Blighty

CONCERNS about the economy continue to weigh heavily on the minds of the British people, according to the April issue of The Economist/MORI issues index. Asked what was the most important issue facing the country, some 62% answered "the economy", up by eight percentage points on March. Economic worries dominate less than they did when David Cameron became prime minister in May 2010, but remain higher than they were when the nation breathed a sigh of relief as the end of the recession was announced in January that year.

The polling also picked up rising concern about defence, foreign affairs and terrorism: 22% of Britons thought it the most pressing concern, up six percentage points on the previous month. That looks set to continue: following international talks about the crisis held in Qatar today, foreign secretary William Hague said Britain would offer more help to the Libyan rebels who first rose against Muammar Qaddafi almost four weeks ago. He had earlier told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the situation in Libya was "fast-moving and unpredictable" and said he could not say when the crisis might end.

All of which leaves less time for fretting about race relations and immigration at home: the downward trend that began when Mr Cameron took office has continued pretty much constantly and dipped strongly this month, falling nine percentage points to just 17%, the lowest level since April 2002. It is the first time in 18 months that race relations and immigration has fallen out of the top three concerns (unemployment is also a big worry).

On the public services front, concern about the National Health Service increased slightly, despite-or perhaps because of-health secretary Andrew Lansley's pledge to halt, temporarily at least, sweeping reforms to the way in which hospital care is commissioned. That said, it is still extraordinarily low historically, at less than half the level when the Tories were last in charge in 1997. Schools, colleges and universities remain off the radar: just 14% of people think them important.

Youth leans to the left. For the past four decades the National Union of Students (NUS) has been led mostly by presidents affiliated to the Labour Party, many of whom have since been elected to Parliament, the occasional independent and a handful of militants. On April 13th students meeting at their national conference in Gateshead will determine which left-leaning candidate will lead them next.

The election is interesting because it is unexpected: an NUS president normally serves two terms but the current incumbent, Aaron Porter, decided against standing for re-election. Mr Porter, who has been a member of the Labour Party since 2006, cites the recent decision by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to allow English universities to charge up to £9,000 ($14,500) in annual tuition fees as the reason for his early departure.

It was not just his failure to stop tuition fees from being raised that made him unpopular, Mr Porter infuriated many of the students he led for claiming success where they smelled failure. Like the LibDem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, he says he is proud of having secured generous government-backed loans for future students. Yet Mr Porter faced calls for a vote of no confidence in his leadership and, unlike Mr Clegg, concluded that the time was right for a new person to represent the interests of students as the new fees are introduced in September 2012

Mr Porter riled the hotheads because, while they protested on the streets, he kept his cool, favouring lobbying over direct action (he was a regular guest on BBC2's Newsnight). He participated in the student march in November 2010, before the vote was taken in Parliament to allow English universities to charge higher fees, but condemned the students' trashing of Conservative Party headquarters and declined to support a further demonstration. Soon after he found himself being escourted to safety by police from a student rally he was due to address in Manchester. (Incidentally, the Jewish Chronicle reported that Mr Porter was subjected to anti-semitic abuse at that event; oddly, it said the same of his predecessor Wes Streeting two years earlier; and neither man is Jewish.)

Healing the rift between the anger expressed by young people on the streets and their political representatives in office will be high on the to-do list of the next president, who will be chosen not by individual students but by the leaders of the university- and college-based unions that purport to represent them (young people are notoriously shy of voting, even for student presidents). Two of the four candidates standing for election come from within the organisation, and a third is closely involved.

Shane Chowen, who spoke to the Manchester crowd when Mr Porter retreated and was pelted with eggs for his trouble, is a vice-president of the NUS. Mr Chowen has never enrolled at university: he represents those students who are educated in further education and sixth form colleges and thinks they should be given the same favourable terms on loans and grants as undergraduates receive. Should he be elected, he would be the first non-graduate to lead the NUS. Tipsters reckon the gap between him and his cloest rival, Liam Burns, who is president of NUS Scotland, is extremely narrow.

Mark Bergfeld is a member of the NUS national executive council and takes the most militant stance of any of the presidential candidates, opposing the priniciple (first embraced by the Labour Party in 1998) that those who receive higher education should pay for it. Thomas Byrne has held no post in the organisation and is highly unlikely to win election but believes-correctly, in my opinion-that it is not high tuition fees that deter poor students from university, rather it is the failures of the state-school system.

