Mark Thompson

Have Labour just made a big mistake on the benefits cap?

2012-01-28T17:45:00.000Z

This is one of my favourite exchanges from Yes Prime Minister:

Sir Humphrey Appleby: [discussing how to stop the PM's anti-smoking legislation] I think the crucial argument is that we are living in a free country and we *must* be free to make our own decisions. After all, government shouldn't be a nursemaid, we don't want the nanny state.
Sir Frank Gordon: Oh, that's very good.
Sir Ian Whitworth: Excellent.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: The only problem is that that is also the argument for legalising the sale of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, arsenic and gelignite.

I wonder if Liam Byrne may come to wish he had had an Appleby around to provide a counter-argument when coming up with Labour's latest approach to the benefits cap. He writes in todays Telegraph, in a piece entitled "The same benefits cap won't fit London and Yorkshire":

But the problem with the Government’s proposal – as presented – is that “one cap fits all” won’t work.

Most of the benefits paid under the cap are for housing. But these are far higher in places like London than in other areas. While all that £500 a week might get you in central London is a one-bedroom apartment, in Rotherham, Yorkshire it would get you a six-bedroom house. How can a “one-size-fits-all” cap be fair to working people in both London and Rotherham?

Perhaps if he had have done the exchange could have gone something like this:

Sir Humphrey Appleby: I think the crucial argument is that a "one-size-fits-all" cap cannot simultaneously be fair to working people in both London and Rotherham.
Liam Byrne: Oh, that's very good.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: The only problem is that that is also the argument for agreeing to regional pay bargaining and even regionally varied benefits. Which the unions and the grass roots of your party will never accept.

Surely that is now Byrne's and Labour's problem. The coalition has been pushing the idea of regional pay bargaining for a while now which has thus far been responded to by protest from Labour MPs. How can they now credibly fight that when they have made pretty much the exact same argument the government make in favour of it in the context of a benefits cap? I can hear Paxman sneering now. If there is such a difference in the cost of living between different parts of the country then how can you possibly argue against regional bargaining? Do you even understand your own policy Mr Byrne?

I expect they'll have an argument against this but I fear it will end up as convoluted as their approach to the cuts and will be far too easy for their political opponents to shoot down as muddled and incoherent.

How much longer can Labour keep dithering around like this before Miliband's position becomes untenable?

Keep it simple, stupid.

2012-01-27T08:30:00.000Z

Compare and contrast:

The candidate with the most votes wins.

and

Round one
• The number 1 votes for each candidate are put into a pile and counted.
• If a candidate receives more than half the number 1 votes cast, they win and there is no further counting.
• If no candidate receives more than half the number 1 votes there would be at least one more round of counting.

Round two
• The candidate with the fewest number 1 votes is removed from the contest – in this case Candidate D.
• Each ballot paper on Candidate D’s pile is looked at again.
• If the ballot paper shows a number 2 vote for another candidate, it is added to that candidate’s pile. For example, if a ballot paper showed a number 1 vote for Candidate D and a number 2 vote for Candidate B, it would be moved to Candidate B’s pile.
• If the ballot paper does not show a number 2 vote, it is no longer used.

Round three
• Again, the candidate with fewest votes is removed from the contest – this time it’s Candidate C.
• Each ballot paper on Candidate C’s pile is looked at again to see if any of the remaining candidates are ranked.
• If so, the ballot paper is moved to the pile of the candidate ranked highest on that ballot paper.
• If none of the remaining candidates are ranked the ballot paper is no longer used.

If more candidates are involved, this process can be repeated until one candidate has more than half the remaining votes.

They are both taken from the Electoral Commission's official literature (opens PDF) circulated before the AV referendum last year. The 7 word one describes First Past The Post. The second one that spans several paragraphs and bullet points describes how AV works.

During the AV campaign, as a supporter of the Yes camp I could see that the fact that FPTP could be described so easily and AV took longer was damaging us. It is hard enough to get people interested in political issues and anything that makes your message harder to get across decreases your chances of gaining traction. I am not saying this was the only reason why the Yes2AV campaign failed. There were lots of reasons but this definitely did not help and contributed to the failure.

Now compare and contrast these:

We have to make these cuts as we are spending beyond our means.

and

If we were in government, we wouldn't be cutting this fast or this much. But because the Government's cuts are damaging economic growth, there will be fewer tax revenues and more spending on unemployment benefits, so even with their cuts, the deficit won't shrink as fast as the Coalition wants. That means, by the time of the next election, the deficit won't have been eliminated, which means, if we win, that we'll have to make even more cuts. So we won't be able to reverse the ones that have already been made.

The first is a reasonable synopsis of the coalition government's economic position, the sort that you hear mnisters regularly trotting out.

The second one is about the best synopsis I have seen of Labour's latest economic position on the cuts (taken from a Mary Ann Sieghart piece in The Indpendent last week).

The first one takes less than three seconds to say. The second one takes about 10 times as long.

Sadly, nuanced political messages are a very difficult sell. Unless you can distill your policy down into a short, catchy ten second or less soundbite then you are on the back foot from the get go. I have lamented this problem before but it is undeniably true and if anything is getting worse as people's attention beomes ever more fragmented with many different sorts of media and leisure activities competing for our time.

Perhaps even more importantly, as we discovered to our cost during the AV campaign, the fact that Labour's message is more nuanced makes it very easy for their opponents to paint it as muddled and overly complicated. Along the lines of "They were against the cuts, now they are for them" (with unfortunate echoes of John Kerry's worst gaffe during his doomed 2004 US presidential bid). I received an e-mail from Nick Clegg sent out to party members recently that does exactly that.

I'm not sure what the two Eds thought they would achieve with this policy. They have both been around in politics long enough to understand the rules of the game. I fear that unless they can quickly find a way to explain it as succinctly as the government can explain theirs then it will fail to cut through.

They may well rue failing to learn one of the main lessons of the AV campaign.

Keep it simple, stupid.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Why is a recession a recession?

2012-01-26T09:36:00.001Z

Consider these two hypothetical scenarios for GDP in the economy:

Q1: -0.7%
Q2: +0.1%
Q3: +0.1%
Q4: -0.5%

and secondly:

Q1: +0.7%
Q2: -0.1%
Q3: -0.1%
Q4: +0.5%

The two scenarios are essentially mirror images of each other with the signs inverted. I am assuming that in Q4 of the preceeding year and Q1 of the following year there is positive growth.

The curious thing is that the first scenario would not technically be considered a recession. There is one quarter of negative growth (-0.7%) followed by two quarters of only just positive growth (+0.1% each time) followed by a final quarter of negative growth again. Beause a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, the non-contiguous nature of the quarters where growth was negative means the dreaded word "recession" cannot be applied.

The second scenario however does fall into the definition of a recession. This is because despite relatively good growth in Q1 and Q4 there are (just) two quarters of negative growth in succession in Qs 2 and 3.

The crazy thing is, in the first scenario, during the year where there is no recession overall growth is -1%. Whereas in the second "recession" scenario growth is +1%!

Some may say this is all a bit technical and doesn't matter but it does. Because words make a big difference. In the second scenario, the media would be all over the "fact" that the country had tipped into recession, there would be all sorts of news reports about it and of course opposition politicians would make as much political capital as possible out of it. This in turn damages confidence and actually makes further contraction more likely.

So the definition of "a recession" seems like it is a little bit inflexible. In the scenarios it is clearly the first one that is worst for the economy and we surely need a way to reflect that? Something that perhaps looks at the trend across three or four quarters and takes the average to see if things are negative might be a bit fairer perhaps?

I would be interested in hearing thoughts from others about this and perhaps a justification of why the current system (which apparently evolved from an article by an economic statistician in the New York Times in 1975) is the best.

I think I may take some convincing!

Does Labour have a charisma problem?

2012-01-23T10:22:00.000Z

I was thinking the other day about the Labour Party and its recent history and I realised something that had not really occurred to me before. Despite having held power for almost half of the last 50 years, there are only two Labour PMs from that period who have actually won an election. They are Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.

I think perhaps this sometimes gets a bit lost in the detail of the 7 election wins and 24 years of power they yielded. Of course Jim Callaghan and Gordon Brown were also PM during this period but they never won any elections.

The reason I am interested in this is because it shows that it is actually quite rare for Labour to have leaders that actually win power following an election. In that period there has been Wilson, Callaghan, Foot, Kinnock, Smith, Blair and Brown. Seven leaders and only two of them managed it. OK in the case of Smith fate intervened to prevent him from contesting an election as leader but even discounting him it is a success rate of only one third. And Kinnock even had two bites of the cherry and failed both times.

What is particularly interesting about this fact for me is that from that list of leaders, Wilson and Blair both stand out as being particularly charismatic. Wilson was the first leader to really get the importance of TV and its effect on the electorate. Looking at old footage of him it can seem quite staid and fuddy-duddy but for his time he was able to connect with the electorate in a way that his contemporaries struggled to do. That must have had a strong bearing on the fact that he managed to win 4 of the 5 elections that he contested between 1964 and 1974 (inclusive). Blair of course was indisputedly the most charismatic politician of his political generation and used this as leverage to help his party win 3 elections.

Callaghan had some avuncular qualities but made a number of mistakes and was rolled over by the Thatcher juggernaut. Foot was an intellectual powerhouse but was unable to connect with the electorate. Kinnock never connected either, perhaps because of his tendency to make long winded speeches that struggled to get to the point. Smith as discussed never had a shot as he died in 1994 and Gordon Brown was a charisma disaster area.

This suggests that far from the pendulum swinging back and forth between the two main parties with any sort of regularity (the Buggins Turn rule) there is a lot of resistance by the electorate to elect a Labour leader as PM unless they are particularly charismatic. I'm not quite sure why this is as the Conservatives don't appear to obey this rule as much. Heath was terrible at connecting and yet won in 1970 and Thatcher was reguarly derided in the 1970s for lacking what was needed in this area (note the joke in that episode of Fawlty Towers about "The wit of Margaret Thatcher" being one of the world's shortest books for example). And John Major was not exactly blessed with a great ability to connect either and yet he won in 1992 with the highest number of votes in UK electoral history (although he was up against Kinnock of course).

Maybe this is unfair to Labour but the barrier does appear to be set a fair bit higher for them. Which brings me to Ed Miliband. Looking at him purely in historical terms, his characteristics are probably closer to Foot and Kinnock than they are Wilson or Blair. He is a policy wonk who like some of his predecessors who failed to win elections is struggling to be heard. Much of the talk is about his personaility and lack of being able to connect. He has made some brave attempts to break through this. His speech at the Labour conference last year was widely derided but it contained some interesting ideas that chime with the times we are in. But of course hardly anyone remembers that now amid all the talk of his fragile hold on the leadership and attacks from the left and right of his party on a seemingly daily basis.

I would be surprised if Ed Miliband manages to get to the end of the year as Labour leader. The rumblings are already quite loud and it is only mid-January.

But who should replace him? A lot of the talk is about Yvette Cooper. There is no doubt she is capable and we shouldn't underestimate how the electorate may react positively to Labour's first female leader*. I even predicted she would be Labour leader by the end of the year myself in my 2012 predictions a couple of weeks ago. But Cooper is also a policy wonk by background. She has an unfortunate tendency to speak in the way that lots of New Labour rising stars of the noughties cannot seem to help, reeling off statistics and repeating the same points over and over again in the same interview. I think with her the party could end up with pretty much more of the problem that they have with Ed.

Which makes me wonder if it might be time for them to skip a generation. There is somebody who was only elected in 2010 but who has already reached the Shadow Cabinet. He definitely has the charm and charisma that Wilson and Blair had and is already being tipped for the top, albeit usually mentioned as the "next leader but one". He is also highly intelligent and has a way of talking that really does seem to connect with the public. I am talking of course about Chuka Umunna.

His youth (he is 33) and lack of experience may count against him but David Cameron had only been in parliament for 4 years when he became leader of his party. And Nick Clegg had only been an MP for less than 3 years when he became leader of his. The trend for younger and only recently elected leaders is well established.

So the question is whether Labour is willing to take a chance on an untested youngster who seems to have the characteristics required to win elections. History would seem to suggest that it will take someone like him for the party to regain power in 2015.

*I am aware that Margaret Beckett was also leader briefly in 1994 but I am talking about leaders who were elected by the party.

NOTE: For what it is worth, from my personal experience I met Yvette a few years back through my professional work. She breezed into the meeting, made a set speech, took a few questions which she basically didn't answer and breezed out before the meeting ended. In stark contrast I was on a radio show with Chuka a couple of years ago and he was charm personified. Despite the fact that I was disagreeing with him he was very graceful and made me think more about my position. He also contacted me on Twitter afterwards to say hello and thank me for the debate.

An edited version of this post was originally published on Liberal Conspiracy.

In praise of Douglas Carswell

2012-01-10T14:28:00.000Z

I am a Lib Dem but I've always found the partisan nature of UK politics a bit of a turn off. I think most people realise it is largely a facade and that lots of parliamentarians get on very well with their colleagues from other parties. In some cases much better than they do on their own side, after all they are vying with those in their own party for the jobs!

So I was pleased to see Labour Political Betting poster Henry Manson's recent post on David Davis and in a similar spirit I would like to pay tribute to my favourite Conservative MP.

Douglas Carswell was first elected MP for Clacton in 2005 and has rapidly become a widely respected backbench MP.

In 2008 along with MEP Daniel Hannan he wrote "The Plan - Twelve Months to Renew Britain" which sets out his thinking in a number of areas including cleaning up Westminster, direct democracy, repealing laws and radical devolution of power.

I interviewed him about the book in 2009 and was struck by how wide-ranging and ambitious some of his ideas were. Yet reviewing some of them a couple of years on it is interesting to see that a number of them have already moved into the mainstream and are being enacted upon such as secret ballots for select committee chairs, widespread use of open primaries within Conservative selections, elected police commissioners and benefit reforms to name but a few.

Whereas too often, too many Tory MPs appear to be conservative with a small c in their approach, Carswell never seems to give this impression. He is genuinely interested in ideas wherever they come from and has formed alliances across all sorts of political boundaries including on occasion with very left wing MPs.

