Academic and Public Activities

Academic

Jad is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English in London University's School of Advanced Study

He is a  Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, has an  MA in Victorian Studies from University of London and a BA from the University of  Sussex.

His long-term academic preoccupation is a large study called 'Decadent Women: Lives of the Lost Generation'

His academic publications include:

The Drowning of Hubert Crackanthorpe and the Persecution of Leila Macdonald English Literature in Transition vol. 52 no 1 2009 pp.6-34

William and Edna Clarke Hall:  Private and Public Childhood “Your Child For Ever” English Literature in Transition vol. 49 no 4 2006 pp.398-417 

Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: Deception and Achievement in the 1890s English Literature in Transition vol.50 no 3 2007 pp.251-268

 Several Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries including ones on Ethel Colburn Mayne and Coulson Kernahan and a group entry on ‘The Rhymers’ (2006-7)

Kipling’s Dilemma: Decadent or Hearty? The Kipling Journal vol 82 no 325  2008 pp.9-27 

Reviews: Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullick Women’s Writing vol  11 no 2 2004 pp.324-328; Essays on Decadence English Literature in Transition vol 51 no 2 2008 pp. 225-228; Citizen Moore: An American Patriot? The Political Quarterly vol 79 no 1 2008 pp 133-136

Jad has been assisted in research by grants from the British Academy, the Scouloudi Foundation and the Authors' Foundation

A recent review: One of Life’s Lieutenants

Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955 by Angela V.John Manchester U.P. 

Unfinished Adventure: Selected Reminiscences from an Englishwoman’s Life by Evelyn Sharp Faber and Faber

Evelyn Sharp was a journalist when the profession was being opened up by women; a suffragette in the Edwardian period; a pacifist in the First World War; an aid worker in Germany in the 1920s and a reporter from the famine-struck Soviet Union after the revolution.

She was also a prolific writer but it is her own life which is of more interest than her work, which makes it apposite that Faber should republish her 1933 memoir Unfinished Adventure at the same time that Angela John is bringing out her well-researched biography, Rebel Woman.

Sharp herself thought the most important adventure in her life was the first: the escape from the suffocating bosom of the household: ‘It is family affection, not the want of it, that enslaves the man and woman in the home,’ she wrote.

With £5 saved from her dress allowance and another £5 borrowed from her brother, she ‘ran away from home’ at the age off 24 to become a writer in London.  She lived in a women’s hostel, earned her living by teaching in schools and coaching private pupils, and in the evenings wrote in her curtained cubicle, using the bed for a table and a candle for a light after the gas was turned off at eleven.  She sent a story to the Yellow Book and a novel to the Bodley Head; both were accepted.  The novel, At the Relton Arms, was set in a large family not unlike the one that she had left in Weston Turville near Aylesbury.

She wrote, ‘I knew it was very heaven to be young when I came to London in the nineties,’ and she did indeed grab all the available opportunities.  She attended publisher John Lane’s parties at The Albany, and the Cromwell Road ‘at homes’ of Yellow Book editor Henry Harland who used to call her ‘Darling of my heart!  Child of my editing.’

She became known for her stories for children, writing about girls’ boarding schools before her contemporary Angela Brazil.  Sharp was praised as writing books for girls that ‘dared to be manly’ but as Angela John remarks, she looks beyond the hockey sticks at the gender transition of her girls, moving from home which was dominated by father and brothers, to a female sphere in which different values pertain.

Her leading characters were often disabled and her fairy stories were deliberately subversive, so that the bravest boy is Kit the Coward who understands animals and doesn’t fight like other boys; Sharp’s princess asks why the prince always has to go out into the world to find his bride, can’t the princess do the finding for a change?  

Sharp met the love of her life, Henry Nevinson, in the Prince’s Skating Rink in Knightsbridge where she collided with the accomplished skater.  Angela John does not interrogate this tale of their meeting, but perhaps Nevinson was so frequently at the rink because it gave him an opportunity to engineer encounters with impressionable young women.  Sharp was certainly captivated, ‘he took my hand and we skated off together as if all our life before had been a preparation for that moment,’ she wrote.

