Is the Catastrophic Withdrawal in Afghanistan due to Failure of Intelligence Services

Mike has been casting his bleak and jaundiced eye over Dominic Raab’s testimony about the current debacle in Afghanistan, and has asked a very serious question: has Raab just told parliament and the British people that our intelligences services have been outwitted by a bunch of desert-dwelling bandits? That’s the conclusion that follows from Raab’s statement that the government was informed that the Taliban couldn’t take power this year. Mike writes

This will upset the racists and Islamophobes.

Foreign Secretary (by the skin of his teeth) Dominic Raab was interrogated on the fall of Afghanistan by Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee yesterday (September 1) – and said information provided by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had told him the Taliban were unlikely to take control of Kabul at all in 2021, even after international forces including those from the UK had left.

Well, they got that badly wrong, didn’t they!

The JIC is a civil service body comprising senior officials in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and United Kingdom Armed Forces, Home Office, Department for International Development, HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office.

It oversees the work of the Secret Intelligence Service, the Security Service, GCHQ and Defence Intelligence.

Are we to take it from Raab that none of these organisations were intelligent enough to notice that there were real problems with the Afghan government and military that UK forces were leaving behind?

Is he really saying that the UK’s entire intelligence community was outsmarted by a gang of desert-dwelling bandits?

The plan was to leave Afghanistan defended by its own National Army – but we have discovered that this organisation was badly-trained (by organisations including the British Army, it seems) and riddled with corruption. Was Raab telling us that nobody knew?

After the United States broke the Doha Agreement’s May 1 deadline for leaving the country, the Taliban simply walked into Kabul and took over. Yes, This Writer is oversimplifying, but the amount of resistance provided by the Afghan National Army was minimal – and UK intelligence should have known.

Indeed, it is unbelievable that our intelligence agencies did not.

Still, there it is: Raab said the “central assessment” provided to ministers was that Afghan security was likely to suffer “steady deterioration” after US troops pulled out last month, but Kabul was “unlikely” to fall this year.

That assessment was wrong, and now we need to know who made it, what information they used to make it, and what information they ignored. Then we’ll need to see evidence of reforms to the JIC, to make it more intelligent.

If Raab is going to blame other government organisations for the incompetence we have seen over Afghanistan, then we need to see him make improvements – or we’ll face more humiliations, possibly involving large-scale loss of life, in the near future.

There’s a saying that goes ‘military intelligence is a contradiction in terms’. And sadly the argument that the current debacle in Afghanistan may have been caused by the incompetence of the British intelligence agencies will be all too familiar to readers of the parapolitics/ conspiracy magazine, Lobster. The mag was set up in mid-1980s on the premise that British intelligence, as well as those of the US and other western countries, was out of control and incompetent. This was based on the covert activities of the British state against the left, the disinformation campaign in Northern Ireland and the way decent politicians like Tony Benn and others were smeared as IRA supporters and sympathisers, and the way the same intelligence agencies have never been subject to official critical scrutiny for their subversion of domestic democracy and their failures. The reports compiled for Margaret Thatcher about the Middle East and elsewhere were so poor that the Leaderene never read them. I go the impression that they were also seriously unprepared for 9/11. After the end of the Cold War, it seems that Britain got rid of its Middle East experts and the security services instead decided that they were now going into corporate espionage.

The 7/7 bombings also caught the security services unawares. They stated that this was to due to failures on their part and asked for a massive increase in funding. This was automatically granted, but Blair’s administration did not ask how this money was going to be spent, what restructuring was needed or indeed exercise any real oversight over the security services. They simply accepted the intelligence agencies that parliamentary scrutiny could cause of breach of security and politely looked away and let them get on with doing whatever they wanted.

Not that the American intelligence agencies are necessarily any better. The CIA became notorious for its ‘health alteration squads’, or gangs of assassins. The Americans were also taken by surprise by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The closest they got was a report by the CIA stating that the Ayatollah Khomeini would return to that ancient land to lead a Gandhi-like campaign of passive resistance. If only!

