WHAT ARE THEY DOING IN THERE?

Update 2011

It is two years since we wrote our book and much has happened in that time. We are pleased to record that many of our once thought unlikely prognostications have come true.....for a simple reason: the English had had enough of back-biting, corruption and infighting and wanted co-operation for a change, politics not personalities. Our book was predicated on the possibility of a coalition and so it came about.

Not that we didn't see some pretty bad behaviour beforehand. To quote Anthony Trollope......"Power is so pleasant that men quickly learn to be greedy in their enjoyment of it" and it was shocking to see Gordon Brown, with absolutely no mandate whatsoever attempt to hang on to power with every nerve and sinew. Eventually he was made to capitulate and only returned once to Parliament to roar that he had been right about everything, to seemingly afterwards for ever drop from sight. It is a funny thing with politicians, the way they ratchet up their successes whilst forgetting their failures; (it is true that Gordon was instrumental in seeing the world through the first credit collapse by way of containment but surely unwise of him to fail to see his own part in the origins of its massive failure?).

Anyway the king is dead - long live the king. The Coalition began with quite a task on its hands and to our minds Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are making a good enough job of it. Power and leadership is very often about plain physical stamina and their relative youth has stood them in good stead. It is also fine to see a government team working pretty much together. OK, Nick Clegg has been the whipping boy and his over-powering wife doesn't help, [surely a Deputy PM should be relieved of the school runs and church on Sunday?], but by and large the fact that the coalition is sticking is all to the credit of these three.

Spin is not dead of course - the spin department seems to have morphed into the "behavioural insight team", a title both grand and comical. We would love to know how they actually spend their days, not to mention justify their tax-payer funded salaries. Perhaps the point of spin is not merely to put out good news but to obscure the actual workings of government. As we know from the expenses and other scandals too much "insight" amongst the electorate is a very bad thing and often "unhelpful" to whichever government is in power.

Unfortunately the main problem with actually holding the reins is that you have to govern and having inherited such a mess from the previous gang, (a gigantic financial mess of such epic proportions that it can't be understood, still less contained, let alone solved), it is quite an undertaking.

It has to be said all new governments inherit bad things, (much in the way that the plumber glares at your leaky pipes in a "who put this lot in?" way or the hairdresser gazes at your hair disdainfully and asks "who cut it last?"). Although when you switch plumbers and hairdressers [or very likely they just disappear] the next load of charlatans will say the same. It was ever thus but every new cabinet has to deal with it afresh and attempt to find a fresh way of dealing with it.

Still forever clairvoyant, on the last page of our book What Are They Doing In There? we quoted Jenny Diski who wrote, "It is not the job of the young to be grateful, it is their job to tear up the world and start again". Which they did. Twice. About five minutes after the Coalition came to power, the middle classes were out on the streets over the issue of student fees. (These were to be hiked up overnight.....a stupid idea unless it was David ["two brains"? A euphemism surely?] Willets' idea of making the market decide which degrees were worth paying for and which were not - or was it a case of "How can we quickly shut down degrees in bulb planting and all these unnecessary arts courses?").

David Willets also had the idea that rich students might be given extra, (undeserved?) places in order to subsidize poorer students, which was once called means testing and worked just fine before the Universities expanded. Now you couldn't find enough rich people to pay for all those poor ones......which include most of the "squeezed middle". Anyway the idea was at first ridiculed by absolutely everybody, (how could he actually think it would work.....the toffs paying for the oiks?) and then kicked with embarrassment into the long grass. There is not a lot of "long grass" in Westminster but it is kicked into it just the same.

And it was "poor Nick Clegg" who took the brunt of the student riots because of his apparent policy U-turn, although this was really unfair as if he was in actual power instead of sharing a bit of it he would have been able to scrap Trident as promised and pay for further education from the government coffers and not have to break any promises.

