The Local Government Ombudsman's External Evaluation.

Can the public have confidence in the recent External Evaluation of the Local Government Ombudsman?

 At the time of writing, the Communities and Local Government Select Committee is carrying out a further inquiry into the work and performance of the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO). 

The LGO is something I have taken a keen interest in since 1999, when I represented a family who had experienced maladministration from their local council with their complaint to the LGO. In the course of my dealings with the LGO, I realised that they were a dishonest and completely unrealiable outfit that was very much biased in favour of local councils. 

Dealing with the appalling local authority in question, and then dealing with the equally appalling LGO, was a traumatising experience, so I gave myself a few years to recharge my batteries before setting up LGO Watch in 2003: a national campaign I directed until 2008.

The LGO is a law unto itself, but it reports to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee (CLG Committee), which until very recently has been impervious and indifferent to the evidence of dishonesty and systemic maladministration at the LGO. Even now, after recently telling the LGO it had to "up its game," they seemed to be more concerned about inefficiencies than about complainants getting regularly and deliberately stitched up. 

Last year, the CLG Committee told the LGO that there had to be an independent External Review of the LGO, an LGO staff satisfaction survey, and a new Customer Satisfaction Survey. The problem is that the LGO is being allowed by the CLG Committee to commission these surveys themselves. This, in spite of the fact that it has been demonstrated to the Committee that the LGO manipulates the process and the reported outcome of surveys in order to avoid negative publicity. 

The LGO published a "summary" of their Staff Satisfaction Survey on their website, together with their response to it. What they did not reckon on was that someone who had received the undoctored version of the original staff survey report would leak it to LGO Watch. Predictably, the "summary" of the survey the LGO published bears little resemblance to the actual survey report, a copy of which I have sent to the CLG Committee. 

The LGO was also allowed to commission its own independent External Review, and to appoint its own independent External Review team. It has now published its  “External Evaluation of the Local Government Ombudsman in England.” There were three members of the External Review team:

"The Team was Chaired by Richard Thomas CBE, Chairman of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council and former Information Commissioner.1 The other members of the Team were Jim Martin, the current Scottish Public Services Ombudsman and former Police Complaints Commissioner for Scotland;2 and Dr Richard Kirkham,3 an academic from the University of Sheffield with previous research experience of ombudsman schemes." (P4)

So one member was a former Information Commissioner. Another was the current Scottish Public Service Ombudsman. And the third, Dr Richard Kirkham, was an academic at Sheffield University who was already known to LGO Watch following an article he wrote in 2005: “A Complainant's View of the Local Government Ombudsman,” was published in the “Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law,” Volume 27, Issue 3-4. 

Dr Kirkham’s article was published in 2005, following the Select Committee inquiry into the LGO where the investigation was aborted when the General Election was called, and at a time when the LGO was starting to receive very negative publicity as a result of LGO Watch evidence reaching the public domain and the newspapers.

  

Dr Kirkham apparently played a major role in the drafting of the External Review. In the Preface to the External Review, we are told:

"Richard Kirkham undertook the bulk of the research and drafting of this Report for which his colleagues are most grateful." (p4)

The following paragraph from the External Evaluation is quite an endorsement, and is inconsistent with the evidence provided by LGO Watch since 2003, and the experience of hundreds of complainants to the LGO who contacted us:

“The current programme of change does not undermine our view that the LGO is an organisation made up of dedicated and hard-working people who deliver appropriate administrative justice on a daily basis. We also recognise that the LGO has a long track record of being a reflective organisation that has often been a leading innovator in its field.” (p4) 

Needless to say, the Local Government Ombudsman seemed very pleased at this endorsement, and announced the following on its website:

 

“LGO welcomes independent confirmation that it is a fair and effective Ombudsman

An independent external evaluation of the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) is published today. It confirms that the LGO is independent and accountable; and it provides clear evidence that the public have access to a fair and effective route to redress when they have complaints about local public services and social care providers.”

http://www.lgo.org.uk/news/2013/apr/lgo-welcomes-independent-confirmation-fair-effective-ombudsman/ 

Dr Kirkham’s 2005 article was published following the ODPM Select Committee's Evidence Session where, for the first time in the history of the LGO, the institution faced questions as to its impartiality, honesty and efficacy. (The ODPM Committee is now the CLG Committee.) LGO Watch had been set up in 2003, and in 2005 we provided detailed evidence to the Committee of how complainants to the LGO were being treated unfairly, and of how the LGO was manipulating its Customer Satisfaction Surveys, whose results were still nonetheless quite damning of the LGO, even after they had been manipulated. 

The Select Committee evidence session on the LGO was held on 15 March 2005, and Jad Adams’s “Thunderer” column was published in the Times on the same day, criticising the LGO http://thetim.es/RfRqGd. The LGO replied with a PR campaign, and on 26 April 2005, a sympathetic interview with the Ombudsman was published in the Times http://thetim.es/Re3Xya.  Dr Kirkham’s article was published in December 2005. It bore the title, “A Complainant’s View of the Local Government Ombudsman.” We were astonished because Dr Kirkham gave absolutely no indication in his article that he had ever been a complainant to the LGO, and absolutely no indication that he had even spoken to any complainants to the LGO in order to find out their perspective. 

It was complainants who had provided the evidence to the Committee of LGO maladministration and dishonesty, and now Dr Kirkham had published a sympathetic article on the LGO which he claimed to be "a complainant's view." Perhaps a surprising title, given that he made no reference in his article to ever having been a complainant to the LGO; given that, in his article, he casually dismissed the evidence provided by real complainants to the Committee; and given that he did not make any effort to contact LGO Watch to ask for our perspective for the purposes of researching his article. 

Where in his article Dr Kirkham did refer to evidence that we as complainants had provided to the Committee - evidence that was published in the ODPM Committee’s report - he did so selectively and constructed straw men to attack, completely ignoring the detailed analysis of and commentary on the MORI Customer Satisfaction Survey that we had provided to the Committee. If Dr Kirkham's article was really "a complainant's view of the LGO" of some description, then it was clearly a very bizarre one indeed.

It is worrying that an academic writing an article that purported to be from the perspective of a complainant took so little interest in the very instruments that had provided evidence of real complainants’ views: the 1995 and 1999 MORI LGO Customer Satisfaction Surveys, and the analysis of them provided in the 2005 LGO Watch submission to the Committee. Instead, Dr Kirkham disregards the devastating and valid accusations of the LGO made by real complainants to the Committee, and focuses on attacking accusations that were not made by LGO Watch, and that would not be made by any informed and intelligent complainant.