Unfortunately, it is only too plausible that the Taliban’s rapid seizure of power and our consequent scramble to leave is due to colossal errors by our intelligence services. Quite apart from the negligence and sheer incompetence of Boris and his wretched crew.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2021/09/02/did-raab-really-tell-us-the-uks-intelligence-agencies-were-outsmarted-by-arab-terrorists/

Black Lives Matter Placard Refuting Fascist Lies of Britain First

Zelo Street has just put up a piece this evening reporting that the odious racists of Britain First turned up at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London yesterday. They were hardly out in force – according to the Street, there were only three of them, and that didn’t include their Fuhrer, Paul Golding. So much for the glorious Fascist legions ready to purge our island of Muslims and other non-White people. They were waving a banner around showing a little girl, who had been murdered by a mentally ill Albanian woman with the slogan ‘White Lives Matter’ and a picture of the royal crown.

This really didn’t go down well with the folks on Twitter, who posted a number of angry replies on Twitter. They attacked Britain First’s moral squalor in using the girl’s image, despite the requests by her family that it should not be so abused, their double standards in claiming to stand up for Whites, except when it came to eastern European, who were to go back to where they came from, and the fact that they were breaking the lockdown. One woman, Sooz Kempner, also said they’d banner her from their site because she kept correcting their spelling of ‘Muslim’. Another Tweeter, ‘Wolfie’, just called them ‘a bunch of knuckle-dragging racist twunts’. Quite.

Never mind – the long arm of the law may well be ready to nab for them breaching the copyright laws over the use of the crown’s image. The Advertising Standards Authority wrote to them, banning them from use it on their website. And although it can’t stop them from using it elsewhere, the cabinet office can and has. They wrote to the Fascisti, telling them to remove it from their website, marketing materials, stationery and stock immediately. Britain First hasn’t, and so Zelo Street suggests that someone just might want to tell the rozzers as ‘there’s nothing like seeing the Fash squeal’. Always a good and righteous endeavour.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/far-right-breaks-lockdown-and-law.html

The Street also points out in its article that White lives have mattered for centuries. It’s just that they mattered, and in parts of the USA continue to matter, at the expense of other lives.

Mike in his article ‘Coronavirus Scrapbook June 6’ has this image from a Black Lives Matter demonstration, tweeted by The Canary.

As you can see, this is an effective response to the claims by racists like Britain First that the Black Lives Matter movement thinks everyone else’s lives are worthless, as expressed in the slogan used by counter-demonstrators ‘All Lives Matter’. They just want people’s help because Black lives really are in danger.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/06/06/coronavirus-scrapbook-june-6/

 

Tory Cuts Destroyed Our Preparedness Against Pandemic Threat

On Friday, Mike put up a piece commenting on and reporting a devastating article from the Huffington Post. This revealed that the Tories’ cuts, imposed in the name of austerity and cheap government, had destroyed or discarded the plans previous governments had drawn up against the threat of a global pandemic.

The Cabinet Office had apparently been drawing up a National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies, listing the possible threats to the United Kingdom. At the top of the list in each document was pandemic flu. Mike states clearly that the British government knew an event like the present global emergency was coming. However, the strategy to cope with it was written in 2011 and not updated. And it gets worse. The government’s plan for getting the right messages across to the public during a pandemic, the UK Pandemic Influenza Communications Strategy, was written in 2012. It is now very out of date in its assumptions about how and where people get their information. The guide to dealing with the pandemic’s fatalities, which names key contacts, was written four years before that, in 2008. And the government abolished the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Team, a section within the department of Health, was abolished in 2011. The Tories thus got rid of the very organisation, which would have had the expertise to deal with the pandemic because they were so keen on inflicting cuts.

As a result, according to the HuffPo, “the government has had to either make policy up as it has gone along or is having to beg, borrow and steal from other countries who have been better prepared”.

