The hard choice facing Justin Welby

The reaction of the North-East media to the recent appointment of Dr Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury says much about the unusually high regard in which he has come to be held in the region since becoming Bishop of Durham last year.


An editorial in The Journal described his appointment to Canterbury as a significant loss to the North-East and, with due respect to other church leaders in the region, few of them would merit such an accolade.

I have to confess I am a little biased where Dr Welby is concerned as we went to the same London church in the 1980s before he received the call to ordination, although I doubt he would have much cause to remember me.

There are many reasons why he will make a first-class archbishop, but in an age when many young people go straight from university into church leadership without the intervention of a career in the real world, the best thing about him is the grounding he gained from 11 years in the oil industry.

But if Dr Welby’s appointment was greeted by a general chorus of media approval, the universal disapproval that greeted this week’s decision by the church’s general synod to say no to women bishops highlights the extent of the challenge facing him.

It must be a moot point as to whether he or the new director general of the BBC, Tony Hall, has been handed the more poisoned chalice.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue itself – and the beliefs are passionately held on both sides of the debate – it seems beyond doubt that the vote will make it harder for the church to get its message across.

The national and broadcast media has given the church a fearful kicking over the issue in recent days, and it didn’t take long for the politicians, from Prime Minister David Cameron downwards, to start joining in.

The broad thrust of their criticisms is that the church has shown itself to be out of touch with modern values and, as the former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith put it, no longer reflects society as it is.

However it is by no means axiomatic that any faith community should be required to conform to the prevailing culture. Indeed, its belief system may at times require it to be vigorously counter-cultural.

To take a different example, there is a widely-held view in society that the accumulation of wealth and possessions is a good thing, and that our political and economic systems should be so arranged as to promote and encourage this.

Christianity, however, takes a different view, arguing not only that you can’t take it with you, but that, in the eternal scheme of things, the abundance of possessions may actually be more of a hindrance than a help.

So for politicians to suggest that a church should necessarily buy in to politically fashionable causes without reference to its teachings and traditions is too lazy an assumption.

No, the real difficulty arises here because of the particular nature of the Church of England as the established church and the role of its all-male bishops in the legislature as members of the House of Lords.

In this regard, it is surely significant that, while MPs mutter dark threats about subjecting the Church of England to equalities legislation over its failure to ordain women bishops, no-one is suggesting doing the same to the Roman Catholic Church over its refusal to allow women priests.

Indeed, if anyone were to suggest that the government should start regulating churches in this way, I suspect the resulting uproar would make the row over whether it should regulate the press look like a vicarage tea party.

Of course, a move to a democratically elected House of Lords, minus the bishops, would remove part of the problem at a stroke.

But Tory MPs foolishly voted down that option as part of their petty feud with the Liberal Democrats, and it is unlikely to come back onto the table before the next election.

The upshot is that unless Dr Welby and his colleagues can find some way of revisiting the women bishops issue, preferably before another five years of argument and bloodletting have passed, the church may be forced to make a hard choice.

Either accept the increasing and unwelcome intervention of politicians in its affairs – or take the nuclear option of disestablishment.

A welcome report - but why is Heseltine having to reinvent the wheel?

OF all leading Conservative politicians of the past half century, the former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine is perhaps the one who has enjoyed the most complex relationship with his own party.

To some, he will be remembered as a spellbinding orator and party conference crowd-pleaser par excellence – or as the late former MP Julian Critchley memorably put it, the man who “always knew where the find the clitoris of the Tory Party.”

To others, he will forever be the dark villain at the centre of what they would see as the most shameful episode in the party’s recent history – the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher after 11 years as Prime Minister in 1990.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy to the party, though, will be to have kept the flag flying for what became some distinctly unfashionable causes in Conservative circles – Europe, state intervention, and above all, regionalism.

Lord Heseltine’s long advocacy of regional policy as a way of promoting both economic growth and social cohesion dates back to his time as the ‘Minister for Merseyside’ in the wake of the Toxteth riots in the early 1980s.

