Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

I've had recent experience of helping half dozen Lords opposing elements of the current planning Bill (the Levelling Up and Regenration Bill) for which the Tories certainly don't have a mandate. While progress has been slow and teh debates pretty long, the Government has pretty much got its way on everything so I think opposition in the Lords to this kind of stuff is not a massive factor.

Is it not a bigger risk if it's a Labour government with the Tories opposing it though rather than trying to whip it through? Tories, Lib Dems and you probably don't need many crossbenchers - or is that overstating it?

But ultimately, especially if it's in the manifesto, even if Labour don't need to force it through the Lords may want to avoid a confrontation with a government that has a big majority and a strong democratic mandate.

[mongers]

I've seen a leak of the 2024 Labour manifesto and to quote it in full:

We're Not The Tories.

It's a winner.

[crazy canuck]

 

[Zanza]

I've seen a leak of the 2024 Labour manifesto and to quote it in full:

We're Not The Tories.

It's a winner.

That's what they should do. But we all know they will do some outlandish stupid stuff that will cost them dearly.

[Sheilbh]

Via Chris Giles, FT Economics Editor - the ONS has issued revisions of growth since the pandemic which have been pretty chunky. Basically 2% higher than they'd previously estimated. Big shifts in estimates of stockbuilding and productivity in wholesale and healthcare - which makes sense for immediate end of pandemic environment. It changes the position from the UK being the only G7 economy to have not hit pre-pandemic levels of economic activity, to hitting it in Q4 2021:


In international comparison it moves the UK from the laggard to basically the same as France and in that European band:


Of course ONS has said other statistical bodies may revise their figures so that international comparison is very very hazy.

But it's one of those things that strikes me how much expectations and perception - which have real world impact on politics and the economy - are shaped by these very imperfect, provisional attempts to sketch what's happening. The people who do it are incredible but it just makes me think of during the pandemic when according to the ONS the area where productivity collapsed the most was healthcare. Which is obviously nonsense. But in the stats it fell by 20% because what they're looking at to measure output is basically things like outpatients seen, procedures performed etc, which obviously took a backseat to responding to a pandemic.

I think productivitiy in education collapsed as well for similar reasons. It is all in line with international best practice on public sector productivity but it is kind of mad and really important (especially when the public sector is a fairly hefty chunk of the economy). But it shapes so much of how we talk about the economy, politics and the public sector in all sorts of ways with real impacts - it's probably the best we can do, but still slightly wild.

It's like that for everything, I suppose. We've got a fairly shaky idea of the present and we're trying to edge our way forward (in whatever way we want to) but it's possible the foundations of that are flawed at best and wholly false at worst.

Edit: Incidentally the revision now means these stats align with other indicators - so it had been a puzzle for UK economists why the growth stats looked the way they did, but tax receipts were higher than you'd expect. That is resolved if actually the stats now say growth was higher.

[HVC]

If you don't like the numbers, change the numbers

[Gups]

Echoes of Denis Healey begging the IMF  for a load thanks to the Treasury grossly overestimating the public sector borrowing requirement

[Sheilbh]

Which probably undermines my thought of maybe the ONS producing their estimates at a slower pace for international comparisons, but for the real-time analysis looking more at tax receipts (which were higher than you'd expect with their previous estimates, but make sense after the revision)?

And the impact has happened and is real. Obviously a lot of what's shaping discourse on Britain's economy is people's lived experience - which has not changed. But I suspect the "worst recovery in the G7" is something that's probably already stuck, not least because it feels true, and you can't put that genie back in the bottle even if it is, apparently, not true.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting story on policing independence in Northern Ireland.

The background is basically around covid restrictions, when we were in one of the lockdowns. There was a gathering of around 60 unionists for a commemoration and PSNI were present but didn't arrest or fine anyone. The following week there was a Republican commemoration and two officers did issues fines and arrest an individual. It shouldn't matter but one constable was Protestant and one was Catholic.

