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From Mess to Success

I agonised over how I was going to vote on Same Sex Marriage (which lead a lot of people to wrongly assume I was voting against) but that process, which has been going on for some weeks and was particularly intense on Tuesday, ended with a decision to vote for the bill.
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Same Sex Mess

I’m in an agony of indecision over same sex marriage. On the one hand I’m not illiberal or homophobic. On the other I am not particularly bothered about this, think civil partnership is enough, and have concerns about the legal repercussions.
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Blog from the Dead

Cameron’s revival of the Conservative’s poll ratings through his EU con has encouraged me to revive my blog. Firstly let me apologise for neglecting it so much. The truth is it had become too easy to criticise the shambolic Government and was becoming repetitive.
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Olympic Mess

I’ve had my doubts about the organisation of the Olympic game staffing ever since two young friends told me what had happened to them.
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Saving Private Clegg

Charles Kennedy the only Lib-Dem who deserves respect wants Labour to save Clegg from his own folly by voting for Lords reform. Sorry Charles. The second Chamber shouldn’t have an elected majority.
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Knights of the order of St Emma

The Tory Party is rallying to defend Emma Harrison of A4E and Working Links by turning its boot boys loose on Margaret Hodge, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee.
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Knights of the order of St Emma

The Tory Party is rallying to defend Emma Harrison of A4E by turning its boot boys loose on Margaret Hodge, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. The PAC and Margaret Hodge got complaints about A4E and Working Links so we decided to hear four whistleblowers. In what looked like a concerted move Tories objected so the committee heard the complaints in private with the Permanent Head of the Department of Work and Pensions present. Matthew Hancock then objected to the publication of the hearing and Chris Grayling and Ian Duncan Smith began to bad mouth the whistleblowers, the PAC and Margaret Hodge without having seen the evidence.
They don’t like it up ‘em because it’s crucial to defend both the work programme and A4E as Tory flagships. Even at the expense of damaging and disrupting the PAC.
Mitchell’s Impartial View? The work programme and payment by results are good idea. The controls are much tighter. Yet they’re not perfect. The contractors receive interim payments, they’re paid for people who would have got jobs anyway and it’s impossible, with DWP staff cuts, to police everything. So fiddles are still possible and the evidence of the whistleblowers showed that these are greedy contractors who have no adequate internal control or audit procedures. The people at the top didn’t really want to know what was going on at the bottom so that DWP could not be sure that these are fit and proper companies to do the job.
The DWP’s first enquiry is a whitewash. We must hope that it’s second and the examination of cases produced to the PAC is tougher and more thorough.
Companies making millions out of the public service by doing what civil servants used to do are a new phenomenon. They must be scrutinised as closely as the departmental staff they’ve replaced would have been. That is, after all, the job of the Public Accounts Committee. So call off your clog dancers Grayling.    

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