Back to Lords of the Blog

Now that the general election is finally behind us and things are beginning to get back to normal, Lords of the Blog is now back in operation over at lordsoftheblog.net.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your patience and for joining the conversation here during our time in Purdah.

Freddy Fallon, Hansard Society

Lords of the Blog

Fawlty Towers

Up very early to hear the news…oh dear, the Great British Public have spoken….and said ‘Errrrr….’

So I went to the gym, where there’s usually ghastly rock on the loudspeaker and a ‘Location’, location’ type house programme on TV. Today it was BBC 24hr news. James Landale was explaining to to GBP  ’what happens now’; the subtitles told us  that the PM had sent for the Cabinet Secretary and asked him to bring ‘the Cabinet ‘Manuel’ to tell him how to proceed. How cheering, so it really is Fawlty Towers at No 10?

Healthy Eating

I thought the following was an interesting example of how members of the Lords can pursue issues which might not grab the headlines but do show real initiative in helping people to change their behaviour. In this case it is about healthy eating.

In order to establish whether or not the Government were assisting women in their efforts to lose weight, immediately prior to the recess for the General Election, Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen asked the Government what steps they had taken to work with women’s magazines to inform women about healthy eating and keeping to a healthy weight.

Magazines which would be of obvious assistance would be those of Slimming World http://www.slimmingworld.com/ and Weightwatchers, http://www.weightwatchers.com/ two of the leading organisations concentrating on a healthy and sensible diet for women.

In her response, Minister of Health, Baroness Thornton said that the Department of Health’s Change4Life Campaign http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/MediaCentre/Currentcampaigns/Change4Life/DH_092080 had begun the previous year, with a focus on families with children aged between 5 and 11 years of age. In February this year, the campaign was extended to cover adults in the 45 to 64 age group. The Change4Life marketing strategy is to use the most effective and relevant communication channels to target audiences. While the marketing strategy for the adult campaign does not include advertisements in women’s magazines, the Government does target them via public relations to gain editorial content and media partnerships.

The Food Standard Agency http://www.food.gov.uk/ has also taken a number of steps to work with women’s magazines, which have been a key media channel in the agency’s healthier eating related advertising campaigns. The FSA has placed both advertisements and advertorials covering a wide range of healthier eating topics, such as salt, saturated fat, labelling, cooking/recipes and teen healthy eating. Women’s magazines are also a key target for the agency’s public relations activity on a wide range of diet and health issues.

Baroness Gibson is the Treasurer of the Parliamentary Food and Health Forum. She intends to pursue these issues with the new Government after the Election.

Diss-affected

There’s Lady Deech going to elegant grand concerts in Oxford (I’m jealous of course, it sounds wonderful) but up here in Diss we did frequent the newly launched arts programme at the Corn Hall last saturday night.  A revue  Taboo-be-doo, billed as ‘a shamelessly cheerful celebration of the outrageous, the ill-considered and the downright inappropriate’ starring Terence Blacker, Derek Hewitson and Victoria Hart. Something to offend everyone and thoroughly enjoyable. But today on a cold, bright but intermittently showery day I’m painting the weathervane from the barns ( a naval captain looking through a telescope who infuriatingly never points in the right direction to the sea) and one of the beehives. The Theoretical Chemist does DIY but only theoretically.

I can talk about Diss now since all of us peers have had to declare within the last month where our primary residence is and have it declared on the parliamentary website. I don’t actually live in Diss but in between Diss another small south Norfolk town Harleston in the Waveney Valley. The Diss Game is pretty good for children bored on a long car journey. The aim is to describe your imaginary feelings in as many words as you can remember beginning with “dis” or “diss” eg “I’m feeling dissatisfied, disaffected, disgruntled, distorted, disagreeable, disenchanted…” but if there’s a pause, the next person comes in with their list…and so on. Someone wanted ‘disestablishmentarianised’ but it was disallowed…

Westminster seems so far away…I had to return to London last week for a meeting and a dinner with two other organisations I work with and  how lovely it was to return home so quickly. David Cameron is promising longer parliamentary terms…..I approve in principle, the long breaks serve no purpose, but only if they allow longer better scrutiny of LESS not more legislation.

Diss has suffered from some bad planning decisions in recent years and I tend to shop in the local shops in Harleston, now a prettier place, but I still feel an echo of the pleasure arriving by train described in John Betjeman’s poem

Dear Mary, Yes, it will be bliss
To go with you by train to Diss.

‘Dear Mary’ was Mary Wilson, wife of Harold Wilson and born in Diss.

Politics round here is true blue Tory with a smattering of Lib Dems. The Labour Party is all but invisible. I guess UKIP may get some support too but I shall be very surprised if the election produces any surprises round here.