Perhaps his most famous public intervention to date was in 2008 when he publicly called for the removal of Michael Martin as Speaker. Martin had become a busted flush following his failure to restore public confidence in the expenses system and indeed his complicity in trying to keep a lid on the scandal. Although lots of MPs were muttering under their breath about the situation the clubbable nature of parliament persuaded them to keep quiet. Carswell as is his wont felt under no such obligation and wrote an article calling for him to go. He was instrumental in the final, successful move against Martin in 2009, tabling the no confidence motion and persuading numerous colleagues to sign it against convention.

So he is no traditional conservative. What underlined this most starkly to me was when he confirmed to me that he would in principle be willing to campaign for a change to a multi-member proportional constituency system. As far as I know he was the only Conservative MP before the last election to have gone on the record with such a statement.

I have my political differences with Douglas. Some of the ideas in The Plan seem a bit wrong-headed to me and he does appear to be a little bit of obsessed with what he refers to as "Guardianistas" infiltrating the political process putting him off being even more radical, dissuading him for example from pushing for a written constitution. I also think he has got it very wrong on climate change.

But if the Conservative party generally had half as much vision, backbone and integrity as Douglas Carswell it would be a much better party than it is today. Who knows, they may have even won the last election.

This post was first published on Political Betting.

If Scotland votes for independence it's game over, binding or not

2012-01-09T18:35:00.000Z

The top story today is how David Cameron is trying to coerce the Scottish parliament into holding the putative independence referendum early. There is also talk of him trying to influence the question on the ballot paper, and whether a "devo max" option is allowed.

The thinking seems to be that because only the UK government can sanction a "binding" referendum that Cameron has leverage here to try and impose his will on the way the plebiscite is held. Without the binding aspect, he seems to think that the Scottish government would not want to proceed.

But that approach seems to be politically naive to me. Let's hypothesise that Salmond tells Cameron where to go and sticks to his plan to have the referendum in 2 or 3 years time in the second half of the parliament (which seems quite likely). Let's also hypothesise that the SNP government chooses the wording without allowing the UK government to influence this. And finally let's imagine that the referendum is won, either for devo max or full independence.

In either of these cases, if the Scottish public has voted by a majority to either have more powers for the parliament or to cede from the UK entirely, does anyone seriously imagine that the UK government can stand in the way of that? Sure, there would be lots of detail to work through and the changes would clearly affect the UK as a whole but the idea that Westminster could just ignore the result and carry on as usual blithely claiming it was "not binding" is politically unrealistic. The democratic will of the Scottish people would need to be respected.

If Scotland votes in a referendum for further or full independence, regardless of whether David Cameron likes how and when the vote occurs, it will happen.

I suspect Alex Salmond knows this full well and is simply playing this situation for all the Tory bashing he can get out of it to nudge a few more votes his way. Nicola Sturgeon has been doing a sterling job today getting the phrase "Tory led government" in almost every sentence she has uttered in copious media appearances. You can almost hear them ticking off another 100 votes for independence every time she says it!

The real question is what does Cameron think he is doing? I can't possibly see what good he can do with this approach for his party's unionist cause.

Should politicians have a sell-by date?

2012-01-08T10:38:00.000Z

I was listening to Radio 4 a few weeks back (I think it might have been Front Row) and heard Harriet Harman being interviewed about her new role as shadow for the Culture, Media and Sport brief.

Dearie, dearie me.

She was given ample opportunity to show her more human side. Indeed the brief surely requires that the holder is able to show how they have enjoyed culture and hence inject a bit more of the personal? No chance from Harman. She came across like an "I speak your policy" robot. The only thing I can really recall her saying was about how vital the performing arts and film etc. are to the economy. When something like this is reduced to such technocratic terms it makes me want to weep.

But the more I have reflected on it, the more I am thinking that this sort of thing is inevitable. Harman has been an MP since 1982 when she was 32 years old. She is now 61 so that is almost half of her life and the vast majority of her adult life. In other words cutting edge television when she entered parliament was Game For A Laugh.

I know the pressure that is on MPs and the hours that they have to work so to expect an MP of nearly 30 years standing, with the last decade near the top of government, to be in touch with popular culture is unrealistic.

It further occurs to me that maybe this is part of the problem. I imagine if Chuka Umunna or Rachel Reeves for example had had that role they would have come across in a much more human way. Because they have lived a relatively normal life until recently where they would have had the time and inclination to keep in touch with popular culture.

So should there be a shelf-life for politicians? Should we say after maybe 20 or 25 years, thanks very much for your service but you cannot serve any longer than that an an MP (or in a reformed upper chamber)?

Peter Oborne's "Tory moment" argument is full of holes

2012-01-06T11:24:00.000Z

I greatly admire Peter Oborne as I have said on here before. He has done some sterling work over the years, especially in exposing political hypocrisy but a piece he wrote for the Telegraph yesterday in which he claims that the right is winning the argument in every major area of policy is wrong-headed in my view.

Mehdi has already had a crack at fisking the article here so I won't go through all of it but I wanted to highlight a couple of things from the last 10 or 15 years that prove Oborne is wrong.

His central thesis is that it is "widely accepted" that the Labour government was an utter failure and therefore the political momentum is now with the right, that their ideas are in the ascendency and even many on the left are coming to accept this.

I don't buy it. Here are just two examples of things that the "liberal left" brought in that the Tories have accepted through gritted teeth:

Equal rights for homosexuals. Labour did some good work in this area when they were in power. The equalised rights for age of consent were introduced on a free vote in Labour's early years despite bitter opposition led by Conservative Peer Baroness Young. And a few years back they introduced civil partnerships.
The minimum wage. One of the first acts of Labour in 1997 was to introduce this. The Tories were deeply opposed to any such move and I vividly remember how convinced Conservative spokespeople were that it would damage the economy and raise unemployment. Of course in the event the economy was fine and a decent floor was put in to stop people, especially the young being exploited for derisory wages.

Some may argue that on point 1, some Conservatives voted for the measure and whilst that may well be true many of them were deeply opposed. Does anyone seriously think that if the Conservatives had been in power from 1997 - 2010 that a vote would have been passed in the Commons to allow this?

Point 2 is unequivocal. The Tories would never have brought this in.

And yet in both cases, a few years later they accepted they had been wrong and now support all of these measures. Indeed David Cameron made a big thing in his early years as leader of saying that marriage can be between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. But it took three big election defeats to force them to accept they were wrong on this. I strongly suspect that they would not have done that on their own.

So there are two big examples of where the left (and the Lib Dems who also played an important part in seeing these measures adopted) made the running in recent years and the Conservatives have been playing catch-up.

One other point I wanted to make is that Oborne really goes off beam when he claims that:

"[throughout the] post-war period...the liberal Left, as general election results show, has tended to be unpopular with voters. But its progressive ideas have enjoyed a disproportionate amount of traction among British governing elites."

Balderdash. At no general election in this period have the Conservative party ever achieved 50% of the vote. In fact with the exception of 1959, the Labour and Liberal (or Lib Dem) plus SDP vote when they were around always totalled more than the Conservative vote. Oborne's point can only be made to work if you ignore that fact. Just because first-past-the-post delivered majority Tory governments does not mean the "liberal left" as he puts it has been unpopular with voters. More that the votes for that bloc have been split allowing the Conservatives to form governments on far less than 50% and in some cases less than 40% of the vote.

The idea that the Conservatives are having some sort of "Tory moment" where they are now in the ascendancy on all major issues is ahistorical and not supported by the facts.

Imagine if a white MP had said this....

2012-01-05T09:12:00.000Z

Imagine if a white MP had said something like this:

"Black people love playing 'divide & rule'. We should not play their game"

There would quite rightly be outrage and calls for apologies for this sort of racist comment. If the MP had a front-bench or ministerial position there would doubtless be calls for resignation or sacking.

Well that didn't happen yesterday. This however did:

In the middle of a discussion on Twitter, Diane Abbott tweeted that. She made a broad generalisation about a group of people in society based on the colour of their skin. That is racism.

As Tory Radio has pointed out, in a further exchange later on, far from apologising she appears to be standing by her comments.

Diane Abbott has form for these sort of generalisations. A couple of years ago when discussing her children she said "I’m a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.". The strong implication there was that mothers from other ethnic backgrounds would not, otherwise why single out the background as a distinguishing factor?

I don't think Abbott should have to resign from her position as a front-bench Labour spokesperson as long as she apologises for her comment yesterday. Also she needs to cut out the broad sweeping generalisations about people based on their skin colour or ethnicity in future.

If she chooses not to apologise however then I expect the Labour leadership will have to act. They surely cannot condone this sort of comment?

UPDATE:

Diane Abbott has now tweeted the following "clarification":

I don't buy that. She used the present tense and was discussing the current situation.

And she has now deleted the original offending tweet. If she is standing behind it why would she do that?

My Predictions for 2012

2012-01-03T16:09:00.000Z

Here are my predictions for the coming year:

HMV will go bust.
A currently living former Chancellor of the Exchequer will no longer be with us by the end of the year.
Barack Obama will win reelection with an even higher percentage of the vote than in 2008.
Chris Huhne will leave the cabinet.
David Laws will rejoin the cabinet.
Kate from off of Teh Roayls will announce she is pregnant. The media will go loopy at the prospect.
Mo Farah will win Gold at the Olympics.
Pointless will be promoted to prime time TV (i.e. after 7pm) with increased prizes to match.
By the end of the year Yvette Cooper will be leader of the Labour Party.
In a shock move I predict that Eddie Mair will become the new host of BBC Question Time. For the fourth year running.

Merry New Holidays people!

In which I disagree with Ewan Hoyle on alcohol pricing

2011-12-31T13:01:00.000Z

My friend Ewan Hoyle has posted a piece on Lib Dem Voice arguing that Cameron's minimum alcohol pricing idea could be the government's first evidence based drugs policy.

His basic thesis is summed up in the final part:

Once we demonstrate that the harms caused by legal drugs can be effectively diminished through evidence-based policy, we can then take the fight to the criminals and terrorists of Big Illegal Drugs. It is a fact the government urgently needs to confront that we can only ever win the “War on Drugs” if they are legal. Only then can the policies of government have a significant moderating impact upon the market.

Ewan has done fantastic work within and without the party pushing the case for liberalisation of our drugs laws in his role as head of LDDPR but in this case I am afraid I disagree with him.

I should first point out that his argument is the best stab I have seen at defending Cameron's idea and a good attempt to look at the potential positive side. Unfortunately from my point of view it overlooks too many of the negatives and there are too many hopeful assumptions about what may need to happen to underpin the policy.

Numerous commenters below his piece have taken issue with his approach, although to be fair there are some supporters too. The objections range from it being an "illiberal" policy (Mill is even rolled out to back this up at one point of course!) through to it not being likely to work and that the evidence is not there.

Whether something is "illiberal" or not is always the source of much contention in any debate like this and there often seem to be nuanced arguments on both sides so I will leave that to one side for now. However I want to briefly tackle whether the policy is likely to increase or decrease harm. In order to do that I am going to reference what us drug policy reform campaigners love to do, the period of prohibition in the USA during the 1920s.

One of the strongest arguments in my view for legalising drugs is that when alcohol was banned we saw a massive increase in crime and harms associated with alcohol consumption. The inherent harms that alcohol consumption can lead to were hugely exacerbated by its very illegality. It encouraged people to distill their own spirits or buy them on the black market or at "speakeasys". The illegal liquor was often of variable and unpredictable strength and sometimes mixed with all sorts of other substances to increase the effect more cheaply. Many people died or suffered horrendous effects such as blindness during this period as a direct result of the legal change. Indeed within a few short years the Americans reversed the policy, so disastrous had it been.

Now I understand that Ewan is not advocating banning alcohol but instead imposing a minimum price. But given that as he rightly points out alcohol can be available for as cheaply as 12p per unit, moving to a situation where the cheapest alcohol is instead quadruple that price or higher is very likely (I would argue inevitably) going to lead to a large increase in the amount of home-made and illegally manufactured spirits. And I would be very surprised if in turn this did not lead to wider harm with the sort of effects that were seen during prohibition in the USA.

Whenever I have been arguing about drug legalisation with someone and they try to argue that there would still be an illegal market in drugs even if they were legalised (look at cigarettes and booze they say) I always respond that the illegal tobacco and alcohol markets are very small in comparison to the legal variants. And I am right about that, the evidence backs me to the hilt. I then counter by suggesting that were drugs legalised we would need to make sure that the scope for a remaining illegal market was vastly reduced by ensuring we made the illegal variants highly unattractive through ensuring taxation was set at the right level.

So if we erode that argument by increasing the size of the illegal alcohol market then we could end up doing the exact opposite of what Ewan intends by giving succour to those who argue substantial illegal markets would remain so "what's the point".

In my view alcohol pricing should remain roughly where it is now. I do not see the case for a big increase being made convincingly enough without account being taken of the potentially major downsides.

However where I do very strongly agree with Ewan is where he calls for "effective investment in outreach and treatment services" in order that for vulnerable people such as impoverished alcoholics "life doesn’t suddenly become an intolerable struggle.". There is no reason why we can't have a big push for investment in that area.

We don't need a minimum price for alcohol in order for that to happen though. It should be happening anyway.

How did I do on my 2011 predictions?

2011-12-30T19:48:00.002Z

The short answer is it's a mixed bag.

The longer answer:

Labour will win the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election but the Lib Dems will be a close second.

CORRECT. They did indeed win and Lib Dems did indeed come a fairly close second. Certainly by the standards of later by-elections!

All 3 main party leaders (Cameron, Clegg and Miliband_E) will still be in post by the end of the year.

CORRECT.

The AV referendum will be (narrowly) won.

WRONG. I could not have been more wrong really. We were trounced 68% to 32%. Polls in the months before really did make it look like it would be close but in the end it was not to be.

Sarah Palin will do something that will effectively end her chances of being a serious candidate for the 2012 US presidential election.