Nevinson was a war correspondent and crusading international journalist whose interests ranged from the sufferings of the Albanians to the near slavery of bonded labourers in Angola.  Sharp was 32 when they met, he was 13 years older.  If he was a wolf on the prowl, she was scarcely an innocent lamb; as soon as they were alone she told him, ‘The first time I saw you I knew you wanted something you have never got.’  As Nevinson correctly surmised, this was not the remark of a woman resisting intimacy.  He certainly brought her joy, ‘Oh I am so glad I love some one who could never make me feel ashamed of what I have given him so freely,’ she wrote to him, words preserved because he carefully transcribed them into his diary, the decipherment of which is a major achievement of Professor John in her work on this couple. 

Nevinson was a complex man, the subject of a 2006 biography by John (War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century I.B.Tauris).  He was depressive and his love affairs were a treatment for his melancholy.  His states of mind were exacerbated by an unhappy marriage to another radical writer, Margaret Nevinson.  They had married when they were both young and she was pregnant, and then suffered almost fifty years of unhappy union.  Margaret was a leading suffragist, the first woman Justice of the Peace in London and a Poor Law guardian.  She was treasurer of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League of which Evelyn Sharp was vice president, so there were doubtless a few frosty encounters.

It might be thought less than sororital behaviour to be having sex with the husband of another suffragist, but if Sharp had any comment to make on the morality of the situation it is not recorded.  All three wrote autobiographies, in none is the question of this affair addressed; Evelyn Sharp is notably coy about Nevinson and never refers to Margaret.  The lack of recognition is reciprocated in Margaret Nevinson’s autobiography, Life’s Fitful Fever of 1926 which does not mention Evelyn and scarcely mentions her husband.  Henry Nevinson’s three volume autobiography (he did things on a big scale) mentions both women, but Evelyn many more times than Margaret.

Nevinson had discovered that supporting radical causes put him in contact with progressive women who, as part of their commitment to the modern, did not require marriage before sex.  He was not alone in this, H.G.Well, Edward Aveling and even the sainted Keir Hardie, made the same discovery.  That is not to say their radicalism was insincere, but it is extraordinary how high ideals often run in parallel with personal desires.

Evelyn Sharp was to discover, as so many others have, that a woman who has sex with another woman’s husband can only one hundred per cent sure of one thing - not of his love, but that she has an unfaithful man on her hands.  He kept seeing his other mistress as well as Evelyn, ‘It is not true that one love drives another out’ he confided to his diary.  Indeed, his chief love was, and remained, the Irish nationalist Nannie Dryhurst.  He did not split with her until 1912, ten years after he had met Evelyn, and described himself at the breach as ‘too unhappy to think or live.’ 

As a suffragette Evelyn Sharp was described by C.P.Scott as ‘the ablest and best brain in the movement.’  When leading activists were jailed for conspiracy in 1912 and Christabel Pankhurst fled to France, Evelyn took over the editorship of the paper Votes for Women.  She was briefly imprisoned twice for suffragette activities and is the most famous of the tax resisters, refusing to pay income tax to a government where she was not represented.  This came to a head during the war when bailiffs in 1915 distrained her furniture, carpets, chairs, books and even her typewriter, leaving only her clothes and bed. Friends bought her goods back when they were sold at public auction.

She was prepared to continue albeit a low-key campaign through the war years as were neither the militant suffragettes nor the constitutional suffragists.  She was, of course, correct: far from being postponed because of it, a franchise for women was achieved during the war.  She realised before most other women’s campaigners that the way forward for the women’s vote was to support adult suffrage, not the vote for women on a property qualification, which would have enfranchised only the relatively wealthy.

Sharp was one of those radicals ‘thrilled at the news of the Russian revolution’ in November 1917 and became a founder member of the 1917 Club.  She hailed Bolshevism as a new order of society, ‘in which no one shall starve and no able-bodied person shall be idle.’  She visited the Soviet Union in January 1922 after civil  war, harvest failures and reckless economic policies had reduced large parts of the country to starvation.  On her first morning she passed a corpse lying face down in the snow.  ‘Before the day was out,’ she wrote, ‘I came to think he was the happiest thing I had seen that day.’