But is a concept that fell so far out of favour among his colleagues that practically the first thing the Tory-led Coalition did on coming to power in 2010 was to abolish the regional development agencies.

In the light of this, perhaps the most surprising thing about Lord Heseltine’s report on industrial strategy published this week under the title ‘No Stone Unturned’ is that he was asked to write it at all.

Is it a sign of a new open-mindedness on the part of Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne - or merely a sign of desperation in the face of the country’s continuing economic plight?

Either way, it was inevitable that Labour would seize on Lord Heseltine’s headline statement that the UK currently “does not have a strategy for growth and wealth creation.”

This is, after all, exactly what Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has been saying all along – that the government needs an economic ‘Plan B’ that puts more emphasis on generating growth and slightly less on cutting the deficit.

Labour leader Ed Miliband is also understandably keen to appropriate the ideas of a One Nation Tory like Heseltine in order to bolster his own attempts to seize the ‘One Nation’ mantle from the Conservatives.

Indeed, it is a measure of how far politics has shifted on its axis since the early 1980s that talk of measures to promote economic growth and wealth creation is now regarded in some circles as “left-wing.”

Some of Lord Heseltine’s proposals have a familiar ring to them.  Since the early 1990s he has viewed elected mayors as a general panacea for everything wrong with local government, and it was no surprise to see him giving this another airing.

The idea of conurbation-wide or even region-wide mayors have also been batted around before, and has some attractions as a halfway house between an elected regional assembly which might be too big to care and local authorities which are too small to cope.

A Mayor of Tyneside, for instance, would have the requisite critical mass of political and financial clout to make a difference while still retaining an element of local accountability.

As I have noted before in this column, it isn’t regional government as we once knew it, but it may be the best, or indeed only, form of regional government that’s ever likely to be on offer.

Lord Heseltine has also advocated handing over responsibility for billions of pounds of central government expenditure to the Local Enterprise Partnerships set up last year following the demise of the RDAs.

But this nothing terribly new either.   Moving power and budgets out of Whitehall was exactly the idea behind the creation of the Government Offices for the Regions in 1994 by the Major administration in which Lord Heseltine served, and also New Labour’s establishment of the RDAs in 1999.

The GORs were wound up by the Coalition in March 2011, exactly a year before the RDAs closed for business, but now Lord Heseltine proposes to turn the LEPs into something that looks suspiciously like a recreation of the two.

While it will be welcomed by those who bemoaned the loss of this institutions, it surely also begs the question why it has been necessary for him to reinvent the wheel.

Deeply disingenuous, but Cameron has the final say

Seven years ago, the Conservative Party faithful gathered in Blackpool for what most observers expected would be a leadership stand-off between right-wing former council house boy David Davis and veteran Europhile Ken Clarke.

That was, of course, before a young MP by the name of David Cameron came along and tore up the script, delivering a speech without notes that electrified the party and made them believe that, with him in charge, they could finally put an end to their losing streak.

That all seems a long time ago now.  Although he did become Prime Minister, Mr Cameron did not turn out to be quite the winner his party had hoped for, and this week’s conference in Birmingham had an element of seven-year-itch about it.

So notwithstanding the fact that his speaking-without-notes routine has since been successfully imitated by other political leaders, it was perhaps no surprise that Mr Cameron eschewed it this week in favour of a traditional, scripted address.

It was, by some distance, the most serious speech of the conference season and indeed of Mr Cameron’s political career to date.

His talk of an “hour of reckoning” for the British economy was a far cry from the David Cameron of a few years back who exhorted us in a previous conference speech to “let sunshine win the day.”  

If that was possibly the worst Cameron soundbite ever coined, someone had clearly been working on them in the run-up to Wednesday’s address.

“The party of one notion:  borrowing” and “I’m not here to defend privilege, but to spread it” may not be in quite the same league as “the Lady’s not for turning”  but they are likely to stick longer in the memory than anything either of the other two party leaders have come up with in the past three weeks.