CORRECT. Although there are various things she has done I think the "cross hairs" thing and the "Blood libel" comment in the aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting torpedoed her chances within a couple of weeks of me making the prediction. This Guardian article here from back in January pretty much sums it up.

A Lib Dem MP will resign the party whip to either sit as an independent or join another party.

WRONG. Not even close. In fact despite lots of problems it looks like the coalition is determined to hold together without this sort of upset.

England will win the Rugby World Cup.

WRONG. They deservedly got knocked out in the quarter-finals.

For the third year running I predict that Eddie Mair will become the new host of BBC Question Time.

WRONG AGAIN! I think I might stop predicting this now although it's become a tradition and I might not be able to resist...

Liam Fox will no longer be a cabinet minister by the end of the year.

CORRECTAMUNDO! I am extremely pleased with my predictive skills here! He is the only cabinet minister from the start of the year who was not in post by the end. And when I predicted it it was far from likely he would go. Indeed the bookies had him way down the list of likely casualties. To be fair I could not have predicted the nature of his downfall but the reason I chose him is because he has always seemed a little bit too hubristic and I just felt somewhere down the line this would trip him up as indeed it proved.

Including Old and Sad there will be 3 by-elections during the year.

WRONG. Way out. There were double that amount. And to be fair, Harry Hayfield called me on the likelihood I had got this wrong in the comments on the original blog post straight away.

A petition signed by more than 100,000 people will trigger a debate in parliament about legalising cannabis.

WRONG. There have been several debates in parliament triggered by the new e-petitions site but cannabis legalisation was not one of them. Probably a bit of wishful thinking on my part there!

So 4/10 but the Liam Fox one somewhat redeems me I feel.

2012 predictions coming soon...

How much does geographical accident influence politics?

2011-12-21T08:00:00.000Z

I have been wondering for a while how much of a role geographical accident plays in politics.

When I first decided to get involved with politics a few years back I chose the Liberal Democrats because they were the party that most closely matched my views. In my local area the party did not have any council seats but there are a small group of very dedicated and experienced local members and campaigners who have fought a number of local and national elections with alacrity since I joined.

The situation though has got me thinking about how political careers are nurtured and developed. Through my blogging and tweeting I have got to know a lot of activists from across the country from lots of different parties. Some of them have gone from being activists to councillors and in a few cases MPs or MEPs. Some of those councillors will doubtless use that valuable experience as a springboard to further political ambitions later.

For my part I fought a council by-election here in Sandhurst in 2010 and despite putting lots of effort into it I lost very heavily to the Conservatives (I blogged about my experiences here). In this area they are very strong. I have no complaints however, they fought very well and won fair and square. I also stood in the local election this year and again lost heavily.

Realistically it would be very difficult for me to win a council seat here. That's not to say impossible of course, with enough time and dedication this party has proved repeatedly that even the most difficult of areas can be cracked. But at the moment I do not have the amount of time available that would take in this area.

But if I happened to live in an area where my party was a lot stronger, by now I may already have been elected and be getting good political experience under my belt representing people and helping to improve their lives.

One day I may have more time to be able to devote to this, but for now, where I live it is unlikely to happen. It makes me wonder how many other people like me would like to get involved in representative politics but because of geographical accident and their political persuasion (e.g. Conservatives in parts of the north, Labour in parts of the South West) it is unlikely to happen.

This post was first published on Lib Dem Voice.

Ricky's too short. On ideas.

2011-12-19T16:30:00.000Z

I have followed the career of Ricky Gervais since the late 1990s with great interest.

I first recall seeing him playing an obnoxious character on Channel 4's 11 O'Clock Show where he seemed to be deliberately trying to offend as many people as possible. Not long after this there was an attempt at a parody of a chat show called Meet Ricky Gervais which is now largely forgotten but I thought at the time was a brave attempt to extend the "obnoxious persona" into the field of chat. Not least because again he retained his actual name rather than making it clear he was playing a character like Alan Partridge or Mrs Merton who were clear antecedents.

I probably don't need to go into detail about Gervais's most famous creation The Office which followed soon after and which in my view is one of the greatest sitcoms of the last 20 years. He also produced another hit sitcom, Extras which although not achieving the same level of accolades as its predecessor was nonetheless very good and ensured he would not just be remembered as a one-trick sitcom pony.

So I had high hopes for his latest sitcom creation Life's Too Short starring Warwick Davis. It is supposedly a fly on the wall documentary about "the life of a showbiz dwarf". Sadly it has not lived up to my expectations.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the underlying concept. I imagine that done well this could have been a good way of highlighting the sort of prejudice that people with disabilities can encounter. The problem is it has not been done well.

The character of "Warwick Davis" played by Warwick Davis is clearly a caricature. He is vain, self-serving, grasping and regularly gets himself into traps of his own making where he ends up embarrassed and looking stupid. Does this remind you of anyone. That could have been a verbatim description of the character of David Brent from The Office. Even some of the mannerisms and asides that Davis employs are textbook Brent. It's almost as if he has studied Gervais's previous creation and used it as a basis for his performance here.

So we've seen it all before. Which means that many of the scenes are groaningly predictable. Davis goes on a date arranged through an agency and feels that he has been misled by the picture of his date not making it clear she is also a dwarf. Perhaps this is supposed to be ironic but it is almost identical to a scene from the final Christmas special of The Office where Brent goes on a date with a woman he has met through the internet and also feels he has been misled about her looks. Davis muscles into an interview with the head of an activist organisation he is involved with and says a load of politically incorrect stuff which, surprise, surprise ends up being edited out of the broadcast interview. Davis offers to make a speech at the wedding of someone who has hired him because he and his wife are sci-fi fans (Davis has starred in a number of such films) and he makes an idiot of himself by making a terrible and insulting speech. Etc. etc. etc.

Life's Too Short is not just derivative of the Brent character, it also purloins what was probably the best character from Extras. In that sitcom Stephen Merchant (Gervais's writing partner) played Darren Lamb, Andy Millman's (the main character's) agent. He was completely clueless and regularly made comments that made it clear he didn't know what he was doing. Merchant's performance was superb; he managed to find just the right balance between likability as a wide eyed ingenue but also doing enough to screw up Millman's career at every turn. Davis's character in LTS has an accountant (Eric Biddle) who is clearly based on the Lamb character, useless at his job, having landed Davis with a massive tax bill through his errors but has none of the charm of the Merchant performance. And Davis even goes on to use Biddle as his solicitor in his divorce even though he is terrible and is not even legally qualified. I know it's only a sitcom but the universe for these things need to be a bit believable.

But what's worse is that the whole thing seems to be exploiting Davis and those with dwarfism more generally. The scenes where Johnny Depp has Davis dancing along to a flute while he shouts at him and separately standing in a toilet, all the while Depp appearing to be bizarrely excited by his height are difficult to view as anything other than distasteful, however many layers of irony we are supposed to be filtering it through. And the scene where he gets locked in a bathroom whilst house viewing because he can't reach the handle and ends up throwing his shoes at the window followed by falling off the toilet when his assistant comes to rescue him are in a similar vein. I expect we were supposed to be laughing at the thoughtlessness of those who locked him in but whichever way you look at it it ends up being "dwarf falls off toilet".

There are flickers and glimmers of what this programme could have been. Gervais and Merchant actually appear in multiple episodes as "themselves" (i.e. parodies of themselves trying to get Davis out of their office as quickly as possible and clearly finding him tiresome). In one of these scenes in "Gervais's" "office" Liam Neeson walks in unannounced and demands to be trained in improvised comedy but has some preconceived ideas about how this should work which as a dynamic worked very well and there was a payoff line at the end of the scene that had me laughing for several minutes. Another scene which starts off in a rather embarrassing way with Davis trying to get out of giving a child with a tumour a free signed book ends amusingly with his prediction of "everyone is going to be saying that" coming true immediately. But there are far too many misses for these little moments to make up for it.

Gervais clearly has lots of talent as The Office, Extras and his sell-out tours as well as his widely admired radio work shows but overall it is a disappointing effort from him this time round. I wonder if he now needs to move outside his sitcom comfort zone of deliberately un-PC fake fly-on-the-wall documentaries as he essentially now just repeating himself for rapidly diminishing returns.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Aidan Burley should not have been fired

2011-12-18T18:39:00.000Z

I realise this is unlikely to be a popular blog post but yet again I find myself compelled to stick up for a politician who has done something highly inadvisable in their private life and who has paid for it with their political career.

Aidan Burley, the Conservative MP for Cannock Chase has been fired by David Cameron as a PPS to Justine Greening because he attended a stag do where some guests were wearing SS uniforms and during which there was a toast to "the ideology and thought processes of the Third Reich". The story broke last week but he seemed to be weathering the storm claiming he was merely an attendee and should have left when he realised what was happening but in the last day or so it became apparent that he had hired one of the SS suits, hence he had clearly been deemed part of the organisation of the event and therefore fired.

Now I fully appreciate that some people will have been offended by what he did. The problem from my perspective is that the reporting of the event and the subsequent sacking take no account of nuance and the highly likely fact that the participants were doing this in a totally misguided attempt at irony. I do not believe that any of them actually do agree with the thought processes and ideology of the Nazis. If evidence emerged that Burley actually did hold these beliefs then it would be a different matter. Instead he went on a stag do where a few people wore distasteful fancy dress costumes and made a few comments almost certainly for shock effect in an attempt at humour. And for that he has now likely paid with his political career.

The reporting by the Mail on Sunday today also tries to show a pattern of behaviour by Burley. They have gone through his history as a student and dredged up the fact that he was kicked out of halls of residence because of an "undisclosed incident" involving a female and a dance floor, that he once stole a sign from outside a dentist's surgery and that he once dressed up as Timmy Mallett and was pictured licking a woman's face.

I've no idea what the "undisclosed incident" was, but until it is substantiated in some way it is frankly immaterial. Stealing a sign from outside a dentist's is stupid of course but how many graduates have done similarly stupid things involving traffic cones etc. when they were students? As for the Timmy Mallett thing, that is where the MoS's agenda becomes crystal clear. They had him on the ropes because of the stag do so they are just pouring as much shit over his head as they possibly can to try and smear him to the point where his position becomes untenable. And they seem to have succeeded. If it had not been for the main story, these other elements would never have been deemed newsworthy as of course they aren't.

Burley did a very stupid thing. He should have known that attending a party like that could easily come back to bite him. His apologies should really have been enough though. I am sure he will not do anything like that again. But to have to pay for it with his career seems disproportionately harsh.

Sadly it is par for the course. We've seen time and again how any transgression can be fatal for political careers. And then we wonder why we so often end up with automatons as MPs who struggle to relate to ordinary people and often seem to have had a sense of humour bypass.

The logical endpoint of drugs policy

2011-12-17T13:02:00.000Z

The government has signalled it is to ban all forms of skydiving in the wake of more than a dozen deaths in the UK linked to the activity in recent years.

"It is a dangerous thing to do and we need to send a message to people that is is not acceptable." a government spokesperson said. "There is no such thing as a safe way to skydive and we need to protect our children and communities from its potentially deadly effects".

Ministers have asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Sports to review the category that skydiving is placed in in order to determine the appropriate penalties for people found indulging in the activity including mandatory prison sentences for anyone caught supplying parachutes.

A senior placed source also indicated that they were looking into potentially banning other sports where people have died in recent years including bungee-jumping, horse-riding and table-tennis.

David Cameron is not a failure

2011-11-29T16:40:00.000Z

Before I start this post I should just point out that I am far from David Cameron's biggest fan. There are numerous areas where I disagree with him, in some cases profoundly. You only have to look at the responses he gave to some of the questions posed by the great and the good in the Guardian's recent Q&A to see plenty I take issue with not least his extraordinarily dismissive answer to Jonathan Ross's question about drugs policy.

However I want to tackle something that I keep hearing and reading about Cameron. Essentially I keep hearing that he is a failure. This is from across the political spectrum including a number from his own party.

It goes something like this.

Brown was unpopular. Very unpopular. We were in the midst of the worst financial crisis since before the Second World War. On top of this Cameron had had several years in which to prepare for the election and yet in the end he couldn't even get an overall majority.

All of these things are true but they fail to take into account a number of factors.

1) The Conservative Party were a basket-case of a party after 1997 and by 2005 after 3 consecutive trouncings they were still in a woeful state. William Hague who is one of the most gifted politicians of his generation couldn't improve their fortunes very much and nor could the subsequent two leaders they had which included a former cabinet minister and Home Secretary of immense experience. Cameron forced through a programme of modernisation which at least left them electable in 2010. In fact it was nearly 20 years since his party had been in such a position (since 1992 when the polls dived following Black Wednesday and never recovered until Cameron's time).

2) Cameron was not facing just Brown but also a fresh-faced insurgent named Nick Clegg who was able to seize the mantle of change that Cameron wanted for himself (if Cameron had just managed to get a couple more percentage points at the expense of the Lib Dems he would have had a majority). I know lots of Tories think it was a terrible mistake for Cameron to agree to the televised debates which helped Clegg forge this impression but Cameron had little choice. Sky were on the verge of "empty chairing" him and the other broadcasters may well have followed suit, after all they could not be accused of political imbalance if the 3 leaders were invited but Cameron refused to show. In fact this would have been disastrous for his campaign as he would have rightly been seen as a coward. What Cameron actually did as soon as he saw that Clegg was in the ascendancy is what he always does when his back is against the wall which is to come out fighting and by the second and third debates he did very well and helped to puncture the Cleggmaina bubble.

3) David Cameron is actually the most successful national politician in terms of percentage of the vote won of the past 10 years. The Conservatives under his leadership in 2010 got 36.1% of the votes. In 2005 Tony Blair only managed 35.2%. It is only our "interesting" electoral system that translated Blair's 35.2% to 55% of the seats when it only gave Cameron 47% on a higher vote share than Blair.

