I am not looking for any recognition, as you know these things don’t matter to me at all and I am profoundly disinterested in where this blog comes in the annual Total Politics ranking of political blogs, so I really am not asking for you to vote for me or my blog ……..

but ……..

should you be so inclined (and I repeat I really, really don’t mind one way or the other), this is what you have to do:

The rules are:
1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and rank them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include at least FIVE blogs in your list, but please list ten if you can. If you include fewer than five, your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents or based on UK politics are eligible. No blog will be excluded from voting.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name.
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2010. Any votes received after that date will not count.

So I’m not asking you to do it, but I really won’t mind if you do……

Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith, 2nd Baron Strathclyde is Leader of the House of Lords.  As such, he is supposed to act as Leader of the WHOLE House.  The Companion to the Standing Orders of the House of Lords is quite explicit on his role:

“The Leader of the House is appointed by the Prime Minister, is a member of the Cabinet, and is responsible for the conduct of government business in the Lords. Because the Lord Speaker has no powers to rule on matters of procedure, the Leader also advises the House on procedure and order, and has the responsibility of drawing attention to violations or abuse.”

The advice on procedure and order is supposed to be impartial and at Question Time he is expected to ensure – in the case of dispute – that supplementary questions are asked in order by the different sections of the House and that the House sticks to 7 1/2 minutes per topic.  This afternoon, however, he chose to ignore impartiality and to ignore the time limit by favouring Lord Tebbit over Labour’s Baroness Rosalie Wilkins.

The question was asking the Government what plans they have for improving the lives of carers and Lord Tebbit made several attempts to get in, including being trumped by the former Conservative Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.  After Lord Mackay’s question had been answered, it should have been a Labour Peer’s turn.  However, two Government Peers tried to get in: Lord Tebbit (for the third time) and Lord Alderdice, the Convenor of the Liberal Democrat Peers.  So too did, Rosalie Wilkins, but because she is in a wheelchair she could not rise in her place – so Lord Strathclyde ignored her.  And in the ensuing fuss, the question went over time as well.

You can watch it here.  And there was real anger in the House.

But I expect there is more to come.  Next week’s business has now been published and three consecutive days of Committee deliberations on the Government’s Academies Bill have been scheduled.  No-one I have spoken to can recall three consecutive days being scheduled like this without the agreement of the Opposition.  It is beginning to look that the normal courtesies are being abandonned and the consensual approach to managing business is being ditched by the Coalition.

Mayor Boris Johnson used the opportunity of speaking to the London Congress of Borough Leaders to outline his wish-list of new powers.

The City Hall press release quotes Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, as saying:

“I welcome this contribution from the Mayor of London. The new Government is committed to genuine decentralisation of power. In London, this means transferring power and responsibility down from Whitehall and its quangos progressively downwards to City Hall, to London boroughs and to local neighbourhoods.”

He also indicated that the Government would be publishing a Localism Bill in the autumn that would provide an opportunity to amend legislation.

So does the phrase “welcome this contribution” amount to an endorsement of the Mayoral package?

I am not sure that it does.

I raised the issue in today’s Lords Question Time (on a question about whether there would be a consultation about the role and number of elected mayors).  The exchange with the Lords’ Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government was as follows:

“Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, I add to the congratulations to the noble Baroness on her appointment. I fondly remember working opposite her on many occasions when she was a stout defender of traditional London boroughs and structures of local government. The Mayor of London today has made a power grab to take over the London region of the Homes and Communities Agency, the Olympic Park Legacy Company, the Royal Parks Agency and the Port of London Authority. It has also sought greater powers over traffic control and awarding rail franchises on routes into London and the allocation of the adult skills budget in London, and to have a greater say in health provision in the capital. Are those proposals supported by Her Majesty’s Government and, if so, will they be the powers on offer to the other prospective city mayors?

Baroness Hanham: My Lords, I appreciate that the Mayor of London is looking for greater powers and devolved policies. As the noble Lord will know, we welcome the contribution that the Mayor of London makes, and the new Government have already committed to genuine decentralisation of power. That may mean transferring further powers to the mayor, but that matter is still under consideration.”

Again, “the contribution” made by the Mayor was welcomed.

But then the put-down (I’ve added the emphasis): 

“That MAY mean transferring further powers to the Mayor, but that matter is still under consideration.”

 Sounds like a touch of the long grass there …..

In Lords Question Time today I asked a supplementary which, although it rather strayed from the original question, gave me the opportunity to try and get some more flesh on the bones of the Coalition’s intentions on patient and service user representation in the NHS.