This is in stark contrast to one of BoJob’s announcements today. Our glorious leader, or one of his minions, declared that Britain was a world leader in tackling the virus. Now this claim was made in the context of the amount of money the government was going to devote to the international effort to develop a vaccine – £500 million. But the statement could be taken to mean that Britain leads the rest of the world in combating the pandemic. Which we don’t. The Chinese are reporting no new cases, or were, and half of the new cases reported in South Korea are of foreigners. It would appear that these countries, which imposed a lockdown much earlier, have been far more successful than we have in tackling it. And other countries have been far less impressed with Johnson. The Greek newspaper Ethnos declared that BoJob was a worse danger than the Coronavirus and reported that he had publicly and essentially asked Britons to accept death. This is in reference to his speech where he declared that Britons were going to lose their loved ones before their time. As he said this, the government was only issuing guidelines but had not imposed a lockdown. The Irish Times stated that Boris was gambling with the health of his citizens. He was. He and his adviser, Dominic Cummings, had decided that they were going to deal with the threat by allowing the disease to spread. The British people would develop herd immunity and the economy would be allowed to continue unharmed by a lockdown. And it was just going to be too bad if a few old people died. The Irish government is relieved that BoJob has at last seen sense. Boris was apparently forced to impose the lockdown because Macron told him he would close the French borders to us if he didn’t. And the mayor of Bergamo, the Italian town hardest hit by the virus, Giorgio Gori, was so frightened by Boris’ complacency and inaction that he flew his two daughters home, because he believed they’d be safer.

Also states that Boris’ singular lack of action on the virus, and the way he dragged his heels before doing anything, bears out criticisms that the Tories have a eugenicist attitude to the poor, the weak and the disabled. They regard them as useless eaters, biologically unfit, who do not deserve to live.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/26/the-tories-axed-their-defence-against-coronavirus-years-before-it-arrived-deaths-were-inevitable/

And the Tories long-term attitude towards the poverty and mass death inflicted by austerity really does suggest that attitude. They seem to believe that the state is only wasting resources by supporting them and they should be allowed to die, so that the biologically superior, meaning the rich and especially the corporate elite, should be left free to do as they wish without government interference and the high taxes required by a proper welfare state

Scientists have been worried for decades about the threat of a pandemic. Some of this fear comes from previous viral outbreaks, such as AIDS in the 1980s, and avian flu and swine flu in the 1990s and early part of this century. I guess that the Tories decided that because these diseases did not require the current measures, such precautions weren’t necessary and could be scrapped.

It was a massively short-sighted decision that has undoubtedly cost lives that could otherwise have been saved. 

 

Elderly Rabbi Arrested at Extinction Rebellion Protest

Yesterday’s I, for Tuesday, 15th October 2019, carried an article by Jennifer Logan reporting that an elderly rabbi had been arrested by the rozzers after praying at an Extinction Rebellion protest in London. The article ran

A rabbi who was arrested after kneeling and praying in the middle of a road during the Extinction Rebellion protests in London said yesterday that he was “standing up for his grandchildren.”

Police have now arrested 1,405 people in connection with the protests, which will continue tomorrow when activists are understood to be planning to block roads outside MI5 on what will be the seventh day of direct action over the global climate crisis.

Jeffrey Newman, the Rabbi Emeritus of Finchley Reform Synagogue in north London, was protesting alongside about 30 Jewish activists. He was arrested near the Bank of England as hundreds of people descended upon the financial centre for a second week of protests.

The 77-year-old, who was wearing a white yarmulka branded with the black Extinction Rebellion logo, said: “I see it as my religious and moral duty to stand up for what I believe in, and what I care about, for my grandchildren.

“I haven’t tried to involve the synagogue, because if you are asking for permission, you might not get it. I think it’s much more important to do what I’m doing.”

After last week’s protests, which blockaded Parliament and targeted City Airport, protesters are now focusing on the City of London over financial backing for fossil fuels. They claim that trillions of pounds are flowing through financial markets to invest in fossil fuels which damage the climate.

Extinction Rebellion said dozens of activists were due to appear in court this week, including trials connected with previous action in April.

