Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

The proposed levy would be based on regular assessments of land value, meaning those in areas where house prices have risen paying higher bills than they currently do for council tax. The Lib Dems insist the tax should be unlimited – allowing local authorities to charge as much as they like. However, Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles, a Tory, has ruled out a council tax revaluation until at least 2015. But when one takes a closer look at those areas most likely to be affected by such a tax the 2015 deadline starts to look a little optimistic. The property website PrimeLocation.com believes it has pinpointed those towns with the greatest number of homes for sale for over £1 million. Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, whose local MP since 1997 has been the current Attorney General Dominic Grieve, has the highest proportion at 47 per cent against 13 per cent of similarly-valued homes on the London market. Other millionaire property hotspots identified in the research included Virginia Water in Surrey – constituency of Transport Secretary Philip Hammond and Hertfordshire’s Much Hadham (Tory MP Oliver Heald) and Radlett (Tory MP James Clappison) where more than a third of all properties for sale had seven-figure asking prices. On a regional level, Surrey contains the most “millionaire towns”, with 10 of the 41 hot spots based there. Hertfordshire is represented six times, while Buckinghamshire is represented five times. Overall, some 3.5 per cent of properties on the British market are valued at more than £1 million, the research shows and some 41 towns across Britain have a higher percentage of their homes for sale over £1 million than London. Whether many of the householders in those areas consider themselves the “squeezed middle”, we have yet to see – but it seems likely that the cut in the 50p rate is more likely to happen before the property tax. l

Last week we heard about deep-seated unease at the Office of National Statistics about the Treasury’s use of advance notice of official statistics. This week, some sleuthing by the Financial Times, diligently seized on by Shadow Education Secretary Andy Burnham, points to possible evidence of Education Secretary Michael Gove – and his closest advisor – playing fast and loose with freedom of information laws. Mr Gove is no stranger to the FoI Act. In fact, as an editorial executive at News International he would have regularly encountered and, even, availed himself of it. He was, it should be noted, even the line manager of political correspondent Tom Baldwin when he investigated the finances of Tory Party donor Lord Ashcroft. It may well be that Mr Gove, and his aide Dominic Cummings, were merely being scrupulously diligent when they agreed that Mr Cummings would no longer use his official departmental account but instead use his own web-based personal account. That account just happens to be exempt from FoI requests. If Mr Cummings was using his own personal account for party political matters and not official departmental business, then he would be entirely within his rights and in the clear. The Information Commissioner’s Office has confirmed it is looking into the circumstances. But it is not yet, if at all, conducting a formal investigation into the affair. l

Match abandoned. This week there was due to be a hearing sat the Old Bailey in which Scotland Yard sought to compel The Guardian, and its reporter Amelia Hill, to disclose the identity of the person who told her that murder victim Millie Dowler’s phone had been hacked by the News of the World. The Met had been  hoping to use Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act  to get holdof documents that would reveal the reporters’ sources for the July 4 article which so dramatically reopened the telephone hacking scandal. It argued this could have compromised Operation Weeting, the 130-officer strong inquiry into telephone tapping formed in January – and so singularly success-free to date. The Met, still smarting from the revelation of its close relationship with News International wanted the attention to go elsewhere. News International’s corporate parent would equally like the matter to go away, hence the £3 million settlement with the Dowlers. Now new Met Commissioner Bernard Horgan Howe – supervising Weeting – has dropped The Guardian case. It’s a good start.

Confident about the superior, high net worth lifestyle to be enjoyed in London he asked: “Have you ever tried to go to the theatre in Zug?” Well, the tiny little enclave of just under 26,000 people – where the languages are German, Italian and Serbo-Croat and which is home to just under 13,000 companies and 24,000 jobs – does have an English language theatre pitching to all those ex-pats working for companies like Alliance Boots and Tata. It’s next production, running from September 30 to October 9, appears to have been carefully tailored to its local tax refugees, especially with numbers such as “You’ve got to pick a pocket or two”, and is, appropriately enough, Oliver!