In response the PSNI suspended one constable and were re-deploiying the other - both of these punishments were ultimately rescinded as they were, in fact, just enforcing the law as it existed at the time. With Police Federation support they took the PSNI to court for judicial review of those disciplinary actions.

The High Court judgement was pretty damning but basically said that the PSNI acted unlawfully in trying to discipline those constables and the motivation was two fold but linked because, in contrast to the unionist gathering it looked like partial policing. Although, as I say, one of the officers was Catholic and I almost wonder if part of the motivation for the arrests was awareness of the criticism for the lack of arrests the previous week. The other reason they were punished was because of a fear republicans would withdraw from the Policing Board and withdraw support for policing in Northern Ireland.

Apparently the Chief Constable (who, apparently has zero support in the force following this and the repeated data breaches) has confidentially told the Policing Board that he was informed by Michelle O'Neill  - First Minister elect and Deputy Leader of Sinn Fein (and effective leader in Northern Ireland) - that Sinn Fein would pull out of the Policing Board if the officers weren't disciplined. Worth noting a Policing Board member has also said the Chief Constable has to go and seems to have said that he was basically trying to pass all the blame for everything onto his deputies.

But I thought it was an interesting one because obviously it is very direct political interference into an operational decision. But Sinn Fein represent a significant community in Northern Ireland and if they decide to withdraw support for policing and pull out of the institutions it significantly undermines the ability of the police to do their job but also to maintain cross-community support (and increasingly cross-community recruitment). You need the support of the leaders of political Republicanism or the local institution will collapse and oversight revert to London, on the other hand one of the causes of ongoing institutional sectarianism basked into power-sharing is that ultimately Catholic Republicans in power will be able to protect the interests of Catholics - which clearly didn't work for this constable.

Not an easy situation, if very awkward for the Chief Constable who is perceived to have sacrificed junior officers pretty willingly and also presided over these several, worrying data breaches.

[Josquius]

The big story of the moment seems to be the collapsing schools thing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-66669239

What is RAAC concrete and why is it a safety risk?
With just days to go before the start of the new school year, more than 100 schools in England have been told to shut buildings made with a certain type of concrete unless they put in place safety measures.

Here is what we know so far about the material at the centre of all this.

What is RAAC?
Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) is a lightweight material that was used mostly in flat roofing, but also in floors and walls, between the 1950s and 1990s.

It is a cheaper alternative to standard concrete, is quicker to produce and easier to install.

It is aerated, or "bubbly", like an Aero chocolate bar.

But it is less durable and has a lifespan of around 30 years.

Its structural behaviour differs significantly from traditional reinforced concrete.

Moreover, it is susceptible to structural failure when exposed to moisture. The bubbles can allow water to enter the material.

If that happens, any rebar reinforcing RAAC can also decay, rust and weaken.

Because of this, RAAC is often coated with another material, such as bitumen on roofing panels. But this material can also degrade.

The Standing Committee on Structural Safety (SCOSS) noted that: "Although called 'concrete', RAAC is very different from traditional concrete and, because of the way in which it was made, much weaker."

According to Loughborough University, there are tens of thousands of these structural panels already in use and "many are showing signs of wear and tear and deterioration".

The Health and Safety Executive says RAAC is now beyond its lifespan and may "collapse with little or no notice".
When were these risks first identified?
The differences to traditional concrete - and the risks of RAAC use - were outlined as far back as 1961, around the time when Britain first began to use the material.

The Institution for Structural Engineers said in a report, seen by the BBC's Newsnight, that RAAC was so different to traditional concrete that "it is perhaps unfortunate that the term concrete has been retained for these aerated products".

The report found that short-term exposure to moisture reduced strength by about 13%, while long-term exposure to "polluted air" reduced it by 40%.

The potential safety issues of ageing RAAC were first reported in the 1980s and 1990s, when roof collapses led to buildings being demolished.

A 1996 government-funded report by the Building Research Establishment had found RAAC panels cracking in a housing development, and cracks and bends in panels installed in schools.