In Dr Kirkham’s article, he refers to the evidence submitted by dissatisfied complainants that was published by the ODPM Committee following the 2005 Evidence Session on the Role and Effectiveness of the LGO. He is clearly aware of the evidence presented by LGO Watch and by our supporters, of LGO bias and maladministration, and he refers to my submission in his article, so it is a reasonable assumption that he read it. Those submitting evidence to the Committee had their submissions rejected if they focused on the content and detail of their individual complaints. Instead, complainants were expected to present a wider, more general picture of systemic and procedural concerns. The submissions of several LGO Watch supporters were rejected because they did not meet this requirement, and their submissions were not published.

The LGO Watch submission, which I wrote as the then director, focused on evidence that the LGO was biased in favour of local authorities, and that its MORI Customer Satisfaction Survey indicated an alarmingly high rate of customer dissatisfaction with the LGO’s service. This dissatisfaction was even shared by 50% of those whose complaints were successfully upheld by the LGO. Our submission also focused on strong evidence that the LGO had manipulated the process of the Survey, so its outcome would have been even more critical  of the LGO if this manipulation had not taken place.

In his 2005 article, Dr Kirkham decided to make no reference to this crucial evidence presented in the LGO Watch submission. Not only this, but in his 2005 article, he says:

“There has never been any serious allegation that the LGO act in any other way but according to the highest standards of public conduct.” (ibid., p 388).

This was an extraordinary thing to say. In this one sentence, Dr Kirkham dismisses the detailed evidence provided to the Committee of LGO bad practice as not being “serious”. Our evidence was not even treated with the courtesy of a statement of its content, an evaluation, and an attempted refutation. It was simply dismissed out-of-hand as though it was not worth a moment's consideration: even though the evidence provided to the ODPM Committee was considered to be "serious" enough to formed the basis for several questions posed to the LGOs during the evidence session.

Just a reminder, at this point, of who Dr Kirkham is. He was one of the three individuals commissioned by the Local Government Ombudsman to conduct an independent external evaluation of the LGO: an evaluation that had been requested by the Select Committee. Dr Kirkham also had a very significant role in the external evaluation:

"Richard Kirkham undertook the bulk of the research and drafting of this Report for which his colleagues are most grateful." (p4)

Where the integrity of the LGO is concerned, I have provided evidence in my 2005 and 2012 submissions (submission 1 and submission 2) to the Select Committee of how dishonestly the LGO outfit operates. Evidence abounds in the experience of individual complainants, but one only has to look at how the LGO manipulated the process and the reported results of their 1995 and 1999 MORI Customer Satisfaction Surveys. 

There is even one very recent example of LGO dishonesty that I discovered while reading through the LGO’s recent "summary" and response to the Staff Satisfaction Survey, which I compared to the actual Report on the results of that Survey that had been leaked to LGO Watch by a member of staff with access to it. In amongst the damage limitation attempt that was the LGO’s response to the damning Survey outcome, the LGO stated:
 

“39% believe we provide a great service to our customers but 34% are undecided.”

There was no mention in this "summary" of any staff member actually disagreeing with the statement that they provided a “great service” to their customers.

This surely gives the impression that no-one had said they positively disagreed with the statement. But the way this data has been presented in the LGO’s response distracts from the fact that 27% of the LGO's own staff positively disagreed with the statement that the LGO provided a great service to their customers, and that 7% of this 27% strongly disagreed with the statement, resulting in a total of 61% of staff either actively disagreeing with the statement, or else feeling unable to actively agree with the statement. This can only have been deliberate misrepresentation of their staff’s opinions, and it is so typical of the spin-doctoring with which the LGO attempts to dupe both the public and those principled politicians who would not tolerate the behaviour of the LGO if they were fully aware of what is happening.

 

At the beginning of his article, Dr Kirkham refers to the 2005 submissions to the ODMP Committee, and says,

“In amongst these submissions, there were even proposals for the abolition of the LGO [...] To a certain extent, such criticisms misunderstand the purpose of public sector redress mechanisms and the remit of the Ombudsmen.” 

Although Dr Kirkham here associates the proposal to abolish the LGO with a misunderstanding of "the purpose of public sector redress mechanisms and the remit of the Ombudsmen," the abolition of the Local Government Ombudsman was proposed in a 1995 report by Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield, after the Government at the time asked him to carry out a fundamental review of the necessity for and functions of the LGO. One might imagine that Sir Geoffrey had a rather good understanding of "the purpose of public sector redress mechanisms and the remit of the Ombudsmen."

People will be looking for a very long time to find any proposal to abolish the LGO among the 2005 submissions to the Committee that indicated a misunderstanding of "the purpose of public sector redress mechanisms and the remit of the Ombudsmen." With the LGO Watch submission I drafted, I was the only person who had submitted evidence calling for the abolition of the LGO as an alternative to radical reform in the 2005 ODPM Committee Report on the LGO. So I can be the only person to whom Dr Kirkham was referring in this respect. I have never been someone who misunderstands the purpose of public sector redress mechanisms or the remit of the Ombudsman. When I was Director of LGO Watch, I repeatedly explained to many people who contacted me, that the LGO could only investigate complaints that fell within his jurisdiction, and that even then, he could only investigate complaints where there was prima facie evidence of maladministration combined with evidence that not only had injustice been suffered, but significant injustice. I was also fully aware that there were time limit restrictions, that the local authority complaints procedure had to have been exhausted, and that there had to be no parallel legal action taking place in order for a complaint to be considered by the LGO.  

Nowhere in my submissions or campaigning have I ever expected the LGO to act outside his legal jurisdiction, or to relax his criterion of requiring prima facie evidence of maladministration with significant injustice. In fact, these are criteria and restrictions that I fully support, given that I have always been infinitely more concerned about grave injustices that affected very vulnerable people and their families, that could actually have brought about the loss of their lives or their mental health, than about any other issues that complainants were taking to the LGO.

Dr Kirkham was clearly referring in the above quotation to my own submission, as he makes reference to “EV 26” (which was my submission) after making his point. Yet nowhere in my submission is there the slightest shred of evidence that I “[misunderstood] the purpose of public sector redress mechanisms or the remit of the Ombudsman.” On the contrary: I gave very clear and detailed evidence that this was not the case. Dr Kirkham’s approach was to refer to my statement about LGO abolition, and then to create a straw man to attack, instead of attacking the points I actually made. So the views that Dr Kirkham dismissed were not by any stretch of the imagination my own views. This is Dr Kirkham, the independent external evaluator who was commissioned by the LGO, and who played such a major role in drafting the report for the Select Committee.