4) He is Prime Minister. This might seem like an odd point to make but it was not guaranteed that it would happen. The coalition negotiations could have gone very differently. The fact that Cameron came out straight away with his "open offer" to the Lib Dems enabled all that flowed from it. His political judgement was spot on and he only had a few hours in which to make the call the morning after polling day. Had he flunked it and allowed Labour to make the running and retain power the Conservatives could well have moved against him. Instead he is safely ensconced in Downing Street. It is David Cameron who gets to take the decisions about things like the Libyan action, the UK's response to the financial crisis and he has the highest and most listened to political platform in the land. And will likely have it for at least another three and a half years.

It is worth bearing in mind that there are only 5 other people who have become Prime Minister of the UK following a General Election in the last 50 years. Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Major and Blair. It is a very difficult thing to do but Cameron has managed it.

Whatever you might think about how he got there it seems perverse to consider him a failure having done so.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Why electoral reformers should want boundary changes to fail

2011-11-28T09:00:00.000Z

I know, I know! AV lost. Decisively.

So why am I still banging on about electoral reform?

Well partly because I can't help myself! It is one of my pet causes and I still think that eventually circumstances will arise in which FPTP becomes indefensible. I appreciate this is likely to be a fair way into the future but it is worth considering how it could come about.

Which actually brings me to the point of this post. One thing that is abundantly clear following the AV failure is that we will only be able to get a majority to back change if there is perceived to be a real need for it. That is one of the main reasons why AV struggled to get traction and opponents were able to argue there was no need to change.

The more I have reflected, the more I am convinced that the only way we are eventually going to be able to convince the electorate that change is needed is if there is an unequivocal and unanswerable failure of FPTP. The most likely scenario I can see leading to that is a situation where FPTP chooses the wrong winner.

With the current boundaries and 650 MPs this is actually quite likely to happen within the next two or three general elections. It would take Labour to get within a couple of percentage points of the Conservatives, say 34% Labour and 36% Conservative. Under this sort of result Labour would almost certainly end up the largest party and may even end up with a majority of MPs. Were this to happen, the time would then be ripe for a huge push to change the electoral system to a more proportional one. Defenders of FPTP would be on the back foot trying to argue for a system that had just picked the wrong winner and would be rapidly losing credibility with the public.

But if the boundary changes and MP reduction goes through then suddenly the above scenario becomes a lot less likely. We would of course still have the broken FPTP system but with things nudged a bit more back towards the Conservatives as a result of the changes.

Which means that when the time comes for MPs to vote on these changes we could find an interesting coalition against them forming. It could consist of Labour MPs who are against the changes as a party, numerous Conservatives who fear losing their seats and other MPs who want to ultimately see a proportional system for Westminster. That could well be enough to see the changes fail to get through the Commons.

I usually try and argue for electoral reform from a position of principle but having been thrashed in the AV referendum I am starting to think that reformers need to employ other tactics to get their message through. Trying to ensure that the broken FPTP system is more easily able to be exposed for what it is could be the start of such an approach.

Should Nick Clegg have held out for the Chancellorship?

2011-11-02T20:37:00.000Z

Should Nick Clegg have held out for the Chancellorship during the coaliton negotiations last year?

I know, I know but bear with me.

I was suprised following the coalition negotiations that none of the jobs that are traditionally considered the big 4 (PM, Chancellor, Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary) were given to Lib Dems. Sure, we got Deputy PM which depending on how you looked at it could have been a bigger job than any of the big 4 except PM. But I am not convinced it has turned out like that nor was it really very likely.

From my understanding of what happened during the negotiations themselves, gleaned from various contemporaneous accounts I do not think that the idea of any of these jobs going to a Lib Dem was seriously entertained. To be fair there are specific problems with each of them:

PM: Non-starter. This role clearly has to go to the leader of the largest party.
Chancellor: Economic policy is the lynchpin of any government and it seems superficially obvious that the role should go to a member of the largest party. But I will come back to this.
Foreign Secretary: Figurehead of the government's foreign policy and given how important this area is to the Conservatives it is difficult to imagine them being happy with a Lib Dem in the top job at the start of a new coalition.
Home Secretary: Given the Conservative Party's traditional stance on issues like Law and Order it would be surprising if they took a Lib Dem in this role lying down. You've only got to look at how the "Sixth Lib Dem in the cabinet" ((C) Nick Clegg 2011) Ken Clarke is doing in the more minor role at Justice to see how this could have gone. Plus Home Secretaries are often only one or two prison or immigration scandals away from political oblivion so Clegg would likely have wanted to steer clear of this anyway.

So how do I think Clegg could have held out for the Chancellorship?

Well all the talk at the time of the negotiations, not least from David Cameron was of an open and generous offer to the Lib Dems to help form a government. It was clear that Cameron and Clegg wanted to bind the two parties together in a strong coalition primarily to reassure the markets that the incoming government was serious about getting a grip on the finances. As Clegg and the other senior Lib Dems made clear following the discussions that they were indeed serious about getting the deficit down there is no reason to think that this programme would have needed to be watered down had Clegg become Chancellor. Indeed if anything it could have sent an even stronger message to the market that the government was seriously committed. After all, Clegg would hardly be likely to demur later in the parliament from an economic policy that he was chiefly responsible for.

There is also of course the political dimension to this. I can certainly imagine that a good number of Conservative MPs would have been less than impressed with such a move. But it is easy to forget now just how opposed they were to a referendum on any sort of electoral reform until they were faced with the stark choice of potentially not forming the next government. I strongly suspect with the right leadership from Cameron that they could have been persuaded.

Which leads me to perhaps the most important point here. Part of the official title of the role of PM is "First Lord of the Treasury". This is often forgotten about, especially these days in the aftermath of the way Gordon Brown managed to use the Chancellor's office to essentially run an alternative government within government from Tony Blair. But that was an extreme example thrown up by a unique set of political circumstances. Cameron and Clegg are generally much more collegiate and it is reasonable to assume that their relations as PM and Chancellor would have been cordial. And of course Clegg would not have been able to get anything through without Cameron's backing so it's not as if he would have been able to go on manouvers even if he had he wanted to.

Another political aspect to this is how the allocation of the role of Chancellor would have reflected the political strengths of the people in the two most senior roles in government. We know Cameron can command 307 MPs through the lobbies (caveat - on subjects other than the EU!). But Clegg can command 57 MPs through the lobbies. How many can George Osborne command? Officially none. But even unofficially he would struggle to get the same number as Clegg through. The truth is that Clegg could effectively bring down the government if he wanted to. Osborne probably could not. He could weaken it for sure but the only person apart from Cameron himself who has the political clout to do this is the man who is currently our Deputy PM.

If Clegg had become Chancellor then the dynamics of the cabinet would have had to be quite different. There would have needed to be a strong Conservative as Chief Secretary to the Treasury (my money would have been on Phillip Hammond) and a suitable role would have needed to be found for Osborne (perhapsa beefed up Deputy PM role combined with Conservative Party Chair?). There would have been other knock-on effects such as Vince Cable would have been unlikely to be Business Secretary but I suspect things would have settled down quite nicely.

The problem I see with the current situation is that Deputy PM at the moment is a bit of a non-role. I know that Clegg has all sorts of responsiblity for constitutional change but with AV out of the window and Lords reform looking ever more tinged with chlorophil from that lengthening grass I can't help but feel that his political skills would have been much better served with the job that is actually number two in the government hierarchy rather than his current one that often seems difficult to define.

This sort of arrangement may have proven more sustainable in the longer run too. Since the failure of the AV referendum the Lib Dems in general and Clegg in particular have started to pursue a much stronger differentiation strategy from the Conservatives. This would have been much harder for him to do if he personally had been much more tightly bound into the centre of government decisions in the Treasury.

We'll never know for sure how this would have played out but Cameron and Clegg could be forgiven for reflecting that it might have been to the advantage of both of them if such a bold move to bind the current parties of government together had been taken from the outset.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Lib Dems should not have whipped against EU referendum

2011-10-30T14:16:00.000Z

Apologies for lack of posting recently. I've been a bit busy and will likely continue to be for a good while. I will dip in and out as I can though.

I really felt that I had to comment though on the debacle of the Lib Dems having been made via a 3 line whip to vote against a referendum on membership of the EU.

Frankly, what the hell were we playing at? I lost count of the number of times I heard party spokespeople in the run up to the election last year repeat the mantra that we should have an "in/out referendum". Over and over again. It was clearly a device to try and neutralise an issue on which the party recognises it is in the minority ay least on superficial polling evidence. I know that the actual manifesto commitment was if there was to be a transfer of powers to the EU then there should be a vote but frankly that nuance will be lost on most people and the caveat was not always invoked when it was discussed either. The man/woman in the street will just vaguely recall having heard that the Lib Dems were in favour of a referendum to give people their say on the EU and then watched only 1 Lib Dem MP (Adrian Sanders) vote for it with the rest either abstaining or voting against.

Way to go guys. In the wake of the tuition fee catastrophe you would think giving ammunition to those who accuse us of breaking our pledges would be avoided at all costs. But apparently not.

I cannot understand why Clegg and the party leadership did this. They could easily have pointed at the manifesto and said "Sorry Dave, we're not going down this road again" and fulfilled the spirit of the pledge. Instead it's more fodder for those who would love to see the Lib Dems destroyed as a political force which includes lots of Dave's own party.

Numerous people quit the party over tuition fees. I have already seen at least one Lib Dem blogger quit the party already over the EU vote. I have not seriously entertained this thought but I am one of those footsoldiers who has stood on doorsteps trying to persuade people to vote for us in the past. Where is my motivation to do this in future if it turns out that even when we are perfectly politically able to fulfill our pledges we choose not to? I could see how difficult the tuition fees situation was but this latest one is 100% self-inflicted.

I just hope the leadership reflects in the aftermath of this and resolves not to put us in such a position again.

Osborne cocaine allegations highlight political hypocrisy on drugs

2011-09-12T13:46:00.002+01:00

Guido has details today of a story about how someone who knew George Osborne when he was in his early twenties is claiming that she saw him take cocaine on multiple occasions.

Osborne has had these allegations made to him before and has always strenuously denied them. It is possible that this latest round of allegations will come to nothing too. It is not clear if there is a smoking gun.

But if it turned out to be true would Osborne have to resign?

If it was up to me he would definitely have to. Not because I think taking cocaine as a 22 year old is such a terrible thing, I don't and I know many young people take all sorts of illegal drugs and go on to have completely normal lives. The only person he was likely to harm is himself and if he was willing to take the risk, it should have been up to him.

But Osborne is one of the most senior members of a government that supports punitive measures against people who take cocaine. In fact it is possible for someone caught in possession of a small amount of a "Class A" drug such as cocaine to be sentenced to 7 years in prison. The same sentence you can get for armed robbery.

So if it turned out that he had taken cocaine, by the terms of the drugs policies that he himself supports he has committed an offence equivalent to this. That's why he should have to resign. Because he himself insists that anyone caught doing what he is alleged to have done can have that sentence imposed on them.

Of course we already know that people like Louise Mensch have admitted drug use in the past and Nick Clegg and even David Cameron himself have refused to deny similar allegations. Cameron insisted that he is entitled to a "private life before politics".

The fact that Osborne could survive something like this, and that numerous of his colleagues have survived too demonstrates the truth of the matter. That despite the "tough on drugs" rhetoric, politicians actually understand that drawing a parallel between a crime like armed robbery and ingesting a powder that affects nobody but yourself is ludicrous.

If you don't believe me, ask yourself whether Mensch, Clegg, Cameron or Osborne could still continue as MPs if there was a strong suspicion that any of them had been involved in an armed robbery.

Of course not. Robbery is a real crime.

Howard Jacobson should read more blogs before attacking them all

2011-09-05T08:03:00.001+01:00

Booker Prize winner and Independent columnist Howard Jacobson has taken it upon himself to make some comments about blogs:

“When I wander off from the newspaper and into the world of blogs I’m a bit chilled.

What you read is extreme ignorance and pure poison. It is a poisonous, poisonous medium. You can’t believe how malicious, how ignorant, how stupid… and you do wonder if they don’t have anything better to do than attack people who have written articles. And you do wonder whatever happened to the idea of the critic; of the reviewer… people who have given their lives to honing the art of what they do.”

This is a ridiculous tirade. To assume all bloggers are one homogenous mass is a fundamental error. To follow this through imagine if I was to apply to same reasoning to his own profession of newspaper columnists.

I often have problems with the writings of Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens, Richard Littlejohn, Liz Jones, Jan Moir and others. Perhaps not every single column they have written, sometimes each of them will have interesting points to make but I am very sure I could quickly pick out several from each of them that I could characterise as poisonous, ignorant, malicious and stupid. And then I could use this as a stick with which to beat all columnists with and dismiss them all.

But that would be to dismiss the writings of people like Matthew Parris, Matthew D'Ancona, Danny Finkelstein, Steve Richards, Mary Ann Sieghart, Julian Glover and countless others whom I respect and admire and who usually produce thought provoking columns of a very high standard. So of course I would never do something as crass as this.

For Mr Jacobson to make a statement like this suggests that he has not read many blogs at all which for an intellectual such as him who doubtless considers himself very widely read is odd. I mentioned this on Twitter and sometime contributor to Dale & Co Louis Barfe sagely suggested that it is probably because he has only ever read blogs that people have pointed him towards that are being negative about his writing. Hence he would be getting a very distorted view of what is out there.

If Mr Jacobson gets pointed towards this article, in an attempt to balance his experiences, can I suggest that he tries the following blogs:

People's Republic of Mortimer (wonderful writing on politics and lots of other subjects from Lib Dem Alix Mortimer)

Scarlet Standard (relatively new blog from a long term committed Labour activist who is thought provoking and highly politically aware)

Ellee Seymour (Ellee has been active in Conservative politics and works in PR - she usually has an interesting take on stories of the day)

I would argue that all three of these bloggers on their best days are up there with the best of the columnists I cited above and there are countless others out there too political and non-political. The idea that it is only people who are being paid to write their opinions and analysis that are worth reading is I am sorry to say ill-informed elitist nonsense.

And I am sorry if that is construed as a poisonous comment!