It said that while there were no immediate safety risks, any RAAC panels in visually poor condition should be inspected every year.

It recommended inspections every five years for those in good condition.

A report by the same body in 2002 came to three new conclusions:

1. Material used to coat RAAC will have very probably become compromised in panels over 20 years old.

2. Crucially, that corrosion can occur without visual indication that the panel was in poor condition - ie, there was a the risk of collapse without warning in panels over 20 years old.

3. Some panels were inadequate and did not meet regulations when they were installed.

What has been done to mitigate the risks?
The government has known since 1994 that some public sector buildings contain potentially compromised RAAC - and has been monitoring their condition since 2018.

Professor Chris Goodier from Loughborough University, who has studied the problem for the NHS, said: "We have a very old building stock in this country right back to the Victorian era and industrial revolution. RAAC is one of many materials that hasn't been looked properly over the decade."

This is a particular problem for schools which sometimes have just one building manager, untrained in structural engineering.

New guidance was issued in 2021 and 2022 about how to manage RAAC, and the DfE sent out a questionnaire last year to "all responsible bodies", asking them to provide information about the use of RAAC in schools across the country.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said the expert advice had been that if RAAC was not in a critical condition, it was safe to continue to use the building.

But over the summer a RAAC beam that had previously been considered low risk collapsed, he said.

That led to those schools identified with RAAC now all being labelled potentially dangerous - and closed or partially closed at short notice.

My mam's school is one of those on the list. She'd been called into the local HQ today, what should be her first day back at work, to figure out whats going on.

Its really mystifying that this story has blown up. Apparently its been slowly unfolding behind the scenes for a few years- London is already well ahead of it. But it seems something happened to give to the press that this is a big scandal.

Really though it perfectly embodies the current government as a story. Gives form to the less tangible decaying functions of state. It also serves as a reminder of their cancelling Labour's school building programme too.

Though realistically.... this is the way of things at the moment. So much concrete poured in the 50s and 60s is way past its lifespan and starting to collapse- this is a problem in the UK but perhaps even moreso in the US where a wave of municipal bankruptcies are coming due as their roads fall apart.

[Richard Hakluyt]

....and yet the Pantheon still stands 


https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/03/the-pantheon-still-the-world-s-largest-reinforced-concrete-dome/

[Sheilbh]

....and yet the Pantheon still stands 


https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/03/the-pantheon-still-the-world-s-largest-reinforced-concrete-dome/

I also want to slightly push back on misremembering the Building Schools for the Future scheme as great. The money should have been spent, Osborne cut it because capital spending is easy to cut - but the coalition criticism of the PFI deals and that it was expensive and under-delivering were fair.

I think the National Audit Office have been investigating on "value for money" bases but the PFI locks schools into a specific company for maintenance future building works and, I think, on top of the initial £45 billion are likely to cost a further £30 billion over the life of the contracts (mostly still due). Similarly of the school's refurbished or built under BSf up to that point, byt 2006 over half of them were rated as poor (the largest group) or mediocre (the other classifications were partially good, good and excellent. I was reading the FT piece on a school in Oldham rebuilt under BSF which noted that it was fine unless it rained in which case the roof leaks - which is an issue in Oldham. As the head put it "it's the drizzle that kills us".

So I think some of the coalition criticism was fair. Their changes on school building/refurbishment made some sense - so they moved from PFI to direct funding and basically wanted to do it as modular/off-the-shelf construction. My understanding is a lot of those buildings have also been identified as sub-standard. So cheaper, not PFI, but still not meeting the key point of a useful habitable building

I know RAAC is an issue for these buildings, but I really suspect that, lots of those hated (by the public) school buildings from the 50s and 60s will have a significantly longer useful life than the schools we've built in the last 25 years. I'm not saying they'll end up at the Pantheon level but in part it's why I was nervous about buying a new build - I look at new builds from the last 25 years in my area and they don't look like they're holding up well (even assuming they don't have cladding issues) compared with either slabs of concrete from the early post-war or older pre-war buildings.