But for all its statesmanlike qualities and oratorical panache, it was, however, a deeply disingenuous speech by the Prime Minister.

Nowhere was this more so than when Mr Cameron sought to claim that only the Conservatives had ‘protected’ the NHS from spending cuts, saying:  “Be in no doubt:  this is the party of the NHS and that’s the way it’s going to stay,”

Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that the government’s Health and Social Care Act has actually turned the NHS into no more than a brand, the situation on the ground is very different.

The reality, in my own local health trust at any rate, is that a fifth of the workforce is to be sacrificed over the next four years to meet the government’s spending squeeze.

In terms of political positioning, the core message of Mr Cameron’s speech was in its appeal to the aspirational voters who previously helped deliver election success to both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

“They call us the party of the better-off.  No, we are the party of the want to be better off,” he said in another of those catchy soundbites.

But the truth of the matter is that, in the public sector at any rate, there are tens of thousands of “want to be better offs” who have simply had the rug cut from under them - a disproportionate number of those being in the North-East.

If the unspoken assumption behind this is that no-one with any genuine aspiration actually goes into the public sector in the first place, then that betrays how little Mr Cameron knows about the way most of us live.

The conference season ends with the battle line starting to be drawn for an election which, on the evidence of the past few weeks, is shaping up to be much more of a two-way fight than the last one.

Ed Miliband’s speech, with his audacious bid to grab the One Nation mantle of the old-style Tory moderates was, once again, the boldest of the three, while Nick Clegg’s, at a time when he needed to put clear yellow water between himself and the Tories, was sadly forgettable.

Mr Cameron’s was the most sombre, but perhaps more importantly in terms of shaping the political agenda going forward, also the last.

It’s purely an accident of history that always lets the Tory leader have the final say in this three-week battle for political supremacy, but this year, at least, it was one he took full advantage of.

Can 'Red Ed' really command the centre ground?

Twelve months ago, Ed Miliband delivered what I described at the time as probably the most courageous party conference speech by any major political leader over the course of the last two decades.

The Liverpool address, in which he admitted that New Labour had not done enough to change the “values” of the British economy, amounted to no less than an attempt to overturn the political consensus that has been maintained by successive governments of right and left since the 1980s.

This year’ s speech, delivered 30 miles down the road in Manchester, was no less audacious - but whereas then Mr Miliband appeared to be adopting a distinctly leftish analysis of the country’s problems, this year saw him resorting to one of Tony Blair’s favourite pastimes – stealing the Tories’ clothes.

And it is perhaps in that apparent contradiction – between the leftward-lurching ‘Red Ed’ of 12 months ago and the ‘One Nation’ Labourite of this week – that Mr Miliband’s problem lies.

You cannot fault the Labour leader’s instincts in seeking to place himself and his party firmly in the centre ground of British politics. That is, after all, where elections are invariably won and lost.

And Prime Minister David Cameron can surely only blame himself for giving his opponent the opportunity to indulge in a spot of political cross-dressing.

By instinct a One Nation, compassionate Conservative himself, he has allowed himself since entering Downing Street to be blown off course by an angry right-wing rump who cannot forgive him for failing to win the election outright and thereby forcing them into a Coalition with those ghastly Lib Dems.

The past 18 months have seen a grisly procession of rightward shifts, from his backbenchers’ piece-by-piece demolition of Nick Clegg’s plans for political reform, to a reshuffle that saw a climate change sceptic put in charge of environment policy.

So the time was surely ripe this week for Mr Miliband to make a play for the centrist-minded voters that Mr Cameron appears to have all-but-abandoned in his desperation to keep the Boris Johnson fan club at bay.

And there was much about the labour leader’s ‘One Nation’ pitch that rang true, in particular his desire to focus attention and resources on the ‘forgotten 50pc’ who don’t go to university and his determination to speak up as much for the ‘squeezed middle’ as those living in poverty.

