I cannot see why anyone takes Nick Cohen seriously now
To be fair, some research went into Nick's column today. Credit where it's due.
There's the old reliable Harry Fletcher of the Probation Officers' Union. The fact that probation officers have a union, which complains about management on their behalf without their being sacked for same seems to go someway to refuting Nick's "dictatorship in the workplace" thesis.
If I may be allowed a Jeremy Clarkson type joke, Nick's view of New Labour's record is, ahem, curiously one-eyed.
Yet earlier we had:
I don't know in which four years "the number of bureaucrats double[d]" but they can't all have been under Gordon Brown.
Brown gets named and blamed; Blair doesn't. Yet much of the changes happened under Tony Blair. Given that Nick wrote Pretty Straight Guys (from this quotation), he has a strange reluctance to name one of the chief suspects. If you look in a mirror and say "Anthony Charles Lynton Blair" three times, does he come to get you?
It's not that Nick is entirely wrong, it's just that this has been said better already by David Craig (as he admits) and is still open to investigative journalism by the BBC. Nick, rather like the middle managers he hates, contributes very little personally.
This week BBC's File on 4 will broadcast a documentary about the disaster in the family courts. Not only did the Cafcass workers its journalists interviewed refuse to allow the BBC to use their real names, they insisted it distort their voices too. It is as if they were terrified dissidents in a totalitarian regime rather than free citizens in a modern democracy.
There's the old reliable Harry Fletcher of the Probation Officers' Union. The fact that probation officers have a union, which complains about management on their behalf without their being sacked for same seems to go someway to refuting Nick's "dictatorship in the workplace" thesis.
If I may be allowed a Jeremy Clarkson type joke, Nick's view of New Labour's record is, ahem, curiously one-eyed.
In local government under Brown, the number of people in councils earning more than £50,000 a year has shot up by a factor of 11 from 3,300 to 38,000, while in the economy as a whole it only went up by a factor of three. I could go on quoting him, but it ought to be clear that while the characteristic beneficiary of the Attlee era was the factory worker and the characteristic beneficiary of the Thatcher era was the entrepreneur, the characteristic beneficiary of the Brown era has been the target-setting manager, regulator or consultant.
Yet earlier we had:
In 1997, the NHS had 12 hospital beds per manager; now it has four. ...
You'll not be surprised to learn that the forms come from a head office that has seen the number of bureaucrats double in four years and its budget increase threefold.
I don't know in which four years "the number of bureaucrats double[d]" but they can't all have been under Gordon Brown.
Brown gets named and blamed; Blair doesn't. Yet much of the changes happened under Tony Blair. Given that Nick wrote Pretty Straight Guys (from this quotation), he has a strange reluctance to name one of the chief suspects. If you look in a mirror and say "Anthony Charles Lynton Blair" three times, does he come to get you?
It's not that Nick is entirely wrong, it's just that this has been said better already by David Craig (as he admits) and is still open to investigative journalism by the BBC. Nick, rather like the middle managers he hates, contributes very little personally.
posted by Chardonnay Chap at 2/21/2010 10:58:00 AM
28 Comments:
Yes indeed, Nick seems to be part of the tendency to blame the wreckage that is New Labour all on Brown.
Guano
This occurred to me later. Oliver Kamm, Comment is Free, 2007: This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide. If, say, Polly Toynbee or Nick Cohen did not exist, a significant part of the blogosphere (a grimly pretentious neologism) would have no purpose and nothing to react to.
The second sentence may have been true at the time; I don't see how the first doesn't apply to Nick Cohen now. (And Oliver Kamm is now a blogger for the Times.)
Second, I really think that Nick's efforts to put all the blame on Gordon Brown (he doesn't name anyone else) counts as a distortion unworthy of a serious paper. The causes really are more complex than 'Brown is a bad guy.' The forms for social workers - they couldn't be a result of the Baby P case, could they?
Third, not only are Nick's facts all second-hand, they all share the same point. New Labour is bad; no really, New Labour is very bad; further to above, New Labour is bad... There's no contrary opinion, no curiosity about why they're like that, no comparison with other countries or examination of multiple causes. Not a very good first year essay in short.
I haven't read a column by him in months, but by chance I saw his column today. There's been a striking deterioration in his prose style. He was never the finest of stylists, but it was effective and direct. Whereas now... Does his florrid and overwrought prose style reflect his state of mind, or is it merely to disguise that he has nothing very much to say anymore.
The style has definitely deteriorated and it seems to be a reult of his bizarre decision to a) blame absolutely evrything on 'the left' and b) see everything in polarities and as part of The Great Intellectual Struggle of Our Time. This has crucially led him to embrace Blairites like Hazel Blears and James Purnell who he'd previously have seen straight through - 'because of Iraq', to use his own phrase. the Brown-bashing is because he thinks Brown got Martin Bright sacked.
this also takes us back to the inherent problem on Nick writing on British politics generally - he is on record saying that he will definitely vote Labour. What's the point of this column, then, even after we get past the problem of Nick's admission that someone has written better on this issue? Does he imagine Brown will do things differently in the future?