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

This Lib Dem conference vetting farce cannot happen again #ldconf

2011-09-03T14:15:00.001+01:00

Cast your mind back to October 2007. A fresh faced recently elected MP is running for the leadership of his party. One of the most eye-catching and in some ways audacious comments that the MP made was on ID cards which he was clearly completely opposed to:

“If the legislation is passed I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the identity cards programme … I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register.”

The MP was Nick Clegg and as we know not long afterwards he was elected leader of the Lib Dems. And now he is Deputy Prime Minister leading a party of 57 MPs as part of a coalition government.

The party's federal conference in Birmingham is due to start in a couple of weeks time. And in a new twist, delegates registering to attend have to submit themselves to a police check.

The noises from the top of the party are very much in the vein of "that is the price we have to pay for being a governing party". I have read that without such checks the party would not have been able to get insurance for the venue. I have also read various comments of the ilk that because we have cabinet and junior government ministers wandering around conference we need to have more stringent security than we had previously.

Regarding the insurance comments I am afraid I am going to call BS on that one. I cannot believe that it is not possible to find insurance that will cover such an event without intrusive police checks on every single attendee.

Regarding the comments about ministers being in attendance, I know for a fact that at other events such as Nick Clegg visiting Newbury recently there were no such checks needed. You only needed to bring your party membership number. So why on earth is police vetting required for federal conference all of a sudden?

There is something deeply unsettling about the party that I joined over 3 years ago precisely because it stood for such strong liberal values such as being completely against ID cards acquiescing so easily to police vetting checks for its members and democratically elected conference representatives.

I really do not see why they are necessary. As Caron rightly points out there is already airport style security and scanners at the entrances to the conference venue. Surely that should be sufficient to ensure protection?

I have heard stories of people having their clearance rejected for various reasons. In some cases it is clear, in others not so much. Gareth Epps for example, a 3 time PPC and former councillor from Reading appears to have been rejected because of a problem with his photograph. I really wonder what danger Gareth will be deemed to pose if his picture is slightly indistinct. I guess the problem lies in the possibility that someone who is not Gareth but looks like him attempts to gain access to the conference. But even if that bizarre scenario was to occur, like I say there is ample security at the venue to prevent weapons etc. from getting in.

Perhaps even more fundamentally, should it be up to the police to decide who does or does not get to attend the main conference of a democratic party? Not to mention the fact that some people (e.g. transgendered) may not wish to submit themselves to a clunky process that may reveal information about themselves that they wished to keep private.

But aside from the principled objections I have there is a practical objection to the way this whole thing has been administered. Lots of Lib Dems have been commenting and tweeting that they have still not had the clearance they need to attend. With two weeks to go this is completely unacceptable. Hotel rooms get booked up in conference season and prices for booking at the last minute can be twice as much (or more) as if you are to book longer in advance. Train tickets are much cheaper in advance too and can be prohibitively expensive so close to the date of travel. I expect there will be people who wanted to attend and will ultimately be cleared to do so but will not be able to because of cost considerations. Not to mention those who take a chance, pay for the train ticket or the non-refundable hotel room only to find they cannot attend after all and have completely wasted their money. And bosses are sometimes not sympathetic towards people who book time off and then need to change their plans at the last minute etc. etc. etc.

None of this is liberal or democratic. I cannot believe that the Nick Clegg of 2007 would have been happy with any of this and I very much hope he is not happy now.

The upper echelons of the party need to reflect long and hard on the problems their attempts to adhere to more stringent security have caused. There are lots of activists who are pretty disgusted with it frankly, myself included.

There is a motion proposed by Stephen Gilbert MP at 9am on the Sunday morning of conference which will hopefully go some way towards redressing this woeful situation for the future. If you are attending conference I urge you to attend and make your voice heard and to vote for it if you have voting rights.

I can only hope that good sense eventually prevails and this sort of farce never happens again.

Tuition fee myths need to be challenged

2011-08-24T08:05:00.003+01:00

Through a mutual acquaintance, I recently heard someone I know outside the world of politics (yes I have ordinary friends!) had been bemoaning the "fact" that he was not going to be able to afford to pay £9,000 per year for his daughter (who is soon going to be 18) to go to university.

This person is pretty well educated and I suspect does regularly watch the news but the fact that the money is paid back over 30 years following graduation by the recipient of the degree, not the parents of the recipient seems to have completely passed him by. He's not the only one from what I can tell. Various vox pops on radio and TV in recent months that I have heard and seen suggest that this misconception is pretty widespread and infuriatingly often not corrected by interviewers or presenters.

That such a basic aspect of the new system is so widely misunderstood is a pretty damning indictment of how the policy has been communicated. Lib Dem and Conservative ministers and MPs need to accept some blame for this. But another big problem as far as I can tell is that the media narrative has focused on the most negative and politically contentious aspects of the scheme. This has led to headlines such as "UNIVERSITY FEES TREBLED" and "LIB DEMS IN DISARRAY OVER FEES". Both of those things were true to an extent but the Lib Dem woes on this topic were focused on so much around the time of the parliamentary vote as well as the protests that I honestly think the substance of the policy was not properly covered. Which given how much airtime the subject was supposedly given is frankly absurd.

For me, the 2 main aspects of the new system that seem to be regularly misunderstood are:

1) It will cost parents £30K+ up front to send their kids to university. This is palpably untrue. The graduate, not the parents pays the loan back at 9% of income above £21K. And they don't pay anything back after 30 years regardless of how much they have paid to that point. So quite a few, probably most will never pay back the entire loan anyway.

2) Graduates will be worse off under the new scheme just when they need disposable income the most, in their 20s making it harder to get a mortgage. This is completely wrong too. Compared to the previous system, graduates will be much better off in their earlier years when trying to build a deposit for a house etc. It is of course true that they will still be paying through their 30s and 40s too (assuming they earn over £21K) but that's the trade-off.

There are loads more (see FOOTNOTE) but they are the two that have most irritated me.

I suspect there will be some who accuse me of being a government patsy on this as I am a Lib Dem but the truth is I would be saying this no matter who was in government. I am always happy to debate the consequences and fairness of policies with anyone but in order to do this properly, the facts need to be clear.

And far too often in this debate they are inadvertently or in some cases I suspect deliberately distorted.

FOOTNOTE: The widely respected Martin Lewis of the Money Saving Expert website who himself is no fan of the changes is nevertheless appalled at the terrible reporting on the subject (I heard him bemoaning it on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 show recently) and has taken it upon himself to produce a "20 Key Facts" page which goes into great detail and busts a number of myths about the new system. It's definitely worth a read if you have half an hour.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Vote for meeee! (Total Politics Blog Awards 2011)

2011-08-15T08:54:00.000+01:00

The Total Politics Blog Awards for 2011 are open for voting until the end of this week.

I've been a bit tardy with my annual "shameless grubbing for votes" post this year but here it is in in all its glory!

If you have liked what I have blogged here or elsewhere then please consider voting for me in the poll.

This year there are two sections, favourite political blog and favourite individual political blogger. I would be most obliged if you could consider me for both categories. You need to nominate at least 5 in each section for that section to be entered in the poll and you nominate a maximum of 10 in each category.

You can vote here.

Cheers!

Mark.

Rebuild Reeves

2011-08-10T12:35:00.000+01:00

Like many other people I was very moved by the dignity of the Reeves family in the face of what must be an horrendous time for them in the last couple of days. For anyone who is not aware, they own the family run "House of Reeves" furniture store in Croydon which was burnt to the ground on Monday as a result of the riots that took place.

The shop has been in their family for almost 150 years and it was burnt down in only a few hours. I suspect that building ablaze for a long time before fire-crews could get to it (because their safety could not be guaranteed) will become a symbol of this period of civil unrest.

I felt compelled to try and do something to help the Reeves family and to demonstrate that there are lots of people in this country who also want to help. They have already indicated that they intend to rebuild their shop which I find immensely heartening so I have set up a Pledge Bank page where I have pledged a small amount of money to contribute towards this and am asking others to pledge what they can too.

I have already had people asking me whether they are insured and I am not yet clear on what the situation is there but irrespective of that I thought this was a good way of showing solidarity with them at this dreadful time. Also, I know that insurance can take a long time to come through whereas I have set a deadline of two and a half weeks on this pledge to reach 1,000 people to give a small amount each which would I am sure be of good practical use to them in the meantime.

I suspect lots of other initiatives to help other business in particular and generally affected by the riots will be underway soon too and I will donate what I can to those too and would encourage everyone else to do so as well. I just felt this was a specific way to help one of the most visible symbols of the riots be restored.

Where's Cleggy?

2011-08-08T09:00:00.002+01:00

Before I start this post properly, I know politicians can't really win. If they take regular holidays they are swanning off leaving the country in the lurch and if they don't they're workaholics out of touch with ordinary people.

However that aside I was a little surprised to hear on the news on Friday that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne were all on holiday at the same time. Apparently William Hague was the most senior cabinet minister still in the country and he was taking charge of the initial response to the current turmoil in the financial markets.

That strikes me as a little bit odd. Nick Clegg is the Deputy Prime Minister. His role includes deputising for the Prime Minister when he is not around, e.g. on holiday. So why did Cameron and Clegg schedule their holidays for the same time? Surely they could have divvied it up so that one of them was around in the country and available during the summer at any one time?

Clegg has made it almost to the top. He is second in command of the government, a position that his predecessors as Lib Dem and Liberal leaders would have given their eye teeth for. And given the position of the third party, second in command is the best we are going to get for a very long time. Yet when Clegg has the opportunity to fulfill one of his primary duties in this role, standing in for the Prime Minister, he has chosen not to do it.

As a Lib Dem I find this quite frustrating. For years we have been told that our party cannot be trusted with the levers of power and now when our leader has the chance to do just that and show those naysayers they are wrong he decides to go on holiday. And this is not the first time it has happened. Back in February he was quoted as having "forgotten" that he was in charge of the country whilst Cameron was abroad and that he was going to head off on holiday at the end of the week so "someone else would have to do it" then. I did not like the casual implication of that comment then and I like even less the pattern that seems to be emerging.

I know that people, especially senior politicians are never fully out of touch these days but the fact that Hague was chairing meetings in London last week demonstrates that there are some things that require a physical presence, especially when there is a crisis.

I hope that next time the PM and his deputy are planning their time away from the country, a little more thought is put into coordinating it.

This post was originally published on Dale & Co.

Has Guido got this #restore campaign all wrong? #retaintheban

2011-08-07T13:09:00.000+01:00

The Guido Fawkes blog run by Paul Staines and Harry Cole has been pushing a campaign recently to try and get 100,000 signatures on a government e-petition for bringing back capital punishment for the murderers of children and on-duty police officers.

I am personally not in favour of this but others have written extensively about the arguments against and I am not going to focus on that today but instead on the approach that Guido Fawkes has taken.

Both Staines and Cole are very experienced media performers and campaigners, especially when it comes to new media. And there is no denying that they have stimulated a debate about the issue. But thanks to Lib Dem campaigner Martin Shapland there is a big fly in their ointment.

As I write the "Restore Capital Punishment" petition has 8,949 signatures. But another petition on the same site that Shapland introduced recently entitled "Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment" has 15,881 signatures. Also it is worth noting that the Shapland petition was introduced a while after the Guido backed one and hence has not had as much time to garner signatures.

It is true that there are other pro-death penalty petitions on the site which may be "splitting the vote" to an extent but there are also multiple anti-death penalty petitions too so effectively both votes are being split. But it would appear that the anti-death penalty supporters online are in the ascendancy.

We shouldn't be too surprised by this. Although there has been a long vaunted majority in favour of the death penalty amongst the public (although I have always felt this is somewhat overstated and once the debate is engaged with the liberal argument is there to be won) that majority is highest amongst older people and lower amongst younger people who are more likely to be active online. Also, as we have seen from previous surveys of things like Twitter there are lots of people with liberal views active on there, perhaps not in proportion to their make-up of the population.

Which brings me back to my main point. I think Guido may have got this one wrong by trying to use new media to push an illiberal measure like the death penalty. Although the initial petition has been a good springboard for provoking a debate, it is looking increasingly likely that online at least the anti-death penalty petition has more momentum behind it. If this continues to be the case then it could be dead in the water before any parliamentary debate even takes place because the government (who probably do not want this distraction) can point to the fact that the petition site is showing we should keep the status quo. And any complaint about this only focusing on the online population could be skewered because the only reason the subject is even being discussed is because of the original e-petition. Which is online. The existence of the more popular opposing petition is a huge spoiler.

The biggest spoiler of all would be if the Shapland petition could reach 100,000 signatures before any other one and especially the Guido one.

I've just signed it and if you are opposed to the reintroduction of the death penalty, you should too.

Louise Mensch has missed an opportunity on drugs

2011-08-05T16:37:00.000+01:00

Following Conservative MP Louise Mensch's excellent work on the Culture Media and Sport Committee, pursuing News International with robust questioning about the activities of their newspapers the tabloids have recently tried to strike back. They have of course tried the tactic that they know best. Muckraking.

They apparently have evidence that during the 1990s, Louise took drugs whilst partying with violin virtuoso Nigel Kennedy amongst others. Louise's response was swift and was clearly an attempt to cut the story off at the knees:

"Although I do not remember the specific incident, this sounds highly probable... since I was in my twenties, I'm sure it was not the only incident of the kind; we all do idiotic things when young."

As I heard this on the radio I found myself vocally praising her riposte to this. Essentially she was saying "so what". She was young and she did what young people do. She went up in my estimations.

However later on that same day I spotted this tweet from her account:

She is using the old politician's trick of admitting having used drugs when she was younger but insisting they should remain illegal now. This has been the standard way that MPs have recently tried to avoid charges of hypocrisy by distancing themselves from their previous behaviour using their former "stupidity" or "youth" as an alibi.

This is particularly disappointing in Louise's case because this tactic is usually used by MPs to keep the tabloids at bay. But she and her committee have the papers on the ropes at the moment. If ever there was a time to break free of the ridiculous strictures the print media in this country impose on public discourse about drugs, now would surely be it? She could easily have said something like "I did take drugs when I was younger as did many of my contemporaries and I think we need a mature debate about this subject rather than these salacious attempts by the tabloid press to use it as a means to push their agenda.".