Just what is it about Tory Chancellors and dominatrixes (or is it dominatrices?) as a package: by now a good old-fashioned British tradition, right up there with jellied eels and pie and mash, it seems – and just as authentic. The Australian TV station ABC this week revived an old story about Chancellor George Osborne’s past friendship or association with “escort” and “disciplinarian” Natalie Rowe which had all the essential lurid ingredients of an old reliable staple – whips, prostitution, cocaine. Mr Osborne – who made a poorly received joke about, erm, “relief” at a men’s magazine awards ceremony the previous week – confidently rejects any suggestions of impropriety on his part during the friendship some 20 years ago. But what is interesting is the manner in which people have sought to breathe new life and relevancy into it. The story was picked up by the News of the World in 2005/6 – who apparently managed to “lift” it from under the nose of the Sunday Mirror by some means presumably known only to its then editor, Andy Coulson. Ms Rowe, who admits she had hoped to sell her story to the Mirror Group, said Mr Coulson and Wapping gave the story a make-over in which she was cast as the villain and which was very sympathetic indeed to Mr Osborne, enabling him to get on with planning David Cameron’s ascent to the party leadership. Was it this professional courtesy from Mr Coulson to Mr Osborne, some people are asking, that led to him recommending the seasoned tabloid executive be the Tories’ most senior media fixer? What is clear is how times change. At the time of the original friendship in the early 1990s, the then beleaguered Chancellor Norman Lamont received endless grief over the colourful tenant of his London flat, Lindi St Clair aka Miss Whiplash, even though he never met her. Mr Lamont, by then the target of several false, fabricated tabloid stories, came under fire for receiving a £4,700 contribution from public funds to the £23,000 legal bill he incurred (approved by both the head of the civil service and by Prime Minister John Major) responding to the stories (writs and so on) and encouraging his controversial tenant to findnew premises. His ministerial career – not helped by some of his own controversial utterances about the recession – was holed below the waterline. Mr Osborne appears to have been lucky enough to find himself in a kinder, more tolerant, Tory Party and a more “sophisticated” News of the World.

Still with George Osborne and the thorny subject of “spin”. The unshakeably self-confident Mr Osborne was this week accused of not playing with a straight bat, so to speak, over the release of Government economic statistics – again. The chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar, who had been due to retire in July but was persuaded to stay on in the job when his nominated successor had second thoughts, is disappointed that Mr Osborne is intent on retaining the rule that allows him and his advisers to see key economic data at least 24 hours before it is released. Mr Osborne’s predecessors as Chancellor certainly enjoyed the same privilege – so much so that as Shadow Chancellor Mr Osborne vowed during the election campaign to end it, in the interests of fairness and eradicating “spin”. Sir Michael believes the practice is out of step with other countries, increases voter fears about spin, increases the prospect of leaks, and – most importantly – undermines the integrity of the Government’s statistical data. In May he complained about a “serious lapse” in which inflation figures were released 17 hours early to unauthorised officials – with obvious market implications. Mr Osborne has defended retaining the early sight of figures, supposedly to give Treasury officials and advisers time to prepare a response and put the figures into context. Sir Michael’s response suggests he is far from convinced, much less impressed: “The Statistics Authority believes that the current arrangements for pre-release access are highly damaging to public trust in official statistics. Pre-release access encourages the belief – held by five out of six people in recent polls – that ministers and their advisors manipulate official statistics. It increases the likelihood of unauthorised disclosure and dishonesty.”

