Martin Bright

I had the strangest call today from an outfit called publicservice.co.uk. A rather pleasant woman, albeit with a slightly insistent phone manner, asked me for my views on work creation and the government’s policy on hard to reach &"NEETS” (horrible jargon for young people not education, employment or training). I have my views, but I also have my own ways of making these known to government, so I asked how the information I gave her would be used. Was someone paying her to provide intelligence? In which case, I wondered how much she was proposing to pay me.

It all seemed innocent enough. I even found myself in the rain at Somerset House watching the river pageant (for the kids, you understand). The street party in my road meant I met neighbours I had never spoken to. And the high-kitsch of the Diamond Jubilee concert seemed to give the world a lesson in how not to take yourself too seriously. But then came Shiv Malik's scoop on the unpaid Jubilee pageant stewards shivering under the bridges with sodden food and no shelter from the elements. It is hard to imagine a more powerful image of our divided nation. Sometimes a news story emerges which has a symbolic power beyond the mere facts it reports. This is one of them.

 The expense of the Jubilee celebrations was always difficult to justify in these straitened times.

The coverage of the appalling Rochdale grooming case has been, for the most part, well-informed and responsible. In the Times today David Aaronovitch takes on the cultural issue directly (£) and should be saluted for so doing. ‘So here are the bald facts about this specific kind of abuse. Men, many middle-aged and most of previous good character, and largely from one community, have been committing a particular series of sexual crimes almost entirely against young girls. Why? Almost certainly because of their attitudes towards women and sex.’ But he saves his most important point for the end of his article when he says: ‘we ought to be mad as hell about the neglect of our most vulnerable kids.

As those of us in London face up to the prospect of the none-of-the-above election, it’s worth thinking ahead to 2015 and asking yourself if any of the major parties really deserves your vote. It’s hard to remember a time when things were quite like this. Daniel Finkelstein has a theory that the British electorate rarely makes the wrong judgement. And it is almost always the case that at least one party is firing on all cylinders. The 1992 election was an exception, but right now John Major, Neil Kinnock and Paddy Ashdown are looking like political giants. We are staring into the political abyss and we think it is mildly amusing to talk in terms of an omnishambles. But this is no joke.

Michael Dugher is only half right when he tweets that you know the government is in trouble when it dusts down another Big Society announcement. The idea, in principle, is a good one, or at very least it is an interesting and important experiment in finding new ways of funding public services. Sir Ronald Cohen, the chair of Big Society Capital, was once a close ally of Gordon Brown and much of the thinking in this area happened in the New Labour era. There is no need for this to become a party-political battleground. The real question is, will it work? Or is it another example of boom-time policy making that will prove unfit for purpose in harder times? For a start, the government needs to get its message on this clear.

Wales have won the Grand Slam and I have grown to love rugby. Over the past weeks I have been completely captivated by the Six Nations and I don’t quite know how this has happened, because I used to hate it. I look back to those bitterly cold afternoons up on the hills above the Gordano Valley near Bristol where the weather always seemed to hover somewhere between horizontal sleet and hail. I’d loved playing football for my primary school and for the local electricity board team, Portishead Sparks. It seemed unjust that I had been sent to a rugby school at 11. I was small, skinny and increasingly short-sighted.

I have warned on this blog before that the reforms of the welfare-to-work system risk embedding unpaid labour into the benefits system. This week’s story about Tesco advertising for night shift workers to be paid Job Seeker’s Allowance plus expenses has rightly caused outrage now it seems that large retailers and charities are pulling out of the work experience element of the Work Programme. As the Independent reports today, Matalan has suspended its involvement in the scheme and Waterstones, Sainsbury’s and TK Maxx have expressed their opposition. Employers are now said to be concerned that job seekers will lose their benefits if they drop out of placements.

Last week David Milband showed some real class when he presented the recommendations from his Commission on Youth Unemployment. This was a sober and intelligent review of the crisis and the government would do well to take note. He has welcomed the introduction of job subsidies under the new Youth Contract, which will come in from April, but is right to urge a boost in the number of these that will be made available to employers. His idea to set up Youth Employment Zones in hotspots of worklessness around the country is also a solid idea that should be lifted by ministers. One element that was not highlighted by the report was self-employment.

Until now I haven’t seen Matthew Norman as a radical figure in British journalism. But his column in the Independent this week was a genuine anti-establishment rant in the best tradition. The headline was a corker: ‘Cameron is the David Brent of welfare reform’ – clear, to-the-point and expressive of the fury of the piece to come (he later describes the man he dubs ‘David Brenteron’ as a ‘galaxy-class hypocrite’ for his government’s betrayal of the disabled in its welfare reforms).

One thing you learn in life is that most people have no idea how they are perceived by others. This is particularly true in Britain, where we don’t generally feel it is polite to tell people what we think of them. Politicians and public figures therefore find themselves in the unusual position of having opinions about them shoved right in their faces. Maurice Glasman’s description of Ed Miliband as having ‘no strategy, no narrative and little energy’ must have been deeply hurtful to the man who elevated a previously little-known academic to the House of Lords. High-profile politicians must cauterise a certain part of their mind (or is it their soul?) in order to cope with the white noise of personal insult they have to endure.