UK Politics

The Church’s Embarrassing Welfare Intervention

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

jobcentre

If you want to start playing in the big leagues, you first have to do the necessary preparation – no ifs or buts – unless comprehensive defeat and embarrassment are an acceptable outcome.

But with each additional intervention in the growing row over the coalition government’s welfare reforms, it becomes increasingly clear that the Church (first as represented by the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and now a large group of Anglican bishops) did not do its homework or due diligence before plunging into the complex welfare policy debate. Worse still, people are starting to notice.

As government indignation grows following the Church’s public accusation of dismantling the social safety net, the Telegraph sardonically notes:

Unlike Jesus, the Treasury cannot work miracles when it comes to funding the welfare budget.

This zinger is just the prelude to a more comprehensive rebuttal of Archbishop Vincent Nichol’s accusation that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government has deliberately and completely destroyed the social safety net for poor and vulnerable Britons. Charlotte Leslie, Conservative MP for Bristol North West, is not having any of it:

Much as we would like it to be otherwise, politics and the treasury are bound by the prosaic principles of miracle-free finance. Christ may be able to produce endless amounts from a couple of loaves of bread and a tin of sardines, but to date, neither the Treasury, nor, must if be said, the Church of England, managed to replicate this, and it seems unwise at best to base a welfare policy upon such a proviso.

Given that is the case, the Bishops’ criticisms would have carried more weight if they had accompanied their foray into welfare policy with some kind of hint as to how they might secure the future of our nation’s low borrowing rates, and continue with a one-third deficit reduction plan, (which of course is essential if we are to have any chance in spending enough on welfare) whilst doing better in helping the poorest. This would have been an extremely welcome contribution to a dreadfully difficult challenge.

By not doing so, they cheapen the essential point they are making about how we care for our vulnerable, in the long term.

This is sadly very accurate, and closely echoes what this blog said on the matter only yesterday:

For all of the noise generated in the wake of the Archbishop’s interview we are no closer to understanding what the Church would prefer to see in place of the coalition government’s reforms.

How much stronger would Archbishop Nichols’ intervention have been if he had proposed something radical to replace Iain Duncan Smith’s incremental reforms? Some might argue that it is not the Church’s place to propose new policy, but if an organisation as large and respected as the Catholic Church disagrees with current government policy on welfare, it would only benefit the country if they made public their best thinking as to how to move forward with reform given the current economic constraints.

The Catholic Church is deeply embedded in communities throughout the entire United Kingdom. What if they were to use that proximity and understanding to propose some better reforms, rather than engaging in fruitless hand-wringing from the sidelines?

It is also heartening to see a Conservative MP taking the church to task for belatedly weighing in on the welfare debate only now, in the year 2014, and for directing their admonition only at the coalition government and not at failed policies of the previous Labour government who laid the groundwork for so much of the human suffering that is now taking place. Leslie writes:

Finally, if such an unprecedented attack was going to be made, the Bishops would have had more credibility if they had acknowledged some basic truths: That food-bank use increased ten-fold under the last Labour Government. That the Labour Government was so worried about the image that food-banks would create, that it prevented Job Centres from referring needy individuals to them (that’s got to rate pretty badly on the New Testament test) and that that the increase in food-banks will also partly be due to this added referral rate.

The facts are that we have a dreadfully difficult task: to bring the country back into economic health so that we are able to continue to support a welfare state whilst at the same time reducing what is simply an unmanageably large current welfare bill.

While it is true that the buck stops with the government of the day in terms of specific policies, anyone wanting to be taken seriously when speaking about welfare should be able to demonstrate an awareness of the political reality going back before 2010, to a time when the last Labour government made so many more people dependent on government benefits or tax credits, and vulnerable to necessary cuts in public spending. Pretending that everything was fine until 2010, and that the fault lies with the people attempting to clean up Britain’s ruined public finances rather than those who brought them to ruin in the first place, is either evidence of extreme left wing partisanship or a very simplistic and immature understanding of welfare policy in general.