I have to say that Extinction Rebellion aren’t exactly my favourite protest group, because their demonstrations seem to inconvenience the general public more than the politicians and the big corporations behind the fossil fuel industries and global warming. But they have a very, very good cause. Meteorologists, ecologists, along with other scientists and broadcasters like Sir David Attenborough have been warning for decades that unless something is done, our beautiful world may very well die and humanity along with it. When I was studying for my doctorate in Archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the postgraduate seminars in the department was by an archaeologist on the impact of climate change on human cultures throughout history. He was particularly concerned about drought and desertification, which certainly has catastrophically affected human civilisations around the world. One of the most dramatic examples was the abandonment of the Amerindian pueblo cities in the Canyon de Chelly in the American southwest around the 12th century AD. The pueblo cultures had created an extensive irrigation to supply water to their crops in the southwestern desert. However, in the 12th century that part of America entered an extremely dry period during which the available water dried up. Civilisation was not destroyed, as the Amerindian peoples themselves survived by retreating to more fertile areas. Nevertheless, it resulted in those pueblos, which had survived for centuries, being abandoned.

And now we face a similar crisis in the 21st century, thanks in part to global warming and an increasingly intense demand for water. Back in the 1990s one edition of the Financial Times predicted that climate change and competition for water resources would be the major force for war in the 21st century. In West Africa one of the reasons for the conflict in the north of Nigeria, for example, between Christians and Muslims is the desertification of the traditional grazing territory of nomadic pastoralists. These are mainly Muslim, who have been forced to move south onto land belonging to mainly Christian peoples in order to feed their flocks. The result has been ethnic and religious conflict. But it’s important to realise that the roots of this conflict are primarily ecological. It is not simply about religion. Examples of desertification and global dry periods in the past have been used by the Right to argue that the current climate crisis really isn’t as acute as scientists have claimed. It’s just the world’s natural climatic cycle repeating itself. This certainly wasn’t the view of the archaeologist giving that talk at uni, who warned that there was only a finite amount of water and urged us all to use it sparingly.

It was interesting to read the good rabbi’s concern for the planet and his grandchildren. People of all faiths are now worried about climate change. One of the priests at our local church preached a very long sermon on Sunday, no doubt partly inspired by the coming Extinction Rebellion protests, on the need to save the planet. I’ve no doubt that the involvement of practising Jews in this protest, and others, will cause something of a problem for some of the propaganda used to attack Green groups. Because there was a very strong ecological aspect to Nazism, the Right tries to close off sympathy for Green politics as a whole by smearing it as a form of Nazism, even when it’s blatantly clear that they aren’t. But the IHRC definition of anti-Semitism states that it is anti-Semitic to describe a Jew as a Nazi. Which is going to make it rather difficult for the organisations and rags that follow this line to claim that Jewish Greens are somehow supporting Nazism for getting involved in protests like this.

But it seems the cops are becoming very heavy-handed in their treatment of protesters. Mike over on his blog condemned the arrest of a 91/2 year old gentleman on another climate protest. This spirited old chap used the same explanation for his actions as Rabbi Newman: he was worried for the future of his grandchildren. Or great-grandchildren. He was arrested because he was caught protesting outside the Cabinet Office, and so frightened that doughty defender of British freedom, Boris Johnson. Yeah, our current excuse for a Prime Minister, who seems to fancy himself as the heir to Julius Caesar, Admiral Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, and Winston Churchill, was ‘frit’ – to use Thatcher’s word – of a 91 or 92 year old gent. Mike concluded of this gentleman’s arrest

Conclusion: John was committing an offence against nobody but Boris Johnson. A Boris Johnson government is an offence against the very environment in which we live.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/10/09/92-year-old-man-arrested-while-supporting-extinction-rebellion-because-the-tories-dont-like-it/

As ever, Mike is correct. In a subsequent article he showed that the Tories are far more likely than Labour to vote for policies that actively harm the planet. BoJo himself ‘was also among 10 ministers who received donations or gifts from oil companies, airports, petrostates, climate sceptics or thinktanks identified as spreading information against climate action.’ Mike’s article was based on a Guardian piece, that developed a scoreboard for the parties’ and individual politicians’ voting record. The Tories on average scored 17. Labour scored 90, and Jeremy Corbyn 92. Mike’s conclusion:

if you want a government that acts against climate change and to protect the environment for you, your children and future generations, you need to vote LABOUR.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/10/12/worried-about-climate-change-then-dont-vote-tory/

And we have to stop the cops being used as BoJo’s private police force, so that no more decent people, including senior citizens and members of the clergy of this country’s diverse religious communities, are picked up because they dare to frighten BoJob and his wretched corporate backers.