Harry Fletcher - Nick is a fan. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:nickcohen.net+nick+cohen+harry+fletcher&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=pPx&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&filter=0
Does he imagine Brown will do things differently in the future?
That's not the point. I think Nick wants the Labour Party to 'see through' Brown and dump him, and then they'll do things differently in future. I can't think of any reason to believe this will happen. For one thing, I can't see how this is especially Brown's fault; for another, the Labour Party certainly didn't plan to greatly increase managers in the NHS; I can't believe there was a think tank which sent secret memos: "Triple the number of middle-managers in the NHS and raise their salaries! the only way forward". It didn't happen like that. As I said in the post, Nick doesn't ask why it did happen. I don't know the answer myself, but until someone does, it's likely to be repeated in future.
... the Labour Party certainly didn't plan to greatly increase managers in the NHS; I can't believe there was a think tank which sent secret memos: "Triple the number of middle-managers in the NHS and raise their salaries! the only way forward".
Isn't it all the inevitable consequence of the NHS "internal market" and trusts? Started under Thatcher, but followed with gusto by Blair. You could blame Brown for the PFI aspect, but after that only for not transparently opposing it in Cabinet.
This is related to a different column of Nick's from a couple of weeks ago, but this might be interesting:
http://lucifee.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/the-journalist-the-tourist-the-claim-and-their-lawyers-libel-reform-part-2/
Back on topic, what exactly has the various people who work in councils got to do with Gordon Brown? Most councils are Tory after all.
And how exactly is the "characteristic beneficiary" of an "era" the people who earn £50,000 working for councils? I don't understand the chain of "reasoning".
Thanks Alex, there's a lot in that post. I may refer to it in a later post.
And, well, I don't really understand what a "classic beneficiary" is in any case.
Isn't it all the inevitable consequence of the NHS "internal market" and trusts?
Yes, in which case, it would be worthwhile writing about how this was intended to work, how it actually worked (if - as seems very likely - different), who benefitted, and so on. Better than the ad hominem on G Brown. And since started under the Tories and continued under Blair, there's little reason to believe that post-Brown Labour would be different, or the Cameroons.
OK, the piece on this I'd like to see would be difficult and technical (and long). Have I said that that's what I expect of the (former) broadsheets? Is it really too much to ask?
When I said that the Labour Party didn't plan to increase managers, I was really thinking of something like this.
My direct experience of Primary Health Care Trusts is that there has been a large increase in staff for "commissioning of services" (ie turning the NHS into a market). Commissioning is now the dominant area in most PCTs and most commissioners are not health professionals. Any potential efficiency gains are lost through the transaction costs of tendering services worth a few thousand pounds. The growth in public service bureaucracy is the result of the Thatcherite - New Labour view of the way public services should operate.
I get the impression that a lot of commentators are trying to blame Brown for the obvious failings of New Labour, and Cohen is joining in. Brown is of course part of New Labour but the objective would seem to be to make Brown the scapegoat for the failings of policies espoused by Blair and the Conservatives.
Guano
I get the impression that a lot of commentators are trying to blame Brown for the obvious failings of New Labour, and Cohen is joining in. Brown is of course part of New Labour but the objective would seem to be to make Brown the scapegoat for the failings of policies espoused by Blair and the Conservatives.
+1. While Brown bears some blame, the neo-liberal managerialists are dumping on him, at the same time casting him as Old Labour, hoping that they can be re-born after the predicted defeat.
James Parnell has far more to do with the managers in the NHS than Brown.
I think Nick wants the Labour Party to 'see through' Brown and dump him, and then they'll do things differently in future. I can't think of any reason to believe this will happen.
Ah yes - not least because the Labour figures Nick most admires now (aside from MacShane obv) are hardcore Blairites like James Purnell.
re Guano's comment above - Nick's been trying to pin everything New Labour has done on Brown (except for Iraq) ever since 'Brown got Martin Bright sacked'.
What would really be useful for someone to do is sytematically work out how much of the 'extra' money that has gone into the NHS (or into schools) over the last 12 years has been either ringfenced and/or required competition between hospitals or schools to secure it. (I don't have the time or the public finance expertise to do this kind of thing myself).
The extra management time needed for doing 'performance audits' and for running a 'market' in patients or school children has been there since Thatcher. But what has really marked the New Labour period is how much extra funding has been available for specific pet projects of the government. It would be interesting to know how much public sector management time is now taken up with attempts to get extra government funding by jumping through such hoops, and then proving that such additional funding has had exactly the desired results, before needing to bid for an new, different programme the next year, because funding the same useful work repeatedly makes a government department look like they don't care about innovation.
If you want to get a good picture of the effects of Labour's (and the Tories') market based NHS policies then I would reccommend Allyson Pollock's "NHS plc".
Maybe Nick should read it, or is that too much hard work?