Now it is of course possible that Louise genuinely thinks that taking drugs as her and her contemporaries appeared to have regularly done (judging by her own comments) was idiotic and anyone doing the same today should be prosecuted and potentially imprisoned. But if that is true then then anyone finding themselves today with a criminal record for having done this would find it impossible to ever get selected as a candidate for a party in a winnable seat, let alone get elected. So the logical conclusion is that she is saying that she is not really fit to be an MP but that she didn't get caught so was lucky. It is very hard to view this as anything other than hypocrisy.

Louise Mensch knows she is on safe ground using this sort of formulation. After all, the Prime Minister led the way with his "entitlement to a private life before politics" comments during his leadership campaign. It would appear today's politicians can have their cake and eat it on this issue.

To be fair to her, maybe she does not want to be fighting on multiple fronts given the current circumstances. That would be understandable in a way although regrettable in my view.

I can only hope that as the power of the press in general and the tabloids in particular continues to wane, partly as a result of Louise's (and others) sterling work that eventually other MPs in her position will feel emboldened to speak up honestly about their experiences and use it as a way to open up a serious debate about drugs policy.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Why Cameron discussing BSkyB with Brooks would matter

2011-07-21T08:52:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, David Cameron repeatedly refused to answer whether he discussed the BSkyB bid with Rebekah Brooks on any of the multiple occasions he met with her since becoming Prime Minister. Instead he has relied on a rather precise formulation of words where he claims he had "no inappropriate conversations" with her and he also points out that he had been taken entirely out of the BSkyB bid process.

It is true that the ultimate decision lay with Jeremy Hunt the Culture Secretary and that he is supposed to be following a quasi-judicial process.

But it still matters if (and I repeat if) Cameron did discuss the BSkyB bid with one of News International's most senior executives. The fact that the relationship between the Prime Minister and Brooks (and also Andy Coulson) was so close provided almost deafening mood music as a backdrop to the bid. Hunt would have to have a particularly tin ear not to have picked up on it. And of course Hunt is relying on Cameron for future promotion and preferment. I am not saying there is anything provable about how one may influence the other, there almost definitely will not be. The main protagonists may not be consciously aware of it even if there was; it could happen on a subconscious level. They are only human beings.

So Cameron should never have discussed the BSkyB bid with Brooks. At all. If she had started to go near it he should have cut her short and insisted it would be wrong to discuss it. If he had done this though I imagine he would have had no problem saying so in the Commons.

Cameron's attempt to draw a line under the affair yesterday with his statement to the House and the questioning he faced afterwards appears to have been partially successful. For the first time in two weeks the "hackgate" saga is not leading the bulletins. But his refusal to answer this properly yesterday has opened up more questions about precisely how close the relationship was and casts further doubt on his judgement.

After all, why would a Prime Minister put himself in a position where he is having to use terminological contortions to obfuscate on this question when he should just be able to say unequivocally that he never discussed the bid?

What if this is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems?

2011-07-18T08:00:00.001+01:00

In the recent local and devolved elections, the Lib Dems polled around 16% of the vote. This was down around a third on the 23% the party polled at the last General Election. Lots of very hard working councillors lost their seats and as a result of this the party's local base has doubtless been damaged. Of course I feel desperately sorry for those people. Fighting against a national trend is very difficult and can feel like one hand is tied behind your back before you even get started.

However what I wanted to focus on today is how the national political picture is likely to pan out over the next few years and to put this into historical context.

Since 1945 there have been 17 General Elections and of the 16 up until 2010 the Lib Dems or Liberal Party achieved precisely 0% of the power in the aftermath of each of them. There was a brief period of influence at the fag-end of a Labour government in the late 1970s with the Lib Lab pact but that was a mere blip and did not result in ministerial office for any Liberal MPs. So effectively we were looking at 65 years when the third party had no executive power to implement its policies.

That historical trend was well and truly bucked last year however when the Lib Dems formed a coalition government with the Conservatives. They got a little over 20% of the cabinet positions including Deputy Prime Minister and a chance to implement all sorts of policies across the political board, even in departments where they did not have the Secretary of State. Indeed recent BBC research suggests that so far the indications are that 75% of the Lib Dem manifesto is being implemented in the government programme vs 60% of the Conservative manifesto! That is an incredible achievement when you consider that the Lib Dems have 57 MPs against 307 for the Conservatives.

But that context is thrown into sharp relief by the opinion polls which regularly have the party in single digit or low double digit figures and the local election results in May which were not quite that bad but still well down from last year as I mentioned at the start.

I suppose there are a number of reasons why the party is doing so badly in the national polls now. Amongst them will be the way Lib Dem MPs mostly signed a pledge promising to vote against a rise in tuition fees and then as a governing party did the opposite (although plenty of individual MPs kept that promise of course), the fact that the party has signed up to a deficit reduction programme that is rather at odds with what was said during the election campaign and so on and so on. The party is in coalition and has had to make compromises but some of them have been hard for Lib Dem inclined voters to swallow.

This would have been the case whoever the Lib Dems had formed a coalition with though. Even if a Lib/Lab coalition had been feasible (and from what I have read I remain convinced it was not for various reasons, both political and mathematical) the Lib Dems would have ended up in a similar position now as well. Lots of people who had voted for the party as an anti-Labour protest vote would have been disgusted that it had "propped up" Labour and would have gone off to vote for another party or not voted at all.

And I think this is the crux of the matter. We have to face up to the fact that a decent chunk of our support in 2010, and for many years before then was made up a protest vote of various kinds. Anti-Conservative certainly, but also Anti-Labour and perhaps even anti-politics. After all, people could vote Lib Dem safe in the knowledge that they would never be in power to do anything about it. Couldn’t they?

Because of the vagaries of the First Past the Post system for Westminster, a drop in support of a third can produce outcomes whereby the number of MPs lost is much more than a third. On some projections, current Lib Dem polling could see us with 15 MPs at the next General Election or perhaps even less. Now in reality there are likely to be local issues and incumbency factors at play that mitigate this somewhat but if the polls stay roughly where they are (even assuming a bit of a bounce if the economy improves by 2015 and the Lib Dems get some credit for this) the number of MPs the party has the next time the voters are asked could easily be half or even less than now.

For the individual MPs and the local parties they represent this will be very difficult. In many cases decades of extremely hard work will have been put into winning and retaining the seat.

But to put this into the historical context I mentioned at the start, all those decades of work, the long, long march from fringe party with only enough MPs to fit in the back of a taxi, never being able to execute any of the 16 manifestos since 1945, to a position where 75% of the 2010 manifesto is actively being implemented is worth considering very carefully. In a way, the investment that those who put all that effort in over all those years is now being realised in terms of political capital, power and policies.

So what if this is as good as it gets? Maybe the party gets one shot at power when the electoral cards fall in a certain way under FPTP and it has to make the most of that when it happens. And that will never be easy for all the reasons mentioned previously. There will always be some voters who will feel betrayed by a party of protest becoming a party of government. And maybe also, the party will lose seats at the next election even if things go very well for the economy and the strong influence the party had had on the government produces very positive outcomes. Nobody ever said life, or politics was fair!

I have talked a lot about positive outcomes of policy but I still think there are plenty of things the party in government could do much better. I certainly think as I have said before they need to make it much clearer to the public what difference they are making (which to be fair to him, Nick Clegg seems to have belatedly realised). And we should certainly keep fighting for as much of our programme as we can get.

But if this is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems when they are in power then I suppose the party has a choice. It can, perhaps after another round or two of bad local election results (which seem inevitable, certainly as the cuts bite) decide it has had enough and withdraw from the coalition, maybe even defenestrating the public face of the Lib Dem compromises on the way in an attempt to shore up its political position. And let’s not kid ourselves that that route would be a panacea. Electoral meltdown could easily follow then too.

The other choice available to the party is to take the long view that this is its chance to make a real difference for the remaining years of this parliament. That difference might not yield immediate political dividends and might leave the party having to rebuild its local base for years to come but at least all the years of hard work in achieving those Westminster seats would have resulted in a very heavily Lib Dem influenced government in the first half of the decade that started with such a remarkable General Election result and one which the party embraced in the national interest.

That is the route I would choose.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Will Cameron's honesty on press influence spread to drug policy?

2011-07-13T08:13:00.000+01:00

Something struck me during David Cameron's press conference about the "Hackgate" scandal last Friday. It was this particular passage:

Because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers, we turned a blind eye to the need to sort this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated.

It's a bit like MPs' expenses.

The people in power knew things weren't right.

But they didn't do enough quickly enough – until the full mess of the situation was revealed.

Now, when the scandal hits and the truth is plain for everyone to see ... there are two choices.

You can downplay it and deny the problem is deep – or you can accept the seriousness of the situation and deal with it.

I want to deal with it.

I was a bit surprised, although pleasantly so that Cameron should admit that politicians have been too much in thrall to the tabloid press and the Murdoch press in particular. It is one of those aspects of public life that has been so prevalent for so long that it barely even merits a mention and of course politicians would never have admitted what Cameron has just done in public. Ed Miliband has also said something similar publicly too.

Cameron is of course responding to the current firestorm around the News of the World and tabloid phone hacking allegations. But the influence of the press generally and the tabloid press in particular runs much deeper.

Already Lance Price, Tony Blair's former spin doctor has off the back of this said that Murdoch had a very strong influence on Labour's attitude to the Euro during his time in office.

But there are lots of areas of policy where there is a strong suspicion that the influence of the tabloids and The Sun/NotW in particular has held sway. One of the most obvious has been in drugs policy.

I have become fairly active in campaigning for a relaxation of the drugs laws and lobbying for a more evidence based approach in recent years and have blogged about various aspects of it on many occasions. Given the fact that in his early days as an MP, David Cameron had put his name to a Select Committee report that recommended a more liberal approach to drugs I had hoped his election as Conservative leader would have heralded a new way of dealing with this. But by the time of the leadership campaign in 2005 his views were downgraded to "options should be considered" and by the time I questioned him on the subject in early 2010, just before the General Election he had very firmly distanced himself from his former views.

The strange way in which politicians seem willing to engage with and consider evidence based approaches to the subject of drugs policy when they are a long way from power and how that changes to backing the status quo as they get closer to power is somewhat hard to understand. Unless you factor in the way the press treats the issue with labels like "Soft on drugs" and appeals to emotion regarding keeping children safe (despite the fact that more children than ever can get drugs now under the current regime). Any senior politician who steps outside the narrow tramlines permitted for debate regarding drugs is apt to find themselves hounded by the tabloid press.

Here is what former Conservative Minister Phillip Oppenhein told me about the subject when I interviewed him a couple of years ago:

I think that politicians would be surprised at the response they would get to a serious debate on the subject. My experience is that a lot of Tories now favour reform, but they are terrified about being seen as soft on drugs by the media and prejudicing an almost certain election victory. Cameron had a chance to start a real debate when his own drug taking experiences became an issue, but I guess he was too timid to do so.

If politicians from the PM down are now genuinely throwing off the shackles off the tyranny of the tabloid press then they should no longer have anything to fear from an open and honest debate on this subject.

If that was to happen, perhaps something very good could come of this horrible scandal with the harm caused by drugs in our society greatly reduced under a liberalised, controlled regime rather than leaving it to the gangsters backed by screaming tabloid headlines.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Outline of a No2STV campaign

2011-07-11T09:27:00.000+01:00

Now that the AV referendum has been lost, those of us who supported the change are licking our wounds and wondering when the next opportunity for electoral change for the Commons may present itself.

At the moment it is looking like a long way off. However I think in the aftermath of the failed AV bid it is worth having a look at what those of us in favour of electoral reform can learn from this campaign to be borne in mind in the future, whenever the next opportunity may present itself.

The system I and most other Liberal Democrats (and more generally most in favour of electoral reform) favour is Single Transferable Vote. It is much more proportional than FPTP (or AV) but importantly it is similar to AV in that you rank candidates in order of preference. The big difference being that more than one MP is elected for each larger constituency (between 3 and 6 is optimal).

Having witnessed at close quarters the tactics used by the No2AV campaign I think we are in a position to at least have a stab at predicting what the outline of a No2STV campaign may look like further down the line. I think this will be a useful exercise in order to ensure that those campaigning for a Yes vote are ready to handle the sort of things that are likely to be thrown at us.

Here are variations on five campaigning messages that I expect we would face:

1) "It's too expensive". This was one of the No2AV campaign's most pushed lines certainly in the early days. Having spoken to people it would seem that this message was resonating. The claim that AV would cost £250 million was bunkum. But it worked this time so you can expect it will be tried again. And of course next time it is likely to be harder to rebut as we already know that counting machines are used for some STV elections. I would suggest that the response to this has to be firmly and consistently on the basis of principle. Moving to STV may cost a little more but what price democracy? I have made the point previously that moving to the universal franchise (twice as many ballot papers to print, issue and count) was more expensive but nobody seriously argues now that women should not have the vote. I have found when trying to make this point that I have faced scorn for appearing to try and conflate votes for women with electoral reform but I maintain it is a fair comparison because to argue it is too expensive to change the electoral system is a diversion and this highlights it. A Yes2STV campaign would definitely need to get on the front foot regarding this message from the off.

2) "It's too complicated". Again, this is a message that was used to apparently good effect against AV. And let's be honest, if AV is considered too complicated then STV could arguably be even more so. Even though I certainly think most people can grasp the concept of what is going on in both cases, a big failure of the Yes2AV campaign was in educating people about how it works. Instead of the first referendum broadcast featuring people shouting at "MPs" using megaphones they would have been much better off explaining how AV actually works (there was none in that broadcast) and highlighting a small number of key reasons why it is better than FPTP. Similarly for STV it will be vital that the system is concisely explained as often as possible and with key messages as to why this is better. With STV I actually think the second part of this will be easier because there is a very clear message regarding fairness with the proportionality factor.

