The Coastguard plans

Having praised Philip Hammond last week, it looks like he’s going to be under fire over messing up closing down local coastguard stations.

These were going to be amalgamated into regional centres. Which presumably would run on a call-centre basis – because why would you actually need any knowledge or skills? We’d just need to have procedures to make sure the scripts were updated for any service failures (or “deaths at sea” as they used to be called).

I’ve been in situations (on dive boats) where we’ve needed to rely on the Coastguards, and more than anything you need to be sure that the guy on the other end of the VHF is able to understand the issues and assess the risk.

Full respect to Sheryll Murray for holding out on this one.

This isn’t the first time a minister has U-turned on a hare-brained scheme. I wrote about the flu jabs, the School Sports Partnership and the Book Funding scheme. And the Forests. And we’ve now, of course, got a “pause” on the NHS reforms.

I’m actually quite pleased when these bozos don’t just carry on trying to crowbar things in. But I still feel this administration’s been doing far too much shooting from the hip. And I wish they’d try to figure out the implications before they try to show they can cut harder than the next guy.

Tuition fees – just more spin.

When the Coalition government announced that tuition fees would max out at £9k, we were told that universities would only charge this rate in “exceptional circumstances”.

Now the colleges are all pitching in at this “exceptional” level we get the goalposts changing.

Apparently David Willetts now wants to calculate fees after factoring in assistance – such as fee waivers and bursaries – for the less well-off.

So those who don’t qualify for the assistance will pretty much have to pay the “exceptional” amount. Or miss out on a degree.

The alternative weaseling is that they don’t actually mean fees – they mean the average loan will be less than £9k. Which, of course, is not necessarily anything to do with fees – but does allow them to muddy the waters.

This really is disgraceful spin and the mainstream media shouldn’t let them get away with this.

that Coalition thing …

I was generally in favour.

My big gripes with the last government included the destruction of our human rights (I think these are a good thing), the way the economy went unregulated, but mostly the arrogance that was exemplified by “Bigotgate”.

If anyone in the Labour Party had actually had the bottle to stand up to Gordon, then I might have some sympathy. But they signally failed to get their act together. The LibDems had no option but to go with the party that had the most seats, the most votes and half a clue about who was leading them (and – as a result – what that party stood for).

At least with a coalition, there was a chance that the more rabid Tories could be moderated – and it looked at first that this would happen. But it’s starting to look a bit like whack-a-mole – as soon as one gets sorted out, up pops another one. To his credit, Cameron seems to be doing his share of reining-in (as with the milk-snatcher deja vu I’ll get to in a minute).

But the voice of reason seems to be missing. During the election campaign, I seem to recall Cameron was telling us that we need to reduce the deficit so that the burden didn’t fall on future generations. So what happens ? The cap on tuition fees is trebled, loaded into student debt.

The LibDems seem to have ended up with breaking most of the bad news, and taking the fall-out as a result. Seems they didn’t plan for Vince to be responsible for putting up the tuition fees (and I may get round to a whole post on that) …

We were told that cuts wouldn’t be determined through “salami slicing”, but what we seem to have instead is a series of ministers slashing their way through the previous governments’ initiatives, irrespective of whether they were actually working or not. Then backtracking when they actually find out what they’ve done.

So very early on, there was a backtrack on free milk for nursery children.

Michael Gove seems to be excelling himself. We’ve had a backtrack on the School Sports Partnership scheme. We’ve had a change of heart on the Book funding scheme. Of course, these aren’t U-turns …

And we can see Andrew Lansley squirming his way through an explanation of why he’s running a flu prevention ad campaign that is completely different from the flu prevention ad campaign (originally scheduled for earlier in the year) that he cancelled. Shame our hospitals have filled up in the meantime …

I’m sure there will be more to come …