consumerist youth the value of what they have on their person, the value of property, the value of society and value of humility.

My posting of 2012 has been poor, so it’s easier to announce I’m on sabbatical (ran out of spoons/gave up smoking/am moving house) than try and catch up at the moment.

However, I’ll post the occasional comment.

Today’s yelling at the radio;
• If you ask someone if we should give a family £26,000 in benefits, they tend to say no. If you ask them whether a family of six can live on £400 a week including rent, bills and food, they tend to think again. Ref

…to be continued…

The ipaper leads today with the archaic and outdated Tories allegedly planning a rebellion against a bill on gay marriage.

Rather like their behaviour over the EU referendum, the Conservative party are demonstrating that they can show a soft-left-side at a push (hug a hoodie) but they won’t allow that sort of behaviour to become entrenched.

With increasing rebellions from coalition parties over diametrically opposed bills (Welfare reform, NHS, EU et al), one must wonder at what point the rumblings cause a massive earthquake.

When one considers Ministers are whipped on the basis that the coalition agreement supercedes all party manifestos and opinions, such rebellions eventually begin to unstable the whips and the government.

It really should be remembered that the Lib Dems, we who have a tendency towards the radical and progressive, have insisted on the not-so-radical levelling of the playing field of marriage. To not allow such an equal right is the equivilant of Victorias hiding all social issues with silk curtains. And by denying that right, the Conservatives are showing a complete lack of public awareness and that really, they haven’t changed much since the times of the Victorians either.

The debate over silicone limps on in the media.

France, for reasons unbeknown, have decided to replace every woman’s implants if they have PIP. This could be a proactive stance on something that poses a potential risk (something the UK isn’t too good at) or an acceptance of a guilty role in the PIP issue where by inspectors were fooled by the organisation making the implants.

Which ever it is, there is medical evidence to suggest that replacement is not necessary unless the implant ruptures. I would lean on the side of proactive government action in the case of NHS implants in this instance, as the UK has done.

However, I find it unfathomable that, for women who get their breasts enhanced privately, there is no legally enforceable duty of care provided to the woman by the company. Surely it should come under Torts? If I buy a bottle of cola, and that cola injures me, I can sue the cola producer. The same should apply to women who have faulty breast implants.

There must be a standard that all implants meet, and failure to meet this standard, whether the product is ‘broken’ or not, should be an obligation.

Furthermore, in the event of organisations that have gone out of business, shouldn’t there be Liability insurance to cover this?

In short, I am confused as to why this is still in the news! There must be legal ramifications that make it a minor story of little interest other than the political stances of the UK and Germany.

Anyone with an interest in public policy will come across Social Return on Investment (SROI). This is the measure through which investment by this date can be measured as to what they have prevented happening in the future. For example, with Cameron’s 150,000 problem families, by investing in them now they can prevent generations of social services, police callouts, offender management, probation, hospital costs and local council costs.

On the other hand, let us consider the detriment that can occur from an unwise investment.

There is a very strict marmite approach to HS2, the high-speed line that will run from London to Birmingham and be in place by 2026. The argument being presented by Transport Secretary Justin Greening MP is that such a rail link will be an investment in generations for the future, allowing high-speed travel and flourishing communities.

The reality, as a resident of a town with HS1, is starkly different.

The knock-on effect of a high-speed train link could be considered to be Social Detriment on Investment. When the Eurostar, and later, the Hitachi line, were introduced to Kent, we all bought the concept that such a service would bring business to towns in Kent. That people would rent office space only 40 minutes from London rather than paying London prices. That people would move to the area in order to catch the train.

Once the train line was introduced, the initial response was mild. A couple more people increase their average spend on travel and started to catch the high-speed line. Soon anyone who could afford it was catching the high-speed line. The Eurostar was introduced in 1994, but we have yet to see an influx of businesses in Ashford.

Vast amounts of office space is failed to be filled. As a result, office space is exchanged for hectares worth of car parks around the station.

Without office buildings, small community businesses slowly but surely start to fall. There are no longer sandwich shops on the high street to support the office population, the number of little sandwich delivery vans are falling. Choice is now limited to mainstream and ubiquitous.

