Ugly Specter of International Development Funding

So after the Conservative’s pop at DfID and my previous post on the subject comes the news that the Department for International (note that international) Development has approved a £2.4 million grant to the Trade Union Congress (TUC), which is obviously based here in the UK.

The money has been awarded under a Partnership Programme Arrangement, or PPA, which is a system of funding existing charities that have a track record in International development.

The main funding is not tied purely to international development though with one of the aims being to carry out “activities to build support for development in the United Kingdom that are likely to contribute to a reduction in poverty in other countries.”

It appears that their memorandum of understanding is purposefully vague and in true DFID style requires no deliverables. So the activities are “likely” to contribute to a reduction in poverty, not “will” contribute.

Other objectives include raising the capacity of foreign trade unions to enforce workers’ rights (no complaint there) and “Great British trade union membership, understanding of a commitment to sustainable development” and “strengthened UK and developing country trade union international development policy”. The last two of which should obviously be read as spending the aid budget on our friends in the UK.

A report by the International Policy Network which examines the TUC’s relatinship with DfID, A closer Union, has also pointed out that the TUC has to date receieved a total of £3.6 million with earlier payments being intended to raise awareness within teh British union movement for International Development issues. now £3.6 million is a lot of money in international development. In fact it is nearly enough money to provide half of the population of Gambia with a free malaria bed net.

The IPN’s report has raised an ugly specter in the international aid market, that few people know about. Mainly that international aid from organisations like DfID and USAID is supposed to be spent at home not abroad. DfID prefers to use UK based consultants and organisations as opposed to locally based ones in order to ensure that UK tax payers money is spent in the UK and I have been told that USAID actually stipulates that all contractors and consultants should be from the US.

The problem here is that the TUC (well its members) is obviously an enormous contributor to the Labour party, and that although DfID funds almost certainly didn’t end up going into Labour party coffers directly they would have indirectly. How? Well any budget for a specific project such as those mentioned above will have an element of overall running costs built into it, the cost of office space, heating, lighting, IT, admin etc, that obviously actually contributes to the running of the whole organisation. So as a result of this “free money” the TUC ultimately can afford to give more to the Labour Party.

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Alveston local By-election

So we were defeated last night in the Alveston By-election. Despite a hard working campaign team and the fact that the by-election had come about by the sad death of a conservative councillor the liberal democrats defeated our candidate Lynda Organ.

It was a narrow margin of defeat just 888 votes for Anthony Cronin to 834 for Lynda. With so few votes in it you have to wonder what swayed those last few voters, particularly as it appears that the Green candidate failed to pull any majority of lib dem votes (only 58 votes went to the Greens and 111 votes to the Labour candidate).

The town council seat was also won by a lib dem candidate, this time by a much larger margin (1028 votes to 694). Showing the sometimes incestuous nature of local politics the winning candidate, Ian Fradgley, is actually husband of the current town mayor Jenny Fradgley.

Something that I am increasingly thinking is of vital importance on a local level though is the local media. It's known in Stratford political circles that the local paper the Stratford Herald leans towards the Lib Dems (why though no one has been able to tell me). And on election day the front story of the Herald was a story detailing how the Conservative led council and cabinet will be voting on the building of 800 new homes in the region on Monday. The second paragraph of the story stated "All in all, new housing in the Stratford district over the next 15 years looks like rapidly becoming the single most explosive issue on the political agenda in South Warwickshire. It’s already been made into a matter of “stop press” urgency by the opposition Liberal Democrats in today’s (Thursday’s) district council by-election in Alveston." although there was no conservative quote or mention of the candidate's position on the issue at all. Her position was left implicit by the tone of the comment and article.

Equally on the same day we received our free local paper the Stratford Observer which in it's letters page included a lead letter from a conservative detailing that they will not be voting conservative because the current council has taken away free parking for over 65s in the town, and a letter responding in very negative terms to a previous letter from a potential conservative local candidate who questioned the validity of being a councillor but failing to attend meetings. His original comments were more than valid but yet the letter makes them sound to be false and accused him of attacking others without finding out all the facts. It also falls back onto the established narrative that Conservatives are all nasty people (more coming on that soon) by saying "... doesn't mark a return to tactics Mr Cameron claims the conservatives have given up."

In terms of most people's knowledge of truly local issues the only way they know what is happening is through the local paper so when it has a clear skew towards one party this causes great issues. In the weeks and months ahead as we head towards a real local election relatinships with the media and gateway individuals are going to become key. Sadly as a result of individual (not really conservative policy) in the last few years this is going to be a difficult sell

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Tories Lead Labour by 2 million in fundraising

The latest figures from the Electoral Commission show that the Conservative party receieved 5.27 million pounds in donations in Q3 as opposed to just 3 million for the Labour party. The poor lib dems only received 816,663 which I think shows that regardless of how much people believe support for them is increasing or any hopes people may have they could become a stronger power / an opposition in British politics, they simply won't.