This is a time for serious debate, and as this blog has already stated, an intervention from the Church was both important and timely. Unfortunately, the intervention that the Church provided was not the one that the seriousness of the subject deserved. Hyperbolic talk about the destruction of the social safety net is not becoming to a serious organisation, and is more at home in one of Ed Miliband’s talking points than coming from the mouths of consecrated bishops.

A real, worthwhile intervention from the bishops would have acknowledged the competing demands for limited financial resources when it comes to government spending, and would have acknowledged the various faults and missteps that led us to the current place as well as chiding those who are currently trying to dig us out of the hole. It might have brought up the fact that politicians of all parties are doing the country a disservice by focusing only on welfare but ignoring pensions and the retirement age when it comes to tackling deficit reduction. A statement on the continued wisdom of universal benefits, the pros and cons of means testing or the extent to which the burden of spending cuts should be re-calibrated between the young and old in our country – all of these would have been welcome interjections.

What we got instead was alarmist, hyperbolic talk about the end of the social safety net from a group of men who appear to have only tuned in to the debate this month, and received most of their information in that time from Labour Party HQ.

The Church diminishes herself by making such blatantly one-sided forays into national policy debate. Faith groups are  capable of making a much more mature and valuable contribution to the national conversation, and the British public deserves the best of their efforts, not the dregs.

The Government Must Be Smart, Not Vindictive On Welfare

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

dwp

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government is already waging a war on two fronts when it comes to welfare reform, with the combined forces of the Catholic and Anglican churches having just taken up one flank and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party menacing from the other. Given this state of affairs, some people might reasonably believe that they had bitten off about as much as they could chew, having now taken on God in addition to David Miliband’s politically fratricidal brother. But apparently not this government.

Already under fire for paying insufficient regard to the suffering of those living on welfare, the Department for Work and Pensions is now plotting to charge people for appealing the rejection or cancellation of their benefits claims. The policy is packaged together with a number of others which collectively manage to do very little to solve a real welfare or fiscal-related issue while sounding very tough and decisive.

The Guardian reports:

Critics said the proposal, contained in an internal Department for Work and Pensions document leaked to the Guardian, would hit some of the poorest people in Britain, who have been left with little or no income.

In the document about the department’s internal finances, officials say the “introduction of a charge for people making appeals against [DWP] decisions to social security tribunals” would raise money.

Other ideas include selling off child support debt to “the private sector to collect”, though civil servants remark that the government would be unlikely to raise more than 5-7p in the pound from the £1.4bn currently owed to the DWP. The department currently collects arrears.

It is depressing indeed to see the government obsessing over the smallest and most insignificant line items in the budget whilst ignoring the parade of elephants in the room. Why look at the billions upon billions of pounds that can (and must) be saved by means-testing pensions and increasing the retirement age when one can look very busy and important (but much less politically brave) saving scraps of money here and there by implementing a pay-as-you-go benefit appeal process?

Of course it would save money to charge people for appealing their adverse benefit claim decisions – by definition, most benefit claimants don’t have much money to splash around taking the government to court. And the only precedent in existence for charging for this kind of appeal would see claimants having to pay in the order of £250 to have their case heard:

Last year the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which sets policy in the area, brought in charges for employment tribunals of up to £250 to lodge a claim, depending on the kind of case being brought. The union Unison asked judges to review the policy, saying the number of claims had dropped by more than half after fees were introduced. High court judges declared the policy lawful this month.

This smacks of government simply hoping to bully and intimidate people into not pursuing legitimate claims. If a short term claimant for Jobseekers’ Allowance is denied their claim, it will hardly be worth their while appealing the decision, no matter how egregiously wrong it may have been. If the claimant can reasonably expect to return to work within a month, the value of the benefit claim in question would barely cover the cost of making the appeal. At best (if the application was approved on appeal) the claimant would break even, and it would be as though they had done nothing at all. And at worst (if the rejection was upheld) the claimant would be £250 in the red.

With the claimant’s potential options so skewed against them, it would create an enormous incentive for the authorities to reject as many applications as possible out of hand, knowing that only a small fraction would likely make it to appeal. The government might accomplish its goal of drastically reducing the welfare rolls, but at what price?