3) "It will help the BNP". Or substitute BNP for whatever extreme party (or parties) exist at the point of the campaign. It proved remarkably difficult to shake this accusation against AV during the recent campaign. This was particularly surprising to me because the BNP was actually in favour of keeping FPTP. However the No campaign rather deftly managed to sow confusion by discussing how lower preferences from those voting BNP as their first preference could end up "deciding elections". I am not going to deconstruct the counter arguments here, it has been done elsewhere many times (best example I have seen is here in this excellent post by mathematician Tim Gowers which incidentally rebuts pretty much all the No2AV campaign's claims) but I will make the point that if the No2AV campaign was able to make this message stick when the BNP are against the change themselves, then I think we can have a pretty good guess at how hard they will push this message when the BNP are likely to be for the change. And I would imagine moving to a more proportional system, even STV would be something that extremist parties like the BNP would be in favour of. I actually think it would be pretty hard for parties like the BNP to get any MPs under STV because it is preferential and therefore makes it very hard for parties that are actively strongly disliked by most people. However having seen what happened during the AV campaign I would expect this message to be drowned out as it relies on a fairly detailed understanding of the underlying counting process for STV. What I would suggest for this message right from the off is that it needs to be rebutted with the argument that the way to beat parties like the BNP is not to rig the electoral system against them. All that does is make them look like martyrs. Instead the way is to beat them by arguing against their extreme and unworkable policies. There are other arguments that can be deployed here too but I think the one of principle is the one that is on strongest ground and should fit in with other campaign messages well too.

4) "Under STV, candidates that come first can end up losing". This was another effective message from No2AV. Of course it all depends on what your definition of "coming first" is. No2AV was relying on the number of votes after one round of counting which is what we are all used to under FPTP. Because under STV there would be multiple seats up for grabs it would be a little different. But I can certainly imagine them trying to argue that STV is "unfair" because a candidate that is way behind when first preferences are taken into account could still eventually end up getting a seat. I expect because the move would be to multi-member constituencies that the change is quite wide reaching and therefore a direct comparison with FPTP is harder. But I am certain No2STV will find a way, and probably quite an effective way of portraying this as unfair. It would be tempting for Yes2STV to try and rebut this claim with technical details but I think instead the "fairness" mantle has to be seized immediately by Yes regarding the proportionality argument. Once people understand that the proportion of MPs elected will be much closer to the number of votes cast, any claim about fairness regarding second, third and so on preferences would hopefully have much less potency.

5) "It will lead to weak and unstable government.". The Yes2AV campaign expended quite a lot of energy trying to claim that coalitions and hung parliaments were no more likely under AV than FPTP. This was a very defensive approach and they may well have been better off trying to argue in favour of coalitions in principle rather than the rather muddled messages that ended up coming across. At least a Yes2STV campaign would have little choice but to argue from the off in favour of coalitions as STV is certainly much more likely than FPTP to produce them. Indeed that is precisely why most campaigners for reform want it!

This is obviously just a very first pass by someone who is admittedly biased but followed the campaign from both sides with great interest. I was disappointed by both AV campaigns as I have blogged about in detail previously. But I still think it is worth thinking ahead whilst the wounds the Yes campaign are licking are still very fresh! I expect others will have their own ideas and I have almost certainly missed some important lessons here. One that springs to mind instantly is the "multiple votes" argument. But I am very tired of rebutting that particular one and let's face it, we have a lot of time to learn all of the lessons!

In conclusion, in some ways STV will be easier to argue for than AV. It has some advantages over FPTP (from a reformer's perspective) that are probably easier to sell than AV. Its proportionality is whatever your view certainly a clear change, rather than the rather mixed change in this respect that AV would have given. However the counting process is harder to explain than AV and that is the area in which I expect No2STV would try to make the most capital (I plan to come back to this point in a future post where I will discuss some other potential broader consequences for the electoral reform movement from the AV No vote). I think another thing that is clear from the AV failure is that more time would be needed to ensure the new system could be explained and understood much better than AV was by 5th May 2011.

Oh, and one more very important lesson. Please, please, please let's not have the referendum on the same day as any other elections!

FOOTNOTE: I have made the assumption for the purposes of this post that an STV campaign would follow roughly the same blueprint as the AV one did, i.e. a single question referendum with only two choice with a No and Yes campaign batting for each side. I actually think there are much better and more sophisticated deliberative processes that could and arguably should be used for something as important as changing our electoral system but that argument is for another day.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Almost two thirds of people think drug users should not be criminalised

2011-06-30T17:33:00.000+01:00

Interesting result from a recent YouGov poll on drugs. The following question was asked:

Suppose people use illegal drugs but have not committed any other crime. In general, should such people be treated as criminals and brought before the courts, or should they be treated as people who may need medical treatment and other forms of support?

And the responses were:

They should be treated as criminals and brought before the courts: 30%
They should be treated as people who may need treatment and other forms of support: 62%
Don't know: 7%

So more than two thirds of those who expressed a view and nearly two thirds of all respondents think that drug users should not be criminalised.

Given this sort of finding, I find it bizarre that politicians and ministers are still unwilling to enter a serious debate about decriminalising or legalising drugs. The reasons I hear again and again are that it is politically difficult to do so and that's why most senior politicians are not willing to engage with it. But how on earth can that be true when the majority of people actually think drug users should not be being criminalised? And what does it say about our political structure that these people and that view are largely being sidelined? A shrewd politician would surely be able to find the words and the approach to go with this very strong grain of public opinion?

So who from the senior ranks of all parties is going to step up to the plate and speak for two-thirds of the British public on this subject?

51p per person per year vs 1000+ nurses

2011-06-30T14:24:00.005+01:00

Paul Waugh from Politics Home has just tweeted the following:

Osborne says Royals cost us 51p per person per year.

I have no doubt that George Osborne's figures are accurate for the direct cost of the Royals*.

But isn't it interesting how when Osborne is talking about something that he wants to spend money on (and you can't get much more Royalist than true blue Tories like our beloved Chancellor) it's presented in a way that tries to make it look miniscule? Almost as if it would be churlish to disagree that the Royals are worth every darn penny and anyway it's less than the cost of a mars bar don't you know and didn't she look radiant on the wedding day and sure the Duke occasionally says the wrong thing but he's been such a good consort for her etc. etc. etc.?

For example, I don't remember the (made up) figures for the cost of switching to AV being presented by the Chancellor in the format of cost per person per year (the real figures for this would have been less than 51p per person per year). Oh no, it was how many sick babies will suffer and how many soldiers will (implicitly) die because of lack of the millions that were supposedly going to be spent.

What what does this figure of 51p per person per year actually mean? Well the figures have just been released for the UK population last year. It was 62,262,000 (see here). I am assuming he is using the most up to date figures so this would be a total of £31,753,620. Or if you want to look at it another way, and a way that politicians like Osborne usually love to do it is approximately 6 new primary schools every year at a cost of just over £5m per school (source).

But the currency politicians simply adore using regarding public spending is nurses. How many extra nurses could we employ each year for the cost of the Royal family? Well according to salarytrack.co.uk the current average salary for a nurse in the UK is £26,123 per year. Let's add on 13.8% for employers' NI and that gives us a total salary cost of £29,728. So we could get around 1068 extra nurses each year. Imagine how many more lives each year could be saved and how much more comfort and care could be provided for that amount of money.

Suddenly that 51p per person per year seems a lot bigger doesn't it?

I know what I would rather spend the money on.

*I say "direct cost" because this does not include the cost of things like security and civic receptions etc. It's hard to know what the total cost is but I have seen estimates previously (e.g. here) of around £100m. So maybe the real cost is more like 3000 nurses.

UPDATE: Millennium Dome in the comments has correctly highlighted the following which I thought was worthy of putting the main post:

I agree with you, but actually I'd say you can get even more nurses for your Royal Family buck!

You've ADDED the employers NI cost - and fair enough that IS a cost to the Dept. of Health... but not to government spending overall because the Treasury, obviously, gets that money back. The actual cost to the exchequer of a nurse (or ANY public sector worker) is their salary NET of tax, so in the case of a nurse on £26,123 that's c£20,150 net of tax and NI.

So I reckon the government could afford 1575 extra nurses a year for £31,753,620 :)

Whataboutery

2011-06-26T21:30:00.001+01:00

Mark Pritchard is an MP whose existence had not imprinted upon my conscience until this week. He holds the seat for The Wrekin for the Conservatives and on Thursday the Commons decided in favour of a ban on circus animals following a motion moved by Mr Pritchard.

The decision is not binding on the government but it does put them in an awkward place politically given their current position on this subject. Much of the coverage has been about how the MP was allegedly threatened and bullied by the No 10 machine to try and get him to withdraw the motion (which he stood up to and refused).

But the thing that caught my eye most about the story was how a number of Labour activists and sympathisers on Twitter started making comments like "It's all very well sticking up for circus animals, but what about people on benefits.." etc.

This is something I see happening a lot in politics. I have seen it referred to in the past as "Whataboutery" which I think is an appropriate term. It is a way of attacking something without necessarily disagreeing with it but diverting the discussion onto different terrain. Probably lots of the Labour people who were doing this actually agree with the proposal but are trying to make out that Mr Pritchard is somehow wrong to be focusing on it.

I disagree. Lots of MPs have special causes that are dear to them for particular reasons and they should be commended when they use their positions to spark an honest debate and ultimately persuade lots of their colleagues to agree with them and perhaps do something about it.

I confess I do not know much about the details of the motion or the current state of how circus animals are treated but I admire the fact that this back-bench MP has been able to make the weather on a subject that he clearly feels very passionate about. I would certainly not try to diminish what he has done on the grounds that there are other causes that are more dear to me (which of course there are as regular readers of this blog will know!).

I am sure there will be plenty of time to debate all the other things that the activists who piped up last week also want covered. It doesn't mean it is wrong to try and make changes in other, possibly less important areas too.

Am I the only one bored by political defections?

2011-06-18T17:18:00.002+01:00

A Conservative councillor in Cornwall has defected to the Lib Dems (reported here on Lib Dem Voice).

Every week or two there will be some political defection reported somewhere at some level. Often council, sometimes MEP, occasionally MP (although we haven't had one of them for a while - I think Quentin Davies was the last one) or MSP, MA etc.

Is it just me or is this sort of thing, you know, well, boring? I know the dynamics that have been behind some defections in the last few years and there are often local factors at play and of course personal ambitions and all sorts of things that would never be admitted to in whatever official statement is released. In other words it is going to be pretty much impossible for an external observer to get the real reasons behind the defection.

Often as well I find that the party receiving the new convert goes well over the top in highlighting the significance and we sometimes get the counter-spin operation from the jilted party. Yawn, yawn, yawn.

People change their mind about stuff all the time in real life and change jobs to work for competitor organisations too. Why, when it happens in politics do people think it means anything significant?

It almost never does, whatever party is being jumped from and to.

Telegraph fundamentally misunderstands how the Lib Dems work

2011-06-15T07:04:00.001+01:00

The Daily Telegraph had a rather forthright leading article yesterday entitled "Political failure has scuppered NHS reform". In it they took both David Cameron and Nick Clegg to task for having given in to pressure on the NHS reforms and regretted how in their view the essence of the original bill now "lies in ruins".

But the bit that leapt out at me was the section where they specifically criticise the Lib Dem leader:

Mr Clegg has pulled the plug on a set of proposals he was happy to go along with until his activists told him otherwise. That was a failure of leadership.

This is how a healthy political party is traditionally supposed to work isn't it!? The members who make up the grass-roots footsoldiers vote on and decide the policies. That's how Labour used to work. The Tories have always been much more top-down but I know many Tory activists who lament the fact that they are unable to decide on their own policy.

Irrespective of the other parties that is always how the Lib Dems have worked. It is one of the things that attracted me to the party in the first place, that I could have a real say in policy. And in this case it was a vital part of the way government policy has been altered. The coalition agreement was sketchy on the detail for the NHS and the recent Lib Dem conference made it very clear what the party in government needed to do to satisfy the party at large.

To attempt to characterise this as a "failure of leadership" by Nick Clegg is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the party that he leads. Other parties may impose policies from the top. The Lib Dems do not.

I think many people will start to realise this following the changes to this bill and perhaps some will consider it to be a much more democratic way of deciding a party's policy than it being cooked up by a cabal in Westminster.

It's the naming convention stupid!

2011-06-14T13:54:00.000+01:00

I watched Panorama yesterday which was about whether banks had learnt their lessons from the various misselling scandals of recent years (e.g. Payment Protection Insurance).

They used undercover filming to show how financial advisers in various banks don't seem to be following the correct procedures or guidelines when it comes to advising people about how to invest their money. One of the biggest bones of contention was regarding people's attitude to risk. They had numerous examples of people who they interviewed who strongly felt they had been misled or even in some cases hoodwinked into investing in products that were much more risky than they had thought.

The undercover filming appeared to show the potential for this to happen. However I felt that the biggest problem the programme highlighted was in how the naming conventions used for products can be utterly misleading.

They followed an undercover reporter who had made it clear to the adviser that they wanted to make sure their investment was low risk. As the adviser took them through the process they kept referring back to how they understood the level of risk the person wanted was low. This happened a few times in the clips they showed. Then at the end of the process the adviser proudly announced that the best product for the customer was something called a "balanced fund". The customer agreed this sounded right.

Cut back to the experts watching the footage all of whom straight away made it clear that the "balanced fund" referred to was not appropriate for the customer and was too risky given what else had been said. Fair enough. They know best and I would fully accept their arguments.

But had this been a real life situation I would not be at all surprised if a real life customer would have accepted that too. Of course all customers should read the small print and be sure they are clear what they are getting into but a product described as "balanced" would seem to me on the surface to suggest a good balance between risk and safety. Of course the reaction of the experts demonstrates this is not the case at all.

So call me crazy, but maybe these sales-people keen to flog their risky products would have a much harder time of it if the products were named more accurately. For example I have read elsewhere that "balanced funds" can have as much as 80% in shares. Well maybe the percentage of equities should be in the title of the fund? That way it would be clear what they were selling and anyone who actually would be a lot more comfortable with say 50% or 30% shares would see straight away that the fund was not right for them.