Supporters of Ed Miliband’s plans to reform the party’s relationship with trade unions might argue they haven’t come a moment too soon. That is certainly the view of political scientists at the University of Bristol who have produced a carefully timed analysis of last year’s Labour leadership election. They argue that last year’s electoral college was unfair and would not have passed muster as a free and fair election in the third world… or words to that effect. In their article, they express concern that nominations for the leadership were co-ordinated and streamlined by the trade unions in order to maximise support for Ed Miliband, their favoured candidate. Of course, there’s always been a wee gulf between those who teach and those who practice. The GMB, Unison and Unite had 75 per cent of the votes in the third section of the electoral college and all nominated  their preferred choice – who won by 0.65 per cent. The authors’ central thesis is that such was union influence over the poll that the 1993 one member, one vote reform was swept aside by an adroit reinvention of the block vote. Mr Miliband this week seemed unfazed by criticism of his victory as he sought to tell the TUC conference that he will from now on be a “critical” friend of the unions. Politics, as said so many times before, can be a rough old trade, all about the possible…

The organisation – which has in the past antagonised MPs of all parties with its high-volume round robin email campaigns – persuaded 3,652 of its members and followers to pay for independent legal advice on the implications of the bill. Solicitors Harrison Grant and barristers Stephen Cragg and Rebecca Haynes gave their legal opinions on two key aspects of the bill – the removal of Secretary of State for Health’s Duty to provide or secure provision of NHS services and the impact of competition and procurement law on the NHS. The full details are available on the group’s website www.38degrees.org.uk, but in short the group’s fears the legislation heralds “privatisation by stealth” were heightened by the legal advice it received. It believes the legislation removing the Health Secretary’s statutory duty to provide or secure provision of health services – a core element of NHS legislation since 1946 – will also curtail the Secretary of State’s influence over delivery of services rendering the NHS “little more than a series of quasi-independent commissioning entities and providers” consisting of unelected commissioners accountable to an unelected quango. That lack of accountability to local authority of parliament also increases the risk, or persistence, of postcode lotteries as the Government will not be in a position to try to ensure a statutory right for everyone to receive the best care possible, the group argues. Opening up the NHS to free market competition law – just like utilities providers – also poses particular threats to the NHS as we know it, the group argues. The changes increase the likelihood of NHS services being found by the courts to be bound by British and European Union competition law. This prospect is further increased by the extension, announced in July 2011, of the right of any qualified provider to be given a contract to deliver health services and the fact new commissioning groups will be subject to EU procurement rules when they commission local health services. This could mean, it warns, that the NHS ends up spending a lot of time and money fighting legal action instead of investing in patient care. Companies that bid unsuccessfully for NHS contracts will be able to challenge commissioning decisions in the courts. The group has one of its e-petitions on its website to lobby Parliament but if you want your MP to not to immediately hit the delete button in a blue, red or yellow fury, it is probably advisable to personalise it.

On the subject of targeting your message, so to speak, MPs were invited to test their accuracy – and their differences – in a different way to usual when they lined up on Speaker’s Green to try archery. The event, organised by Welsh Labour MP Huw Irranca-Davies to mark the British archery team’s 150th anniversary and promote the sport ahead of next year’s Olympics, was attended by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and several MPs. The prospect of several consecutive by-elections caused by MPs’ unfortunate aim was avoided by the supervision and tutelage of Commonwealth archery double gold medallist Nicky Hunt.

The site of one of Rupert Murdoch’s greatest “victories” a quarter of a century ago, in which he transformed this country’s national newspaper industry – News International’s 15-acre fortified site at Wapping near the Tower of London – was this week put up for sale – again. The site ceased to be a printing works in 2008 when distribution shifted to a state of the art works on the M25 near Watford, and since 2009 editorial and commercial staff of The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun – and, until its demise this summer, the News of the World – have been working out of offices on Thomas More Square. Plans for a brighter, friendlier Google-style campus on the Wapping site were scrapped by US-based parent News Corp in 2008 and a sale of the site fell through as the property market collapsed. Reports say the sale this time could realise a much-appreciated £150 million for the British newspaper arm that has been feeling so unloved by its US parent.