Regardless of whether the majority of decisions end up being upheld or overturned, making people with no money pay to appeal decisions can only hurt some of the poorest people in Britain.

Those people who are generally supportive of the coalition government’s attempts to tackle the ongoing British budget deficit and make meaningful reforms to the welfare system can only be immensely frustrated by this development. The introduction of the Universal Credit and other associated reforms are proving contentious enough, and their implementation has been beset with difficulty. The government has not successfully implemented a new IT system on time or on budget since the days of 5.25 inch floppy disks, and this track record shows no sign of imminent improvement.

The scale of the task already underway was challenging enough, and faced enough opposition, so why was there such an urgent need to make its progress even more treacherous? True, the plans only came to public knowledge because an internal document was leaked, but at some point these proposals would have seen the light of day and been formally announced. When was the government saving this kick-the-poor-while-they’re-down announcement for? One year before the general election? Six months? Just before the start of the official campaign, as a surefire way to help Ed Miliband win back power for Labour?

Now is the time when the coalition government needs to circle the wagons around welfare reforms that are coming under increasing attack from the Labour Party and the more hand-wringing, less cerebral ranks of the church.

Finding out, instead, that the DWP has essentially been writing another six months worth of unfavourable headlines for the government in The Guardian and The Daily Mirror was not the decisive response that welfare reform proponents were looking for.

When David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith have finished giving the bishops remedial lessons in economics and social policy, they would also do well to bring the DWP to heel. Self-inflicted wounds of this kind are not helping to advance their agenda.

The Church vs Welfare Reform

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, has inserted the Catholic church squarely into the centre of the debate about welfare reform and deficit reduction.

The accusations that he makes are serious, and are directed squarely at the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government – namely, that the social safety net has been ripped up in the period following the 2010 general election:

 

The Telegraph reports on their interview with the Archbishop which launched the story into the news cycle:

Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has accused the Coalition of leaving increasing numbers of people facing “hunger and destitution”.

Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said that while the need to reduce spending on benefits is widely accepted, the Government’s reforms have now destroyed even the “basic safety net”.

Archbishop Nichols, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

The Guardian follows up with a report detailing the extent to which Archbishop Nichols has been ‘inundated’ with messages of support:

In his Telegraph interview, published on Saturday, Nichols accused ministers of tearing apart the safety net that protects people from hunger and destitution. He said since he made those comments he had been “inundated with accounts from people … saying there are indeed many cases where people are left without benefits, without any support, for sometimes weeks on end”.

The criticism has clearly rankled the government, and not just the Work & Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (himself a practicing Roman Catholic). Indeed, the rebuke was such that David Cameron himself felt the need to respond to the church’s criticism. Writing in The Telegraph, Cameron made a convincing argument in support of his government’s welfare reform:

For me the moral case for welfare reform is every bit as important as making the numbers add up: building a country where people aren’t trapped in a cycle of dependency but are able to get on, stand on their own two feet and build a better life for themselves and their family.

Let’s be clear about the welfare system we inherited. It was a system where in too many cases people were paid more to be on benefits than to be in work. A system where people could claim unlimited amounts of housing benefit – in London there were people claiming truly astonishing sums of £60,000, £70,000, £80,000 a year. A system where hundreds of thousands of people were put on Incapacity Benefit and never reassessed, essentially taken off the books and forgotten about. None of these things is defensible. And it is right both economically – and morally – to change them.

The founders of our welfare system believed in the principle of responsibility – and so do we. As I said on the steps of Downing Street on my first night as Prime Minister, “those who can should, those who can’t we will always help”. Those who can’t work will be always supported, but those who can work have the responsibility to do so. The welfare system should never take that responsibility away.

In all of this, one gets the sense that the two sides are talking at cross purposes with one another. The government is eager to stress the need to work pay for the majority, while the Church is more keen to focus on any potential iniquities in marginal cases, stemming from welfare reform. And while these marginal cases often deserve full attention and consideration, there is never any real acceptance by the Church that the welfare system requires fixing of any kind in the first place. For all of the noise generated in the wake of the Archbishop’s interview we are no closer to understanding what the Church would prefer to see in place of the coalition government’s reforms.

