A Moving Remembrance for Indian Political Great Dr Lekh Raj Sharma

On Saturday I was lucky enough to be able to attend a moving tribute to Dr Lekh Raj Sharma, an Indian political great and father of Virendra Sharma MP. At a packed Gurdwara in Southall, politicians and community leaders lined up to pay their respects to Dr. Lekh Raj Sharma, and their condolences to his family. I had never really met Dr Sharma, whose political activism went back to the days of Gandhi, but at the remembrance service it was clear that the spirit of this great man shone through on Saturday with tributes from British MPs and MEPs, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim leaders, the Tamil community and others.
His story, his values, his integrity and strong sense of service made an impact on me in more ways than I expected. He was one of the architects of modern India, part of the movement that created a country, a constitution, a secular Government alongside an inclusive community politics. He had been a prominent Congress leader in the Punjab, a freedom fighter and a politician. It became quite clear what had driven Virendra Sharma MP to be the man of integrity that he is, and an important voice in British politics. Both men see the importance of the ongoing relationship between Britain and India, and both espoused the secular politics so vital to making sure all religions are treated equally and fairly. I was honoured to be there this weekend, and it has left me feeling far more inquisitive about the personal stories of the men and women of the last two generations who paved the way for modern Britain and modern India, and in doing so left such an important legacy for us today.

Shelter Associates - A story of social housing in India

If you want to be blown away by the tenacity of a social entrepreneur, look no further than Pratima Joshi, architect and co-founder of Shelter Associates, India. Our #Dishaa group had the privilege of meeting her and understanding more about the NGO today, the challenges it has faced in working with, empowering and improving the housing of slum dwellers in Pune. The "before" and "after" shots on the website are a real testament to one of their most successful stories, that of a community relocated when their slum was going to be destroyed 12 years ago. The families that lived in homes made of tin sheeting with only loan sharks to fund them now live in Coop housing, running their community, managing budgets, holding down jobs. The children are at school learning multiple languages including English and clearly showing signs of aspiration of their own. This is a community that designed its own housing, the women literally made the beams that hold the flats together and year by year the progress of those families is a testament to the work of an NGO that has been fearless in its pursuit of better housing for the poor. We learnt directly from those women about how their health has also improved with less sickness than before. However as we left and drove past more tin shack slums on the hillside and roadside I couldn't help feeling that whilst what was achieved was a triumph of human spirit and solidarity, it was but a drop in the ocean of the change we need to see in the rest of India, which I hope we will see in my lifetime. And it brought home to me that behind every door made of tin sheeting is another family hoping for a better home that can be a base from which they can start to give themselves and their children a better life.

Dishaa and the Healthcare challenge

Day 1 of #dishaa began with an early morning pre-breakfast walk with a fellow participant around the grounds of the training centre. It’s a fairly common thing for Indians to go for an early morning walk – and indeed a wonderful way to start the day. It allows you to see much of what is around you with more time to absorb. Perhaps most fascinating was the beautiful trees with amazing roots (will post a pic tomorrow!) – trees that have been here for generations and around which has grown the Tata Management Training Centre, a place that grows human talent and is now exporting that expertise around the world. Some highlights of today were discussions around @CommonPurpose principles, a sharing of thoughts on the week’s strategic question of how we can reduce the cost of heart surgery around the world to less than $1000.
Characteristics of great leaders and levels of listening were ongoing themes of the day, culminating in a wonderfully insightful discussion with Dr Shetty, who spoke to us via video link in between surgeries. He has conducted over 70,000 heart operations in India and is constantly innovating around different and new forms of sustainable funding particularly to increase access to surgery and cardiac care for people in remote and rural areas. The discussion around this developed into thinking about the extent to which one country can bring down its health costs on its own, and indeed the extent to which an international strategy for global healthcare could have a bigger impact on reducing costs of R&D, production and provision of drugs and healthcare. Technology has brought down the costs of cars, mobile phones, computers and much else – what about the cost of healthcare?
Looking forward to tomorrow when we’ll be visiting hospitals and related charitable practices in the Pune area to understand more about challenges and costs of local health care provision.