The Israel Lobby, Liam Fox and the Planned Bombing of Iran

I found a few more bits and pieces on the Israel Lobby going through some more recent back issues of Lobster on the net. I know there’s a risk of sounding fixated with them, but much of the hostility against Jeremy Corbyn from the Blairites is directly due to the Blairite’s strong connections to the lobby. The lobby’s influence is also extremely strong in the media, which is why, apart from the space given to ludicrous allegations of anti-Semitism against perfectly decent people, you rarely hear reports condemning the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And it seems that it was the machinations of the Israel lobby that nearly got us involved in an American-Israeli plot to bomb Iran.

Liam Fox and Werrity Scandal

Remember the scandal that erupted a few years ago over the improper relationship between Dr. Liam Fox, then Secretary of State for Defence, and his adviser, Adam Werrity. Werrity had been Fox’s flatmate. Fox was nearly prosecuted for breaching various ministerial codes of conduct over his relationship with Werrity. He met Werrity over 40 times both abroad and in the Ministry of Defence, and a full report revealing Fox’s misdeeds was published by the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell. This revealed that Fox had not informed his permanent secretary that he had tried to obtain funds for Werrity, and had blocked other civil servants from attending meetings alongside him. Fox had also ignored calls to distance himself from him.

See Lobster 65, ‘Tittle-Tattle’, by Tom Easton.

All that was covered in the media, if I recall correctly. I think Mike also wrote a few pieces about it, as it’s yet another example of the ministerial corruption that soon accompanies the Tories into office.

About a year and a half previously, in Lobster 62, Robin Ramsay in his ‘View from the Bridge’ column, discussed a piece about the Werrity scandal by Craig Murray in his blog. Murray was the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who lost his job because he dared to start making waves about how corrupt and brutal the Uzbek dictator was. It was information that the British government and business establishment really didn’t want to hear, or the public knowing, as they were desperate to conclude various trade deals. So Murray got the sack.

In his article, Murray revealed that at last someone in the mainstream media had had the courage to talk about the possibility that the Werrity affair was part of a operation by the Israeli secret services, and stated that this had been a major concern of the MOD and government officials. He wrote

‘A mainstream media source has finally plucked up the courage to publish the widespread concern among MOD, Cabinet Office and FCO officials and military that the Werritty operation was linked to, and perhaps controlled by, Mossad – something which agitated officials have been desperately signalling for some days.

“Officials expressed concern that Fox and Werritty might even have been in freelanced iscussions with Israeli intelligence agencies” write Patrick Wintour and Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian.

As I have been explaining, the real issue here is a British defence secretary who had a parallel advice structure designed expressly to serve the interests of
another state and linked to that state’s security services. That is not just a sacking offence, it is treasonable.’

Ramsay goes on to state that in a later article, Murray cited answers to questions he and Jeremy Corbyn had put to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to show that the Werrity scandal wasn’t an intelligence operation, but part of the preparations for an ‘Anglo-British-Israeli’ attack on Iran. I think Ramsay might mean that the attack was planned by America, Britain and Israel. Unless Scots, Northern Irish and Welsh devolution had gone much further than everyone knew.

Ramsay then remarks that Murray didn’t comment on the incompetence of using Werrity, the Defence Secretary’s bagman, as part of the plot, and suggests that the bizarre dealings had been deliberately exposed by Whitehall civil servants determined to stop the attack going ahead.