The students were only the beginning of the unrest – worse - the underclass, the disenfranchised, and the ill-educated; "the poor" (although you are not really allowed to call them that, although they are hated as much as the rich) set fire to cities in the heat of the summer and put the fear of god into us all. This wasn't ideological, well not exactly, it was because all they had was physical strength (not intelligence, money, education or power) and to get things they wanted all they had to do was break windows and suddenly, because everyone was doing it, (just like the bankers sailing collectively too close to the wind and wrecking the economy), it must be all right. Although David Cameron said it was nothing to do with the bankers it was mere lawlessness, hooliganism and yobbery and yup he was right, which doesn't mean there isn't a connection.

Actually it wasn't all right. Firstly it was pretty obvious we didn't have enough police on our streets, something that the general public had been saying since time immemorial, and not only that, the police, like the rest of us seemed pretty afraid. Even Theresa May looked frightened, this is not normal: in fact it is very uncommon. She is made of much stronger stuff than Jacqui Smith and Theresa's husband is her greatest fan and doesn't use pornography the minute her back is turned. Until this point, when she, Theresa, looked very uncomfortable indeed, she had been doing a pretty good job of being Home Secretary, (apart from not putting more police on the streets which everyone, including, in fact especially, those on the hard right of her own party had very much desired).

There were a few resignations after this, (pointless mainly), a lot of roving youth were given custodial sentences, when it would have been more sensible, (and probably not more expensive) to get them to repair the damage and give them a trade in bricklaying and carpentry and paint effects. This needs good management of course plus imagination plus intelligence, which as we observed, seems to be generally in very short supply - in spite of the increase in higher education. Ken Clarke has had a jolly good go at all kinds of sensible reform, but he has been kicked into the long grass, (the small Westminster lawn area is now full of ideas.....some bad, but others very good) by the tabloids first and then the rightwing of his own party. Also there would have been the problem of those not involved in the riots wanting these kinds of apprenticeships and not being able to get on them. This is another area in which Vince Cable seems to be failing, although he says he is succeeding. Perhaps apprenticeships should be part of the education remit in which case he and Michael Gove need their heads knocking together. There is still a lot of scope in all areas of government for more joined up thinking, which would be a much better all round objective for the behavioural insight department. We would like to see them banging heads and kicking arse in Westminster itself before they start on us the electorate. Leading from the front so to speak.

As I write this, following on from the students and the rioters there is a small and fairly harmless encampment in the city that pretty much everyone wants moved a bit like Dale Farm, except that these campers have probably nice homes to go to unlike the members of Dale Farm who have to take what they have, the little that it seems to the rest of us, with them. I was brought up to think being a gypsy was a romantic, pastoral way of life, how has it turned into the only kind of view you have is that of another battered caravan on a crowded with caravans field that nobody much wanted? So much so that these squatters proclaimed their rights for not months but years. And how do they support themselves and their families? Once it seemed noble and dignified; they did crafts and sold clothes pegs and gave pony rides. I fear for them now, they look like just another section of a dullard underclass, yet another section of society that has simply missed the boat. Also grown men in St.Paul's Cathedral are dropping like ninepins seemingly unable to cope with a few tented protesters who are not even much in the way and causing very little harm.

We started What Are They Doing In There? with a genuinely open mind, not knowing what we would find. Even though it was around the time of the expenses scandal, we quickly came to see that corruption wasn't really the issue in English politics, it was general incompetence. There is still incompetence.....patient data is lost, computer systems run over budget and then fail. PFI iniatives remain poorly negotiated, expensive, unregulated options. It is systemic and hierarchical and all the muddles are passed down from one government to the next and even sometimes confused with "best practice". In fact the buck is passed this way and that, around and about and back again so vigorously and so expertly that it is very hard for outsiders to unravel or discover the root of the problem. Ineptitude is so very well disguised. Furthermore there is no imperative for a PM to rootle it out unless the miscreants threaten his own position. And frankly he already has enough to do. The one MP to have the gumption to stand up to the slippery bureaucrats/civil servants in the MoD is Richard Bacon, (Con, S. Norfolk) who is quite correctly wanting heads to roll. We are cheering him on.