May Day

I went into Oxford very early this morning and made my way to the Sheldonian Theatre in Broad Street, because I was fortunate enough to have tickets for the unique visit by conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic  Orchestra.  Their annual European Concert was hosted by Oxford this year, the first visit by them to Oxford in 30 years.  My tickets were for the unreserved upper gallery, so I was determined to be first in the queue to get in and get seats with a view.  So I found myself early on a sunny morning in the midst of the traditional Oxford May morning revels: Morris Men, girls in flowered hats and dresses dancing in the street, students having an early drink at the pubs in the Broad, lots of noise, litter and good humour.  By 9am the May revellers had gone home to bed and the more sober classical music fans were lining up to get into the Sheldonian for the 10am start. Sleek German cars with German number plates were arriving to deposit the orchestra and the VIPs.  The concert was sponsored by VW, who had reserved all the good seats in the theatre for their guests – shame on them that some remained unoccupied throughout the concert while the real Oxford music lovers were crammed into the gallery, knees wedged  against the back of the person in front.  Oh but it was worth it! 

 First we heard the Prelude to Act 3 of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg; then Elgar’s Cello Concerto.  How could Barenboim not have been thinking of his late wife, Jacqueline du Pre, who made this piece her own, as he conducted an equally talented, beautiful and profound cellist, Alisa Weilerstein (in a red satin evening dress), as she gave a performance as emotional and satisfying as her predecessor?  We finished with Brahms Symphony no. 1, of terrific energy and intensity, and then the audience exploded in applause and thanks.  We realised this was one of the best concerts we were ever likely to hear. 

This was the 20th European Concert given by the orchestra.  After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the orchestra, which was founded on May Day 1882, decided to promote the idea of a united and democratic Europe by musical means, and every year since 1991 the concert has been held on 1 May in a chosen European city.  It was broadcast throughout Europe today – but not in the UK, although maybe later.  For once I felt European, as the music and its message spoke to me.

Westminster gearing up

I was back in Westminster again this week, for the third week running.  It’s difficult to stay away!  It was even busier than in previous weeks.  Apart from maintenance and security staff, there are clerks and administrative staff busy at work preparing for the new Parliament.  Apart from the preparations for the State Opening - a major logistical exercise, albeit well practiced – there is the need to get ready for an influx of new Members.  We know that about one-fifth of the membership will be new as a result of retirements.  Then there will be those who defeat incumbents.  Many may have little or no knowledge of the Palace of Westminster and how the House works.  As a result, preparations are being made to welcome new Members and provide them with as much help and information as possible.  A New Members’ section is being created in Portcullis House. 

At the other end of the Palace, we are aware we may see quite an influx of new peers, which will also create problems, not least in finding space for them.  At Question Time, the chamber can become crowded and there is pressure on office space.  Finding desk space is likely to prove difficult, certainly in the short term until the redevelopment of 2 Millbank is complete.  New peers may find the Palace is grand but not the working conditions.

Fiscal Fallacies

I’m glad to see the The Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out the large black holes inall the main parties’ plans to plug the deficit gap. “The government’s proposals are not appealing, even considering the need to raise revenue”.”They will increase complexity and distort the tax system and restricting pension contributions relief is particularly badly designed”. So are the Tories any better? No. The Conservatives want to forgo much of straightforward NI rise but go ahead with the most damaging of Labour’s tax rises, and introduce more complexities of their own. So let’s turn to the Lib Dems for a “Change” and there the Institute of Fiscal Studies spotted a much more radical reform, but judged plans to restrict pensions contribution relief to the basic rate for all higher rate taxpayers are “misconceived”. The Lib dems are also vague about what they would do. And there’s £52 bn gap none of them are talking about.

I can remember the  impact on the NHS of a standstill budget in the early 1980s, in effect a reduction in income. We closed 25% of the beds in London, stopped employing newly qualified nurses, there was very little improvement in productivity, staff just did less. There are plenty of ways the NHS could spend a lot less and improve its services but the management talent to do it either isn’t there, or more truthfully, isn’t willing. I predict the cuts will come after the election, to all sectors of public spending, but will anyone implement reductions in a clever less harmful way? I doubt it.