The Dishaa experience

The sound of crickets outside in the evening, fresh coconut water available from the street stalls and an amazing group of 40 "leaders" from UK and India coming together in Pune bodes well for a stimulating and challenging week networking with people minded to social change. It's the first round of the Dishaa and a few hours in I'm already feeling humbled by the achievements and drive of those I'm meeting. Journalists, consultants, social entrepreneurs, corporate financiers, industrialists - just sharing stories of who we are and what we are doing is itself truly inspirational. Over dinner we talked about life as an Asian in London, tackling poverty in Bihar and how Bihar is a next great unfolding story of Indian progress, innovative vocational education programmes being run by Lend-a-Hand India in rural schools, textile industry across the world and legacy of decline of UK textile base, infrastructure bonds and their use in India and potential applicability to UK. And the week hasn't even yet formally begun.

EMA – Cost effective intervention or waste of taxpayers money?

Hot on the heels of the Tuition Fees fiasco, the Conservative-led Government looks set to go through with its pledge to abolish the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). Many do not fully understand exactly what the EMA is, or realise that it is means-tested for students from the poorest families in Britain. Launched in 2004, the EMA scheme directly pays eligible pupils up to £30 a week, depending on family income, to stay on at school after compulsory education – i.e aged 16. Entitlement rules are that for family income up to £20,817 per year, a 16-18 year old who stays on in education can get £30 per week, for household income of £20,818 - £25,521 per year the payment is £20 a week, and for £25,522 - £30,810 per year it is £10 a week.
At a speech to IPPR in 2008, Michael Gove claimed the scheme “fails the poorest families and costs too much money”. He also argued there had been an “overcentralisation” of education, saying “the capacity of local communities to set their own autonomous goals, to pilot their own strategies, to develop the relationships they want is constrained and curbed by central government's nationally-set targets, challenges and protocols.”
I have been quite interested in the question of whether indeed as an intervention it has made any difference – particularly to educational outcomes – and indeed whether that indeed represents value for money. It is right that policies come under scrutiny and that tough questions are asked. The additional point to ask is that if it has had an impact, what is the reason for it?
I have to say I was rather blown away by the findings of one of the most robust evaluations to date of what is still a relatively new policy, conducted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Because not only did it show an increase in ‘participation’ rates, i.e. staying on in education compared to a control group, but it showed an increase in attainment rates. Pupils on EMA – and in particular from ethnic minority backgrounds – black females and males – were achieving higher grades than they would have otherwise. Generally results were more impressive for we find achievement among females, though interestingly with black females seeing a greater improvement than white females. The report goes on to suggest that even more impressive is the impact among black s males – the impact roughly translated into a one-grade improvement in an AS Level subject across all black males in the pilot areas.
This suggests two things. Firstly that there is a gender and ethnicity penalty that is set to result from the abolition of the EMA. Secondly that when Gove suggested it wasn’t working as a policy for those in the most deprived areas, he was using statistics misleadingly. There is some debate about whether it has the same impact for pupils in least deprived / fairly deprived / most deprived areas and what other factors may be critical to consider. However overall the IFS report, which offers a “conservative” estimate of benefits and it actually suggests could be twice that stated, is incontrovertible in support of the policy achievements.
What we should perhaps pay more attention to then are the other comments that Gove raises (the “overcentralisation” of education and “ the capacity of local communities to set their own autonomous goals, to pilot their own strategies”) which offer a hint as to the politics of this decision, rather than the economics. The achievement of poor – and often black or Asian, but not exclusively so – in deprived areas is a matter for local authorities who may wish to choose which children to invest in and which to not. An aspiration for all children is not what the Tory-led education policy appears to be about. And indeed the findings of the IFS report are supported by anecdotal and qualitative data – such as case studies collated by the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/17/students-ema-bribe-necessity). But more importantly for me is a conversation I had with a young black man from East London who had recently finished studying, and had had EMA and whose brother was currently on EMA. His view was that it made a big difference to how much time you actually had to study, and for him had resulted in better grades that had enabled him to go to a good university and achieve much more. Indeed, an amount (means tested) of £30 equates approximately to one full day’s work on the minimum wage.
This is an argument to which I am very sympathetic, and in fact I feel hugely saddened that such a targeted investment for some 600,000 of the poorest children at a critical stage in their life, an investment that has had a positive early evaluation, is to be taken away without any clarity of what is to replace it, and indeed why it will be any better.