Mr Porter, meanwhile, says he has no desire to emulate Jim Murphy, who entered Parliament within a year of stepping down as NUS president and now serves as shadow secretary of state for defence. (Former home secretary Jack Straw and former education secretary Charles Clarke are also ex-NUS presidents, as was disgraced former MP Phil Woolas.) He would be well advised to wait awhile for the political stink to disperse.

"Any cabinet minister, if we win the election, who comes to me and says 'here are my plans' and they involve front-line reductions, they'll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again." - David Cameron, speaking on the Andrew Marr Show before the general election last May

When it comes to public-sector spending cuts, there seems to be a near-universal consensus that front-line services should be prioritised, and funding cuts should fall on back office departments and staff. On the face of it, this sounds sensible: it is the front-line staff who actually provide a service to the public–the nurses, the teachers, the police officers and so on–so surely it makes sense to leave them untouched and get rid of a few surplus desk-jockeys if economies need to be made. I am oversimplifying, of course, but even I find the reasoning superficially compelling, despite the fact that it is effectively suggesting I should be out of a job (I deal with patients, but since I am not doing anything clinical I doubt I am really what most people have in mind when they talk about front-line staff).

Unfortunately, though, things don't tend to be quite so cut-and-dried. Getting rid of paper-pushers doesn't get rid of the paper that needs pushing. All it does is push the responsibility for dealing with it onto those people who still have their jobs, regardless of whether or not they would normally be on the front line.

The clinicians in my department already have to take on my workload if I take a day off (there isn't the budget to pay for a temp). If my job disappeared tomorrow, appointments would still need to be made, the phone would still need answering and letters to GPs would still need writing. None of these are optional extras that can be jettisoned to save a few quid.

Admin posts are already starting to go at my hospital (albeit without compulsory redundancies so far, thankfully), but the admin workload isn't magically going to shrink to match. All that will happen is that we lucky ones who keep our jobs will have to work harder and, if there aren't enough admins around, then all the nurses, therapists, lab techs and other specialist staff are going to have to spend more of their time doing paperwork and less doing what they are actually trained and qualified to do. Which, needless to say, is going to hit front-line services pretty hard. Hospitals are not alone in this, it is also happening to the police force in Warwickshire, for example.

This is not to say that all the paperwork done in hospitals or police forces is essential. I am sure it would be possible to reduce public-sector bureaucracy, though anyone who tried it would probably be surprised at how much hospital admin genuinely does serve a useful purpose. And if unnecessary form-filling were eliminated, then the hospital could almost certainly get rid of a few clerks and middle managers quite happily. But I don't know anyone in my hospital who expects the level of bureaucracy to decline significantly and soon. I am sure there are genuine efficiencies that can and will be made in the NHS as the spending cuts bite, but make no mistake: front-line services are sure to take a hit as well.

FOR those of you not watching the television coverage of today's march against spending cuts in central London, let me offer you a vignette. On a big stage in front of the bulk of the protestors in Hyde Park, Brendan Barber, the head of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) warms up for Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, by screaming into the microphone about the injustice of the government's austerity mission. Meanwhile, Harriet Harman, Labour's deputy, stands to his side while Mr Miliband waits at the back. So far, so bad. Viewers who worry that the current Labour leadership is beholden to the unions and public-sector vested interests will hardly be changing their minds.

Then the public-relations nightmare really begins. At the exact moment that Mr Miliband arrives at the lectern and begins speaking, black-clad protestors who had broken away from the main march begin misbehaving in the shopping areas of Regent Street and Oxford Street. Topshop, the high-street retailer accused of tax-dodging by many of the protestors, comes under assault. Various other shops close down as a precaution. The Metropolitan Police have just tweeted that some of their officers have been attacked by lightbulbs filled with ammonia.

The television coverage shows footage of all this happening while the disembodied voice of Mr Miliband, speaking in Hyde Park, compares the march to the Suffragette cause, the civil rights movement in America and the anti-apartheid protests in South Africa. As the words "David Cameron, this is the big society!" tauntingly leave his lips, viewers are treated to the spectacle of police officers being charged at by protestors. Mr Miliband finishes his speech by invoking Martin Luther King.

This embarrassing juxataposition of the speech with the violence is, according to some angry left-wing bloggers and tweeters, the dastardly work of Sky News. They are mistaken. I was watching the coverage on BBC News, who were carrying the same images and the same speech. How could they not?