How much stronger would Archbishop Nichols’ intervention have been if he had proposed something radical to replace Iain Duncan Smith’s incremental reforms? Some might argue that it is not the Church’s place to propose new policy, but if an organisation as large and respected as the Catholic Church disagrees with current government policy on welfare, it would only benefit the country if they made public their best thinking as to how to move forward with reform given the current economic constraints.

The Catholic Church is deeply embedded in communities throughout the entire United Kingdom. What if they were to use that proximity and understanding to propose some better reforms, rather than engaging in fruitless hand-wringing from the sidelines?

vincentnichols

 

If the Church feels that it is the right time to make a contribution to the debate about welfare spending, then this should be welcomed and taken seriously. But it becomes harder to do so when the intervention is so piecemeal and one-sided in nature, failing to look at the historical context of the welfare problem or proposing alternatives when specific policies are to be attacked. The Church has a responsibility to pay attention to the debate from the start and to at least attempt to gain an understanding for the reasoning behind government policy, and not just to repeat Labour Party talking points.

A sense of missed opportunity now pervades the coverage of the entire debate.

It is certainly the case that living on standard benefits – Jobseeker’s Allowance or Employment Support Allowance – is practically impossible in many parts of the country, particularly for those who unexpectedly fall on hard times and who are unable to trim their expenditures with the same brutal speed at which their income evaporates. This is worthy of discussion, and sensible changes could be made along lines previously suggested on this blog.

It is also true that new measures recently put in place can make benefit claimants subject to sanctions for failing to comply with what are sometimes confusing and arbitrary procedures. This too could have been discussed seriously and in detail. Nichols goes so far as to call this a ‘disgrace’:

[Archbishop Vincent Nichols] said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

While it is true that such sanctions do exist, what is missing from Nichols’ interview is any acknowledgement of the problem that the sanctions exist to counter – the number of claimants who do (or did) not make sufficient efforts to find new employment. If it is the Church’s position that those who do not make reasonable efforts to find work should never be penalised for their inaction, this is something that should be explicitly admitted.

In short, it is all well and good to attack the impact of austerity on welfare recipients here and now in 2014, but one wonders where was the Church’s criticism when Gordon Brown and the Labour Party made so many millions more people dependent on state assistance and more vulnerable to the cuts in government spending which would always have been inevitable in the event of recession?

There is a strong sense – at least from Archbishop Nichols’ first intervention in the debate – that the strategy of the Church will be to attack the people now trying to fix the budgetary mess left by the last government, and to accuse them of cruelty and neglect, while turning a blind eye toward the misguided politics and personalities of the people who did so much to make the poorest Britons more vulnerable and dependent on the state.

It will be a shame if the Labour Party really is to get a free pass in this debate, as the Conservatives are not the only ones who stand to benefit from the guidance and prompting toward social justice potentially offered by the Catholic Church. In the past, too many from the Labour Party have been content to parade around loudly talking about how compassionate they are (and that the other side is heartless by virtue of their lack of faith in government provision by default), and so are given a free pass when their badly conceived ideas inevitably go wrong during implementation.

On this, though, the Cardinal-elect is absolutely right:

He concluded: “The moral challenge roots back to the principle that we have to regard and treat every single person with respect. That’s one of the great geniuses of Pope Francis – that he manages in his gestures to show that respect to even the most unlovely of people.”

Absolutely. And where the welfare system or the austerity programme is helping rather than hindering this effort, it is absolutely right to point it out. It is all too easy to begin reducing human lives and human suffering to statistics, to black and white numbers on a  pre-budget report or a policy paper, and if nothing else, Archbishop Nichols did service to the debate by pointing this out and giving voice to some of the unheard suffering.