From 1922, she contributed to the daily feature in the Manchester Guardian, ‘on subjects which are special to women’ that became the Women’s Page.  This celebration of women’s journalism seemed progressive, but Sharp had been writing journalism since the beginning of the century, latterly including hard reporting from Germany and Ireland.  Now her work, by virtue of her gender, was to be relegated to a specialist column which, to add injury, was shorter and therefore less well paid than non-women’s page pieces.  This did not seem like progress.

After the war, the celebrity Nevinson and Sharp had enjoyed was eclipsed by that of her brother Cecil, the folk music collector, and Nevinson’s son C.R.W. Nevinson, the war artist.  The couple were finally able to marry in 1933, after Margaret’s death, when Sharp was 63; Nevinson was to die eight years later.

Sharp was one of life’s lieutenants – second in command to the Pankhursts then to the Pethick-Lawrences; for most of her life a mistress not a wife (and not even the most valued mistress at that).  She did not seem cut out for a leading role even in her own life; she was always a little girl in a big family.  It is this that is reflected in the limitation of both these books: Angela John puts in all the information, but Sharp does not herself provide the spark that makes the difference between a biographical subject who comes alive and one who does not – Sharp just does not give enough of herself in her writing, she is always an observer.

Sharp could have given us a powerful book had she told the true story of herself, Nevinson and Margaret but, as she perceptively points out in the preface to her autobiography, she was not courageous.  She had the physical courage to face down mounted police at a demonstration and venture into areas of endemic typhus, but for courage as an artist, her contemporary George Egerton is a better bet from that 1890s cohort of women writers.

Times Literary Supplement 7 August 2009

 

Public Activities:

Jad has worked voluntarily for the homelessness charity Nightwatch since 1979, and been chair since 1992.  The Nightwatch website is www.croydonnightwatch.org.uk

Councillor, London Borough of Lewisham 1978-86; posts included Chair of Finance Committee.  

Formerly member of executive of Greater London Arts Association and of Delegacy of   Goldsmiths'  College.  Lobbied for public works of art in Lewisham.

Campaigned for right-to-buy legislation for leasehold flats 1987-93 (eventually becoming law as the Leasehold Reform Act) while fighting for the residents of Kings and Princes Garth to take over their property.  Director K & P G Limited since 1991.

Has fought various campaigns against injustice in local government.

MY LOYALTY TO THE PARTY HAS REACHED BREAKING POINT

This is Jad's contribution to the local government election in May 2006; published in The Independent on 21 April. 

The local elections on May 4 will be a personal and sad occasion for me.  On that day, I will be the first person in four generations to vote against Labour.

My family voted Labour for as long as they had a vote and there was a Labour candidate standing.  But what the party has done with the town halls is such an affront to any conception of public representation that loyalty is stretched to and beyond breaking point.

It is often said that New Labour abandoned the socialism of Old Labour.  In fact it only abandoned half of socialism: all that stuff about fairness and justice and equal opportunities, the revolutionary zeal to make the popular will manifest.  Unfortunately, that was the bit I liked about it.

The New Labour project was to retain and surge forward with other aspects of socialist systems of government: the huge budgets on salaries and prestige projects; the centralisation of decision making; the suffocating bureaucracy; the reliance on managers and party apparatchiks (none of whom are ever responsible when things go wrong) the obsession with leaders.

Oh, the worship of leadership, ‘strong local leadership’ in the deputy prime minister’s words, as if politics consisted of nothing else.  In the world of New Local Government manager shall mumble mealy-mouthed excuses to manager and each think themselves leaders of high calibre.  I always thought local government was about representation - I should have been focussing on the leadership principle.

This government imposed on us, with no consultation with the general public, the 2000 Local Government Act.  With this the division between elected councillors and appointed officials has been blurred to the extent that none of them, are representing the public, all are managers of the same system that pays all their salaries and supplies all their pensions.  The ‘Local Leadership, Local Choice’ that John Prescott promised us is in fact a choice between identikit managers.

In the abandonment of socialism there is a supposed embrace of the market system that is carried out with every trick of presentation and jargon, with glossy presentational brochures, bar charts and focus groups.  What is not done is the very reason the market system is in any way admirable in the first place: because it supplies value for money.  Local government today does not do that, hence the council tax bill that has increased by 91 per cent in the past ten years over a time in which councillors have paid themselves vastly more for doing a job which used to be voluntary public service.