[Sheilbh]

Powerful piece from an investigative journalist following the conviction of Peter Wilby, former Independent on Sunday and New Statesman editor (also in charge during some of the NS' most controversial and anti-semitic pieces - the whole "Kosher conspiracy" stuff in the 2000s) and a Guardian columnist, of possession of child sexual abuse images:

My editor trashed my inquiry into child sexual abuse. Now I know why
Dean Nelson
Peter Wilby, who spent years denigrating victims in the media, has been convicted of possessing the most appalling images
Sat 2 Sep 2023 12.03 BST
Last modified on Sun 3 Sep 2023 02.30 BST

One morning, a fortnight ago, I checked the BBC headlines to find my old editor, Peter Wilby, peering out. He'd been exposed as a paedophile and convicted of possessing child sexual abuse images. I still feel sick at the discovery.

It would be disturbing enough to discover anyone you knew had done something so terrible – he was convicted of possessing images of children being raped since the 1990s. But Wilby wasn't anyone. He was a pillar of the media establishment, an editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman, and a Guardian columnist.

Journalists who had worked with Wilby were appalled at his crimes, while others raged at his "hypocrisy", but what shocked me was the creeping realisation that he had used his position as an editor and columnist to create what the writer Beatrix Campbell has called a "hostile environment" for victims of abuse.

It dawned on me that he had applied that "hostile environment" to me at the outset of my career when I was a freelance reporter at the Independent on Sunday, and he was its news editor.

In April 1991, I learned of mental and physical abuse at Ty Mawr children's home in Gwent, south Wales, where some residents had attempted suicide. The claims emerged in the wake of abuse claims at other children's homes – the "Pindown" scandal in Staffordshire where staff used violent restraint on children, and sexual abuse by social worker Frank Beck at homes in Leicestershire. I thought Wilby would be excited at the prospect of a scoop, but he couldn't have been less interested. I took it to the daily Independent, which put it on the front page and made a campaign of it.

Seven months later, I reported on an abuse scandal in north Wales, centred on the Bryn Estyn children's home in Wrexham, where former residents said they had been sexually assaulted by care home staff and a senior policeman. The story led the front page of the Independent on Sunday, where Wilby was then deputy editor and, I later learned, had advised the editor against publishing it.

A tribunal of inquiry was ordered under the retired judge Sir Ronald Waterhouse, whose report Lost in Care, published in 2000, confirmed the vast scale of abuse and recommended an overhaul of the care system. He described Bryn Estyn as "a form of purgatory or worse from which [children] emerged more damaged than when they entered". The deputy head of the home, Peter Howarth, was jailed for buggery and sexual assault of children in his care and died in jail. Police later said had he not died he would have been charged with a further 38 assaults.

But one of those implicated in the abuse, Supt Gordon Anglesea, successfully sued for libel and it marked the start of a wider backlash, led by Wilby, against whistleblowers, victims and journalists who paid too much heed to their claims.

As New Statesman editor, he published articles denigrating the north Wales victims as "damaged" and manipulated by journalists such as me, all part of a modern witch-hunt in which the real victims were those accused of abuse. The Anglesea libel verdict was regularly cited as evidence of the witch-hunt.

Some of my witnesses in this investigation did not survive. Three killed themselves, two of whom had alleged sexual abuse by Anglesea. The former senior policeman was eventually convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting two boys, aged 14 and 15, at an "attendance centre" he ran for runaways. He was sentenced to 12 years and died in jail a few weeks later, but it was more than 25 years too late. Mark Humphreys never lived to see the justice he craved; he took his life a few weeks after Anglesea's 1995 libel case victory.

The heroic whistleblower in the north Wales case, the former social worker and now novelist Alison Taylor, sued Wilby and the New Statesman for defamation and won an apology.