Now, of course, Mr Miliband was unable to see what was going on a mile of two away from Hyde Park. And it was a pure accident of timing that one breakaway march (which amounted to a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands peacefully demonstrating) turned ugly just as he began speaking.

But it was his choice to address the rally in the first place, the latest stage in his curious political strategy of appealing to people who are already certain to vote Labour. It was his choice to go for the moral bombast of the apartheid and civil rights allusions in his speech, which were hostages to fortune. And he must have known that some kind of violence would take place today: it is only three months since the smashing-up of Parliament Square by protestors opposed to higher university tuition fees. Those few seconds of news coverage will have reached many viewers (it is Saturday, after all) and those who did not see it will probably have it brought to their attention in the coming weeks by the Tories' attack operation, who must not be able to believe their luck.

It is not just the violent fringe of these protests that are a threat to Labour's credibility and electability, though. As Bagehot blogged yesterday, and as Philip Collins wrote in The Times, the decent and good-natured majority of the anti-cuts movement are often wilfully oblivious to the need for any spending cuts at all, and "the alternative" they campaign for is the old standby of getting assorted tycoons, banks and corporations to pay more in tax. Labour's decision to associate itself so closely with these groups (who, in their soft-headedness, are worryingly evocative of some of the company Labour kept in their 1980s dog-days) is, quietly but surely, damaging the brand of a party that is already seen by voters as too left-wing. It may also make Labour look swivel-eyed and perpetually angry, in the way the Tories once did.  In the short term, backing the protests might help rattle the government. In the long term, which slice of the electorate is Mr Miliband hoping to win over that he cannot already count on?

As I watch the television coverage of the march making its way through London, and of an HSBC branch being smashed up by anarchists, my eye is drawn less and less to the angry protestors and more to the ordinary people milling around looking perturbed. Some are foreign tourists. The rest are called voters.

THE annual budget speech is one of the great set-pieces of British politics. Ministers and civil servants burn the midnight oil for weeks, searching for precisely the right mix of stern rectitude and popular handouts. The details are kept a carefully guarded secret, apart from the string of carefully-planned leaks to sympathetic newspapers. When the big day arrives, the chancellor, clutching the red box containing the precious document, poses for his ritual photograph in Downing Street before heading to Parliament to given an hour-long speech covering everything from tax breaks on capital investments to the price of beer.

Yet what if there isn’t much to say? There are big, serious arguments going on about the direction of Britain’s economic policy. The governing Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition believes that fiscal rectitude is necessary to mollify investors worried by the scale of the country’s debts, and that cutting the deficit must therefore be the first priority. The opposition Labour party, for its part, thinks such talk is overblown, and argues that sharp public-spending cuts risk snuffing out the country’s fragile recovery.

But you wouldn’t know any of that from the Budget speech itself, for despite the saturation press coverage, Mr Osborne’s announcements were rather thin. The general principle of  tax rises and eye-watering spending cuts to reduce the deficit had been set out in the coalition’s emergency Budget last June, and Mr Osborne did not deviate from that course. With the exception of growth, which at 1.7% for next year was lower than the 2.1% originally forecast, most of today’s fiscal projections were little changed from those outlined in the Pre-Budget Report—a sort of mini-Budget in its own right—in November. That left rather little for the chancellor to talk about.

True, there were some headline-grabbing tweaks to the tax system, chief among them the abandonment of the “fuel duty escalator”, a tax on petrol designed to rise every year faster than the rate of inflation, and introduced by the previous Conservative government in 1993. Motorists have been fulminating over petrol prices of £1.33 a litre and more, much of which is accounted for by Britain’s high levels of fuel duty. Mr Osborne scrapped a planned increase in the tax due to take effect next month, and instead cut it by 1p per litre. The lost revenue will be made up by a £2 billion ($3.4 billion) rise in a tax applied to firms producing oil and gas from the North Sea, which will remain in effect as long as oil prices stay above about $75 per barrel. Other crowd-pleasers included a tax on private jets and a “crackdown” on tax avoidance schemes that aims to raise around £1 billion a year

Things were thinner still on the spending front. Plans for state subsidies for young home-buyers (possibly unwise given Britain’s still-expensive housing) and more cash for big science facilities gave way to micromanaging announcements about railway routes in Manchester and a £100m fund to repair some of the potholes on Britain’s roads. A Green Investment Bank, intended to encourage spending on renewable energy, will be set up but will be forbidden from borrowing any money until 2015.