What we advised was a simplification of all systems, as far as we could see this was the only way for there to be any "transparency" (an overworked but more vital word than change or choice). It seemed that only if systems were simplified would the people who operated them, never mind the public; know what they were actually doing. As far as can be ascertained the only minister to be genuinely attempting this is Iain Duncan Smith. His social security system should make life a lot easier for everyone, although as in all things to do with government we retain a healthy scepticism, reserve judgement and hold our breath. And a word of warning - social security is pretty measly as it is. You can't live on it, or have ambitions for yourself. If the lack of ambition of the underclass, (although we mustn't call them this, any more than we can call them poor) is to be seen clearly, it was during the riots when bookshops remained entirely unscathed. Deborah Orr in the Guardian wrote a good piece on this particular anomaly. And it wasn't to do with the rioters being squeamish about not burning books. They just didn't value them in the slightest.

What nobody likes to say is that there are a lot of young boys (it is usually boys) who are simply not very clever, they will, whatever we do, not get to University and only ever undertake very rudimentary training. We said it in our book, but it is still the elephant in the room, and it is not to be patronising or defeatist to say so. We must find a way of making citizens of them whilst recognising certain of their limitations. For some people social mobility is never going to happen, they just aint't up to it. In any case surely somebody's up means another's down? Surely that is unfair too? It seems spurious for the children of the aspirant and hard working middle classes, (and the middle classes are the engine of society), now called "the squeezed middle" to be penalised for their endeavour. As a grammar school pupil myself who sent her children to independent school because that was the only way they could get an education of similar standard, what have I worked for? Certainly not to see my children pushed down the snakes after my hard climbing of the ladder.

The main failing of the European bail out currently being worked on, (Christine Lagade the French Finance Minister has taken over at the IMF - we singled her out for praise in our final chapter, saying she "spoke better sense than anyone"), still seems to be that it is too complicated. (Or ironically, possibly, this could be its strength. Nobody understands it, but because everyone else seems to nobody wants to look a fool and all have given it the nod).

It is being lauded mainly because finally, at the eleventh hour, with Angela Merkel threatening war, yes actual war but in an oblique way by saying peace in Europe could not be guaranteed if the Union did not hold, not because anyone actually understands the detail, or has a clue whether it will actually do the trick. In fact many ministers have said it is so incomprehensible they voted for it simply because they all seemed to be in agreement. This at least is a good start. Or it was before it all started unravelling. Yup, I'm a feminist but it seems to be that the last decade of foolishness fuelled by the misdeeds of men now has to be sorted out by two women: Merkel and Lagarde.

Anyway, well done Angela. Her stocky trouser suited performance was reassuring, as were the calm words of C. Lagarde. Without them would we have such confidence? Or indeed any? I don't think so. For these women it is a huge undertaking. And it is not done yet. The EU bungling, dithering is on an epic scale, even women as unflappable as Merkel and Lagarde with this level of provocation could not be blamed should they exhibit the occasional hissy fit. David Cameron himself says there should be more women in the city and the banks, obviously without casting around his own cabinet first and wondering why they are virtually all male.

Still, Ed Miliband has quite a few ladies on the opposition benches, although when it came to a leadership battle, the only candidates the Labour Party could throw up was two feuding brothers when if it had truly wanted to be"progressive" (new in-word, has taken over partially from change and choice except in the NHS) it would have chosen Harriet Harman, who did an excellent job as interim Labour Party leader and Diane Abbott who would have delivered plenty of left hooks as well as ticking the gender/diversity box into the bargain.

There was also Yvette Cooper, who Ed Balls says he would stand aside for in a leadership context. Well pigs might fly and if it happens I pity the four children at home. Not that Ed would be relegated to the school run -it would end up being a Clinton-esqe double ticket, (although without the wisdom and hindsight) be a disaster for the country and end their marriage. Since they are in opposition and will probably be so for quite a time, (much to the annoyance of all parties, I think the English people are fond of Coalitions), so for now we don't really have to worry.