As these businesses disappear and no businesses take their place, people who didn’t commute five years ago are now forced to as their local jobs dissolve. Office space that is available is only used up by public sector bodies while the rest remains vacant.

Rather like the majority of jobs in Kent, people either work in London or work for the public sector. The closure of Pfizer last year really hasn’t helped.

The people that are now commuting are losing hours of free time. As a result, their children are losing hours of parenting. While, arguably, this increases demand for childminders, the lack of stable parent figures can have a significant detrimental effects on a family. Just as with SROI, it is possible to measure the cost of social services involvement, only in this case increasing not decreasing. From here we could potentially forecast the cost on police callouts, on the courts, on the NHS, on the local council managing ASBOs.

All of a sudden, the £46 billion being invested in setting up HS2 multiplies tenfold as the burdens on the state and the detriment to communities magnify.

Fix my Transport have published my letter to Southeastern requesting better services. You can support the campaign here.

I am a High Speed Train user and travel daily from Ashford to St Pancras.

However, I have observed the continued problem of overcrowding. This is exacerbated on both specific days and specific times.

To give you an idea of the problem, allow me to describe my week;
9/1/12 7.43 overcrowded resulting in four people in both of the door sections in my carriage (no.3). I was unable to get a seat, and, as a result of my disability, had to sit on the floor.
10/1/12 7.43 overcrowded with three people standing in my carriage (3)
11/1/12 7.43 overcrowded with three people standing in my carriage. I had to sit on the floor again.

I have observed that the overcrowding is worse on Monday mornings and Friday evenings, and always on the 7.43. In comparison, the 8.13 can have double seats free. However, this necessitates a later start to the day.

When speaking to train guards, they have commented that there are issues with adding more carriages due to platform length, adding more trains due to Eurostar frequency and the financial cost of this.

Bearing in mind in the last three years, I have seen a total of 32% fare rise and increasing issues with overcrowding, I cannot see that financial burdens is a viable excuse. Also, with the reduced frequency of Eurostar journeys since the Dartford line, which have reduced my ability to go to Paris or Brussels, this is not a viable reason. I am left with the issue of platform length as a reason for the consistent and unpleasant overcrowding. Again, I return to the fare increases, and can only urge you to build longer platforms to prevent people from being forced to sit on the floor on a regular basis.

I look forward to your response in the hope that there is a resolution that will relieve the pressure on your passengers.

Quietly quietly, the Occupy movement has slipped out of the news. their website(s) continue to grow in professionalism, and judging by the expansive timetable, they are trying hard to get a coherent message to put in the papers and persuade politicians.

Many supporters of the Occupy movement, the key issue is one of tax avoidance and tax evasion, a government that allows public bodies to pick on the so-called squeezed middle and allows the rich to evade and escape similar pressures financially.

Certainly the news that HMRC are intending to conduct spot checks on small businesses yet not chase up Vodafone, Goldman Sachs or hundreds of other large businesses for not paying their tax bills.

When drawing up the coalition agreement, the Liberal Democrats insisted on a mandate to crackdown on tax avoidance. Danny Alexander said in September 2010;

“There are some people who seem to believe that not paying their fair share of tax is a lifestyle choice that is socially acceptable. We will be ruthless with those often wealthy people and businesses who think they can treat paying tax as an optional extra.

However, in a society where politics is based on soundbites, most comments on today’s news HMRC will do spot checks on businesses seem to be from the Labour perspective claiming to be on the side of the Occupy movement.

This is a growing trend in UK media, there is a good person and a bad person, and this applies to political parties as well. Soundbite media favours first past the post into party politics and has no time for pluralism. The two-fold problem presented is that firstly, there is a reluctance among the press and the media to accept that the coalition is attempting to tackle the issues in front of it, and secondly, that Labour are intent on stealing headlines and escaping all blame for the detriment they have done to the U.K.’s economy.

When presented with what is essentially Labour propaganda debating what can be done with regards to the economic deficit, is it necessary to continuously challenge the messages are pointing out they put the UK in this position. Labour had the opportunity to correct the problems and in fact increased them.