But if there is a war on poor people currently underway in Britain, it has been waged just as much by those on the ‘compassionate’ left who sought to make more and more people dependent on government benefits and tax credits as it has been by the new coalition government which had the unenviable task of repairing the economic damage wrought by thirteen years of Labour rule. If the Conservatives are to be blamed for undermining the social safety net, why should Labour escape censure for vastly overfilling it in the first place, causing the weight of the full net to threaten the buoyancy of the whole ship?

One cannot help but feel that the voice of the church – a serious and valued voice in our national debate – would have a lot more credibility on the topic of if, when they spoke, they gave the slightest indication that they had been paying equal attention to the plight of welfare recipients before David Cameron entered 10 Downing Street.

Scottish Independence vs Reality

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

It has not been a good week for the Scottish nationalists, however they try to spin it.

First came the three-pronged scolding from each of the main Westminster parties, denying a potential future independent Scotland the possibility of a currency union with the rest of the UK, sharing the pound. And then the European Union piled on the pressure, casting serious doubt on the possibility of Scotland acceding to EU membership as a separate country.

For once they agree on something.
For once they agree on something.

 

The overhyped emotional appeal (to some) of Scottish independence is finally running smack into the wall of cold, hard reality and common sense. This is a good thing for those people who want to preserve our Union, not just because it is heartening to see the nationalist pipe dream suffering a setback, but because it has thrown two important arguments against Scottish independence into sharper focus.

The first of these is the fact that the pro-independence movement, led by Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party, really haven’t fleshed out any detail as to how a newly independent Scotland would engage with the rest of the world. The very first issue that would be confronted by a future Scottish Foreign Secretary would be the question of how to normalise relations with the rest of the United Kingdom and the European Union, with whom the new nation would now share a land border.

Scotland historically leans further to the left than England, and as a very small country would almost certainly want to preserve membership of the EU. But it is now clear that this will almost certainly not happen, as The Guardian reports:

It would be “difficult, if not impossible” for an independent Scotland to become a member of the European Union, the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, has said.

The statement will be seen as a blow to the hopes of the Scottish Nationalists who claim the country would join the EU in the event of a yes vote in September’s referendum.

Barroso told the Andrew Marr Show that member states seeking to prevent their own semi-autonomous regions from seceding would almost certainly block Scotland’s membership. He said Scotland would have to apply for EU membership in the usual way.

“It will be extremely difficult to get the approval of all the other member states to have a new member coming from one member state,” he said.

This is a good point. Various other European Union member states wrestle with problems relating to semi-autonomous regions of their own. Seeing Scotland secede from the United Kingdom and accede to the EU as a separate country would set an alarming precedent for them, and the only way to send a strong message to their own restive would-be breakaway regions would be to make an example of Scotland by leaving them in the wilderness and denying them membership.

The counterargument by the SNP – that Scotland’s case is very different to that of other newly-separated countries such as Kosovo, the recognition of which has been opposed by Spain – is correct, but irrelevant. Scotland is already a part of the European Union by virtue of being part of the UK. This means that the laws, customs and processes of Scotland are already in alignment with EU norms, which would make the harmonisation process much easier, if not nonexistent. Aside from agreeing Scottish monetary contributions to the EU and rearranging Scotland’s representation in the European Parliament, there are precious few complex steps toward membership that spring to mind. Scotland as an independent nation would instinctively be much more at home within the EU than is the United Kingdom. Precisely none of which would matter once Scotland’s membership is vetoed. Fantasy – meet reality.

Given this somewhat counterintuitive reality, and given the looming deadline of the independence referendum, it is no longer sufficient for Alex Salmond and the SNP to continue to publicly stick to Plan A and assume that the European Union would welcome an independent Scotland into its fold. The Scottish people deserve to hear the fallback plan, since that is the one most likely to become reality.

Is Plan B an individually negotiated free trade agreement with the EU? A series of bilateral treaties and trade agreements with other nations? Either way, New Scotland would likely quickly realise the pitfalls of being a minnow of a country negotiating with giants. The argument sometimes falsely leveled at the UK – that we are somehow a small country incapable of punching our weight and negotiating favourable terms with other countries – actually applies to Scotland quite strikingly.