I was also impressed by the evident passion with which he spoke up, not for the unions, but for the Union – under threat as never before as a result of Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s independence referendum plans.

Mr Miliband is right that only the Labour Party can save it. The Tories and Lib Dems are a busted flush north of the border, and only the Labour Party will ever have the strength in Scotland to defeat Mr Salmond’s nationalists.

Above all, the speech demonstrated that Mr Miliband has the potential to give the Labour Party the clear sense of direction it has lacked since Mr Blair left office in 2007.

Gordon Brown should have done this, and had the opportunity to do so, but for all his talk about restoring the party’s cherished ‘var-lues’, his much-vaunted Real Labour – or was it True Labour? – never really achieved lift-off.

Now we have One Nation Labour, which, if rather short on specifics at this stage, at least sounds as if it might finally resolve the vexed question of what follows New Labour.

If Mr Miliband is to ensure it is more than a slogan, he now needs to spend the 12 months between this and the next party conference putting some policy flesh on the bones.

There was widespread agreement, even among Tory commentators, that Tuesday’s speech was a bravura performance by the Labour leader, a brilliantly-crafted and passionate address that has the potential to be a political game-changer.

But the nub of Ed Miliband’s problem, as the former Tory MP turned political blogger Jerry Hayes put it rather crudely this week, is that he genuinely is the most left-wing Labour leader since Michael Foot.

The really big question is whether, the light of this, Mr Miliband can come to be seen by the voters as a credible occupant of the political centre-ground in the way that both Mr Blair and Mr Cameron were before him.

And on that score, the jury is still out.

Clegg's apology will not ultimately save his leadership

Broken promises are nothing new in politics.  From the Labour Party’s 110-year-old pledge to introduce an elected House of Lords to George H.W. Bush’s infamous one-liner ‘Read my lips, No new taxes,’ history is full of instances of parties and politicians failing to keep their word.

But there seems to be something about the subject of university tuition fees which brings out the worst in politicians where keeping promises is concerned.

Back in 2001, New Labour went into the general election with the cast-iron manifesto pledge:  “We will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them.”

Less than two years later Tony Blair’s government duly introduced them, in the teeth of a backbench parliamentary revolt in which several leading North-East Labour MPs were to the fore.

If Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had been more of a student of history, perhaps he would have reflected on this before issuing his similarly unequivocal pledge not to raise tuition fees in the run-up to the 2010 election.

Then again, had he done so he might have concluded that breaking promises is not necessarily politically fatal.   After all, Mr Blair’s original broken pledge on tuition fees did not prevent him winning a third general election in 2005.

By the same token, keeping your election promises is no guarantee of political success.

Indeed, it was Margaret Thatcher’s determination to stick to a promise to reform the system of domestic rates that led to the disastrous implementation of the poll tax in 1988 and indirectly to her fall from power two years later.

But for the Liberal Democrats, there was something about breaking the tuition fee pledge that seemed to strike at the heart of what the party is and what it stands for.

Partly because of its strong activist base in the education sector, and perhaps also because of its level of support among students, the question of tuition fees had become something of a touchstone issue for the party.

It was certainly one of the biggest reasons why, in the North East, the Liberal Democrats had become credible challengers in seats with large concentrations of students such as Newcastle Central and Durham City.

So in this sense, for the party leadership to change its mind over the issue was always likely to be viewed as a betrayal on a par with a Labour leader calling for the privatisation of the NHS or a Tory leader announcing we should join the euro.

But this is not all.    There was also something about the idea of breaking election promises at all that ran counter to the Lib Dems’ self-image as a party.

This is why the broken promise on tuition fees was such a watershed for the party – the moment it gave up – possibly for all time – any claim to be representative of a “new” or different kind of politics.

It is for all those reasons that Mr Clegg issued his videoed apology to party supporters this week ahead of what is certain to be a difficult party conference for him.

Whether it will do him any good however remains very much to be seen.  Many of the party’s supporters are likely to take a fairly dim view of the fact that he appeared to be apologising not for breaking the ‘solemn’ promise, but for having made it in the first place.