With comparatively little to say about tax and spending, the chancellor was keen to talk up his plan for growth. The idea of a “pro-growth” budget is difficult for many Tories, who cleave to the view that the best thing the government can do when managing the economy is to adopt the Hippocratic principle of “do no harm”, and then get out of the way while the general population gets on with the business of wealth creation.

Nevertheless, Mr Osborne announced a new generation of “enterprise zones”, a flashback to the 1980s under which firms in the designated areas (mostly poor urban places with state-dominated economies) will have their rents paid by the government, discounts on businesses rates and access to “super-fast” broadband. A presumption in favour of economic growth will be enshrined in planning law, which ought to make it easier to build houses, factories, roads, power stations and the like. Corporation tax will be cut by two percentage points this year, rather than the one point previously advertised, to 26%, and eventually to 23% by 2014—“the lowest in the G7”, said the chancellor proudly, although still almost double the level in neighbouring Ireland.

So Britain will continue on its austere course. The next big set-piece will be the announcement of growth figures for the first quarter of the year, due out a month from now. The Office of Budget Responsibility, an independent economic forecaster, is predicting an expansion of 0.8%. If the figures come in substantially lower than that, the pressure on the Chancellor to change his mind will grow. But having argued so strongly for austerity, Mr Osborne will find it hard to change course even if he wants to. So ignore the flashbulbs, the parliamentary jeering and cheering and the speechifying. Some potholes will be fixed, petrol prices will come down a little and beer will get a little more expensive. But the big decisions have already been taken, and they will not be changed.

IN ADVANCE of the budget on March 23rd, The Economist commissioned a poll from Ipsos MORI to gauge the state of public opinion on matters fiscal. You can read some of the results in this week's edition of the newspaper. The news is mixed for George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer. 70% of Britons think that his deficit reduction plan is too quick for a fragile economy, 71% believe it will affect the poor most of all, and only 28% say it strikes the right balance between spending cuts and tax rises (more are worried about the former than the latter). The government's insistence that "we are all in this together" is manifestly getting nowhere.

More happily for Mr Osborne, voters are more inclined to blame the previous Labour government for this fiscal pain than the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, by a margin of 49% to 26%. Given a broader range of culprits to choose from, only 10% say the coalition is most to blame for the spending cuts. The state of the global economy (18%), the banks (29%) and, again, Labour (31%) are the more commonly fingered as villains.

It is Mr Osborne's political strategy to form an indelible link in voters' minds between the Labour Party and fiscal irresponsibility. He brings up Labour's record whenever he can, as do other ministers and attack-dog MPs on the backbenches. Whenever they do, there are groans of exasperation from bored audiences. It is tempting to assume that this means the government would be smart to stop blaming its predecessors. But Mr Osborne knows one of the golden rules of political messaging: endless repetition works. The message has to be vaguely plausible to begin with, of course, but that is necessary not sufficient for it to really lodge in voters' minds.

2015 is a long time away but the basic shape of the political argument at the next general election may already be taking shape: what will voters dislike most, a government they see as needlessly austere and socially unjust, or an opposition they regard as incompetent and indirectly culpable for the austerity itself?

As for the chancellor's own political prospects, the poll makes for bleaker reading. If David Cameron were to step down as prime minister, only 9% of voters think Mr Osborne would be the most capable replacement. 28% favour William Hague, the recently beleagured foreign secretary, 18% plump for Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister, and 8% choose Liam Fox, the defence secretary.

Bleak reading, as I say, but not surprising for someone as realistic as Mr Osborne, who knows that voters see him as cocky and over-privileged. Mr Hague, too, is wryly dismissive of polls attesting to his popularity, of which there have been quite a few since he quit as Conservative leader in 2001. Britons have a habit of warming to public figures after a defeat or humiliation. The real surprise in this section of the poll is, in my view, the relatively high support for Mr Clegg, ostensibly the most despised man in politics.

In another question, only 8% of respondents said the Lib Dems had been more true to their pre-election proposals than the Tories, who were backed by 44%. You would think that the leader of a party with such a serious problem of trust would not be favoured as a future prime minister by 18% of the public. But then remind yourself of the question: who would make the most "capable" prime minister? Mr Clegg's advisers think his best hope is to trade likeability for credibility, to portray the policy u-turns he has made as grown-up compromises to preserve a stable government. A single poll does not mean their strategy is working, but it does offer a glimmer of hope. Which, these days, counts for quite a lot for the Lib Dems.