Scotland would also wrestle with Small Country Syndrome in the matter of her currency, as it has now been made abundantly clear that there is no appetite within the main UK political parties to share the pound. The BBC reports:

[Chancellor of the Exchequer George] Osborne said: “The pound isn’t an asset to be divided up between two countries after a break-up like a CD collection.

“If Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the UK pound.”

He went on: “There’s no legal reason why the rest of the UK would need to share its currency with Scotland.

“So when the Nationalists say the pound is as much ours as the rest of the UK’s, are they really saying that an independent Scotland could insist that taxpayers in a nation it had just voted to leave had to continue to back the currency of this new, foreign country?”

The SNP is desperately trying to spin this refusal as an act of bullying by Westminster, but that is not the case. It is true that the announcements from the three main parties – the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats – were coordinated, but this was for purely party political tactical purposes, and the necessity to avoid muddying the debate through separate interventions in the debate.

George Osborne summarised the reasons against allowing an independent Scotland to continue to use the pound in his Edinburgh speech. By default, a national currency should remain with the remaining bulk of a fracturing country, and not the small breakaway entity – that much is self evident. So why then should the rump of the UK agree to continue sharing the pound?

The one sole advantage is quite important and quite obvious – the fact that it would be a nightmare to have two currencies operating on what is geographically a very small island. Those living on the land border would find it especially difficult and would be beset with new currency exchange transaction costs, as would all businesses trading both north and south of the border.

The disadvantages are not so immediately tangible, but they are many, and together they outweigh the sole advantage of sharing a currency (avoiding increased transaction costs). Since the Scottish electorate sits somewhat to the left of the English on the political spectrum, it is reasonable to expect that there would be quite radically divergent economic policies operating north and south of the border soon after independence. Certainly, the SNP would favour more government spending on virtually everything that moves, and higher taxes to help pay for it all.

Whether or not you think that such an economic policy would lead to greater economic growth and prosperity – and it won’t – it must be understood that hugely divergent fiscal  and government spending policies cannot sit under a common monetary policy without causing tremendous strain. You need look no further than the comparative experiences of Greece and Germany within the eurozone for proof of this fact. If a future independent Scottish government wants to essentially pick up where Gordon Brown left off in Westminster, spending hand over fist without a care for the consequences, why should the 53 million people of England, the 3 million people of Wales and the 2 million people of Northern Ireland be on the hook as the ultimate guarantor for Holyrood’s spending spree?

It is not a case of bullying when George Osborne and his shadow counterparts refuse outright to entertain the idea of sharing the British pound with an independent Scotland. Rather, it is the only prudent and responsible decision that could be taken in protection of the best interests of the remainder of the United Kingdom.

Spending decisions made here by an independent Scotland should not be underwritten by the rest of the UK
Spending decisions made here by an independent Scotland should not be underwritten by the rest of the UK

 

It can be argued that both of these twin setbacks suffered by the Scottish nationalists – being denied the pound and being rebuffed by the EU – are unfair. They are certainly keen to make this argument, at every opportunity and to anybody who will listen. And they have a point. Having two currencies operating in the British Isles would be immensely awkward, and the costs to the UK of not sharing the pound with Scotland are not inconsiderable. Though the announcement made by the main Westminster parties is doubtless the correct decision, a detailed feasibility study weighing the potential risk and costs of a badly managed Scottish economy harming the remaining United Kingdom in a currency union scenario against the costs to the economy of the 5.25 million people at the top of the British Isles using a different currency would have given solid credibility to the statement.

The case of Scotland’s future EU membership can also be seen as unfair. All things being equal, it would probably be in the interests of both an independent Scotland and the EU for membership negotiations to be quick and painless, and so it is regrettable that the accession of an independent Scotland would likely be blocked by other member states. Regrettable but highly likely and easily predictable.