On page 384, Dr Kirkham’s article continues with an exploration of the LGO’s need to make the public aware of the LGO service. As he has already declared a belief that the LGO behaves with such a high degree of probity, and dismisses the counterevidence as not being “serious”, he clearly cannot appreciate that encouraging more public use of an outfit that systematically stitches people up after telling them they will be treated justly, only serves to increase the number of people who get stitched up. 
 

On page 386, Dr Kirkham explores the limitations of the LGO’s remit, which correctly includes the point that the LGO is not allowed to look at the merits of a decision of a local authority taken “in the exercise of a discretion vested in that authority.” This again has always been something of which I and other senior members of LGO Watch have been very much aware, and that we have never wanted to contest. Yet this is a very good target for Dr Kirkham to attack, even though LGO Watch was not associated with it:

“Judging from many of the consumer complaints made to the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the failure of the LGO to review the merits of a local authority decision probably lies at the heart of much of the dissatisfaction that some members of the public experience with the LGO.”

This line of attack continues on page 386, where Dr Kirkham writes about the disappointment of those whose complaints are not investigated by the LGO because they fall outside the LGO's jurisdiction, or for the various other reasons to which I have referred above. What Dr Kirkham presents as complainants’ objections bear no relevance to the arguments made by the current and previous Directors of LGO Watch in our 2005 and 2012 submissions.  


On page 388 Dr Kirkham states that

“[...] the public should be entitled to expect the highest standards of conduct and impartiality from the Ombudsman. Hence, it is a worry that in some quarters there is a perception that the LGO is too familiar with local authorities (Select Committee on the ODPM, 2004-2005, Ev 16-28). This perception has mostly been derived from the fact that two out of three present LGOs were Chief Executives of local authorities before moving to their present post (Local Government Ombudsman, 2005).”

But here, Dr Kirkham posits a cause that is in fact an effect. It was LGO Watch that claimed the Ombudsmen were too close to local authorities. We did not derive this perception from the fact that Ombudsmen tended to be ex-council CEOs. We derived the perception that the Ombudsmen were too close to local authorities from the fact that we had observed so much pro-council bias. We had observed this bias not only in our own personal experience of complaining to them, but also in evidence available in LGO annual reports, in the data  relating to their published Customer Satisfaction Surveys, and in the ongoing dishonesty and subterfuge we experienced from their office as we conducted the ongoing LGO Watch campaign. This was what caused the perception that the Ombudsmen were biased in favour of local authorities. The fact that, in 2005, two of the Ombudsmen were ex-local authority CEOs merely provided a reasonable explanation as to why such pro-council bias existed. As Dr Kirkham did not bother to speak to the real complainants at LGO Watch before writing "a complainant's view," we did not have the opportunity to explain this to him.

On page 389, Dr Kirkham bizarrely writes about “silencing” critics of the LGO:

“Improving the openness and transparency of the work of the LGO through regular public scrutiny would probably go a long way towards silencing critics of the post.” 

Surely what is important is "reassuring" and "satisfying" critics of the LGO, and not "silencing" us. If we were reassured, we would be silenced, of course. But it seems a very odd word to use in this context. What was Dr Kirkham thinking of?

On page 390, Dr Kirkham writes about delays during LGO investigations:

 

“Such delays have even opened up the LGO to allegations of maladministration!” 

So Dr Kirkham decided to use an exclamation mark here. What does that express? That  the incredibly high levels of probity and efficiency of the Local Government Ombudsman are such that any suggestion the LGO could be guilty of maladministration is simply absurd? Nothing more than a joke worthy of an exclamation mark?

Yet the External Evaluation team were supposed to be investigating this very possibility: whether the LGO was itself guilty of a high level of maladministration. This was surely not something to be rejected out-of-hand with a dismissive exclamation mark. Indeed, a member of the CLG Committee, Mr Simon Danczuk MP, himself raised the possibility that the LGO was committing maladministration in his piece for the Guardian of 26 July 2012 http://bit.ly/N8gQ7l entitled “Local Government Ombudsman risks becoming 'pickled in aspic'“:
 

“The ombudsman's 2011 Strategic Review, which it avoided publishing, suggested the bottom 20% of performers among the team handled some 10% cases. Some corporate functions within the ombudsman boasted staffing levels that were difficult to justify and that a significant proportion of operational support existed only to provide basic administrative and office services.

We heard of cases sitting in the commissioner's office for 12 months. A body responsible for examining maladministration was now being accused of maladministration because of its lethargic and cumbersome approach. The ombudsman's response wasn't encouraging. It was sketchy about plans for transformation and appeared to learn little from good practice in Scotland and Ireland.

There is no doubt the ombudsman needs to dramatically improve, and though it must retain its independence the Department for Communities and Local Government and parliament itself must push for that change.”

On page 391, Dr Kirkham writes about the merits of local settlements, but does not  explore the effect on complainants of having a “local settlement” effectively imposed on them by the LGO should a local authority agree to it, but the complainant regard the remedy as inadequate. This is something that actually violates the definition of the word “settlement”, which surely normally implies agreement – perhaps with some compromise - by both or all parties concerned. Of course, where complainants are concerned, the alternative to rejecting a “local settlement” proposed by the LGO is to have the investigation terminated and to get nothing at all. 

Dr Kirkham makes a statement on page 392 that merits closer examination:

“[...] the LGO are there to perform a number of roles and, of those roles, publicly calling local authorities to account is one of the least important.”

My view is that the taxpayers who fund the LGO would have little sympathy for Dr Kirkham’s position on this matter. One of the greatest checks and balances on the behaviour of a public authority, or of any person in public life, is the possibility of being publicly called to account: the essence of “accountability”. The priority of the LGO should indeed be to provide a remedy for a complainant who has suffered maladministration with significant injustice and harm at the hands of his local authority. But any suggestion that calling local authorities to account for maladministration should be “one of the least important roles” of the LGO does the citizen and taxpayer a disservice. It is the kind of attitude that LGO Watch associates with the LGO, whose office has a very strong reluctance to call local authorities to account. Indeed, the experience of LGO Watch activists is that the LGO does all he can to disguise, excuse and whitewash local authority maladministration, which, as a result, is massively underidentified and underreported. 

In contrast to the positive External Evaluation report on the LGO that has been drafted by Dr Kirkham and his colleagues, many of the LGO's own staff have far less confidence in the LGO, as was expressed in the damning results of the LGO's Staff Survey that the CLG Committee required them to carry out. Although the LGO published a highly selective and doctored "summary" and response to the Survey on their website, the actual Staff Survey Report was leaked to LGO Watch by someone who obviously wanted the public to know the truth. I have sent a copy of this leaked report to the CLG Select Committee, and it may form the content of a future blog.