I have even witnessed that jewel of the old Eastern European justice system, a show trial: the humiliation of ‘working people and their families’ by a flagship New Labour council in pursuit of a dubious policy goal.

The council in question spent £600,000 to try to persuade council tenants to vote for their homes to be sold off.  The local housing group, containing organisations representing council tenants and private tenants, campaigned successfully against the council: the sell-off was stopped when tenants voted against.

Instead of assessing the housing policy in the light of public mistrust, the New Labour response was to attack those who campaigned against its failed sell-off.  Community representation was not a guide for future policy but an obstacle to their organisational plans.

The methods used were the manipulation of council procedures, unaccountable meetings, and bogus legal threats.  The council tenants’ organisation was forced into liquidation.  Once it used to be that canvassers could expect a welcome on any council estate, and tenants privately renting were natural supporters.  The organisation representing private tenants (to which I had often acted as an advisor) had been set up by working class people to deal with their own bad landlords, they were a genuine indigenous, grass-roots organisation full of lifelong Labour people.

This private tenants’ group was ‘tried’ by a meeting at which allegations were made about the members of the organisation behind closed doors which the people accused were not allowed to know.  In a Kafka-esque charade they were then invited in to give a defence to allegations, the terms of which they were ignorant.

The more cynical or conspiratorial folk believed the leading councillors involved were on the take, receiving a payoff from a housing company for selling off council homes on the cheap.  I doubt this, I think they were just so blind to any concept of public service that their personal needs were perfectly satisfied with the pleasure of hitting a policy target.  They had become management automata.

Of course, none of this ever went before a committee open to the public gaze and subject to questioning.  Many councillors (who I suppose should be described as ‘Old Labour’) protested at the injustice of these procedures but to no avail, as back bench members they had no power.

While this all may seem like a little local story, it is not the scale of it but the mind set that it reveals which appals.  The attitudes it displays, with the gaping hole where there should be natural justice or even compassion, are so widely repeated across the country that it is clearly a symptom of the system of local government that has been imposed on the town halls.

New Labour has lost the values that made the party worth supporting.  It is simply no longer a vehicle for social progress.  Indeed, there is evidence it is going in reverse.

Goodbye New Labour, now I’ll vote strategically for any candidate willing to do something to restrain council arrogance.

What Next for Councils of Despair?

Jad wrote a piece for The Times mentioning the LGOWatch conference in Croydon on August 14.  The piece was published on August 16, but somewhat reduced for space reasons.  The following is the full text as Jad wrote it.

Angry voices are being raised about the state of local government, just two and a half years after the reforms of the Local Government Act 2000 completely transformed the way town halls operate.

An independent organisation, LGOWatch, is calling for the setting up of an independent local government complaints commission to bring order into a system it describes as ‘morally corrupt’ at its first national conference at a theatre in Croydon.

A strong warning light should be flashing in Whitehall, for the 2000 Act was supposed to herald a regime of quality, efficiency and leadership.  In fact it has meant the introduction of the payroll vote and pork barrel politics into English local government, along with the acceleration of an arrogant, managerial style of operation.

One fact, glaring and inescapable is that the total council tax bill in England has risen by more than 40% in the years the Local Government Act has been in operation, from £14 billion in 2000-1 to $20 billion in 2004-5 (all councils had to have a new constitution in place by December 2002, though some had changed before that).

In the old system local decisions were made in – admittedly sometimes interminable - committee meetings by councillors informed by council officers.  Council officers were paid experts with very limited decision-making powers.  Councillors were elected representatives who were paid nothing but expenses and small sums, never enough to make a real difference to someone’s personal wealth.

The Local Government Act 2000 changed all that.  Now councillors are paid and officers make decisions.  The Act was lobbied for by those who would gain most: senior officers who would get enhanced power and prestige to justify salary increases; senior councillors who would get generous salaries and pension rights in place of their meagre attendance allowances; and private industry supplying local councils who would gain from an accelerated privatisation policy.

They worked together in organisations such as the New Local Government Network of ‘senior local government figures’ working with the private sector (so-called ‘corporate partners’) and seeking to ‘transform local services’.  Well, they did that.