I don't know if he ever actually read Ms Pollock's but he used to quote from her extensively, back in the day.
There's a real problemn trying to parse his politics in non decent related areas because they seem to be stuck in a position of basic incoherence. He's convinced himself that yer actually existing left is evil but he can't quite convince himself that it's wrong. So he just flails about a lot in a bad tempered sort of way.
rioja kid
Another clanger from Nasty Nick
@nickcohen2 he has been tweeting to all and sundry that Charlie Whelan went to public school.
A little research shows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Whelan
The son of a civil servant, Whelan went to the Ottershaw School, a boarding school in Ottershaw, Surrey.
and
http://www.osobs.co.uk/index.php?page_id=14
The school was established in 1948 by Surrey County Council (SCC) as a boarding school for boys of 12 to 18 years of age. It was the first of its kind in the country to be entirely in the hands of a Local Education Authority.
@nickcohen2 he has been tweeting to all and sundry that Charlie Whelan went to public school.
Anon, that's not true. Nick Cohen has tweeted it to ONE person. I'll copy and paste the relevant tweet.
@charliewhelan, You are a public school phoney who lost what reputation you had when you served brown and balls as they let bankers run riot
I wonder who it really matters to that Charlie Whelan didn't go to public school?
Got abusive tweet from @nickcohen2. Included a class war lie that I went to public school. I didn't
Charlie Whelan and retweeted by someone called Grace the Collie.
It appears some people spread lies, accusations, and abuse for money. I don't know how they live with themselves.
you served brown and balls as they let bankers run riot
is Nick seriously trying to say that the financial crisis was the fault of Brown and Balls alone? I refer to the title of the post above - 'i cannot see...'. If this genuinely pases for Cohen's economic insight, how on earth has he stayed in a job? The Balls bit is weirdest, he's only been in govt since 2005 ffs. Does nick seriously think that prior to that it was all good? Again there's a real problem with his attitude to Blair here isn't there? He seems to have literally forgotten Blair existed.
Oh and there's also this:
the Brownites are now bullying an anti-bullying charity
I imagine he kind of regrets that one now, not that it's stopped Martin Bright taking the exact same line. this is pisspoor stuff.
In fact Cohen repeats it on Standpump
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2774
' I heard Charlie Whelan, Brown's prolier-than-thou public school boy, denounce the Chancellor outside a Soho pub.'
ps In another tweet, Nick calls (genuine public schoolboy) Andrew Rawnsley 'Comrade'!
I've no doubt my comment won't get through over there, but it's worth reiterating that Nick is pretending that he reported Whelan's briefing at the time it was made ('here's what i wrote at the time', with a link to a 2009 Standpump article). Actually the briefing was made an entire year before Cohen 'reported' it (of course he offers exactly zero quotes).
God, what an incredibly odious man. Never mind taking him seriously, I'm finding it increasingly hard to understand how anyone can bear to be in the same room as him if he acts like that all the time.
Again, what's Nick's educational history? Ah yes, Hertford College, Oxford. Seat of the proletariat.
I know that this will sound especially hypocritical since I did start this discussion, but can we please cool the ad hominems? And yes I know Nick Cohen is guilty of ad hominems too, but can we try to keep the comments to what is said or written (or tweeted or whatever), rather than global personality traits? I'm not addressing anyone in particular here.
will try my best not to, i promise.
This is from his twitter and is very much on topic:
@jimpurnell Is it true you are stepping down. If so, it will be a loss to politics. Best wishes, Nick 2:48 AM Feb 19th via web
Also see his all-new standpump article on how everyone should stop being so nasty to, er, tony blair... that article also contains another rehash of the 'why lefties love fascists' piece. Pretty sure that's the third time he's written that piece for Standpoint, let alone for anyone else.
Oh, I don't have any problem with saying "He writes the same article over and over" because that's verifiable. But I'm uncomfortable with calling anyone a horrible person - a) I don't know NC; and b) I hope everyone has some good in them. Too much of teh internets are obsessed with people rather than with issues. Yes, I am thinking of Harry's Place.
Speaking of public schoolboys, I do think Harry's Place's twitter image is appropriate. Waiting for George O...
Yeah, I regret writing that. I think I was just a bit startled by the tone of that tweet - I'd always just assumed, even after watching the Orwell Prize video, that the spiteful streak in Nick's writing was just rhetoric, and he mistakenly thought it made his articles more forceful or witty or something. It's kind of depressing to see a grown man resorting to that kind of playground insult, and to make such a negligible, politically cock-eyed 'point'.
I've often found his writing style bitter and unpleasant - say what you want about Wheen, at least he can mask his vitriol with a sense of humour - but at least before his conversion you could say it was worth persevering with the style to get to the content. Now both of them are pretty awful, and his hanging around certain websites isn't improving matters.
I do always appreciate AW's commitment to discussing serious stuff in a friendly way. Now, let's all get the acoustic guitars out and sing 'Give Peace a Chance'...
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