For the public to have confidence that an independent external review of a body is truly an independent external review, it should surely only be carried out by people who are completely independent from the body being reviewed. The LGO were founder members of the British and Irish Ombudsman Association (BIOA). Dr Kirkham certainly was a member of the BIOA in the recent past, and may still be a member of it, for all I know (Please click on the link below and scroll to near bottom: “Member of British and Irish Ombudsman Association” http://www.shef.ac.uk/law/staff/academic/rkirkham .) The LGO is also a member of the BIOA.

Professional associations tend to function as a union that exists for the benefit and support of their members. Accordingly, I do not see how one member of an association can be considered to be truly independent from another member where the investigation of professional good practice is concerned.

 
Much of this blog has been dedicated to Dr Kirkham and his surprising views expressed in his 2005 article, and to the way that his article did an injustice to the evidence presented to the ODPM Committee in 2005 by real complainants to the LGO. There were two other Review Team members. Mr Jim Martin, as the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman, was also criticised by Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Watch in similar ways to which LGO Watch criticised the LGO. Yet he was commissioned as someone the public was meant to regard as impartial. As the SPSO, Mr Martin was also almost certainly a member of BIOS, and perhaps still is.

Mr Richard Thomas was the third Review Team member. He was the Information Commissioner at one time, which is essentially just another name for an ombudsman. Legally, the LGO are also commissioners, of course. In 2009 he was elected as Chairman of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Justice_and_Tribunals_Council

In 2010 the Government wanted to abolish the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmjust/965/96504.htm

but it has only recently folded:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Justice_and_Tribunals_Council

If the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council had been doing their job properly, a component of which was to keep under review administrative justice, then the LGO, the SPSO and the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales would have been improved a long time ago. Furthermore, if they were doing a good job, the question must be asked as to why the Government abolished them. The ex-Chairperson of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council was now being asked to review the performance of the LGO, when he should have already identified LGO maladministration when he was the Chairperson, but did not.

However one decides to describe the professional relationship between the LGO and the External Evaluation team, it appears to be a very incestuous one, and not one that inspires public confidence in objectivity and true independence. Instead we see the BIOA, the AJ&TC, Ombudsmen, and an academic who wrote a very pro-LGO article in 2005 that ignored and the evidence provided by real complainants in favour of straw men he could easily attack. 

Any amount of evidence can be rejected as an indication of bias, if the person evaluating the evidence is, for any reason, simply unwilling to see the bias. Although a legitimate judgment of bias will be based on reasonable evidence, it is ultimately a subjective interpretation: and those people who have vested interests in not seeing bias will always be able to say that, in their opinion, no bias is in evidence, and they may be skilled in selecting the counter-evidence they adduce to justify their position.

Those of us who have campaigned since 2003 to have the systemic maladministration, subterfuge and dishonesty of the Local Government Ombudsman exposed, have serious misgivings about the accuracy and objectivity of the External Evaluation into the LGO that has just been carried out. Most people do not realise how central a role the Local Government Ombudsman plays in encouraging bad practice and maladministration by local authorities. The fact that local authorities realise they have nothing to fear from their a friendly and biased LGO outfit means they can afford to be more relaxed about committing maladminstration and bad practice. This results in worse local authority services for local taxpayers, and the risk that any one of us could be seriously stitched-up one day, and have nowhere to turn to for justice. 

It remains to be seen whether the CLG Select Committee finally manage to recognise the LGO for what it is, and if they do, whether they will care enough to do something about it.

© Gary Powell, 2013

 

The Disgraceful Local Government Ombudsman.

How and why the Local Government Ombudsman (Twitter: @LGOmbudsman) stitches up complainants.

When I was Director of Local Government Ombudsman Watch, I found out that the LGO had commissioned a MORI Customer Satisfaction Poll in 1999 that exposed a 73% complainant dissatisfaction level with the Local Government Ombudsman's service. 61% of complainants declared themselves to be ‘very dissatisfied’ with the final outcome of their complaint. The survey revealed that even among those whose complaints had been successfully upheld by the LGO, roughly 50% reported dissatisfaction with the outcome. The results of this poll are similar to the previous and subsequent ones.

A number of the complainants interviewed for these polls would admittedly have lacked a valid or significant complaint, and would have expressed unjustified dissatisfaction. However, one should remember that the complainants interviewed would have already passed through an initial filter, as the LGO only investigates cases where there is prima facie evidence of maladministration with injustice. A dissatisfaction level of this order, including high levels of dissatisfaction among those whose complaints had been upheld, should therefore surely be a serious cause for concern.

The dissatisfaction statistics are even worse than the MORI poll revealed, as prior to the poll, the LGO took it upon themselves to remove 11% of the random sample selected by MORI for interview, with the excuse that the 11% of complainants removed included people who "might have been emotionally unsettled or abusive if contacted". The LGO was permitted to exclude this 11% at its own complete discretion. When I tried to find out from MORI what proportion of this figure was represented by what the LGO claimed to be potentially "unsettled or abusive" complainants, I was told MORI had no breakdown by category available. As the interviews were conducted by telephone, with the interviewers therefore safe from personal danger, I was very concerned indeed to hear that such a potentially large sample was removed at the LGO’s compete discretion, and in my view without justification. I believe therefore that the potentially "emotionally unsettled and abusive" complainants were mostly people who were understandably very angry at how unjustly they had been treated by the LGO, or else simply people the LGO knew had been stitched up, and that the motivation for their removal from the interview sample was a damage limitation exercise on the part of the LGO.

Following the 1999 Customer Satisfaction Survey, there have been two further quantitative-type customer satisfaction surveys, and each time the LGO has removed more and more complainants from the sample selected for interview. For the survey following the 1999 one, the LGO removed 14% of the sample. For the subsequent survey, the LGO removed 18% of the sample. There is overwhelming evidence of significant and increasing statistical manipulation, and it is very disheartening that the Communities and Local Government Select Committee (Twitter: @CommonsCLG)  has allowed the LGO continue behaving in this way with impunity.