Another obituary

Baroness Deech has recorded here the death of an admired Oxford Colleague so I thought I’d mention the death  yesterday of the novelist Alan Sillitoe, whose novel about life in the back-to-back terraces of rough working class Nottingham portrayed in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had a profound effect on me when I was growing up in that town. I grew up in the rather better off area of Nottingham–Chilwell, still working class and lower middle class, an area of semi-detached and small suburban homes with gardens, safe streets, few cars and good schools, the other side of the tracks but a million miles away in terms of lack of criminality, drunkenness, poverty and illness. I knew nothing about the lives of the people in the St Ann’s Well Road Area and the Meadows and as a young grammar school girl I fear I was a terrible snob about the way they lived their lives. But at 17, in the summer holidays, I signed on as a ward orderly at Nottingham General Hospital, being a year too early to be an auxiliary nurse. And the other ward orderlies were all from the rough areas of town; raucous, chain smoking, shockingly vulgar, their  bawdy jokes opened my eyes to a woman’s world I never knew existed. In my Janet and John world of nuclear happy families men were in charge, responsible and admirable. In theirs men were feckless drunks, unreliable and unfaithful but good for sex if you could catch one you fancied. They took great pleasure in shocking me out of my innocence. And I watched them working their backsides off to earn a meagre wage over long hours, providing the real companionship to patients where nurses never had time to stop and doctors were invisible. They showed me how to give real personal care to the sick and uncomfortable. It was ward orderlies who fed the patients who couldn’t reach their food, doled out mugs of stout to help them sleep and bravely if dishonestly, reinterpreted in a hopeful, cheery fashion what the doctor had told patients on their infrequent rounds.  Their lives were hard, nearly all of them had been battered by life’s unfairness; some were hard as nails themselves; most were not.  Alan Sillitoe chronicled the real lives of this Nottingham community in a way I recognised at once as being fundamentally truthful to these women’s stories. His later work didn’t always hit the mark but the early novels and short stories are well worth re-reading.

A Quiet Don

I am mourning the loss of Roger van Noorden, economics don, who died very suddenly a few days ago.  Roger taught Economics at Hertford College, Oxford, from 1963-2006, and he also served as the investment bursar of the college, building up its funds by canny investments from a very modest endowment, by Oxford standards, to a healthy one.  He was famous throughout the university as the creator of the van Noorden index, Oxford’s own inflation index based on its costs, which formed the basis of the annual rate of increase of student rents.  He was a brilliant student and tutor, much loved by students not only because he cared for them and their education but also because he helped them with their worries about costs.  They named a college common room after him, a rare tribute.

Roger was a man of contradictions.  Although he knew all there was to know about economics and energy, he wore the same tweed jacket year in year out, cycled about Oxford on an old bike and lived modestly, eschewing TV.  Although he retired from teaching a few years ago, he carried on giving tutorials without reward, because he was needed.  Outwardly old-fashioned, he was an early “new man”, taking the children to nursery and then school on his bike, and collecting them again, because his wife finished work later than he could.  He taught for many more hours than officially required, but also managed to find time to play bridge and was nationally recognised as an outstanding player.  My husband has lost the best bridge partner he ever had, and regards Roger as irreplaceable. 

Roger was quiet, modest, kind, courteous, patient, clever, humorous and loyal.  His life is worthy of comment because, above all, he was the embodiment of the type of university teacher that will no longer exist nor be valued.  Ever since the “reforms” of university funding and promotion a few years ago that placed research ahead of teaching, younger tutors have given priority to research over their teaching.  Years ago, my generation of lecturers would spend extra time with students who needed their help: no longer, for an hour with a student is an hour less for research and publication.  Tutors used to be happy to volunteer  to serve their colleges, as Roger did, in the adminstrative roles of tutor for admissions or bursar.  Not any more, for undertaking those offices reduces the time available for research.  It used to be the case that to be a good and hardworking tutor was the most valued and important job that one could have in higher education.  Not any more – today’s universities cherish the lecturers who do the most research and attract the most funding.  It is not their fault, but the fault of the system, and the loss is the students’.  No wonder there are reports that students complain about too little contact with lecturers, for those lecturers will not get promotion on the basis of time spent with students.  I often meet former students of mine, who tell me that they remember something encouraging that I said to them, or some perspective on the law that I was teaching them.  I never yet met a former student who remembered their lecturer for the research that she was carrying out!  Fortunate is the cohort of students taught and looked after by Roger van Noorden.

A few phrases I never want to hear again

While I’m still in ranting mode from my last blog, just in case a campaigning politician ever reads this, here is my list of phrases I don’t want to hear again.

“We will put patients first” “We won’t close local hospitals” “Less managers and bureaucracy, put doctors and nurses in charge”, ”We will put more police on the streets” “We will be tough on crime and the causes of crime”. “We will build a future that is fair for all” “We are committed to strong local communities” “we will clean up politics”, “We want to give women choice over their own lives….etc etc etc

Any suggestions for more platitudes that ought to be ditched?

Oh and by the way here is a picture of some of our spectacular daffodils in a corner of the garden. This weather is great for enjoying spring at home instead of Westminster.