The complete polling results can be found here

EXCUSE my smugness, but some of us saw this coming years ago. In opposition, David Cameron seemed to believe that there was nothing wrong with the British civil service that a new set of political stewards would not fix. He promised to limit the number of political advisers, pledged an end to Blairite "sofa government" and generally assumed that he would find in Whitehall a cadre of administrative ubermenschen aching to serve him. His faith was that of an English patrician; Mr Cameron is drawn from the same social circles that have traditionally produced senior mandarins. There was an implicit trust.

Less than a year into his premiership, he is now, make no mistake, fighting something approaching an attritional civil war with what his advisers call “the machine”. This enmity between a government striving to reform the state and a bureaucracy it believes is resistant to change, and not very good at running things, has begun to seep into the media. Our very own Bagehot wrote about it recently. Sue Cameron, the Financial Times’s Whitehall-watcher, has chronicled the mutual resentment between ministers and mandarins. In the new Spectator, James Forsyth reports some jaw-dropping stories: one cabinet minister was allegedly so frustrated by his department’s refusal to answer his questions that he asked a friendly MP to table a Freedom of Information request to extract the desired response. Every political journalist is hearing similar testimonies. The government's desire to open up public sector procurement to small and medium-sized businesses is running into particularly forceful objections from civil servants.

And so Mr Cameron is fighting back. The recent reorganisation of Downing Street was partly designed to strengthen his sway over the machine. Steve Hilton has become something of a one-man implementation unit, using his force of personality and closeness to the prime minister to ensure Whitehall enforces the government's policies properly. He has support from new hires, as well as from Jeremy Heywood, the one senior civil servant who Mr Cameron's people regard as being on their side.

The depth of the hostility between politicians and their civil servants would shock many, but not the more reform-minded members of the previous Labour government, who are now smiling wryly. Tony Blair talked of the “scars on (his) back” left by opponents of his public sector reforms, including the civil service, but the wounds were sustained by many other ministers and advisers too. Some of those involved in trying to reform the welfare system in the later part of the last decade still have a hollow, traumatised look when they recount the resistance they encountered from the Work and Pensions department. Resistance to change in education, where mandarins had allies among the trades unions, was yet more tenacious. Those who dealt with the Home Office actually developed their own genre of gallows humour to cope with their struggles with a department regarded in some quarters as the most implacable in Whitehall.

The civil service has many defenders, and Bagehot in his column made the very true observation that the government must deal with the bureacuracy it has. Civil servants can and do argue that the coalition's plans are too extreme, too rushed. But I wonder whether the hoary old myth of Whitehall as a purring Rolls Royce blinds some observers to the very real problems with the bureaucracy.

Recruitment to the British civil service is not as rigorous as in, say, France (the Foreign Office and the Treasury are more stringent than most departments but don't actually directly run very much). Neither is Whitehall as open to outside appointees as America's federal executive bureaucracy. Once in, civil servants, from the lowest functionary to the highest offical, are unbelievably difficult to dismiss (and, believe me, there is at least one permanent secretary of a major department that some Conservatives believe should be fired for an alleged combination of incompetence and insurbodination). How many organisations with largely unsackable staff function properly?

There is something else that those who revere Whitehall (including the Mr Cameron of just a year ago) struggle to explain. They often insist that all civil servants desire is a minister who knows what he wants. Give Whitehall a sense of direction, they say, and it will toil away dutifully. Even if you do not think this is hopelessly naive in itself, it clashes with another trope favoured by these same observers: that the "politicisation" of the civil service is malign and desctructive. These are surely irreconcileable viewpoints. If civil servants crave leadership from above, but regard two special advisers per cabinet minister as intolerable political interference, is that not unreasonable? Is the expectation really that one secretary of state, backed by just a few junior ministers, should be able to direct a department of many thousands this way or that, without being able to bring in staff of their own choosing? Which large organisations in the private sector are run like that?

Ultimately, Mr Cameron has himself to blame. The problems he has encountered with Whitehall were eminently predictable. When, in 2009, I asked one senior Tory who is particular close to Mr Cameron how he planned to deal with bureaucratic resistance to government policies, he blithely replied that the Tories would devolve power out of central government anyway, so the civil servants would not be a force to be reckoned with. I pressed him on the obvious logical flaw here: that the government would depend on these civil servants to execute the devolving. Whatever his answer was, it clearly did not amount to a plan.