The LGO’s own published statistics prove an under-reporting of maladministration. The majority of cases of maladministration are reported as ‘local settlements’. This is a euphemism. Where the LGO finds that a council is guilty of bad practice, and the council agrees to comply with his remedy, or volunteers to put things right during the investigation, regardless of the harm the complainant has been caused or the seriousness of the maladministration in question, the LGO officially terminates the investigation, and reports the maladministration as a ‘local settlement’. It is hardly a settlement in the usual sense of the word at all, because the complainant is unable to reject a settlement imposed by the LGO if the council agrees to it. On the other hand, the council has no legal obligation to accept any settlement suggested to them by the LGO. The local settlements are beyond any question still cases of maladministration, as the former ombudsman, Mr White, attested in his oral evidence during the 2005 evidence session. They are just not reported as such by the LGO when a council agrees to its "remedy". This results in under-reporting of local authority maladministration on a grand scale. The LGO generally only applies the term ‘maladministration’ if a council refuses to comply with the local settlement requested. When this happens, the LGO publishes a report. This is the punishment for a member not playing by the rules of the Old Boys' Club and jeopardising the whole edifice of privilege and subterfuge in the process.

Maladministration cannot become ‘non-maladministration’ just because a council agrees to comply with a remedy. The LGO logically cannot request that the council agree to a ‘local settlement’ unless he has determined that maladministration has taken place. Indeed, as noted above, Mr White admitted that ‘local settlements’ were cases of maladministration.
This misreporting of the true levels of maladministration results in the public receiving heavily massaged figures regarding the actual frequency of maladministration committed by their local authorities. This in turn encourages councils to commit maladministration with impunity, as they know it is very unlikely it will ever be reported as such in the media, and they also know that the LGO does all it can to keep its friends running local authorities off the hook.

As an example, in the LGO’s report for 2003/4, for every one case of maladministration reported (i.e. normally, where the council has refused to accept the LGO’s ‘local settlement’ proposal), there were a further nineteen cases of maladministration hidden in the ‘local settlements’ statistics. (Of the 11,600 complaints submitted that the LGO regarded prima facie as representing ‘maladministration with injustice’ in 2003/4, the LGO reported that only 180 cases (1.6 %) represented maladministration. There were however a further 3,368 cases (29%) of maladministration reported merely as 'local settlements'. The former Ombudsman, Jerry White, confirmed at the 2005 Select Committee evidence session that these further cases also represented maladministration.)

The investigating and adjudicating staff at the LGO, including the senior staff, are mostly recruited from local government. They are far too emotionally and professionally connected with local councils to be investigating them impartially. The Ombudsmen themselves, at the time when I ran LGO Watch, were usually former Chief Executive Officers of local authorities. In that former role, they would obviously have experienced findings of maladministration against their own councils - even if they were only described as ‘local settlements’ - and it is hard to believe they did not have an inappropriate degree of sympathy and identification with the CEOs of councils the LGO was investigating.

The LGO has been allowed by the select committee overseeing them - now called the Communities and Local Government Committee - to behave with impunity, and that has reinforced bad practice and led to a great deal of injustice being committed against UK citizens, some of whom are in a desperate situation, and have been seriously wronged, by the time they make a complaint to the local government ombudsman. There is no adequate mechanism for appealing against a finding of the LGO. Judicial reviews are only available to the wealthy. Even then, only very rarely is it possible to bring a successful challenge against the LGO via this route. There seems to be a great deal of resistance in the senior judiciary to challenging the judgment of the LGO. Even if a judicial review was upheld, the judges only have the authority to ask the LGO to take another look at his decision. For anyone pursuing this futile process, the legal costs costs can be astronomical.

Where the LGO requests a ‘local settlement’, this usually involves very paltry sums of compensation that do not properly reflect the harm and suffering caused to the complainant. Ironically, it is local taxpayers who have to foot the bill for these local settlements. I believe that, in many cases, complainants would be happy to do without these compensation payments if instead they had a proper acknowledgment of the injustice they have been caused. This acknowledgment should take the form of a clear finding of maladministration that is not disguised by any euphemism, and should be accompanied by an instruction to the council that it put things right for the complainant in practical terms. The council would then be better motivated to good practice by the knowledge that any finding of maladministration will be reported as such by the LGO and potentially by the media, and the public would then have a better idea of the extent of maladministration being committed by local councils.

At the moment, most complainants to the LGO, including those with compelling evidence, have their complaints dismissed. The LGO currently has absolute discretion to discontinue an investigation, and to offer any excuse or subterfuge for doing so that comes to mind, or none. The LGO also tends to accept the word of local councils without demanding evidence, whilst ignoring evidence provided by the complainant. The LGO is a biased and profoundly unjust institution that actively works against the good citizen. It is an ugly distortion of what it was set up in 1974 to be. It exists to preserve its own interests, the interests of local authorities, and the interests of its cross-party political supporters in Parliament, all of whom have a vested interest in continuing to disguise the full extent of maladministration and bad practice being committed by local authorities, whatever political party happens to be governing them. (I am a member of the Conservative Party, and am still waiting for my own Party to address the problem of the LGO, after suffering several years of the previous Labour Government ignoring the injustice and actively obstructing the efforts of LGO Watch to expose the LGO and encourage reform.)

When someone who has been treated unjustly by a local authority takes their case to the LGO, and the LGO takes the side of that local authority, the individual who is the now the victim of two tiers of injustice can be effectively silenced by their local authority, which is now able to claim to anyone who asks that the LGO has found in their favour. The complainant therefore ends up in an even worse situation than the one in which they found themself prior to taking their complaint to the LGO.

One thing the Local Government Ombudsman is good at, and which is facilitated by the £20 million per annum of taxpayers' money they receive, is whitewashing their own bad practice and the misery and suffering they cause to so many people. Since LGO Watch was founded in 2003, they have had to expend a lot of money and energy covering up the maladministration they themselves commit, and spin-doctoring their way foward in an attempt to preserve their privileges and the privileges of the very highly-paid local authority CEOs whose councils are guilty of bad practice against taxpayers. 

If you have an interest in the LGO for any reason, and have not been taken in by their spin, a good website to visit is this one, and I would recommend first reading the LGO's Fifteen Pillars of Injustice.

The Local Government Ombudsman has now taken its spin-doctoring campaign onto Twitter at @LGOmbudsman and are now using #LGOlive to advance their spin-doctoring PR "Advisory Forum".

Gary Powell

© Gary Powell, 2013  

Chile: yet another violent homophobic attack. Young man in coma.

Below is my translation of an article that appeared in the German online LGBT magazine "Queer.de" on 28.10.13. (The original article in German, with links to related articles in German, can be read here.)

No improvement in his condition.

Chile: young gay man in a coma after a homophobic attack.

Wladimir Sepúlveda was kicked unconscious

A blatant hate crime rocks the country - while it already anxiously awaits the verdict in another homophobic hate-crime case. 