Councils were now going to be run by a mayor in concert with a ‘cabinet’ of senior councillors and a rump of ordinary members who were supposed to be operating a ‘scrutiny’ function over the mayor and cabinet.

The voters were, of course consulted: they were asked whether they wanted the cabinet system with a directly elected mayor or the system with a mayor appointed by the council.  They were not asked if they wanted to retain the committee system that had maintained probity and gradual social development since 1835.  It was the sort of ‘consultation’ we were going to get used to under New Local Government.

The word ‘leadership’ recurs in promotion of the supposed benefits of the new system, but how many people were ever looking to local councillors for ‘leadership’? (though perhaps it is more than were looking to local government officers for the same quality).

Slow deliberation in committees and public meetings on hot issues is now replaced by a series of ‘consultations’ on policy, though genuine consultation is utterly alien to the managerial mind and what in fact happens is the glossy presentation of decisions a few senior councillors have already taken.

Why is it all costing so much more?  

One reason is the lack of financial brakes before decisions are taken.  ‘Scrutiny committees’ supposedly examine council actions, but scrutiny after the act is no scrutiny at all, particularly as the majority party will almost never condemn the actions of its own cabinet members – or they might end up not only out of office but out of pocket.  

We have had a class of paid politicians foisted on us, in place of local volunteers working for expenses, and it has completely altered the balance of local power.

Even the possibility of suffering personal loss through misconduct has now been removed from local government.  Councillors used to be subject to having to make up financial losses caused through their personal misconduct.  These ‘surcharge’ provisions were repealed and replaced by an obligation on councillors to sign a code of conduct.  The Standards Board that enforces the code has no power to fine or imprison malefactors, the maximum penalty is now five years disqualification from standing as a councillor.

The proposals were promised to ‘combat local sleaze’ but introducing large sums of money into the system seems a bizarre way to achieve that.

The money councillors receive varies vastly according to no obvious principle. Thus the leader of Manchester City Council gets £48,765 while the mayor of my local council in south London (only one of 32 London boroughs, after all) gets £71,543.  Ordinary councillors in Basingstoke, with no special responsibilities, get £5,556; in Lewisham they get £9,025.

The sums given to councillors are decided by the councillors bearing in mind the advice of ‘independent remuneration panels’. When I asked the press office at Lewisham town hall how the sums given to councillors were independently arrived at, I was told the only person who knew was on leave, and I was advised to put in a Freedom of Information Act request. 

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister knows that this issue of the salaries councillors pay themselves, for work which was done on a voluntary basis a few years ago, is the hottest of hot potatoes.  Asked if there are figures kept for payments to councillors nationally, or even guidance on a national scale of remuneration, they distanced themselves like an 100 metre sprinter: ‘It is for the authority to decide…the level of allowances paid to members.  The ODPM has no role in providing guideline figures.  Nor have we historically or currently collected information on levels of payments actually made by local authorities.’ 

By the way, the ‘bad news’ that Jo Moore wanted to bury after September 11 was about giving selected local councillors enhanced pension benefits.

The stricture for taking a principled line against your party over some issue used to be that the whip would be withdrawn and a councillor would be censured.  The threat now is to lose endorsement as a councillor and therefore lose what may be a large percentage of their income.

Any sense of fair pay and openness seems to have left the town halls to be replaced by a management-style focus on achieving the goals and targets set by whatever the policy of the day happens to be.  Community organisations that used to sit on committees along with councillors, and have the right to vote on policies, are now held in contempt by the handful of officers and cabinet members who make all the decisions.  Or they are fobbed off with ersatz ‘consultations’ designed to produce the result already decided on.  It is rule by the sort of people who think the solution to life’s problems is to introduce a management consultant.
 
A council I am familiar with decided to sell off some of its stock of council houses.  In a consultation exercise the residents said no.  Instead of examining its policy to respond more appropriately to the needs of the community, the council’s response was to attack the community groups who campaigned against its sell-off, using false allegations and the withdrawal of grants.  The council of ‘strong local leadership’ (in the Deputy Prime Minister’s phrase) treated community representation not as a guide for future policy but as an obstacle to their organisational plans.