Her father was the Tory Attorney General – nicknamed Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner – who advised Anthony Eden that his illegal Suez invasion would clearly breach international law. A fact she took pains to tell her audience. So when former MI5 chief Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller made clear her own criticisms of the Iraq invasion in her recorded Reith lecture, broadcast on Radio 4 this week, she not only proved, in the words of Time magazine’s London correspondent,  that “the apple didn’t fall far from the tree”, she earned considerable kudos for the crisp concision of her apparently even-handed and realistic analysis. She was, she suggested, always disdainful of the term “war on terror” and insisted Britain had eschewed it, she acknowledged that intelligence professionals openly admitted to each other in the immediate aftermath of September 11 that the Israeli-Palestine conflict is an “open sore” that fuels aggression towards the West. Above all, the Iraq invasion, whose validity she opposed, only hindered the pursuit of al Qaida in Afghanistan. Echoing her former employers’ lessons in Northern Ireland she told her handpicked audience that: “Terrorism is resolved through economics and politics, not through arms and intelligence”. To that end, would she support negotiations with al Qaida, she was asked. “Yes”, came the reply. “It is always better to talk to the people who are attacking you then attacking them, if you can.”

So Tony Blair is godfather to Rupert Murdoch’s nine-year-old daughter, Grace. Confirmation of such a close familial relationship between the former Labour leader and the party’s favourite bête noir has already caused some people in the party he once led to express their unease. But others, who have noted Mr Blair’s occasional messianic self-belief (especially in his recently published memoirs) have seen cause to be struck by the rare display of humility – at the spring 2010 event (featured sans Blairs in the April 5, Easter Monday issue of Hello! magazine) on the banks of the River Jordan, the site of Christ’s own baptism by John – in that while the former Prime Minister (so often accused by critics of being Rupert Murdoch’s own John the Baptist, or even his “representative on Earth” while in Downing Street) is said to have worn a white robe, like every other guest, he did not apparently attempt to carry out the Christening himself

A year after the general election and the only ones (still) smiling are David Cameron and George Osborne – and even they have told their party colleagues to keep straight faces for fear of upsetting the Liberal Democrats. Even as Nick Clegg tries to assert that his party is keeping the Tories honest in government, the latest opinion polls – coming so soon after the AV referendum and local election drubbings – do not make cheering reading. According to Populus, The Times in-house pollster, there is a silver lining of a sort for the Orange Book proslatyser: voters think he is not so much dishonest as he is a fool. Ouch. More than half of voters surveyed by Populus felt he was “out of his depth”, more than a third that he is “weak” and a quarter said he was just “out of touch”. A fifth found him “likeable” and only 17 per cent thought he was actually “dishonest”. Yet almost two-thirds (64 per cent) say that a year on the party has not demonstrated they’ve made any difference to the direction of the government. But note, the same poll puts the Tories only 2 per cent behind Labour’s 39 per cent approval rating.

*****

One of those who most willingly embraced the Tory “slash and burn” rhetoric was David Laws whose career as Chief Secretary to the Treasury was very short-lived indeed. Mr Clegg’s fellow Orange Book-er was this week due to hear the ruling of Parliamentary Commissioner John Lyon. The awkward business of Mr Laws’ wrongful claiming of £40,000 of House of Commons accommodation allowances to pay to his boyfriend/landlord and the covering-up has been the subject of the Commissioner’s deliberations for nigh on a year and is an inconvenient, persistent and immovable obstacle to a return to Cabinet for him. However, all is not lost. Despite suggestions that the Commissioner is expected to find against Mr Laws on six counts, he is apparently holding to the mitigation that all he wanted to do was safeguard his privacy. A year on, it will be interesting to see if people struggling to make ends meet are warmer or cooler to such a defence. l Step forward the Lib Dem who rushed to replace David Laws and has been a credit to his Cabinet colleagues in staunchly defending any number of cuts he opposed in opposition – Danny “Beaker” Alexander who may soon be the unwilling bearer of any number of flatulence-related nicknames. Sky News has reportedly warned all employees that under no circumstances is “off-air” footage of the Treasury Chief Secretary awaiting an interview at the Millbank studios – in which he reportedly breaks wind very, very loudly – to make it into the public domain despite its potential entertainment value to political mischief makers. A spokesman for Mr Alexander was quoted in the Daily Mirror as saying the story was just so much “hot air”. Meanwhile, candidates for Mr Alexander’s new nickname range from “Rolling Thunder” to the more musical “Le Petomane”.