 

Once again a hate crime makes the headlines in Chile: on Sunday 20th October a 21-year-old was so badly beaten up in San Francisco de Mostazal that he has since been in a coma. His prognosis is not optimistic.

Wladimir Sepúlveda was walking arm-in-arm with three friends through the town centre after visiting the beach, when a group of four men and two women asked him if he had a cigarette lighter. Then the group started to deliver insults, saying, "We will massacre you queers."

Following a brief scuffle, Wladimir initially managed to flee, but was caught up by the attackers and punched to the ground. Then he was repeatedly kicked in the head. By the time his friends reached him, he was already unconscious.

Shortcomings of the emergency services.

Despite an urgent call to the emergency services, it took an ambulance thirty minutes to arrive, and even then it had only one attendant. His friends had to put Wladimir, who was seriously injured, onto a stretcher. At the Accident and Emergency Department, a doctor diagnosed only minor injuries. It was only when he was taken to another hospital that he received immediate treatment.

Chile's Minister for Health has in the meantime visited the young man in hospital and has promised that there would be an investigation into these events. As the injuries were initially diagnosed as minor, the attackers were not arrested immediately: this did not happen until four days later.

The young man's condition has not improved since his admission to hospital. The Minister for Health has announced that, because of his serious head injuries and bleeding in the brain, it is not expected that he will improve. The LGBT organisation Movilh, which represents Wladimir's family, has criticised the police and the health service.

Verdict awaited in the Zamudio case.

This attack is a reminder of another violent attack, which has outraged Chile in the same way as did the murder of Matthew Shepard in the USA. At the beginning of March 2012, 24-year-old Daniel Zamudio was so badly tortured by neo-Nazis that he had to be put into an artifical coma. At the end of the month he succumbed to his injuries.

Chile was shocked last year by the brutal murder of Daniel Zamudio. Bild vergrößern

The murder of Zamudio, whose torments included having a Swastika carved into his chest, led to an outpouring of sympathy among the population. This also happened in the political domain: in summer 2012 an anti-discrimination law was passed that had been on ice for a long time. This law introduces harsher punishments for hate crimes.

But this law was too late for the trial of the four men accused of Zamudio's murder. On 17th October, a court found them guilty of first-degree murder. The sentence is being announced this coming Monday; the state prosecution service is demanding life imprisonment for one of the convicted men, and jail sentences of between eight and fifteen years for the other three.

Translated by Gary Powell. Published with permission from Queer.de.

Puzzled bigots

Why bigots are so puzzled when they get called "bigots".

Anyone who has spent any time perusing readers' comments under online Daily Telegraph articles may know that the toxic racists and homophobes who post there are often at a complete loss to process the accusation when they are called "bigots" in response to their poisonous remarks. 

Words often accrue a meaning from their public use that is generally understood, but that does not lend itself readily to verbal exegesis. Most people seem to have a pretty clear idea of what is meant in our public language by the word "bigot", and most people feel confident using the word in the correct social context. The word does also seem to assume a common value system, as it is clearly a pejorative term, and it seems to be applied to people who cause real or potential suffering to others - usually a class of people - by attributing to the people they vilify some negative qualities on the basis of no, very little, or very selective evidence, and that is impervious to all rational counter-argument and evidence because the judgment is based on negative emotions and malice, or because the judgment has at its root a stubborn adherence to the teachings of a dogmatic religious system.

Those who the majority of the population might feel are appropriately termed "bigots", might themselves be fused with a very different definition of bigotry. For them, the "bigot" is someone who criticises them for making negative judgments about people or groups of people when those judgments are based on a religious faith or other set of beliefs that they deem to be immune from criticism. Or the "bigot" is someone who accuses them of prejudice, of having made their judgment on the basis of inadequate or of selective evidence, and of being impervious to counter-arguments and evidence, where they themselves disagree that these accusations are based in fact.

There is always going to be disagreement about who is, and who isn't, a bigot. He who harbours prejudice and malice, and bats away all evidence of the falsity of his beliefs, has a very different perception of the world from the person who does not. For the former, what most of us call "bigotry" is simply normality - the perspective that every right-thinking person should have - and there is nothing wrong with it.

There is room for people to disagree about who is, and who isn't, a bigot. But it remains the case that someone who is a bigot will regard his mindset as a perfectly natural and reasonable one, and is never going to admit to the condition.

For such a person, the "bigot" is simply the person who presumes to challenge the legitimacy and validity of somebody else's perspective, no matter how offensive that perspective might be perceived to be. This is a self-defeating concept of the word "bigot", of course, as it prevents the real bigot from challenging those who accuse him of bigotry without ensnaring himself in his own peculiar definition of bigotry in the process.

© Gary Powell, 2013

Pro-gay bus ads.

My imaginary pro-gay bus ad: "Thank you for supporting gay equality."

We are all human beings in a state of transition. Many of us have held and expressed prejudiced views in our past that we are now embarrassed about and regard as in error. Such views need to be challenged, but it also needs to be acknowledged that they arise from specific causes and conditions, such as social programming, a rigid belief structure, a lack of exposure to counter-evidence, or difficulties in processing evidence and thinking logically. 

When people are locked in to prejudiced mindsets, they themselves will benefit from liberation, as well as the people they wrongly denigrate. Challenging their beliefs, and making them feel uncomfortable about their beliefs, should be a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Yet so often, political activists write off the offender, and are satisfied with causing him depression, anger, humiliation, or some other kind of disadvantage, as the end in itself, apparently without any concern as to whether a different approach might be more likely to change his mind, or whether it might accord with the generosity of spirit with which we would all like to be treated when we make mistakes about our interpretation of the world that lead to undeserved suffering by others. We all have something in our lives - even if it is in the distant past - to match the ignorant callousness of the homophobes. Who is to say we would not have the same views they hold if we had been born with the same genes, into the same families, and had their life experience?

The person who has shifted to the bleakest part of the moral spectrum is not the ignoramus, but the hypocrite: this person expresses or acts in accordance with a view he knows to be false and to cause suffering, for the sake of personal advantage. This person secretly commits actions that are in the same general category as those he condemns, and includes those who condemn equal marriage yet have affairs. The hypocrite is joined in this acrid moral sludge by those who are simply venomous and sadistic: those who gain satisfaction simply by trying to cause other people unhappiness and by denigrating minority groups they regard as fair game. Even here, none of us knows how many of the venomous and sadistic are simply sociopaths who lack the empathy that informs the moral insights of the vast majority.

When I first saw the Stonewall bus advertisements saying, "Some people are gay. Get over it!" I felt gratified about this very public challenge to homophobic attitudes. But before long, the slogan started to jar with me, and although it had stark appeal to what remains psychologically of the radical gay activism of my early 20s, I came to the view that the advertisement was ill-considered.