So in these two key aspects of the debate, the aspirations of the Scottish nationalists bump up against obstacles that can be seen as unfair. But sadly, that’s just life. It would be nice if countries like Spain would not veto an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU for domestic reasons, but they probably still would. And it would be nice (for Scotland) if the rejected rump of the United Kingdom would simply roll over and allow the seceded Scotland to continue sharing the currency of it’s southern neighbours, thus making them also share in the economic risks incurred by the socialist experiment north of the border. It might be nice, but it won’t (and we now know isn’t going to) happen.

Once the SNP’s bleating about unfairness dies down, the awkward silence will urgently demand to be filled with details of their Plan B. The SNP and the Yes to Independence crowd don’t like to talk about a Plan B because it involves grappling with the the United Kingdom and the world as they are, not as they would like them to be. But, hemmed in by George Osborne, Ed Balls, Danny Alexander and now José Manuel Barroso, they no longer have a choice in the matter.

So, Alex Salmond: What does your independent, non-EU aligned, non-sterling based Scotland look like? Paint us a word picture. More importantly, describe it in detail to the people of Scotland so that they can make an informed decision based on the facts, not on nationalist wishful thinking.

Spare A Thought For Those Who Spy On Us

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Today saw a rare moment of insight into the workings of Britain’s intelligence services and the mindset of those who lead them. It was but a fleeting glimpse, though – provided by a former employee, summoned to give evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in Parliament.

Unrepentant.
Unrepentant.

The Guardian provides a concise summary of former GCHQ chief Sir David Omand’s testimony, but the real showstopper is this question, posed by Conservative MP Michael Ellis, and the response he receives from Sir David:

Q: Have the unauthorised leaks have a negative effect on morale?

Omand says that his impression, from the outside, is that it has been a bitter blow.

There have been concerns about reputation.

And they have been accused of breaking the law. They have been accused of using the US as a backdoor, to circumvent UK law. Omand says he does not think that is true.

There has been an impact on families too, he says.

And he suggests there has been an impact on recruitment. Would parents encourage their children to join an organisation accused of acting like this.

In other words, as far as David Omand is concerned, the problem is not that the all-powerful British security agencies have been collecting bulk data on the personal communications of British citizens without reasonable suspicion of criminal intent. No, the real outrage is the fact that in protesting the draconian steps taken in the name of our safety (but without our knowledge or consent), having found out about them, we have hurt the feelings of the people who have actually been doing the spying. Never mind the right to privacy – the fragile egos of our intelligence analysts are apparently at stake.

Also of interest is Omand’s opinion on whistleblowing in general, as revealed in his response to a question from Labour MP Paul Flynn:

Q: Don’t we need whistleblowers?

Omand says he supports the free press. In a well-regulated society, you don’t need whistleblowers.

So there we have it. If society is well regulated – meaning, as far as I can tell, if the elites are free to do whatever they think needs to be done under a secret gentlemen’s agreement, and the public are willing to be docile and credulous and to relinquish any expectations of oversight or checks on power – then there would be no need for whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden.

And in a sense, Sir David Omand is right. A “well-regulated” society such as this would not need whistleblowers, because it would have sacrificed so much of its integrity and worth that there would be nothing left for an honourable whistleblower to defend.

This Parliamentary performance by the former head of GCHQ provides a very revealing insight into the self-entitled mind of our political and national security elites. In their worldview, not only are they perfectly entitled to treat the average citizen with suspicion and intercept their personal communications at will, but they should also be allowed to do so with total impunity, and without ever being made to feel the slightest bit bad about their actions, either through having their clandestine work revealed by a whistleblower, or by reading a negative newspaper editorials on the subject in the aftermath.

Omand is essentially telling us that our first thought as members of the public, when confronted with proof of massive government surveillance by whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, should not be for ourselves, the people whom the security services supposedly exist to protect and serve, but rather for the sensitive feelings of the GCHQ operatives and their political masters.

If that strikes you as being slightly ludicrous, that’s good, because it should.

A fearsome building, apparently filled with very sensitive souls.
A fearsome building, apparently filled with very sensitive souls.

 

The impact of the Snowden revelations on morale within GCHQ should not be our overriding concern at this time. The organisation has been flagrantly violating the privacy of fellow British citizens – who should not be their target – unknown and unopposed, and a certain dose of guilt and shame for having done so is probably quite appropriate.