*****

It often falls to those blessed with the gift of prophesy that they shall be reviled in their homeland. Or so George Galloway might be saying to himself after the voters of Glasgow stubbornly – and spectacularly – spurned him. Gorgeous George, who returned to the Scottish political stage in his characteristically confident, self-assured and even boastful style, predicted early on that the SNP would win by a landslide – the same landslide that surprised and confounded so many pundits on polling night. Alas, the self-styled hero of the left – and opponent of the cuts – accomplished an inglorious hat trick for himself in adding rejection by Glasgow voters to his failures in the European and general elections. Glaswegians opted for SNP, Labour, Green and even a Tory as their MSPs before George.

*****

It has been official Walk to Work Week, all this week. Which in London carries with it the ever-present risk of a tube strike. One could not but be bemused by the apparent synchronicity of events at City Hall, Transport for London and Downing Street that led to a postponement by Bob Crow’s RMT of what promised to be a lengthy disruption to service next week. No sooner had London Mayor Boris Johnson been publicly upbraided by a Cabinet minister (presumably officially sanctioned by Number 10) for trying to pass off his own responsibility for London Transport industrial relations to the government (he is calling for tougher, anti-strike laws) when he should actually be talking to the unions than suddenly, overnight and after secret talks with TfL bosses, a truce is agreed. The cause of the strike action was the sacking of two RMT members. A tribunal looking into the accusations against one of them, a driver, found that no reasonable employer would have sacked him. Boris, meanwhile, tries to maintain the fiction it has nothing to do with him – a fiction for which Whitehall and Downing Street appears to have fast diminishing tolerance.

*****

Trade Secretary Vince Cable is delighted to be vindicated by the Press Complaints Commission which censured the Daily Telegraph for the sting operation in which he boasted of preventing Rupert Murdoch’s plans for supreme domination of British media. In so doing he disqualified himself and his party from any formal oversight of the Sky take over bid, and opened himself and his party up to ridicule. But it wasn’t what he said it was how it was obtained.

He may have taken stick for his symbolic policy book full of blank pages but for those who sought it their wait has not been in vain. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband has perhaps come closer to defining his party’s brand of socialism than any of his recent predecessors dared. In a lengthy interview and profile for The Guardian’s magazine, by Andy Beckett, the man who has so often been defined in terms of his relationships to others – son of Ralph, brother of David, heir to Gordon – quietly and without fanfare articulated Labour’s purpose as identifying and correcting “the injustices of capitalism”.

He told the magazine: “A lot of the faith that people had in markets has been shaken by what happened in 2008. The financial crisis has got to be this big moment of reassessment. Now, clearly you need markets…(but) if you’re Labour you believe that it’s just not good enough to say the outcome the market produces is a fair outcome.  You’ve got to find ways of intervening in that outcome.” New Labour was “about coming to terms with capitalism. It was hard to be a critic of capitalism. I’m not making excuses. But I’m trying to explain it – almost as a historian might explain it”. But Mr Miliband, who worked at a very City-friendly Treasury as advisor to Chancellor Gordon Brown until 2005 when he resigned to become an MP – the same year as Nick Clegg – is nevertheless pretty sanguine about the Labour Party leader being called a socialist. “Well, the Labour Party card says ‘democratic socialist’”, he told his interviewer.