Many people do brave and determined battle with their homophobic social programming, especially when they have been raised to respect the tenets of their parents' dogmatic religion. It can take a long time before they have processed the cognitive and affective obstacles to the liberalism and fairness that the deepest part of their psyches wants to embrace. Barking "Get over it!" at such people does not seem to me to do justice to their good will and their own personal struggle in this respect.

There are also, in my view, many people whose aversion to homosexuality, or to expressing publicly a liberal attitude towards it, derives from their own homosexual feelings that, because of the prejudiced society or parental home in which they grew up, they find themselves unable to come to terms with. Exclaiming "Get over it!" to such people seems a little akin to telling someone with clinical depression, "Pull yourself together!" or "Snap out of it!" Perhaps the slightly less abrasive approach that reflects the circumstances beyond their control that led to their personal predicament, that may well have involved quite a lot of suffering over the years, is the one that will best help them on their journey.

Of course, there was an attempt by a Christian group to retaliate by running a bus advertisement that very misleadingly implied homosexuality could be cured. The "Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!" posters were rightly banned by Transport for London, chaired by Boris Johnson. This advertisement could have contributed to psychological harm suffered by lesbian and gay young people who are exposed to the false messages that their sexuality is something defective that needs to be cured, and that it is possible for their sexual orientation to be changed. I wrote an article for Pink News about how such religious homophobia caused me to develop a serious clinical depression in my teens.

The ban on the Christian advertisement was followed by the inevitable protests from dogmatic religious adherents that people of faith should have the right to criticise homosexuality. What these protesters did not grasp is that Transport for London should equally have the right to deny them a platform for their ideas. Person/ organisation A having a right to "freedom of speech" does not entail that person/organisation B has any obligation to provide a platform for it.

Quite apart from my view that the Stonewall bus ad is juvenile and badly crafted, I have to say that I don't regard the side of buses as a good place for any advertising that could be considered contentious: and that includes pro-gay or anti-gay advertisements, and advertisements for religious conventions. A thought should perhaps be given to the feelings of the people who drive the buses all day. Someone who is strongly opposed to fundamentalist Christianity might feel very uncomfortable driving a bus advertising an Evangelical festival. A gay or pro-gay driver might feel similarly about driving a bus with an ad suggesting that being LGBT is something that needs to be cured, and can be cured. A driver who has religious misgivings about homosexuality (as misguided and unfortunate as they may be) might similarly have a crisis of conscience about driving a bus with the Stonewall advertisements. In fact, there is at least one documented case of this happening.

There is a sense in which bus drivers are agents for the dissemination of the advertising on bus posters. I don't think it is fair to force them to choose between losing their job or suffering the discomfort of promoting ideas with which they might strongly disagree. In addition to the discomfort caused to the drivers, forcing a homophobic person to help advertise the acceptability of homosexuality on pain of losing his job, is hardly likely to make him or her feel less resentful towards LGBT people: on the contrary. There are plenty of other places where contentious advertising can be located instead.

Changing hearts and minds is a subtle business, and although using blunt instruments might feel very satisfying to those who wield them, we need to remember that we are supposed to be trying to make friends of the people who are about to be clobbered. Winning over a homophobic person, rather than being satisfied with simply telling him he is a jerk, might make a great difference to the life experience of any gay or lesbian children or grandchildren that former homophobe might have.

As stated above, I do not regard the sides of buses as appropriate places for pro-gay or anti-gay advertisements, any more than I regard them as appropriage places for pro-religion or anti-religion advertisements. But if there are to be pro-LGBT advertisements on buses, let's have one that does more than bark at anti-gay people. Let's have one that speaks to far more people, and that carries a positive and optimistic message. 

Something along the lines of, "Thanks for supporting gay equality."
 

© Gary Powell, 2013

Homophobia in the 2013 German elections.

Below is a translation of an article that appeared in the German online LGBT magazine "Queer.de" on 16.9.13. (The original article in German can be read here.)

Homophobia in the 2013 German General Election.

The BIG Party: posters opposing equal marriage.

One of several BIG posters opposing equal marriage in Bad Godesberg, Bonn. It reads: “Every child has a right to a father and a mother.”

Not for the first time, this small Islamic party is campaigning on a homophobic platform.

“BIG”, a fringe party founded by migrants to Germany, has continued its homophobic campaign in the German parliamentary elections, leading to the appearance of posters that declare, by means of photos and an inequality sign, that a gay couple is something different from a heterosexual one. To this end, the poster states: “Every child has a right to a father and a mother.”

The message is that only the BIG Party stands up for heterosexual couples, whereas gay couples have the SPD, the Greens, the FDP, the “Linke” (Democratic Socialists) and the Pirate Party on their side. Only the CDU (Conservative Party) is missing: arguably, for good reason.

This year, the "Bündnis für Innovation und Gerechtigkeit" (Alliance for Innovation and Justice) is standing in the German parliamentary general election for the first time: in Berlin, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Baden-Württemberg. However, since the party was founded in 2010, it has never gained more than 0.5 per cent of the vote in several regional and local elections. In the 2011 elections to the Berlin House of Representatives, the Alliance already conducted a homophobic campaign by warning in a leaflet that "being gay" could become a school subject.

Parallels to the "AfD" (The "Alternatives for Germany Party").

The BIG Party was not alone with its faux-outrage about a new sex education programme. First of all the Springer press got worked up about it, and then Catholics such as the k-tv chief editor Martin Lohmann on the “Free World” website, and the similarly popular talkshow guest Hedwig Freifrau von Beverfoerde as the spokesperson for the "Initiativ Familienschutz" (Family Protection Initiative).

The “Free World” news website and the Family Protection Initiative are run by Sven von Storch, the husband of the conservative activist Beatrix von Storch, who has second place on the Berlin federal state elections list for the “AfD” (Alternatives for Germany) and could gain a place in the German national parliament should the party succeed in gaining over 5 per cent of the vote. Von Storch, who as an also-ran takes up the issue of homosexuality on her campaign home page, asked the chairperson of the German Bishops’ Conference a few weeks ago to warn people about the Green Party’s and the Pirate Party’s support for equal marriage.

The homophobic advertisement by the Partei Bibeltreuer Christen (The Bible-Believing Christian Party).

Leaving aside the public rejection of LGBT equality from the German Chancellor, the Bible-Believing Christian Party is certainly conducting the most vocally homophobic election campaign at the moment, thanks to an advertisement that is also being broadcast on television. 