Examples of bad behaviour in local government, however, are by their nature almost always small fry.  While local government seems small and uninteresting compared to the big questions of the day, in fact it is vast, employing 2.1 million people in England and Wales and consuming a quarter of all government spending.  The local is national.

Have the changes of the Local Government Act passed even the electoral test and led to increased participation or voting levels?  Again, to cite Lewisham as an example because its figures are easy for me to come by: turnout was 29.7% at the 1998 elections under the old system and 25.6% at the 2002 election with all the bells and whistles of a directly elected mayoral contest.   No cheers for New Democracy there, then.

National government has created a system of local administration in which the arrogant abuse of authority is more likely, and probable.  Tomorrow’s conference is a straw in the wind but a sign of anger by non-partisan citizens.  It will start trying to re-establish accountability by first calling for the abandonment of the council-biased Ombudsman and the establishment of a genuinely independent Council Complains Commission.  More power to them.

The need for an independent Local Government Complaints Commission

Jad Adams wrote an article which was published in The Times on 15 March 2005, criticising the complacent and partisan nature of the Local Government Ombudsman's office.  It was reduced in length for reasons of space.  The full version follows:

"Not before time, the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is today [Tuesday March 15] hearing evidence on the effectiveness of the Local Government Ombudsman.

This is welcome: anyone who does not feel a sense of injustice at the way local authorities routinely conduct themselves has, I would suggest, experienced so much shabby behaviour they have lost their sense of outrage.

The need for an effective body policing local government excesses is more important now than ever before.  Who monitors the slowly unfolding disaster that is local government under the Local Government Act 2000 changes?  These ‘reforms’ destroyed the distinction between local government officers and councillors. Officers used to be paid but had limited decision-making powers.  Councillors were unpaid elected representatives.  Now they are all paid and officers have greater authority.

The introduction of money into the system of local representation is an open door to corruption – this is not to say that corruption is invariably dining with your local council, just that the door is open, the lamps trimmed and the seat warm.  Mr Graft will not be turned away.

The ballot box theoretically gives the public a choice, but no one gives the public to the right to vote for councillors who are not paid, or a council in which they can participate in public committee meetings.  Now there are no unpaid councillors and most of the committee meetings have been abolished.  An increasingly popular electoral choice is for people not to vote, to demonstrate their disgust with the system, or vote for a joke candidate such as a football mascot.

With both councillors and officers paid for participating in the system, there is no incentive for anyone to rein in its cost, or administrative excesses.  Our one defence against misuse of local power is the Ombudsman’s office, set up in 1974 to investigate ‘maladministration’ leading to ‘injustice.’  The Act under which the Ombudsman operates does not define injustice, he has to do that himself, and define it he does.

Of 11,600 complaints sent to the LGO for England in 2003/4, only 180 cases, that is fewer than 1.6% of the total, were found to be maladministration.  How is such an absurdly low figure of findings in favour of people who think themselves aggrieved reached?

I was given an object lesson in Ombudsman investigation when I represented a small community group in a London borough who suffered legal bullying culminating in a travesty of a hearing in which in which the organisation was called before a group of three councillors and three officers and accused of something written on a ‘secret agenda’ so they had to defend themselves from a charge which they did not know.

When this abomination was reported to the Ombudsman he found that the abuse of legal services to achieve a dubious policy goal was ‘not something in which the Ombudsman can become involved’ as ‘I believe that the Council is entitled to consult whichever officers it believes is appropriate.’  The Ombudsman’s officer claimed he could not question the decision to hold a meeting in confidential session and to deny the subjects of the meeting information about the charges against them as ‘this is a decision it [the council] is entitled to reach and not something that the Ombudsman can question.’

One wonders how much more glaring an injustice the Ombudsman has to see before taking action.  The underlying problem is that the Ombudsman’s office is too close to the organisation it is charged with investigating.  Two of the three current English Ombudsmen are former local authority chief officers, all three deputy Ombudsmen worked in local government before joining the commission.  How can we expect impartiality from people who owe their status and their professional background to precisely the local government ethos they are called upon to investigate?  Their automatic assumption seems to be that councils have acted in a fair and public spirited manner, and that the complainant is in the wrong. 