*****

Honesty and principle are not always synonymous with political ambition, certainly at the start of a House of Commons career. True, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive but they can be inconvenient or come at a price. One thinks of former Education Secretary Estelle Morris’s overly harsh self-criticism that led to her resignation. Health minister Edwina Currie in the late 1980s whose resignation sparked a shake-up of hygiene and health standards in the egg industry also springs to mind. Now a new name might be added to that roll call of honour. Step forward Tory MP and GP Sarah Wollaston from Devon who this week probably torpedoed any ministerial ambitions she might once quietly have harboured by admitting the Government’s health policy may well destroy the NHS. Handing GPs control of the purse strings would change the health service “beyond recognition” – and not for the better. She also mentioned the inconvenient truth that her party campaigned in 2010 on a pledge of Nno “top-down reorganisation” of the NHS. The bill currently before MPs is no less than a “Trojan horse”, Dr Wollaston said. “No top-down reorganisation of the NHS promised on the outside, but perhaps the greatest upheaval in the organisation’s history on the inside.” Groups of GPs that ministers want to band together to make savings are “doomed to fail and will have to hand over their commissioning to the private sector. An organisation responsible for over £100 billion needs people who understand accountancy and, trust me, GPs do not.”

*****

Lord Saville’s lengthy and costly investigation into the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry attracted much criticism and pledges that never again will a judicial inquiry be given a blank cheque. Nevertheless, anyone watching the families in Derry last year as David Cameron addressed the Commons on its findings had to concede the inquiry did bring about a common good. This week over in Dublin another tribunal established in 1997 finally published its findings. The story could hardly be in greater contrast to Lord Saville’s efforts. The Moriarty Tribunal, set up by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to look into corrupt payments to some of Ireland’s senior politicians, delivered several thousand pages of findings. It commenced in October 1997, heard from its first witness in 1998 and hasn’t sat as a public tribunal since 2004. It cost the Irish taxpayer between 100 million euros and 150 million euros and made multi-millionaires of the three most senior barristers assigned to it. This week it concluded that  then communications minister Michael Lowry in John Bruton’s Fine Gael government – now an independent TD – received a payment from (then) small businessman Denis O’Brien who was seeking the license for Ireland’s second GSM mobile phone network for his company ESAT Digifone which he set up in 1995. Mr O’Brien won the franchise and sold it to BT in 2000 netting himself a personal profit of 317 million euros which he used to build up the Digicel network in the Caribbean. Mr O’Brien, who denies the tribunal’s finding, is now the second wealthiest person in Ireland, owns much of its media, and Forbes this month estimated his personal fortune at $4.2 billion, up by $700 million in the last year alone. The amount said to be paid to the corrupt minister – £147,000.

Meanwhile, now that Project Merlin has been agreed and bankers’ bonuses no longer dominate the front pages Barclays has released details of bonuses and compensation paid to its boss Bob Diamond and other staff members. Chief executive Diamond, the public face of the bank, did not actually get the £9.5 million bonus for 2010 everyone thought he would and, we are told, got a much more modest £6.75 million – emblematic of restraint and sensitivity to these straitened times. Mr Diamond wasn’t even the best paid in his bank. Two of his lieutenants, Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci of the Barclay’s Capital received something like £77 million in bonuses, incentives and rewards for past performance. Some 231 senior employees – known as “code staff” – took home £554 million between them, an average of about £2.4 million per executive. In deference to political and public sensitivities, we are told, Mr Diamond’s pay for 2011 will be an annual salary of £1.35 million, up from his current pay of £250,000. His annual bonus will be 2.5 times his salary – £3.37 million – and he will also receive a long-term incentive plan of five times his salary. Some 10 per cent of his long-term rewards will be based on “sustainability” of the business including factors such as the bank’s relationships with regulators.

It’s the Oscars for the super rich: Forbes Magazine this week published its annual survey of the world’s billionaires.  Whatever its forensic accuracy it is nevertheless used as a handy barometer of the state of the world’s economies, not least that of the United States where year in, year out for the past couple of decades the list shows that around 400 of its richest possess as much wealth as 155 million of their compatriots – the so-called bottom half of society. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, 55, would have topped the list with a personal fortune of $88 billion – if he and his wife Melinda had not given away $28 billion to good causes such as the eradication of malaria and polio in poorer, developing countries through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Berkshire Hathaway investment vehicle founder Warren Buffett whose fortune is estimated at $47 billion would have been second if he, too, had not given away billions to philanthropic causes. Both Mr Gates and Mr Buffett have been trying to persuade their fellow billionaires, through their charity The Giving Pledge, to give way at least half of their immense fortunes either during their lifetimes or as bequests. Their campaign has met with mixed responses probably best characterised by Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican telecoms entrepreneur who is officially the world’s richest man (according to Forbes, at least), with an estimated personal wealth of $60 billion. Businessmen do more good by creating jobs and wealth through investment, “not by being Santa Claus”, says the no-nonsense Mexican billionaire.