“Could HMRC avoid taking an increasingly tougher line with the tax dodgers?” the article cries.

Unlike Labour, under whose 13 years of government social divide actually increased as did the number of non-domiciled taxpayers, the coalition of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has, in 18 months, but in positions plans to tackle tax avoidance, engaging in an “afluent team” to track down Mega avoiders, begun to implement taxation of foreign bank accounts so people can’t hide their money elsewhere and are seeking to make things easier on smaller businesses.

As the coalition agreement states;

We will review IR 35, as part of a wholesale review of all small business taxation, and seek to replace it with simpler measures that prevent tax avoidance but do not place undue administrative burdens or uncertainty on the self-employed, or restrict labour market flexibility.

The continual insistence by headline media and by a party flagging in opposition that nothing is being done to tackle the problem is simply ludicrous. Most people will understand that these sorts of things cannot be implemented overnight. The changes being made have to be done correctly in order to create a sustainable policy that prevent tax avoidance at both ends of the scale.

It’s all very well for the Occupy movement to remain in their tents with the sanctimonious outlook. However, there seems to be little understanding coming from the group as to the moves are being made to challenge tax avoidance and evasion and the necessary steps it takes to do this on such a large scale. As for Labour, they’ve had their opportunity and to be honest they should stop whingeing.

There are a few political/news highlights of 2011 that are worth a mention.

Mobile Phone Hacking
I do loathe the pretension of adding “gate” to the end of every verb to describe some dilemma, it creates delusions of grandeur around meaningless stories. However, hackgate was worthy of the title, given the rapid expansion of the story over a short period of time.

A précis would be the Guardian accused Rupert Murdoch owned papers of immoral activity by hacking the telephones of the rich and famous. Nobody really cared until it turned out that they also hacked phones of victims of crime. All of a sudden all of the papers apart from the Rupert-Murdoch-owned papers were outraged. The government was forced to make an apology as one person who had been involved in hacking worked at Number 10, lots of people resigned and a very old newspaper closed down. The government decided to hold an enquiry, the political equivalent of kicking the issue into the long grass, which brought forward a whole host of celebrities who objected to their privacy being invaded and very little else. The inquiry is still ongoing and, like all government enquiries, is unlikely to provide any real or lasting effect on the press, the erosion of civil liberties nor the invasion of civil liberties.

However, this could be seen as one of the latest developments in the long-running saga of transparency, corruption and elitism between politics and the press. Some MPs expenses for mobile phone hacking, more and more people are getting “hacked off” (sorry) with the one-rule-for-them and another-for-us approach. But, as I commented in previous articles, the press has become very good at controlling what people pay attention to what they don’t. MPs expenses is no longer a big issue therefore it goes away. Just as the hacking scandal has quietly filtered to the back pages, alongside any presence of protestors in the city of London.

And I’m Not Making This up
Theresa May’s Conservative conference speech. Also known as catgate.

What was so delightful about this story was it was rather like Dickens’s Great Expectations, the plot spiralling and spiralling. May was a fool for making outrageous statements, for not checking the sources of whichever unlucky intern wrote the speech, and for attempting to turn it into a sanctimonious tirade to excite the “Tweed and Twin-Set” Tories.

The speech was rumoured to have been taken from the leader of UKIP (where many Conservatives have decamped following the formation of the coalition), the details were so ridiculous that even members of May’s own government turned on her and bet her to prove it.

All in all, it turned out that the case in question did feature a cat, but the cat was not the primary reason for preventing deportation, that the person in question within the story was not an illegal immigrant, and above all that the Home Secretary has little understanding of immigration or home affairs and should not even be a minister.

Has Anyone Seen Santa Claus?

A society obsessed with consumerism stays fixated on the myths of childhood to sustain their own demands. Or, the Littlewoods Advert.

The best surmise of many complaints about the ousting of a mythical figure was in this Guardian article;

“The ASA was left in the tricky position of having to adjudicate on whether the ad breaches any part of the advertising code by revealing that Father Christmas does not exist.”