This seems all too plausible to me. Netanyahu was desperately trying to get America to attack Iran, including scaremongering about Iran being a few months away from having a nuclear bomb. This was rubbish. Netanyahu’s generals and his own intelligence services told him so. But this didn’t stop the old butcher turning up in front of Congress or the UN with entirely fraudulent diagram to hawk his lies. Fortunately, nobody believed him, which is why the situation in the Middle East hasn’t become very much worse.

This little incident also adds yet more information explaining why the Israel lobby has such desperate hatred for Corbyn. Not only is one of the few politicians genuinely trying to stand up for the rights of the Palestinians against their oppression and brutalisation by the Israelis, he’s also an obstacle to the foreign policy objectives. Netanyahu, his hawks and the neocons in Britain and America wanted to attack Iran, and he and Murray helped prevent them from doing so. Hence the splenetic attempts to portray him and his supporters as anti-Semites, when they are no such thing.

Vox Political on the Government’s Plan to Waste Money Writing on Vellum

Earlier today Mike posted up on his website a piece from the Guardian, reporting that the government had blocked proposals from the House of Lords, which would hav seen the official copies of acts of parliament switched from being written on vellum, to printed on archival paper. The change would save about £80,000 a year. However, Matt Hancock, a spokesman for the Cabinet Office, stated that some traditions were too important to change.

Now I actually do believe in tradition, always depending, of course, on what the tradition is. But this is just nonsensical. I’ve used vellum myself – it’s a very tough, very durable material. There are documents written on vellum that have survived for more than a thousand years, like the Domesday Book, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. But the archival paper they wish to use to replace vellum sounds almost as tough, if not as. This will last 500 hundred years. I can believe it, because as an historian and archaeologist, I’ve examined documents written on early paper. By and large, the paper used in Britain from the 16th to the mid-19th century is extremely tough and durable. Of course it depends on how it’s treated, but it doesn’t degrade easily and some of the documents from the 19th century are better preserved than modern printed material.

And if we’re talking about the long-term survival of paper documents, just think about the Oxyrhinchus Papyri. These are Graeco-Roman and ancient Egyptian documents on papyrus from ancient Egypt, which date from the 3-4th centuries AD. Scholars are still going through them and discovering new, and often previously lost texts illuminating the life of people in Egypt and generally in the Roman Empire from well over a millennium and a half ago. And this is despite the fact that the stuff was thrown out on the fields and used as fertiliser.

Really, when ordinary citizens are suffering serious cuts to their benefits, cuts that threaten their very lives, it’s ridiculous for parliament to waste such amounts of money on tradition. This just shows the Cabinet to be obstinate, bloody-minded and indifferent to the suffering of ordinary people, but indulgent when it comes to their own petty tastes. Traditions change and evolve. So must this.

Private Eye on Think Tanks Funding Political Conferences

One of the key causes in the corruption of British politics has been the way the different political parties are being lobbied and funded by the same, almost exclusively right-wing think tanks. These organisations provide the parties with advisors and sponsor debates and events at the various political conferences. As a result, while the parties themselves have changed, the Thatcherite policies they have pursued have remained unchallenged. Not only is this influence corrupt in itself, but it’s also led to the British voting public becoming alienated and disenfranchised. They feel with some justification, that there is little difference between the parties, and that they are being sidelined and ignored in favour of big business.

Private Eye published a piece on this issue in their edition of 21st September – 4th October 2012, listing the various think tanks and describing their links to various politicians and ministers.

Conference Callers

Party members may see conference season as their chance to be heard, but judging by the brochures put out by think tanks, the grassroots will have a job making it past better-funded rivals from the business lobby.

Over the summer, the Eye acquired prospectuses from several think tanks looking to recruit sponsors for debates at the forthcoming Tory, Lib Dem and Labour conferences.

Reform, a think tank with Tory links, tells potential sponsors it can set up “successful events attended by ministers and shadow ministers, special advisors, MPs, MEPs and council leaders”, among them minister for welfare reform Lord Freud, housing minister Mark Prisk, employment minister Mark Hoban and the Foreign Office’s Henry Bellingham.