IT'S crunch time for the police this week. Today the Winsor report came out with proposals to cut police pay and benefits when the current three-year pay deal ends in September. At the heart of it is curbing overtime and bonuses and other allowances which have become embedded and conceal real differences in what people of similar seniority do. One goal is obviously to save money; but another important one is to modernise police management, recognising and motivating officers who do more and better than their fellows.

But this is only one of blows police say they are reeling from. On Thursday the Hutton report is widely expected to recommend making coppers, like other public-sector workers, pay more for their pensions (they say they already contribute more than others in state employment). The police service has in any event been in austerity mode for a couple of years, even before the 20% budget cut through 2014-15 was announced last October. And like other public-sector workers they also face a two-year pay freeze from next September.

Is all this a death blow to law and order as we know it? Or the foundations of more efficient and flexible policing?

Policing can be a difficult and dangerous occupation, and the proliferation of laws and form-filling and what-not over the past decade have not made the job easier. But resources, both money and manpower, have also grown tremendously. There has been a sustained increase in funding since 2001, the year in which police officers and civilian staff started climbing. But management has been sluggish. Despite the increase in bodies, overtime more than doubled between 2001-02 and 2007-08, points out Policy Exchange, a think-tank.  

Manpower is undoubtedly going to take a hit now; this has been clear since the 20% fiscal cutback was made public in the autumn. Since pay accounts for 80% of most forces’ budget, and a certain amount of back-office costs were already being squeezed out, it is hard to see what else can go. ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, estimates that 16,000 police officers and 12,000 staff will be cut. If that is the eventual figure--and the Police Federation, which represents lower-ranking policemen, has put round a bigger number--there would still be more police officers on the strength than ten years ago and many more civilian staff.

Three points are perhaps worth making. The first is that the link between boots on the ground and crime reduction isn’t absolute: many factors influence the crime rate, of which bobbies on the beat is only one. Crime fell through the noughties when resources were being poured into it, and most people definitely like to see police around, as recent polling by Ipsos-MORI for the Police Federation emphasises. Cutting police numbers is not a step that any politician would relish, absent the fiscal deficit. But it is not axiomatic that crime will surge as a result, especially if these proposals (which remain only that) enable police chiefs to deploy manpower more efficiently. Part 2 of the Winsor report is due to hit the stands in the autumn, suggesting wider-ranging management reforms.

The second point has to do with internal police politics. There are two broad police reforms going on, both at a time when money is in short supply. In addition to the pay review is a flagship government policy to create, from 2012, elected police and crime commissioners, with power to set spending priorities and hire and fire chief constables. The Police Federation, the body representing rank-and-file officers (police constables through chief superintendents), is disturbed by the Winsor recommendations on pay but less so by the prospect of new commissioners. ACPO, which groups their bosses, greeted the Winsor report with sang-froid (it gives them more flexibility in managing their forces) but detests the elected commissioners. In the past, the police have met opposition as one. No longer—and just how that may affect the reform process remains to be seen.  

A final point is also political, but on a bigger and potentially more dangerous stage. There are troubled times ahead as broad budget cuts bite, not least on March 26th, when a large union-organised protest is scheduled to hit the streets. Margaret Thatcher, no friend of the unions, took care to have the police onside whenever she took on organised labour. This time, as Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation, points out,  “Those policing the march will be facing deeper cuts than those actually on it.” 

ON MARCH 3rd Jeremy Hunt, Britain's culture secretary, effectively cleared the way for New York-based News Corporation to take full ownership of BSkyB, a British broadcaster. News Corporation will spin off Sky News, so as to avoid the appearance of one company having too much control over the information Britons get. There will be a brief consultation. Rival media outfits, including the BBC and Guardian Media Group, will wail and gnash their teeth at the prospect of Rupert Murdoch taking a larger slice of the British media pie. But this deal is done.

The legal and regulatory obstacles to News Corporation's effort were never as great as those rival media companies made them out to be. News Corporation already owns 39% of BSkyB, which emerged from an outfit set up by Mr Murdoch in the 1980s. That is a controlling stake. If there is a problem with Mr Murdoch controlling Sky, the problem already exists: an outright purchase does not create it. The more-or-less openly-voiced fear that Mr Murdoch would turn Sky News into a British outpost of America's conservative Fox News Channel is also misplaced. The point of Sky News, which loses money, is that it burnishes BSkyB's image, turning the broadcaster into something more respectable than a purveyor of football, films and American dramas. Taking Sky News downmarket or compromising its objectivity would damage a valuable brand.