I am pleased to see David Cameron hasn't resorted to many dreaded re-shuffles, [we hoped he wouldn't do this] except when it was an imperative; the Liam Fox incident. We mention in the book there are a good many MPs who think the rules set up by society don't fully apply to themselves and Liam Fox was such a man. He didn't say sorry exactly, just that he had created "an impression of wrong-doing", which fell short of admitting guilt by quite a long way, a nice turn of phrase that he has probably had to use before. His place has been taken by lucky Philip Hammond who had been stuck with trying to make happen the new billion pond high speed link between London and Manchester, which was to be driven through areas of outstanding natural beauty, [if it goes through Cheryl Gilliam the a local MP and government minister has said she will resign] even though there is already a fast link between these two cities, while passengers in the SE are squashed on commuter lines, with seats too small, trains too crowded and invariably late in autumn and winter through lack of investment; ( no ability to deal with leaves and snow] and yet stuck with paying more and more for the pleasure even though their salaries are nowhere keeping up with inflation. (However if there is one place we are in it together it is on SE trains; now ministers cannot travel first class that is).

Being Defence Minister can only be a breeze by comparison, although Hammond will have to dig very deep into the murky world of defence procurement, which still needs a massive amount of reforming. It has to be said that Liam Fox had all the qualities to deal with this, if only he had concentrated his mind and hadn't been dashing about the world with Werrity. The trouble with these triple A characters is that they are also restless and do not hang around long enough to allow their massive personalities to take full effect. Hammond is strangely impassive and immoveable. Perhaps after the first push from Fox he will now go in for the kill.

David Cameron like all PMs before him has been torn between dealing with domestic policy and making his name on the world stage; it is so much easier to lead a trade mission than deal with inner city schools. The intervention in Libya, supposedly to limit "collateral damage" (death of civilians, as if their lives are of somehow less value than soldiers'), whilst really wanting to get rid of Gadaffi, at first seemed ill-advised, but he had beginners luck, although he probably frightened himself when he realised that it wasn't going to be as easy as he first thought. So I doubt he will do it again in a hurry. Apart from anything else back at home there is Michael Gove to help and Andrew Lansley to throttle.......or keep a very close eye on.

Lansley is roaring ahead with reforms to the NHS, quite without mandate, and in the present format will definitely fail as nobody knows what problem the reforms are supposed to be solving, they are too complicated to understand, (the same old deliberate mistake) and hardly anybody wants them. Whilst mangers are invariably failed doctors, doctors are usually pretty bight, and a lot of them have stood up to say that these reforms as well as not being good for them, in all likelihood will not be good for anyone else.

By the time they have been kicked back, tried and tested, not to mention stalled by the Lib Dems, (Shirley Williams' last stand?)they will be so diluted it will be discovered that there was no need to make a fuss and things will go on much as before, until a mandated government in time of prosperity has a steering committee of sufficient clout to actually say what people want from the NHS and how it can be achieved. Nothing major is going to happen right now in spite of all the rhetoric. Reorganisations take time, energy and money and almost invariably detract from the task in hand. Also under the next regime and blue sky thinker they are more than usually changed back again. Anyway hospitals fail in different ways. It might be going bust because it delivers good care to patients - not because it starves them. Failing in government terms is a complicated business and in hospitals it is not always linked to quality of care. Poor care can be very cost efficient.

If I am in hospital I need confidence in the nursing staff who should be of sufficient education to understand my illness, be conversant with my medical history and able to discuss my particular regime with doctors without being out of their depth but not so grand they won't help me to the toilet. These considerations among many are essential to good patient experience but seem to be mentioned nowhere in Lansley's giant "document for change". As we have observed "change", (and all parties are still banging on about it in the most pointless way as if the electorate is stupid. Can't they see by voting them all out, it has proved it isn't? [Get rid of the last lot and make the next lot work together, was the message from the country]), isn't necessarily a good thing. Still, let Andrew Lansley deliver his reforms and show us how well they are working before he is allowed to move on. He must not be permitted to go to the back benches or moved to transport as punishment. No re-shuffle. Let him carry it through as he says he can and let us see it working for the benefit of patients as he says it will.