On the 100th anniversary of Barbara Castle's birth, what would she make of the Tories on Equal Pay transparency and Child Benefit cuts?

100 years ago today, one of the most successful and well known Labour woman politicians - Barbara Castle was born. She was elected to Parliament as MP for Blackburn in 1945, a seat she held before it was taken over by Jack Straw MP, her special adviser. There's a great piece about her life by Radio 4's Anne Perkins here, but just a few thoughts of my own.
Barbara Castle was the "Harriet Harman" of her time, a woman who challenged the male lens through which political discussion and decision making was always done. Her Equal Pay Act, the struggle for which is being brought to a new generation through the outstanding film "Made in Dagenham", was ground-breaking in its challenge both to politicians and business on the accepted way of doing things. And like the Minimum Wage, despite the mountain of opposition, it quickly became accepted as a long overdue measure of fairness in our economic life.
The Equal Pay Act was one of the last bills to go through Parliament in 1970 before Labour lost power - an uncanny parallel to the passing of Harman's Equality Act just before the election this year, becoming an Act of Parliament on 8th April.
An important milestone 40 years on from the Equal Pay Act, the Equality Act included measures on information about equal pay. Despite progress, there is still a gender pay gap of approx 21% in the UK, worse than the EU average. The gap varies each year, but is in the ball park of 80% of men's pay. This was cleverly marked by Fawcett's Equal Pay Day on 30th October 2009 - when they presented a cheque to the Prime Minister to symbolise the last pay cheque that woman would get for the year.
It isn't rocket science to suggest that tackling the gender pay gap once and for all is going to require gender pay gap information. To put this inequality right you need to know where it is happening. The Equality Act included two new ideas to help make equal pay happen - voluntary pay reporting on differences in men and women’s pay for a company with 250 or more workers, and secondly for public bodies to publish information about equal pay (and how many workers it has who are disabled or people of different races). The Government planned to do this for public bodies with 150 or more workers.
The part of the Act which relates to this is Section 78, which creates a power for Ministers to require employers to publish information relating to the gender pay gap. However the new Tory led Government has already said this is not being commenced from 1st October; instead they are "considering how to approach this clause in the best way for business and others involved."
Theresa May in her Conference speech this week talked about Equal Pay in a list of wrongs and said that the Conservatives plan to "put things right". It is unclear to me how this will be done without pay gap information. A lot of HR data today is computerised - a pay reporting function should hardly be problematic in an age when we expect complex and accurate end of year financial reporting from organisations and solid in-year management accounting to ensure efficiency and productivity.
The real reason for avoiding pay gap information is not red tape - the data already exists and could easily be compiled - the real reason is that as soon as you make something transparent you will see greater demand to do something about it. And the political will to really do something about it is just not there.
But onto another issue. Child Benefit is another of Barbara Castle's legacies - it replaced the Family Allowance in her final years as an MP. She was instrumental in changing a mindset and moving family funds from the wallet to the purse and investing in children. If she were here, she would certainly have made her views known on the regressive steps this Government is now taking, which is much less about economics than it is about politics. The idea that you save a billion by taking money away from children, and "sweeten" the move by giving a billion back to married couples in the form of tax relief is one step short of Dickensian.
This is politics plain and simple - a symbolic step in support of a traditionalist Conservative view of political economy, by attacking a symbol of a social democratic tradition that is in fact one of the symbols of equality for children and families across social classes, as well as a vital contribution to family income and welfare of children. It may be a small contribution to Castle's legacy on the 100th anniversary of her birth is to highlight how the Tories are turning the clock back on progress, but one that I hope will encourage others to look beyond the smokescreen to the reality that lies behind the Tories' words.

The election - just over or just beginning?