In the advertisement, we see a child being led through a park by two men, and we hear the comment, “and in this way, man has disgraced himself with man.” Later, the girl says, “But I need a dad and a mum.” However, the PBC has also never achieved more than 0.1 per cent  in a general election. 

In last week’s ARD documentary, “Der Kampf der Kleinen” (“The Fight of the Small Parties”), we were treated to activists from both BIG and PBC who made anti-gay comments on camera. Although the BIG Party Chairman, Haluk Yildiz, said he had no fundamental problem with same-sex relationships, he did say he was opposed to their being treated equally. However, when the issue of homosexuality was raised, the Party Treasurer soon started to talk about child abuse.

Translated by Gary Powell, and published with permission from Queer.de.

Fundamentalism and slavery.

History is littered with examples of how dogmatic, fundamentalist religion can make the human condition much worse than it needs to be. 

This was perhaps best expressed by the physicist Steven Weinberg, who said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.”

He went on to give other examples where dogmatic religious belief had made people’s behaviour worse:

“Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will.”

In 2013, the former Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, who is a Christian, was challenged by a Christian pastor for his liberal stance on equal marriage. The pastor objected to same-sex marriage because he believed the Bible taught that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Mr Rudd replied by reminding the pastor that the Bible treated slavery as a natural condition, and that St Paul instructed slaves to obey their masters. 

Now that slavery is considered an abomination rather than a natural, divinely-endorsed state in modern society, fundamentalist Christians tend to gloss over or ignore the many Biblical references that treat it uncritically or even approvingly. Perhaps, in the course of time, should Evangelical Christianity survive, Biblical homophobia will go the same way.

[Thanks to "Campaigns Worth Sharing", on Twitter as @campaignsworth, for drawing my attention to the Kevin Rudd statement after reading the first draft of this blogpost.]

© Gary Powell, 2013

UKIP: the repository for the ideological toxic waste of British history.

UKIP's behaviour regarding the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act speaks volumes for its regressive and opportunistic values.

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) opposed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. Its central argument seemed to be that if equal marriage were legalised in the UK, then the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would impose it on reluctant religious institutions.

During the equal marriage campaign, many religious adherents expressed support for UKIP on these grounds. The policy certainly attracted the votes of social conservatives, many of whom expressed belief in UKIP's ECHR warning, while others, in some state of confusion, stubbornly declared their conviction that the Act itself was intending to force places of religious worship to conduct weddings. 

UKIP was very serious about its opposition to equal marriage, and sacked its libertarian youth leader, Olly Neville, after he gave an interview expressing support for the policy of same-sex matrimony. 

Now that the Act has been passed into law, things seem to have gone very quiet on the objection front. Including from UKIP.

The arguments invoking the ECHR bogeyman might have seemed impressive to some at the time, and they were certainly repeated often enough. But they were very flawed arguments. Crying "wolf" is a very effective way of getting people's feelings stirred up and mustering allies. But if no wolf actually turns up, the rabble-rousers will suffer the longer-term harm of seriously damaged credibility.

There was no possibility of the ECHR imposing same-sex marriage on religious institutions in the UK or anywhere else. The evidence to counter the credibility of claims of an impending ECHR imposition was absolutely overwhelming. No-one making this claim made similar claims about the ECHR intervening in British law to force religious institutions to comply with equality measures that relate to groups other than gay and lesbian people.

If the ECHR had any intentions of imposing equal marriage on reluctant religious institutions in the UK, then it would already have intervened on behalf of other groups protected by equality legislation.

There has been no attempt by the ECHR to impose women priests on the Catholic Church anywhere in Europe. I have not heard a single campaigner against equal marriage who warned of the ECHR imposing same-sex marriage on churches, mention that he has any similar concerns about the ECHR imposing women priests on the Catholic Church.
The claim that the ECHR will impose same-sex marriage on English or Welsh religious institutions is no more credible than any claim it will impose women priests on the English or Welsh Catholic Church.

Neither has the ECHR imposed women bishops on the Anglican Church. Or forced the Catholic Church to marry divorcés. Or forced any church or other religious institution to host civil partnership ceremonies. And neither have I ever heard a single opponent of same-sex marriage say they fear that the ECHR would do so.

The fact that the ECHR has never behaved in this way, and that the opponents of equal marriage never announce that they expect them to do so, together with the fact that same-sex marriage has existed in the Netherlands for about twelve years without the ECHR imposing it on its churches, are very clear indications of the legal safeguards that protect the religious institutions of EU member states.

So now I come back to the deafening silence from UKIP. If they were genuinely concerned that outraged churches, mosques, synagogues and temples would have same-sex marriage imposed on them by the ECHR, where has that concern gone? Why are they not now exploiting the situation as an opportunity to point to an impending human rights atrocity soon to make its way towards us over the Channel? And if religions are sitting on a cliff edge now, just waiting for this intervention to happen, shouldn't UKIP be pledging to campaign for the repeal of the Act, at least until they bring about their planned withdrawal of the UK from the ECHR?

If UKIP started to campaign for the repeal of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, which would involve the annulment of same-sex marriages, the impression of bigotry and heartlessness they created would chime with some of the worst of their negative publicity. If UKIP continued to warn that the ECHR was going to impose same-sex marriages on churches, mosques, synagogues and temples on pain of prosecution, their credibility when this didn't happen would be badly damaged.

UKIP's silence on this issue speaks volumes with regard to their true motives in opposing same-sex marriage. When votes are up for grabs, UKIP's libertarian and pro-gay equality supporters can go to hell, as far as their opportunistic leadership is concerned. 

Homophobia is fast becoming as unacceptable as racism in mainstream UK society. British society is continuing to evolve in a way that casts off fetters that have made us a less cohesive, enlightened and productive society. The question is whether the behaviour of elected UKIP candidates, and key UKIP policies such as opposition to same-sex marriage, actually reveal more concerning what UKIP is really about than the facade of the laissez-faire, chummy, chortling, man-of-the-people UKIP officers photographed and filmed with a beer in one hand and maybe a cigarette in the other.

In a decade, UKIP won't be able to use the ECHR as an excuse to oppose equal marriage any more, more countries will have legalised same-sex marriage, and there will be many more younger voters in the UK who oppose homophobic discrimination. In its current form, UKIP will become increasingly out-of-touch with the electorate, and with the modern world. And any party that treats its libertarian, progressive and LGBT supporters with the contempt and dishonesty UKIP has displayed recently, thoroughly deserves the demise that awaits it as history sweeps away the ideological toxic waste that divides and deludes otherwise good people. 

© Gary Powell, 2013