Guest Blog 16

Back to the Future

As Jim renames his TR round-up series ‘Bleak Futures’, we may well be feeling pretty bleak ourselves about how our professional dedication and expertise have been trashed by a minister whose monumental ignorance about our work is matched only by his moral vacuity and his servility to his corporate puppet masters. Has there ever been a Parliamentary Bill, where its architect remains utterly oblivious to who are the main protagonists in the profession he is destroying? Yet, it is surely not delusional (and certainly seasonal!) to find hope in the New Year, when one contemplates that Grayling’s unseemly (even panicky) haste over the Offender Rehabilitation Bill was driven by an event which even he cannot shamelessly railroad: the General Election…

At this point I imagine a dispirited groan, since I know that many of you feel that our campaign of writing to MPs and lobbying parliament was a wasted effort. Speaking personally, I know how many hours I wasted writing to Lib Dem MPs, who would agree with our case, before voting with the whip like sheep. So no-one can be more cynical than me. However, cynicism and defeatism aren’t the same thing, except perhaps in the case of Lorely Burt whose argument to me was that there was little point of resisting the OR Bill as it had progressed so far already… Less a reluctant lamb to the slaughter in her case than a rabbit hypnotised by the headlights.

But there were real victories of a small kind, and pleasing to my vanity too: as when I was rung by Glenda Jackson while skulking in the car at my son’s football training, and she said that she would support us, and that she shared our outrage at what the Con Dems were doing. Luckily in retrospect I resisted the star-struck impulse to ask her what it was like to roll around naked with Oliver Reed in Women in Love, since, as my husband pointed out, that was Alan Bates. At such moments, one could actually feel that copious lobbying was having an effect.

So what are the green shoots of our recovery, since we seem to have achieved so little? Keeping with the grass metaphor, we can point to those in 2014 who campaigned successfully and succeeded at a grassroots level, such as the housing campaigners in Newham and Hoxton. (I'm not saying it's easy as this attempt at making a film about the truth behind this government struggles to raise funds). But I realise this was on a much smaller scale and without the full weight of the government against them, but the same applies in our case, and my belief is that those in parliament need to be forced to do the right thing, and they will never do it without a great deal of collective pressure from below, as well as passionate and informed protest. 

This fits into a wider ideological/class war, and little by little we have to exert that pressure, with the one single weapon (if I can avoid sounding like Jonathan Aitken before he went to prison), that we have truth on our side, and the government is basically a front pedalling lies and propaganda for corporate interests. So, we may have lost the battle, or at least this stage of it, but we must win the war and so must regroup now or later and start again.

In this election year, the knowledge of massive Tory funding bears out this narrative that the fight will be between a clapped out dogma adopted by the privateers and their lickspittle parliamentary mouthpieces, and grassroots movements struggling to articulate their alternative and strategy. Certainly, it is hard to see how our profession can meaningfully survive a Tory component in the next government. However, there could be endless permutations of coalition and so one way forward is to pin down those who might be a part of it. What are UKIP’s views on Probation? They seem to have little view on anything other than blaming immigration for everything and managed to change their mind in a week or so about the NHS, so asking them this question would have amusement value if nothing else.

The Greens are most sure to re-nationalise Probation and support our profession perhaps but they need to be pinned down too. There are now open bets on Alex Salmond becoming Deputy Prime Minister – so, what are the SNP’s views on Probation? We know Plaid Cymru are sound (three cheers for Wales!). I heard Jenny Chapman say that she would scrutinise the contracts but there is no further assurance from the Labour Party and it is hard to give them the confidence one would like to.

Somehow, we have to exert enough pressure to force them to agree, and while I’m not promising yet more letters will pay off, it is surprisingly easy to lobby your local MP and the prospective MPs in your area at the moment, because they are desperate for your votes. (I wrote a very rude letter to the Conservative hopeful in Cheltenham on New Year’s Day, fed up of receiving lobbying emails with pictures of him and David Cameron, with my last sentence being ‘I hope you crash and burn and go back to your elitist barrister existence in London’ – he got back to me within the hour offering to meet up and praising Probation to the skies!) So one moral we can take out of the New Year is that change is a constant, and that life can be surprising. So let’s hope that surprise and change can be our keywords for 2015!

To approach it another way: for the first time in a while, politicians are the nervous and insecure ones, facing the possibility of life on benefits and weekly interrogation about whether they have ducked out of an internship at Poundland (well, maybe that was an exaggeration, but remember hope is our watchword, and it is a nice image…). 

Despite the despicable 10-year contracts, every party wants to get votes and all are amenable to lobbying. We could try and push for all the parties who could form a coalition, apart from the Tories and Lib Dems, to put a promise in their manifesto to repeal privatisation. At the very least, we want those in power to have an awareness of our profession, and our power to organise and lobby and speak for ourselves. Which brings me back in a nice loop to Grayling who dismantles the service without knowing the difference between a PO and a PSO (you might have expected even him to see that there is an extra letter between them, but there you go…).

Joanna Hughes