Anglesea's conviction in 2016 didn't give Wilby pause for reflection – he shrugged it off and stuck to his campaign. In the Guardian, he wrote in support of the paedophile former pop star Gary Glitter and chastised the Sun's campaign to identify child sex offenders. The Guardian has now removed those and six other columns by Wilby and updated his profile page to reflect his conviction.

He also used a column in the Times Educational Supplement to decry what he portrayed as the wokery of overzealous child protection. He called for a more relaxed approach to "intimate relations" between adults and children. "It is right that we abhor child abuse and no longer tolerate abuse of authority for even low-level sexual gratification. But do we need to go so far? Can't we forbid the sex but still allow intimate relations between teachers and pupils, adults and children?"

Wilby argued for "nuance" in these matters, while denigrating those who dared complain of abuse. There was nothing nuanced in the material Wilby collected and created over his career – they were crime scene photographs of our most vulnerable children being raped for his pleasure.

The clues were all there, but it took the evidence gathered by the National Crime Agency for us all to see him for what he really is: a child sex offender.

I've wondered over this past fortnight how I might have explained all this to Mark Humphreys, the young man I promised to help find justice but who killed himself waiting in vain. He'd been sexually abused in Bryn Estyn by staff hired to care for him, including the home's deputy head. The nearest police officer he might complain to was Anglesea. And when he finally decided to trust a reporter with his story, it turned out the journalist's editor was a paedophile – someone who is sexually attracted to children – looking out for other abusers.

I was a young man when I met Mark more than 30 years ago and I naively thought that if I could help expose the scale of abuse that children in care had endured, we could change the care system and ensure our most vulnerable children were seen and heard.

I hadn't reckoned on Wilby's secret agenda. More than 30 years after north Wales, Pindown, Leicester and so many other child-abuse scandals, the case for listening to children and taking abuse allegations seriously must still be made over and over again.

Wilby leaves us a tough question: will we ever learn?

Dean Nelson is an investigative journalist and author

And New Statesman has done a review of Wilby's time as editor and contributions:

Peter Wilby: an updated statement
By New Statesman

On 18 August it was reported that Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman, was convicted after he admitted viewing images of child sexual abuse. He was given a ten-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, at Chelmsford Crown Court.

The New Statesman staff and management had no knowledge of Wilby's arrest or charges before they were reported yesterday, and are shocked and appalled to learn of these horrifying crimes. 

Wilby, 78, was New Statesman editor from 1998 to 2005, and remained a contributor.

The New Statesman has now completed an internal review of all articles related to child sexual abuse that were published during Wilby's editorship, or subsequently contributed by Wilby as a writer. 

Approximately 19,000 articles were published during Wilby's seven years as editor, of which 126 have a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 126 articles, 12 contain comments or arguments that could reasonably be interpreted as either minimising the seriousness of child sexual abuse, or as questioning the integrity of victims, whistle-blowers, police or journalists investigating allegations of sexual abuse of children. Four of the 12 remained available on newstatesman.com as of 18 August, and they have now been taken down. 

Subsequent to his time as editor, Wilby contributed 659 columns or pieces to the New Statesman from 2006 to 2022, of which 37 contain a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 37 articles, four contain arguments that the degree of public concern around child sexual abuse is out of proportion to the actual scope and scale of the horrendous crime. Those four articles have been taken down.

Wilby's author profile has been updated to include a link to this statement.

[Sheilbh]

Hot mic at the end of the interview with the Education Secretary:
https://x.com/itvnewspolitics/status/1698674935424581991?s=46&t=o9GOIj6BKKcLcHiyQTlAoA

Being generous (and I think this is possibly true too) there were apparently repeated warnings when Zahawi was Education Secretary, and he didn't do anything about it, while she is and getting the flack...but that's just the nature of politics so...

[HVC]

Man in jail for over a decade for stealing a cellphone, drives him crazy

Would they have sent him to Australia for stealing bread? There's got to more to the reason for the jail term. I'm also skeptical that it drove him nuts.

 BB can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we have something similar to indefinite jail sentences here, but usually the prisoner is crazy first and held until they are deemed "safe"