Another obstacle, which had been largely overlooked in the political and regulatory kerfuffle, now looms. News Corporation offered £7 a share for BSkyB last summer. It was rebuffed by BSkyB's board, which suggested that only offers over £8 a share would be entertained. That may not have been too much of a stretch for News Corp at the time. But three things have happened in the past few months. First, BSkyB announced record earnings. It is on track to bring in £1 billion in profits this year, raising its value. Second, the pound has strengthened against the dollar—the currency in which News Corporation will pay for BSkyB. Last June £7 cost $10.82. Now it costs $11.40—a greater than 5% increase. Third, News Corporation has agreed to pay £415m for Shine, a production company run by Elisabeth Murdoch, of the clan. The spat over regulation is over. Let the arguments over money begin.

SOME governments are dominated by the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer, such as New Labour and the current coalition. In other administrations, the prime minister is merely the chairman of a group of talented, independent-minded cabinet members, each with their own power base. Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government was one example of this, and so was John Major's seven-year premiership. The oligopoly of cabinet ministers that toiled and often squabbled under the latter's watch were known as "the big beasts", a term frequently revived in Westminster discourse to bemoan the supposed dearth of such creatures today.

The impending appointment of one of these big beasts, Chris Patten, to the chairmanship of the BBC Trust, got me thinking about what has happened to the others, and why some have carved out an enduring role for themselves beyond their 1990s cabinet careers, while others, perhaps to the loss of their party and their country, have not.

Mr Patten, who went on to govern Hong Kong after losing his parliamentary seat in 1992 and who is still the chancellor of Oxford University, has successfully retained a prominent role in public life. Ken Clarke, a fellow One Nation Conservative (which means a member of the party's ideological left, for those not versed in Tory sectarianism), wields even more power as a current cabinet member. But most of their peers from the Major era are keeping their talents dormant.

One example, Michael Heseltine, is easy to understand. He was a politician of enormous significance: a bold environment secretary, the author of the stunning regeneration of east London, a deputy prime minister who was not alone in thinking that job title was one word too long for him. But he is 77 and has suffered bouts of serious ill health.

But what about Michael Howard? It is hard to think of a post-war politician who was not either prime minister or chancellor who had more of an impact on the nation than Mr Howard did as home secretary. Many on the right credit his reforms (mandatory sentences, expanded prisons) for the mid-1990s fall in crime that continues to this day. Even those who loathe him concede his enduring influence; all home secretaries since Mr Howard have been in his image, rather than in the patrician mould of Douglas Hurd and other former occupants of the office. Yet Mr Howard, or Lord Howard as he is now, is now only nominally involved in public life as a member of the second chamber. Many Tories want him to replace Mr Clarke as justice secretary but that seems a remote prospect.

Then there is Michael Portillo, the right-wing thorn in Mr Major's side who went on to become the original moderniser. Since his failed bid to become leader in 2001, he has had a prominent role in the media and been involved with various charities. But he is not running any major public institution. Neither is he serving as the wise elder of Tory modernisation; he has never been close to the current party leadership, and seems not to be bothered by that. 

Peter Lilley is another example. He, too, was a Thatcherite hate-figure during the Major years who quickly understood, after the party's electoral evisceration in 1997, that the Tories would have to change to win again. It is easily forgotten that he was the first shadow chancellor that Gordon Brown faced when he took over at the Treasury (not counting Mr Clarke's month-long stint while the Tories were choosing a new leader). In that role, Mr Lilley alienated many of his colleagues by arguing that the Tories needed to develop a political economy that looked beyond Thatcherism. He also called for the legalisation of cannabis. Aside from chairing one of the policy reviews that David Cameron launched when he became leader five years ago, he remains a circumspect backbencher.

Of course, the willingness of these former cabinet members to let their successors get on with it reflects well on them. But their talents and experience are still of use, especially to Mr Cameron. In retrospect, the Major government, loathed at the time, was an impressive reforming administration given the hellish political context it laboured in. Despite a paper-thin majority in parliament, and a deeply divided party, it pioneered reforms in healthcare that have been taken further since, it oversaw an economic recovery and boom, it followed a policy on the European Union that kept Britain out of the euro while persuing the strategic goal of eastern enlargement, and it presided over that historic fall in crime. These achievements were possible because of the big beasts (and because Mr Major was a far more effective prime minister, albeit in the chairman mould, that he is given credit for). They have reservoirs of wisdom on public sector reform and the myraid obstacles to it. Mr Cameron's willingness to revive some of the big beasts from their slumber should not stop with Mr Patten and Mr Clarke.