Do these local issues really matter?  Local government already suffers from a lack of scrutiny, as it is all just too little for national coverage and few local newspapers are up to the challenge of investigative reporting.  Yet local government is not little, it is the biggest employer in the country, with 2.1 million staff in England and Wales, spending a quarter of all national government expenditure.  The local is national and we should pay more attention to a fair system of complaints about it. 

A local government complaints commission, on the same lines as the new Police Complaints Commission, would not be a solution to the abuses of local government, but it would at least prevent the obvious absurdity of the guardians guarding themselves."

The organisation campaigning for an independent Local Government Complaints Commission is LGOwatch.  Their website is www.ombudsmanwatch.org

STUDENT DEBT

Published in the New Statesman 29 August 2005 as:

A TALE OF TWO NEPHEWS 

I have two nephews of roughly equal ages, in their early 20s.  One is £17,000 in debt, the other has no debts.

However, the reason why one has no debts is not due to his financial probity or juvenile acumen, it is that his parents tear up the letters from credit card companies.  The parents feel free to do this because he has Downs syndrome.  That might not make him a very good credit risk, you might think.  But as he is over 18 he is increasingly a target for finance companies who would like to take the waiting out of wanting and give him a few tens of thousands of pounds of debt on a rainbow array of cards.  The benefits are unmissable, what’s stopping him from applying for priority handling?  With money-back offers, it will pay him to add another card to his wallet, he could make money the more he spends, at around 15% interest.

He has his own bank account, which has a positive balance, and as he has the skills to fill in the application forms and return them with the Freepost envelope.  If he did not live at home he could be out spending right now, with no possibility of ever paying off the high debts he would incur.

The indebted nephew had the opposite situation: instead of any guidance telling him it might not be a good idea to be heavily in debt before you are out of your teens, the government said the only way he could get an education was by borrowing, and the government even arranged the loan.  It was an obvious next step for him to cover living expenses by incurring further debts with credit cards at absurd rates of interest.

Britain’s higher education is, we have recently been told, the most expensive in Europe and set to get more so.  This suggests a gloomy future of indebtedness for young people way into their twenties and after.  Results published last week for the big banks show provision for personal bad debts up by more than 20% over the past year.

There has to be a way out of the recurring nightmare of ‘unperforming debts’ as the banks call them.  Bankruptcy is an obvious one which an increasing number of the under 30s are taking, with consequences for their credit worthiness that will dog them in the future.  Even insurance companies asked for a quote for simple car insurance now demand to know ‘Are you currently the subject of a bankruptcy order or have you ever been bankrupt?’

A stern moralist might well say that getting into trouble will teach probity to the young by hard lessons (such as a visit from the bailiffs).  But who is going to teach the same lesson in financial responsibility to the credit card companies that have loaned where there is insufficient income to repay the debt?

One way forward is the market solution: to let the finance companies which are responsible fail as bad businesses.  They made loans they have little chance of recouping and they do not deserve to survive alongside more responsible companies.

When the credit card companies pursue my indebted nephew, his family does not tell them where he is.  My family takes the view, which they express volubly, that no company which has sold their products so recklessly as they did deserves to be helped.

I was not brought up evading debt collectors and this is unusual behaviour for my family.  It does not come naturally to us to run away from debt, and when I was growing up to incur debt in the first place was felt to be courting shame.  However, I was not brought up in a world in which teenagers were expected to make major financial decisions that will affect the rest of their lives.  The credit card companies will keep selling their products to the young until it becomes unprofitable for them, and the only way to make it unprofitable is to stop giving them any money.

'New' Labour:

Though he was a member of the Labour Party Jad Adams is critical of the direction the party has taken in recent years.  He has said:

‘There is no New Labour, and there is no ‘old’ Labour, there is only the Labour Party with its history, its traditions and its responsibility to adapt to changing times.  You cannot relaunch a political party like a domestic cleaning product, to attempt to do so was a confidence trick on the public that they were bound to see through eventually.  Such tricks have a limited shelf life anyway, as nothing described as ‘new’ can stay that way for long: the concept of ‘New’ Labour always carried the seeds of its own destruction in the not-too-distant future.’

He left the Labour Party over the government's invasion of Iraq and the imposition of fees for higher education which he considers a betrayal of the young.