This has been doing the rounds in Westminster, Twitter, cyberspace and elsewhere for a few weeks now and has been attributed to many, including TV presenter Andrew Neil, but it still merits an airing: “Q: What is the difference between ‘The Big Society’ and ‘The Big Issue’? A: Nobody buys ‘The Big Society’.”

David Cameron’s voluntarism initiative has also become synonymous with redundancy, as in losing your job is “joining the Big Society”. Even the man put in charge, Lord Wei, found he could not do it and make ends meet so had to scale back his hours. So far, so inauspicious – couldn’t really get much worse, or could it? TimeBank, the charity hailed by Office for Civil Society Minister Nick Hurd as the retort to the cynics faces possible closure – just months after celebrating its 10th anniversary – following his department’s refusal to give it a £500,000 grant. The organisation, which employs 35 staff and co-ordinates 300,000 volunteers and work experience candidates, was one of 42 organisations receiving government funding and invited to reapply to become a “strategic partner” and get up to £500,000 a year until the programme’s closure in 2014. Spending cuts means that only 14 designated “strategic partners” will get any funding. The Cabinet Office, we are told, is mulling whether it will publish the full list of organisations that have already been told they are being cut loose and won’t get any money. As for TimeBank, which says it is considering a legal challenge, a Cabinet Office spokesperson said drily that the organisation was given six months notice “which is ample time to plan for the future”.

The combative governor tried unsuccessfully to force the senators back to give constitutional legitimacy to his plans to end health care, collective bargaining and pension rights for teachers and other public sector workers. Walker’s strategy has been to pit hard-pressed blue collar and middle class (in the US, it means lower-waged employees) workers against state employees and to blame them for the state’s $137 million deficit by claiming that, with benefits, they earn as much as $75,000 a year and enjoy job security. Meanwhile, his party has been pushing for lower corporation tax and tax breaks for the top 2 per cent of the country. Any opposition is denounced as “class war” or “politics of envy”. Sound familiar? Tensions became so heated in the past two weeks that  protestors occupied the state’s ornate Capitol building in Madison for a prolonged “sleep over” – prompting an unsuccessful appeal to them to leave to allow the authorities to steam clean the legislature because of the overpowering smell of, erm, well, irate workers and voters, not to put too fine a point on it.

Mr Emanuel is a man who could teach the Israeli Defence Forces a thing or two about coming at an opponent the hard way. Among the many euphemisms used to describe him when he announced he was leaving the West Wing for the Windy City were “bombastic”, “brusque”, “tough personal style”, “not afraid to break a little china”, “not a shrinking violet”, “will use the f-word”. They were from, if not exactly his admirers, certainly not his enemies. His enemies tried shamelessly to have him thrown off the ballot as recently as January 24, claiming that because he worked in the White House, he didn’t live in Chicago – despite the fact he kept all his possessions stored in the house he rented out to tenants who, apparently didn’t want to give him back his home. Among those items was his wife’s wedding dress and an overcoat worn by his maternal grandfather when he arrived in America in 1917 after he fled persecution on the Russian-Romanian border. Emmanuel saw off the procedural dirty tricks without even breaking sweat but Chicago – where his predecessors included the formidable Richard J Daley and his son Richard M Daley – breeds its politicians hard-nosed. In fairness, they have to be – six of its parent state Illinois’s governors were charged with crimes during or after their gubernatorial terms, four were convicted and Rod Blagojevich (who tried to extort a children’s hospital) was succesfully impeached.