Of course, ultimate responsibility for the actions of the intelligence services rests with the government and the elected politicians who sanctioned the draconian use of surveillance practices without ever seeking the consent of the people. It is true that people working for GCHQ and the intelligence services are given orders and must carry those orders out as part of the job, and I also appreciate the power of organisational or institutional loyalty, and the corrosive effects of groupthink, both of which may play a part in allowing intelligence agency operatives to justify some of the actions that they take. But this does not absolve them of all responsibility.

Yes, the buck stops with the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, but good men and women at all levels within the hierarchy who knew of what was taking place should have stood up and said something. The sad fact is that were it not for a disgruntled and outraged American citizen blowing the whistle and releasing incriminating documents to the media, the British public would still be blissfully unaware of what has been taking place.

So where is this well-regulated society of which Omand speaks? In Britain, it clearly does not exist, as The Guardian’s summary of another of his responses makes clear:

Omand says a whistleblower has to have exhausted his other options. Edward Snowden could have gone to his employers, or to Congress. Imagine if he had walked into Congress, flanked by the editor of the Guardian, saying you have been lied to. He could have achieved his objectives, without having had to take more than 50,000 documents.

Is it not striking that when pressed to come up with an alternative to releasing sensitive intelligence documents to the media, the only alternative scenario to whistleblowing offered by Omand occurs in the context of the US government, and not the British?

Firstly, it is somewhat ludicrous to suggest that Edward Snowden could have followed this course of action. There were those in Congress, after all, who were aware of the NSA’s activities but who felt bound not to talk about them. And with unrepentant national security fanatics such as Peter King and Mike Rogers in the House, Snowden would likely have been disappeared before he had finished uttering his first sentence.

And secondly, how does Omand picture the same scenario playing out in the United Kingdom? Clearly not well, as he doesn’t expand upon the scenario during his testimony. So the concerned GCHQ analyst walks into Parliament flanked by Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian, and tells MPs that they had been lied to. What happens next? How, in any way, would that analyst’s objectives of raising awareness of the malpractice be accomplished? It wouldn’t.

Whistleblowing actions of the type carried out by Edward Snowden are sadly necessary, because it is simply not enough to flag misbehaviour by the national security complex to elected representatives in Parliament or Congress. In the US Congress there are a sufficient number of cheerleaders for Bush-era, PATRIOT Act-style security that the whistleblower could almost certainly expect immediate reprisal and persecution, and in the case of the British Parliament, there sadly exists a lazy general consensus that the security services should be left in peace to do whatever they think is reasonable to keep us safe.

In neither country, Britain or America, is there a plausible scenario where a concerned citizen could approach elected politicians with evidence of wrongdoing by the state and expect that their personal privacy and liberty to be respected and guaranteed in the aftermath. We know this because time and again, we see the majority of public officials (with a significant but outnumbered minority of brave dissenters) closing ranks to defend the intelligence agencies and the status quo. Therefore, the only way to bring a halt to these practices is by releasing information into the public sphere – which, it should be acknowledged, has been done in a very measured and sensitive way by Snowden, and is certainly no indiscriminate data dump – to increase public awareness and concern.

It would have been foolish to expect the former head of GCHQ to offer anything other than a full-throated defence of the work that he and his agency were so deeply involved in for so long. And so, in that sense, we learned nothing new from Sir David’s testimony to the Home Affairs committee today. There will be no immediate change of policy and no deathbed confessions of wrongdoing from anyone in power just yet.

And yet there was progress today. As well as the softball questions lobbed by sympathetic MPs with a similarly authoritarian outlook, Sir David Omand also had to face some tough and awkward questions. Even in centralised, deferential Britain, there are some MPs willing to do their job and represent the interests of their constituents.

Take this small ray of hope and combine it with Ed Miliband’s curious new-found interest in ensuring that the intelligence agencies receive more thorough public scrutiny and oversight, and you have the makings of what now passes for a good week for civil liberties and citizen privacy in 21st century Britain.