In total political parties received 9.5 million in the quarter down from 13.2 million in the previous quarter (april to June). Any way you look at it these are large figures, by comparison Children in Need this year raised 20 million pounds and was seen as a huge success, so are people more willing to give to political parties than to charity?

This also continues to be a great fact for the conservatives with most if not nearly all donations coming from individuals whilst the Labour Party continue to receive large block donations from unions. Interestingly when you look at per person figures there are approximately 290,000 members of the conservative party so in the last 3 months they on average gave just £18.17, by comparison the Lib Dems have around 73,000 members who are on average each giving £11. I couldn't find current membership figures for Labour, but apparently in 2005 it was 198,000 so they are on average gave the party £15 however I suspect that was one or two generous unions rather than a collective of generous individuals as unions supposedly represent 90% of Labour Donations now. If that's true then members on average gave just £1.04 each in the last quarter. Clearly an unexpected effect of the current financial climate for Mr Brown!

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Queen's Speech - Laws are not for aspirations

Haven't got much time this morning as I have to head off to facilitate a workshop for a social housing provider in just a minute.

However my quick reaction to the Queen's speech is that laws and bills should not be used for aspirations. A law or piece of legislation either says how you are going to do something or introduces a new idea of something you shouldn't do. Targets and aspirations such as cutting the deficit by a quarter should not become laws.

This is another case of Labour fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of targets which are to tell you when you have achieved an objective not to be something to achieve. Whilst an aspiration is something to aim towards, but you still need to work out a plan how to get there.

Time after time the objective behind a target is forgotten and all focus goes into achieving the target, look at NHS targets, education targets, policing targets, recruitment targets, the list goes on. In this case cutting the deficit is a target that will tell us when fiscal responsibility and a return to a growth economy rather than recession has been reached, it is not the thing to achieve in itself.

All too often this government has believed that if it manages to achieve A, B and C then that will miraculously equal D, but it won't. The modern world is too complex, ideas are too inter related, problems are too inter-related, it is only by giving up centralised control and targets and concentrating on achieving objectives not targets that real change and transformation will take place.

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Cameron on the Queen's speech

There is a great piece in the Times today about Labour's claims that they will be politicising the queen's speech.

He clearly lays out the difference's between Conservative and Labour policies in a number of areas and highlights yet again the Conservative's approach to cutting the level of public borrowing. The statistic that keeps coming up from the high ranking Conservatives at the moment is that by next year we will be borrowing almost 14% of GDP (or as it has morphed into lately, our national income, for those that don't know what GDP means) and that this is twice the borrowing which under a labour government nearly took us bust in the 1970s.

I think this is a good tactic to remind people that we have been here before and that really New Labour inherited more of the foundations of a good economy than created them . Yes there were mistakes in the previous conservative government on pubic finances but nothing to the scale we're seeing today. At the end of the day I see it as an ideological issue, Labour is tax and spend, spend money to get people out of poverty (which hasn't worked), spend money to bail out the banking sector, spend money to solve pretty much any problem in fact. As an alternative the Conservative party are more willing to look at root causes, to look at the issue as complex and interconnected, a complex systems view, that sees the system as a number of interconnected parts that are more than the sum of the whole will always beat a throw money at the visible issues solution.

On the subject of throwing money at poverty an ICM poll last night showed that the Tories have a 13% lead over Labour, but more importantly in the context of this post are more trusted than labour to lift people out of poverty (admitedly it's 42%, 41%). I think this really shows that the messages on compassionate conservatism are really getting out there. Well done Team Cameron for beginning to change the established narrative (more on that later today)

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Wordles on Politics

For anyone that doesn't know a wordle is a graphic visulisation of word frequency within a document, the larger a word the more frequently it comes up. Someone decided to do this on the three main political parties websites with some interesting results.

Conservatives.com

labour.org.uk

libdems.org.uk

Now much has been made today of the fact that the Labour website has no mention of Brown whilst the conservative website has David Cameron at it's centre, whilst the Lib Dems are focusing on themselves. When you look at strategy and approach this seems an obvious choice

1) Conservatives have David Cameron as a charasmatic and effective figurehead

2) Lib Dems rally around the party rather than their leader and although Nick Clegg is doing a good job he's not that out there as a figurehead preferring to push the party.

3) Brown is a liability and everyone knows it!

What I take away from these is something quite different and that is about clarity of messages. When you look at the conservative's wordle versus the labour one it's clear that the conservatives have focused on a number of key messages and ideas, whilst Labour have a muddle of messages on a huge range of topics and this I believe is the real learning point from this exercise. Labour has lost its way and is muddled, it lurches from one message to another with seemingly no strategy or approach, whilst the conservatives have a clear plan and focus on one item at a time.

I'm just starting to look at campaigning on a local level for the district council and this concept of identifying a few key messages that individuals can be represented by is I think vitally important. It helps a candidate engage with the electorate and communicate something clearly.

Thanks to LibDemVoice.org who it seems made the Wordles orriginally

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