Anyway in spite of reservations, (the jury is still out on the student fees increase) we think the coalition is trying hard and doing its damndest. Nicholas Soames and Frank Field are keeping on keeping on about the problem of the country filling up too fast; almost everyone thinks England is now overflowing with immigrants, but for some reason the Coalition can't see it, (Vince Cable in particular): they refuse to be influenced by the results of their own surveys and deny what was told to all of them on the doorstep on the run up to the election. The people do not like it when they see the Border Agency "losing migrants equivalent to size of Cambridge" as reported in The Times.

As we suggested should happen M. Gove is trying to deal with truancy as well as letting free schools and academies start up all over. Hopefully Gove and Iain Duncan Smith between them will manage to make inroads on illiterate youth. They should be receiving six years of primary education learning to read and write, but somehow this is not happening and in spite of Ofsted and endless inspections nobody knows why. Task forces need to strike earlier and earlier; the midwives and social workers are vital to help mothers with the new born. It has been known for a long time, that the first years, even the first months of a child's life years are the most important. Unfortunately this kind of intervention, although effective is very expensive, but something has to break the cycle. You can't shut the door once the horse has bolted. It is a terrible indictment of our education system that Poles, Ukrainians and Russians speak better English than our own inner city youth - no wonder they find jobs so effortlessly.

There remains contention on the subject of global warming, although most people now believe it is happening. The government is encouraging people to go green yet those green enough to generate their own electricity are now having their subsidies cut for their trouble. All the useless watch-dogs, (the OF-lot), are still toothless and our fuel bills are going up and up. They say because of green compliance: we see profits spiralling exponentially and that profit going to shareholders, the layer that was never there before private ownership and should, had the utilities been run properly, have gone straight back into investment for the future.

Vince Cable as business secretary has been a disappointment at drumming up business. Perhaps his book about the credit crunch had too much of a Doomsday view. Because we might be in for a double dip, because we are sensibly, it could be said, refusing to borrow money we cannot pay back, we are not re-inflating the economy. Cutting the coat according to our cloth just doesn't work when spending in the high street is needed. Anyway because we are not obliging in this way apparently the only other course of action is by getting the building industry going. (This argument could be flawed as how will we afford the houses if we can't afford Christmas presents?). The government thinks the planning laws need simplifying; (probably they do but not necessarily in favour of the developer). A lot of people, (even Cameron's own back-benchers, even the landowners themselves) are not prepared to believe the countryside won't be sacrificed - they just see kit houses without amenities being squashed together on easy access flat green fields and then the builders doing a vamoose. Fly by night. Nothing finished off, a quick buck made and then a void. Because we've seen it before we don't believe it when governments tells us otherwise. Safeguards? We don't give them credence. Why on earth should we?

If the government is stuck not knowing what to do it sets up an enquiry. Surely the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq war can't still be going on? Its cost must surely have outrun its usefulness. By the time it tells us what we know anyway, we will no longer care. You can bet there will always be jobs for lawyers and ex-MPs. That's another reason nobody knows how to tackle lobbying, a clouded and unexamined area that journalists cannot seem to infiltrate. The issue of lobbying needs the Telegraph's expenses-cracking team to take it on or the Guardian reporters who unearthed the Murdoch phone hacking. Lobbying is a still pool of water beneath which lies something very murky. Sometime, some day, lobbying will be uncovered for what it is. At the moment it is hard to pin down, meetings always taking place somewhere else. (Apart from overt lobbying from the food and drinks industry that put the kybosh on tackling the obesity problem). Described by doctors as an epidemic, along with liver disease, obesity costs the NHS billions as well as ruining lives: yet the industry has been allowed to self regulate - in other words leave things as they are. So we tax the food producers who make us fat to put money into the NHS. Wouldn't we all have happier healthier lives if we did it differently? And isn't our "happiness" a new Coalition objective? (So many surveys....so many unresolved questions. We fear the happiness index will go the way of Vote Blue Go Green).