I HAD an unusual appointment on Saturday at a tent outside the British embassy in Mexico City. Estíbalis Chávez, a 19-year-old Mexican schoolgirl, had been camped on a street corner outside the compound for ten days, foregoing food. Her ongoing hunger strike is designed to persuade the British government to give her a ticket to the April wedding of “Príncipe Guillermo” and Kate Middleton. The ambassador, Judith Miller, has sent her a letter gently telling her that it’s not going to happen. “But I still have hope,” says Ms Chávez, who is very faint after ten days without food but has vowed to stay outside the embassy until her health gives way—or the wedding planners give in.

Just as many Americans secretly wish Jed Bartlet were their president, I would be quite happy if Britain ditched the royal family and installed Colin Firth and Helen Mirren in their place. But the popularity of the Windsors abroad is formidable. The royal engagement made the front page of many newspapers here; the doorman in our building has so far congratulated me on the news three times. Many people, including Ms Chávez, are especially devoted to the memory of Lady Di (here pronounced lady dee). The Duke of Edinburgh remains the prime suspect in her death.

By no means everyone in Britain shares my republicanism. Guillermo’s wedding day is likely to be celebrated with street parties, weather permitting. But it does seem that the royal family may have joined the curious class of brands and individuals who go down better overseas than at home. Given the occasional flare-up of international controversies, it’s handy for Brits abroad to be able to fall back on something that everyone seems to love. Last year I was ordered out of my car at an army checkpoint by a soldier who said he wanted to ask me some questions. The interrogation? “How is la Reina Isabel?”

AS PUBLIC spending cuts start to bite and the government attempts to give away power by encouraging more ordinary people to wield the stuff, it is belatedly showing a certain deftness while tinkering with an existing service that relies on volunteers.

The National Blood Service, which employs National Health Service (NHS) staff to collect blood from donors and distribute it to hospitals where it is transfused into patients or spun into other vital products, is being examined. The aim is to save money by outsourcing some of its activities to the private sector, according to a report in the Health Services Journal.

Blood donors are stalwarts of the voluntary sector, and rich countries with advanced medical systems rely on them. Some 4% of the population gives blood in Britain, comparable to the levels in America, Australia and the rest of Europe, according to this map from the World Health Organisation.

Blood donors are also unpaid, in Britain and elsewhere. A debate over whether or not they should be compensated for their efforts has raged for at least four decades. In a classic 1970 study called "The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy" Richard Titmuss compared the voluntary British system favourably with the American one in which payments were then widely made. Titmuss reckoned such a market was inefficient and wasteful, that it created shortages and surpluses, and led eventually to a contaminated product. 

Although he was wrong, and such arguments have since been widely discredited, Americans mostly no longer receive payment for giving blood. Too many people in poor health lied about their medical histories in order to make a few bucks, endangering those who were to receive the blood. As the World Health Organisation notes, people who give blood voluntarily and for altruistic reasons have a lower prevalence of HIV, hepatitis viruses and other blood-borne infections than do those who seek monetary reward. Presumably that is because being rich is a great protection against disease.

People who give blood without payment tend to give one of two reasons for their actions: either it is for the general good; or it is because they hope to benefit from the generosity of other donors at some future date. I started giving blood myself as a way of repaying what I perceived as being the family debt to the national blood bank when my grandfather began to need monthly transfusions to slow the progress of his leukaemia, and have continued to donate in the years following his death.

I have seen first hand the inefficiencies in the system: limited space means long queues at busy lunchtime periods, and unused equipment and idle staff in the hush of midafternoon, for example. Subcontracting work to the private sector is common within the NHS, and is mostly accepted by its patients.

But would British people would still donate blood if it were being taken by staff working for a profit-making company? As my colleague Bagehot discussed recently in relation to plans to privatise forests, volunteers are happy to contribute to the state but would be far more wary about giving to a private company. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, has acted deftly to avoid the pitfalls that have floored his counterpart in forestry. Only the outsourcing of the storage and distribution of blood will be considered; its collection will remain firmly within the NHS.