Lest anyone mistake the purpose, any “partner organisation” – ie company willing to pay for access – can use roundtable events or dinners with “around 20 high-level participants” to put their own “insights into the relevant policy debate at the beginning of the meeting”.

Not to be outdone, ResPublica, run by David Cameron’s “Red Tory” guru Phillip Blond, offers potential “partners” a chance for “intimate discussion over diner with select stakeholders and policymakers”, plus the opportunity to “contribute” to the choice of subject and speaker for meetings with ministers.

Meanwhile the Social Market Foundation (SMF) is touting “an excellent standard of service to our sponsors”, including the chance to “shape the key questions for debate” and “input into the speaker line-up”, with top totty on offer to include Lord Freud (again), Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin, prisons and probation minister Crispin Blunt, universities minister David Willetts and chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander.

Trendy think tank Demos urges companies to cough up for events and roundtables potentially hosted by the prime minister or chancellor, with sponsors getting the chance for “conversations that link their policy agenda to contemporary political issues”. And Policy Exchange, the Cameroonian think tank, trumpets its “competitive sponsorship package”: as well as potential access to ministers, a few broad themes scheduled for debate will be honed after … conversations with sponsors.

Think tanks have tax-free charitable status based on their lofty aims to improve public policy. How does offering commercial interests the chance to pitch ideas to ministers over dinner fit that mission?

Clearly, it doesn’t. If politics in Britain is to be improved, and its people to be given a genuine choice between the parties, and have a real voice in how their country is governed, the corporatists think tanks need to be thrown out. Removing their charitable status, except for those rare occasions where they might, actually, represent charities, would be a start.

From 2011: Government Appoints A4E to Design Contracts for Private Welfare Schemes

This is another story from Private Eye, this time from 2011. According to the Eye for 30th September – 13th October 2011, the government was awarding A4E the contract for designing the rules under which A4E, amongst other contractors, would bid to provide public welfare and social services.

Welfare Reform

Contract Claws

The Cabinet Office has appointed A4E, one of the government’s biggest contractors, to design the kind of contracts for which it will itself bid.

A4E will design the “payments by results” rules for the welfare contracts funded by “social impact bonds”, the government’s new big idea for public services. By putting its main welfare contractor in charge of designing welfare contracts, the department is effectively repeating one of the central failure of the private finance initiative.

The contract is worth up to £300,000 and covers pilot schemes in four regions to help families with multiple problems. Private investors fund welfare and social work schemes and the government then pays the investors back over years based on the public money “saved” by unemployed people finding work or ex-offenders staying out of jail.

The Cabinet Office is seeking “more innovative financiers, with a bigger appetite for risk”, so it will take very tight contracts to prevent these aggressive investors getting big returns over long periods for ill-defined “savings”, as the PFI example shows. Asking A4E to guarantee the “robustness of the savings estimates” seems perverse as the firm has repeatedly failed to give good results on its existing welfare-to-work contracts (Eyes passim), and it has every interest in government contracts being as soft as possible.

A4E may be excluded from bidding for the contracts it is drawing up in Birmingham, Leicestershire, Hammersmith and Westminster (all Conservative councils); but exclusion is not automatic; A4E is being asked to guard against “cream skimming/cherry picking” and ensure “value for money” – but critics say that A4E is itself guilty of the former and does not offer the latter.

Such conflicts of interest and soft corruption are, of course, no strangers to welfare reform and the public-private contracts governments since Maggie Thatcher’s have pursued. The Skwawkbox today blogged on the close links between George Osborne and the company, which bought up many of the Royal Mail shares at a discount. Way back in the 1990s, one of big accountancy firms being employed by Major’s government to adjudicate the bids of companies competing for a government contract, then decided to bid themselves as they decided they were the best candidate. A4E in this instance is merely part of a long line of such cases. It was all part of the ‘sleaze’ of the Major years, of which a French politician said ‘You call it ‘sleaze’. In France we simply call it corruption.’ The point of such contracts in any case isn’t to guarantee quality of service, or provide transparency and accountability, but simply to award lucrative government money to big companies that will then reward the politicians concerned with directorships.