It is strange how resilient the Houses of Parliament are about remuneration. The expense reforms were thought too draconian, and slowly but surely the MPs are making money once again, still paying their wives, claiming poverty and crying foul. The creep back is on its way. Lord Taylor of Warwick is intending to show up in the Lords now he is out of gaol. Presumably because in these lean times he cannot get another job. It has always been hard for offenders with a criminal record, 99% of whom are not lucky enough to enjoy a sinecure in Parliament.

There was a time, at the start of the crash while everything was up in the air when it could have fallen down different. Society could have re-valued itself, teachers in "bog standard" comprehensives might need to be paid as much as lawyers for example and lawyers and other "fat cats" could have been paid a lot less but it was not to be. The Labour Party, (yes, they were in power and you might have thought the redistribution of wealth might have been right up their street, but no, all they could think of was how to hang onto power for its own sake and they were in such a blind funk that they clearly couldn't "think outside the box").CEOs of major companies are still paid astonishing salaries, as are the board of banks, even those owned and saved by the taxpayer. We are all suffering and nobody but nobody thinks the burdens are shared. It might help if the recipients of these vast salaries spent their huge wealth in their local high street or donated it to charity, but there is precious sign of that since both are failing. How much more respect we would have for bankers if they poured time and money into their local school, or sports facilities, or homes for the elderly or street cleaning. It is time to bring back those Victorian philanthropists. As we said in the book.....just do it, you know you can. Show us the colour of your money.

(This is something the behavioural insight team could get to work on, perhaps after it has first exposed the blockers and incompetents inside the government and civil service, no doubt unfortunately many among its own ranks). It might be good to start on bankers and government insiders before they struggle with us, the obdurate, uncomprehending electorate. We would also feel so much more kindly towards the banks if they didn't operate a high street cartel and offered better service, service being the operative word, rather than constantly trying to sell us financial products of which we have no need.

We didn't write much about the Afghanistan war not because it wasn't important but because it was. Having researched it thoroughly we could see there was a separate book to be written and that this book needed research on the ground to be of any worth. What we did say however was that if any good is to come out of our troops' time there we are in for the long haul which we doubted would happen. Obama wants out and Europe will doubtless follow. Our soldiers have worked hard but paid too high a price with too many lost lives. Also too many lives not just of soldiers but of the indigenous population have been lost including innocent women and children who never asked for intervention and especially not to be killed and maimed.

In spite of the billions of pounds spent, there is little good news to come out of Afghanistan. The Taliban are still blowing things up in Kabul. It is not a safe country for anybody. It is pretty obvious that the minute the West retreats there will be squabbling and anarchy and the tribal leaders will emerge from the hills and flood back from Pakistan and life will go on as before. (Protecting and educating women was always one of the weak reasons for intervention, laudable in the big international "freedom-fighting" sense, oh yes, if we are in it it is always for freedom not oil) but it was never going to work). Pakistan's complicity in the whole corrupt charade was to be proved by the audacious American strike against Bin Laden on its own soil. Who said Obama wasn't a brave man? If that had gone wrong it would very likely have been the end of his presidency.

The "war on terror" - meaningless, impressive, an ambition bound to fail, is seen now simply as empty rhetoric and nothing but hubris and the disaster of Iraq merely a reprisal for 9/11. As we said all MPs should study history and learn that the aftermath of wars are often as bloody as the wars themselves and when you remove a dictator all hell lets loose, always infighting....seldom peaceful transition to democracy..... and at worst civil war. We watch Libya and Tunisia and Egypt with hope and fear in equal measure. For all these countries it will be a long hard road and things may get very much worse before they get better.

Anyway, signing off right now, there is another book to be written and we are open to offers, but it may not be us who writes it. Still we know we gave it our best shot and we are proud to have contributed to the debate.