On 3rd June, in the Queen’s Speech debate, Earl Howe, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health, said this on patient representation:

“The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, asked about the patient voice. We are going to give the public a strong and independent voice though Health Watch, which will be a statutory body with the power to investigate and support complaints. I hope that this will be music to the ears of my noble friend Lady Knight. Locally, we will strengthen the patient voice by having directly elected members of the public on the boards of PCTs. That will ensure that boards are balanced between locally accountable individuals and technical expertise.”

Today, there was a question

“To ask Her Majesty’s Government which health agencies and arm’s-length bodies will be affected by cuts in government spending.”

My supplementary (which as I acknowledge was a fair way away from the original focus of the question – a traditional House of Lords Question Time tactic) and the answer it elicited were as follows:

“Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, the noble Earl has frequently argued in this House in favour of there being arm’s-length bodies to protect the patient’s interest in the NHS. Will extra resources be found to enable this aspiration of his—and I am sure, of the coalition’s—to be fully funded?

Earl Howe: My Lords, the budgetary implications of our plans are being worked through at the moment but we are clear that we need to have a more powerful patient voice within the system than at present. I believe that that goes hand-in-hand with our agenda for patient choice, greater quality standards and more information being made available to patients to enable them to make choices.”

I am not sure that much new light was shed on whether a properly independent patient voice will be created to take on the mantle of Community Health Councils and Patient Forums – successively abolished by the last Government.  We will no doubt have to await a definitive statement of Government policy ….

It is early days yet but I am beginning to hear that the various civil liberties lobbying organisations and activists are questioning whether the Coalition’s commitment to their agenda is quite as strong as they were led to believe before the General Election.

Even though the Coalition Government in its document “Our Programme for Government” trumpets that:

“We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.”

and Nick Clegg has made bizarre statements about the greatest reforms since 1832, those who are picking over the details are clearly not impressed.

For example, Ross Anderson at Cambridge University is already talking of “A very rapid betrayal“, saying:

“The coalition Government plans to keep the Summary Care Record, despite pre-election pledges by both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to rip up the system – which is not compliant with the I v Finland judgement of the European Court of Human Rights.”

And Hawktalk says:

“Ah! The reality of power! For all the Opposition talk about strengthening the protection of privacy, in the first weeks of Government, the pro-privacy proposition has become more difficult to implement. The inevitable result is that gears are being put into neutral or reverse (as quietly as possible, mind you!).

So it is with the repeal of the ID Card Act and the abolition of the National Identity Register by the “Identity Documents Bill 2010-11” whose Second Reading is today. We all know that from their respective manifestos, both Lib-Con coalition partners wanted to scrap ID Cards and strengthen the penalties in the Data Protection Act. We know that the previous Government had draft legislation on the stocks which provided for custodial penalties for misuse of personal data under the Data Protection Act.

With apparent political unity about the weak data protection offences associated with the deliberate misuse of personal data, one would have thought that an stronger penalty could have been introduced quite quickly. Alas, this is not the case. The Identity Documents Bill has used a contorted definition of “personal information” in order to avoid strengthening the offences in the Data Protection Act.”

And then there is the huge anger already generated by the plans to repatriate asylum-seekers to Iraq and the deportation of children to Afghanistan.

I always thought that the Tories were cynical and opportunist in their attacks on the last Government’s record on civil liberties and human rights, but I suspect the LibDems believed their own rhetoric.  I suspect that faultline is going to get increasingly strained as the Coalition comes to grips with the realities of being in Government.

Whenever I am asked to speak about the lessons of the 7/7 bombings or emergency preparedness generally, one of the points I make is about the importance of exercises that test the effectiveness of emergency plans and enable different agencies to get used to working together under stress conditions.

However, my attention has been drawn to an article in the Las Vegas Sun which describes an exercise conducted by the  St. Rose Dominican Hospital.  This was intended to test the emergency preparedness of hospital staff, but I think most people would agree that hospital administrators may have taken things a bit too far.

According to the article, the exercise started when

“an off-duty cop pretending to be a terrorist stormed into a hospital intensive care unit brandishing a handgun, which he pointed at nurses while herding them down a corridor and into a room.”

Only then were they told that it was a training exercise.

And as the article explains:

“The staff at St. Rose Dominican Hospitals-Siena Campus, where the incident took place Monday morning, found the exercise more traumatizing than instructive.

Hospital employees would have been justified in fearing for their lives.

Just last year, Henderson police shot and killed an armed, hostile man in the emergency room. So it would make sense that security and emergency preparedness have been a focus at the hospital.

But in Monday’s incident, which occurred in a unit that houses the hospital’s sickest patients, nurses, patients and their families did not know it was a drill.”

The hospital’s director of public policy and external affairs has apologized for any distress caused by the incident; saying that there was an

“ongoing effort to try and make (emergency preparedness drills) as realistic as possible.”