Someone said to me today - "But the election's over!" - to which I replied, "Nonsense, it's only just beginning!" And of course it is; the next election is what is really beginning with the leadership election kicking off this week. For a party that has "lost" an election (though I think we came second, and the Lib Dems third) we are in remarkably good spirits. Usually after a campaign the party steps back, takes a few weeks off, winds down. Not so this time. I've never known us more fired up to get on the #labourdoorstep and keep talking. The doorstep election has changed some of the culture of our campaigning for the better - a rebalancing from the technology driven hard targetting to a re-introduction of the importance of the personal touch.
Just this evening I was talking to a member in the West Midlands - as intrigued as me as to the positive spirit and fierce sense of fight back we are experiencing. Perhaps this is helped by the leadership election, which is giving us something positive and productive to focus on, and a lens through which to have a conversation about where the British people are at, and how connected our politics is to them - both in terms of substance and style.
So whilst it is agonising for me to see David Miliband and Ed Miliband go against each other, both of whom I admire, respect and know, they are doing our party a huge service in starting to lay out terms of the debate and a vision for the future. David kicked off his campaign this week, with a photoshoot in Westminster, and a tour of seats Labour has lost. Ed Miliband kicks off tomorrow, with a speech at the now sold-out Fabian post-election conference. A straw poll, totally unscientific, that I did this evening of where people currently stand gave a remarkably consistent picture of the election being wide open. Seeming to reflect the election polls to some extent, we're seeing a large number of "don't knows" in the party selectorate - members are waiting to be inspired and wooed, and included. David seems to have the lead in terms of profile and sense of heavyweight, Ed in terms of his ability to connect and communicate, and of course policy mastery with authorship of the manifesto. Exciting times. #ProudtobeLabour.

Radio 4 - or the Rachel Reeves Show this morning

Great to hear Rachel Reeves MP for Leeds West (I love saying that) on Radio 4 this morning. She made two excellent points - that we mustn't lose sight of. Firstly that people no longer came to see us as the party of fairness - and the underlying issues of immigration, housing and welfare needed to be addressed. Secondly, that Labour in Parliament needed now to be a responsible opposition, agreeing with the Government when they get it right, and saying very clearly when they don't. Looking forward to seeing Rachel in the Shadow Cabinet before long. Amazing to think I've known Rachel since she was 18, and before she went to university! #ProudtobeLabour.

Nick Clegg: Damned if he doesn't, damned if he does

Listening to Laura Kuenssberg, Ben Wright and other BBC journalists this morning, it's pretty clear that there is still only one story in town. The Lib Dems and Conservatives are set to resume talks this morning, and there is every expectation that by the time the leaders meet their parties later today there will at least be an early deal on offer. Nick Clegg will rightly be tempted by the first opportunity for the Liberals to sit in Government for 90 years. The problem for him, however, is that in taking the prize now, the consequence could be the end of the Lib Dems.
Firstly, many voted Lib Dem to tactically keep the Tories out in Labour seats. They will now find their votes being used to prop up a Tory administration. Secondly, many in the Lib Dems are progressives, who have a commitment to public services and a view of social justice that gives more common ground with Labour. They will now be voting with a Tory manifesto they went to the country to fight against. Thirdly, the election saw a loss in Lib Dem seats, though the 6 million votes that the Lib Dems achieved is very significant. However many votes were for Nick Clegg based on his debate performances, less than for Lib Dem policies. The problem being of course that this wasnt a presidential election, and the harsh reality of party politics and Parliamentary processes are about to kick in. Finally, there are those who voted for the Lib Dems because of the promise of electoral reform. With Labour having been behind reform too, this would be another completion of a progressive project of reform that was started in 1997 but not finished. If what is delivered is watered down by the Tories, Lib Dem supporters may well feel sold out by Clegg. And indeed, once it is delivered, the Lib Dems will need to redefine what they are about and why people should vote Lib Dem. The divisions between different camps in what is essentially a franchise party could make this very difficult for a party that in many ways has been a single issue campaign. The Lib Dems could very well become the first victim of their own success.

So what's your view on Electoral Reform?

Really interesting discussion today on one of my favourite programmes The Big Questions on electoral reform. What it highlighted was the overwhelming sense of need for change, but real lack of clarity about what to change to. Richard Reeves of Demos, someone who has made a real impact in the think tank world in defining new debates on the centre-left, made a strong case for a referendum to allow people to decide how we reform our electoral system, a view I totally agree with. What remains an important part of the debate is what on earth will be on the referendum ballot paper. We are going to have to take a close look at what we think works in the current system which we should keep, such as geographical constituency links, and what doesn't work. Only then will we actually have a sensible vote for change that leads to a better outcome and a better method of managing our democracy. Take a look my column in Asian Voice next week for more on this.