Mr Clegg finds himself in a strange kind of political limbo.  Despite the comments by Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott last month that any business that had lost so much market share would now be under new management, the coming conference week will not see any overt challenge to his leadership.

Yet at the same time, it is hard to find many Liberal Democrats who seriously believe Mr Clegg will actually lead them into the next general election in 2015.

The remorseless logic of their plight is that if they are to present themselves to the electorate as a viable alternative to the Tories as well as to Labour, it will have to be without the man who took them into a Tory-led coalition.

But that is next year’s Lib Dem conference story.  For now, Mr Clegg continues to inhabit the ranks of the political living dead.

Hillsborough: The apology still missing

After more than 25 years in journalism, much of it spent covering the political arena, there is little that surprises me any more about the lengths to which some people will go in order to preserve their power, position or reputation.

But in the week that the truth about the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster was finally and dramatically laid bare, even an ageing cynic like me has to confess to being shocked by the sheer scale of deception and disinformation involved.

Of course bad apples can crop up in any organisations, and sometimes, as in the case of the West Midlands Crime Squad in the 1970s or, dare I say it, News International in the past decade, this can extend into institutional corruption.

But the fact that so many pillars of the establishment, from the police, to the ambulance service, the coroners’ service, the judiciary, the government and, yes, the media could somehow collude to deny justice for so long almost – but not quite - beggars belief.

Looking back at that old footage of the disaster, it seems in many ways to have happened in another country, a Britain where football was still a working-class game and where the North-South divide was as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one.

As Labour MP Andy Burnham put it: “There was an 'us and them' culture in the 1980s where people seen as being troublemakers could just be treated as second class citizens - football supporters, people taking industrial action. That was very evident in the North of England when I grew up."

Some believe it couldn’t happen again, that in the age of email, mobile phones and Twitter a cover-up on this scale would be impossible to carry out even if it were to be attempted.

Yet the battle to get at the truth of what happened in more recent tragedies such as the deaths of Dr David Kelly, Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson suggest that perhaps the country has not changed quite as much as might first appear.

If Hillsborough has been a saga that has showed the best and worst of humanity – and there are many heroes to stand alongside the obvious villains - then it has certainly also demonstrated the best and worst of British journalism.

South Yorkshire Police’s deliberate campaign of misinformation found a ready outlet in The Sun, whose then editor was this week forced, to use his own immortal phrase, to empty a bucket of something very nasty over his own head.

Not surprisingly, it was the regional press which demonstrated that journalism can be a potent force for good as well as harm.

It was The Journal’s sister title the Liverpool Echo which, as Labour leader Ed Miliband acknowledged on Wednesday, was primarily responsible for keeping the issue on the political agenda during the long 23-year fight.

But amid all the relief of the campaigners at having finally prevailed, there is, however, one aspect of the truth that is still to come out – the role of Margaret Thatcher.

The documents released this week by the independent inquiry panel make clear that the then Prime Minister was briefed by her aides over the level of deceit by South Yorkshire Police - yet she chose to do nothing.

Is it possible she may have felt she owed them one for helping her win the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 – a decisive encounter in the year-long conflict which ultimately led to the rout of Arthur Scargill’s miners?

She certainly cannot have been expected to show any instinctive sympathy for the victims, having previously been on record as linking football fans to the IRA and the miners as ‘the enemy within.’

In the midst of delivering his “profound apology” to the victims’ families this week on the nation’s behalf, the current Prime Minister David Cameron maintained that the Thatcher government had done nothing wrong.

Well, he had to say that, given the continued emotional hold that the Iron Lady retains over the party which he now rather precariously leads.

But it is nevertheless odd that in the week that has seen everyone from Kelvin Mackenzie to the Football Association to Boris Johnson forced to swallow a large slice of humble pie, there is still one apology missing.

From the woman who sat at the apogee of that complex, interwoven 1980s establishment, there remains an eerie silence.