And went on to say:

“the goal is not to scare or harm anyone.”

So that’s alright then.

On BBC Radio 4′s “Today” programme this morning, the new Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said that he expects to go beyond the efficiency savings already planned by the outgoing Government and he said that these had “implied something like three to three-and-a-half percent, probably about three percent efficiency savings each year in the NHS”.

He also said that the NHS could not expect to continue to receive increases to cover ‘NHS inflation’  – ie the higher rate of cost increases that have been faced by the NHS in the past to cover demography changes and the cost of new drugs and treatments.

It looks like the softening up has started ……

I am sometimes a bit unfair to the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson.  Although I like him personally and enjoy his broadcasting style, I sometimes find it difficult when watching him to forget his Young Conservative past.

However, in his blog today he manages to sum up the nonsense that masquerades as Tory economic policy so succinctly that I will even forgive his history.  He explains that the Tory offer is to “say they can head off one tax rise (national insurance) whilst cutting other taxes (inheritance tax, council tax and some, as yet unspecified, marriage tax breaks) whilst also cutting the deficit faster than Labour and protecting spending on health and international development.”  And if it is like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland explaining that sometimes she believed “six impossible things before breakfast”, that is because it is.

There are a number of parallels between this General Election and the one in 1992.  However, in that Election the Party with the wackiest ideas was the Natural Law Party which fielded 310 candidates and garnered 0.19% of the vote on a platform that promoted “yogic flying” to solve the country’s problems.  Listening to Nick Robinson’s summary of the six impossible things before breakfast that make up the Conservative Party’s economic policy it is clear that the Tories are the natural successors of the Natural Law Party and that George Osborne is promoting the equivalent of yogic flying without, of course, any use of hallucinogenic substances.

David Cameron and the Conservative Party are still fudging their economic policies and being deliberately misleading over their so-called public sector efficiency savings.  Peter Gershon, who is advising the Tories on their policies, has told the Financial Times that 40,000 jobs would be cut over the next year by a public sector recruitment freeze.  (This is the same Peter Gershon whose firm will benefit from NHS cutbacks.)  This was reiterated by Cameron in the BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme this morning.

But a recruitment freeze is NOT an efficiency saving.  Quite the opposite: it makes services less efficient.  Job vacancies occur all the time – staff move on or retire – and most of them are doing work on which others depend.  Some will be front-line and some will be providing support services that are vital for front-line workers.  When a post is frozen, either the work of that post is not done or others have to cover that role to the detriment of their own work.  You end up with a Swiss cheese effect and services are delivered less efficiently or there are random gaps in the service.

So just imagine what it would mean to a local community where the local health visitor has retired and the neighbourhood police officer has been promoted, the dustbins cannot be emptied because the person who maintains the refuse collection vehicles has gone on long-term sick and cannot be replaced ……

Welcome to a Tory Britain.

First, Grayling now Lansley.

How many Shadow Cabinet members will the Cameron machine have to brief against this week?

The weekend gave us Chris Grayling demonstrating that it’s the same-old-Tories after all and that their commitment to equalities is skin-deep opportunism.  So the briefing machine has to hint that Grayling may not be “up to the job”.

Now Andrew Lansley has started shooting from the hip with numbers (and a policy) that don’t add up, reinforcing the Tory insiders’ view that he too is dispensible as “he has gone native”.

The Shadow Health Secretary’s plan to allow more cancer drugs to be available to NHS patients at first sounds nice and caring – until you look at it more closely.

The problem is – as the respected independent think-tank, the Kings Fund, has pointed out – the numbers don’t add up.  The money just is not there.  It is typical George Osborne-style double-counting: it is to be funded from the “savings” from the National Insurance increase that Osborne wants to “cancel” (rather than getting on with reducing the budget deficit that is allegedly the Tories’ top priority).

In practice therefore Lansley is offering up the rest of the NHS for a double budget hit: first to fund the cancer drugs and second to cut the deficit (made larger by not proceeding with the National Insurance increase).

And that’s not all.

The cancer drugs that he wants to fund are those that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has ruled are either ineffective or far too expensive for the benefits they bring – so they are hardly a good efficient use of resources.

The key need in the treatment of cancer is early diagnosis – something that the Labour Government has prioritised.  By contrast, the Tories have opposed  giving people a guaranteed right to see a cancer specialist within two weeks if the GP suspects cancer.  And presumably it is those primary care and diagnostic services that will now be threatened by Lansley’s double budget hit.  And, of course, if patients are not diagnosed early they have a greater likelihood of needing more expensive drugs and treatment.

Opportunism, the desire for quick headlines and economic illiteracy are not a sound basis for policy formulation.

So which member of the Shadow Cabinet will be next?