Interestingly though, this was not picked up by the programme. Perhaps they needed a lay-person among the experts to point out that the definition of the word balanced that they all seemed to intuitively understand actually meant "pretty risky" doesn't mean that in plain English!

You can still watch the programme for a few days via this link.

I'll never accept the label tribalist

2011-06-12T10:53:00.001+01:00

I've had numerous debates over the last few years with people about the definition of a political tribalist and the fact that I do not think of myself as one of them. I have had counter arguments posed such as the mere fact that I go out knocking on doors and delivering leaflets for a particular political party (in my case the Lib Dems) by definition makes me tribal. I disagree with this quite strongly.

For me, tribalism is the sort of "my party right and wrong" attitude that I see from the more partisan political activists, perhaps epitomised by the sort of person who opposes a policy simply because it is from another party. I had a discussion last year with a Labour activist who claimed that there had never been a Liberal/Lib Dem policy that he had agreed with. Ever. To me that just seems utterly preposterous and completely lacking in credibility, especially given that the overlap between Liberal/Lib Dem and Labour over the years must have meant in the past that plenty of those policies must have essentially also been Labour policies at various points. But that's the sort of thing I am talking about.

I saw another example yesterday in this piece from Luke Akehurst on Labourlist. At one point in the post he writes:

The worst day and the worst decisions of the Blair and Brown years would be better to live through again than the best day of the mob running Britain now.

That to me shows the mindset of a tribalist and one that I just cannot empathise with. Luke is saying that the day that David Kelly committed suicide following being named by a "outing" strategy devised by the Labour Party media machine is a better day to live through than the day David Cameron unequivocally and with widely praised Statesmanship accepted the findings of the Bloody Sunday inquiry in full. He is also saying that the day the records of 25 million people went missing from the Child Benefits system is a better day than when nearly 1 million of the lowest earning workers in the country were taken out of tax altogether.

I could go on. For me, that sort of thinking does not add up. Of course I accept that Luke thinks overall the 13 years of Labour government were better than the last year of the coalition. But to think every single individual day of the years running from 2nd May 1997 through to 11th May 2010 are all better than any of the days since then is what I define as tribalism. It's the sort of thing that in a speech from the podium at Labour conference would get great cheers but that does not stand up to scrutiny.

And I would say this about any government's record against any other. I grew up in a family that had very strong views about Margaret Thatcher and were against much of what she stood for but the day that the Falkland Islands were liberated from Argentine occupation would be high up there in the best days for this country of the last 30 years. And despite the fact that I have spent the last few years campaigning for the Lib Dems and against the Labour Party I would highlight the decisions to give the Bank of England control over interest rates and the introduction of the minimum wage two of the best decisions any government has ever made.

Tribalists exist in all parties. Sometimes they are interesting to listen to even putting aside the somewhat hyperbolic tendencies. Sometimes they bore the pants off me and I stop listening.

But I will never consider myself one of them.

Ed Balls is a proven liar

2011-06-10T09:12:00.002+01:00

I'll be honest, I have never liked Ed Balls. I used to struggle to put it into words but he has always come across as slimy and disingenuous. For me, previous claims he has made about his innocence regarding any role he might have had in trying to oust Tony Blair did not ring true.

And he has kept up the denials through thick and thin. When Andrew Rawnsley published his book last year "The End of the Party" which went into great detail about Brown's various alleged plots and Balls' role in them I remember categorical denunciations from Balls on the media. Not only that but Rawnsley himself and his reputation was traduced by various Labour figures and especially a lot of the more partisan activists on Twitter.

But isn't it funny how the more the concrete evidence comes to light, the more the sort of picture that Rawnsley was painting becomes ever more clearly true?

The Telegraph has today published details of letters that apparently are from a box that was supposed to go to Balls but has ended up in their hands. They include correspondence between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair from 2005 and 2006 with content and handwritten annotations that make it completely clear that not only was Brown actively plotting to overthrow Blair from at least 2005, but that Balls was up to his neck in the scheming too.

That makes his previous on the record claims that he was "never ever" involved in attempting to undermine colleagues now provably untrue.

The Labour Party should reflect on this and consider whether they really want someone who is happy to go onto the media and say things that are blatantly untrue in such an important position as the Treasury brief. Not to mention how someone who has been so disloyal in the past will now struggle to inspire loyalty in other colleagues.

The Labour Westminster Village may have known what he had been up to and have been largely willing to overlook it but there is now a smoking gun so the rest of us can see the truth of the matter too.

For that reason I now suspect that any residual future leadership ambitions for Mr Balls have bitten the dust. He is far too compromised by his past.

Here is a 6 minute clip from This Week during the Labour leadership campaign last year where Balls repeatedly denies what there is now written evidence to demonstrate:

Do as I say, not as I do

2011-06-06T13:05:00.001+01:00

There has been a slightly worrying tendency of late for my party, the Lib Dems to say one thing in terms of policy campaigns but then on the ground in practise to do something else.

The two examples that have reared their heads in the last few weeks are the situation regarding interns and most recently the security measures for Lib Dem conference. In both cases the party at the highest level is campaigning for something, in the case of interns it is to ensure they are paid a fair wage, in the case of security measures such as ID cards it is to scrap them and only have things that are absolutely necessary and proportionate in place and yet in both cases the party has very much been found wanting when it comes to practising what they preach.

The interns campaign is something I have been behind for a long time. It is terrible for social mobility in this country that some of the best and most coveted positions are only available to people who can afford to live without a wage for months on end and hence only end up going to those with wealthy parents. I was delighted when Nick Clegg threw his weight behind the campaign as Deputy PM. However more than two months later, not only have some individual Lib Dem MPs been advertising for unpaid interns but the party centrally has even been doing it. I am afraid this is just not on. It is simply not credible for us as a party to campaign on this issue if we are not willing to put our money where our mouth is.

The security arrangements at conference issue is a bit more nuanced in that there does have to be some security. But the way in which the party has gone about imposing the new measures does not leave me (and many other Lib Dems from what I have picked up) with a good taste in my mouth. I think the worst aspect of it is that what appears to have happened is that the police have asked for something (to have all sorts of information about putative attendees which they can then use as a reason to ban them from conference if their vetting processes say so) and the party has simply given it to them. This might be an unfair characterisation and I stand to be corrected in the comments but this is the way it is coming across. This party has campaigned for decades for civil liberties and was particularly vociferous in its opposition to ID cards. I remember one of Tony Blair's main arguments for ID cards at one stage (the arguments changed regularly as I recall) was that "the police want them". The security arrangements for conference seem to have exactly the same argument underpinning them and this does not sit easily with me. I am not saying there need be no security measures but aspects of this such as the data being stored "indefinitely" and the inconvenience and cost especially for younger members should be being challenged by the party.

I hope that the party can learn from these two different but related issues that if they are going to campaign on something, they need to be willing and able to put the principles being espoused into practise. That way the party will be leading the way rather than effectively saying "Do as I say, not as I do".

Spot the irony

2011-06-02T08:49:00.000+01:00

See if you can spot the irony in this quote from "Dads Against Drugs" founder Rob Broomfield:

“Drugs are dangerous. There is no straightforward, simple answer.”

Not confident about "Confidence and Supply"

2011-05-30T18:41:00.000+01:00

On Saturday, Andrew Grice wrote in The Independent that sources have told him the idea of a "confidence and supply" arrangement between the Conservatives and Lib Dems is now back on the cards. It was mooted in the aftermath of the election result last year before the coalition was formed and would allow the Lib Dems to oppose certain pieces of legislation but allow through others that it supported. However it would mean losing the government positions and what we would effectively end up with would be a Conservative minority government with an arrangement for important legislation such as the budget to be supported by the Lib Dems in return for some influence.

Apparently there are suggestions that such an arrangement could be put into place a year or 18 months before the next general election as part of a "decoupling phase" for the two governing parties.

I posted a blog on this subject last year where I suggested the following:

The problem with this approach is that I am not convinced that all of the public will make the distinction between C&S and a full coalition. Some will just be vaguely aware that we "propped up the Tories". I expect this will be drummed into them by Labour candidates in every LD/Labour seat.

We should think very carefully before entering into something like this. I am far from convinced that this is the right way forward. It would be better to either walk away altogether or go for a full blooded coalition.

I think a halfway house could leave us with very little influence but considerable political exposure on the downside.

I am afraid I stand by this analysis. Except now it would be even worse. Because the Lib Dems would be strongly criticised for not have the staying power, guts, call it what you will to see the government through to the end of its term. Instead they will be perceived as having "cut and run" in order to try and distance itself from its own record in government. Whatever the downsides of a confidence and supply arrangement may have been initially, at least the party would have had a consistent story to tell about what it had decided to do. Were they to initiate any sort of "decoupling" like this I think the party would be reduced to a laughing stock.

But even worse, lots of people would not fully realise what had happened. They would still see the government in place taking decisions and the Lib Dems (largely) supporting it. So effectively a good chunk of the electorate would still perceive the Lib Dems as being part of or at least complicit in the decisions of the government. Except for the people who do realise and who deride them for bottling it!

As tempting as it might be for Lib Dems in parliament to try and find a way to extricate themselves from this government, the only realistic choice now is to stay the course and do their best to show the difference they have made in government.

Anything else will be seen as weakness and dithering which we know from previous experience in politics is usually fatal.

John Hemming MP abuses parliamentary privilege

2011-05-23T18:37:00.002+01:00

So it's finally out in the open. Today in parliament, the Lib Dem MP John Hemming outed Ryan Giggs as the footballer at the centre of the Imogen Thomas affair superinjunction. You can watch him doing it, and the Speaker's robust* (and in my opinion correct) admonishment of him here:

It had become pretty much common knowledge for anyone with a Twitter account, or Scottish newsagent that Giggs was the culprit. So it could be argued that all Hemming was doing was bringing an unsustainable situation to a head.

I think this is wrong. Parliamentary privilege exists in order to make sure that parliament can freely speak on issues without fear of its MPs being prosecuted. There are situations where this is vital for our democracy and it should be a cherished and carefully used privilege. It should not be used to out philandering footballers who have allegedly been sleeping with former reality TV contestants.

There are various arguments about superinjunctions going on at the moment and I have some reservations about how they are currently being used. But it is not the place for a member of parliament to unilaterally decide to flout a court order under protection of this ancient parliamentary right on such a trivial matter.

Not least because the more this right is abused, the more likely it is in future to start to be eroded. I can certainly imagine if this sort of thing continues that eventually the argument will be put forward that there are certain things currently covered that need to be excluded from parliamentary privilege. I for one would not want to see that happening. It is telling that most MPs of all parties are reportedly very annoyed with Hemming. I suspect they are concerned about this too.

MPs need to make sure this debate never gets started, because who knows where it could lead. Nowhere good for our democracy I am sure.

*Incidentally, I am wondering if Bercow could have asked for Hemming's contribution of specifically naming Giggs to have been redacted from the parliamentary record and edited out of Hansard? Does anyone know if this is an option that was open to him or whether even if it was it would have opened its own can of worms?

How No2AV poisoned the coalition well

2011-05-23T08:58:00.001+01:00

When the coalition first formed last May, I found myself in an odd position. Having been a member of and involved in campaigning for the Lib Dems and of course against the Conservatives, I now found myself as a member of a party that had 57 MPs, 5 cabinet ministers and a Deputy Prime Minister that were part of a government with the Conservatives and led by David Cameron.

Over the next few weeks and months I did start to find my perceptions of Cameron changing a little. I had previously seen him as a bit of a political chancer and had witnessed first hand his dissembling and obfuscation on the subject of drugs policy when I had questioned him at a "Cameron Direct" event. Various other things he had said and done, not least during the leader debates had only firmed up this view.

But his "open" offer of cooperation to the Lib Dems on the morning after the elections, combined with the fairly graceful way in which he seemed to be willing to share power and allow a decent chunk of the Lib Dem manifesto to be included in the government programme started a slight thawing of my view of him. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't about to send my application form for membership off to CCHQ or anything but things like the way he handled the Bloody Sunday inquiry announcement for example without trying to wriggle and the way he seemed to fit the role of PM pretty well was somewhat impressive.

I suspect that some other Lib Dems shared this rather odd feeling. After all, it's only natural when you see the leaders of your party day in, day out being nice and polite about the leaders and senior politicians of another party that at the very least you become a bit more willing to listen to their arguments and to an extent give them the benefit of the doubt. Of course there were aspects of the government programme I did not agree with but I generally had an optimistic and positive outlook about how the two parties in government were working and could work together in the future.

This all changed for me however in the last few weeks of the AV campaign.

If I had to pinpoint a moment, it was when the No2AV campaign released literature saying that AV would lead to broken promises and cited things like tuition fees etc. that they said were examples of Nick Clegg's broken promises.

I'm not arguing here about the rights and wrongs of the tuition fee decision. That has been debated endlessly elsewhere. What I am arguing is that for the Conservative led and funded No campaign to use the argument that their coalition partners had gone back on promises, when it was precisely because both parties were supposed to be coming together in the national interest, as Cameron had claimed he wanted on that Friday morning last May that those compromises had needed to be made was an utter betrayal. And I do not accept the argument that the No campaign was separate from the Conservatives. If Cameron had wanted to he could have stopped this line. He clearly wanted to win the campaign more than he wanted to preserve coalition cohesion and unity.

I suspect plenty will say I was naive to have expected anything else and they are probably right. Maybe I did get a little bit carried away with the idea that the two parties could genuinely do something new and work together without the usual politicking. But the result now is that any residual goodwill I had for Cameron and the Conservative leadership has been flushed down the toilet. I now have very little trust for them. And I suspect any other Lib Dems who may have had similar views to those I had last year will also have been given pause for thought.

If others across the party, including in parliament share my view, then in the long term this will be damaging for Cameron. With the Lib Dems both inside and outside the government now much more suspicious of his motives he will inevitably find it harder to get agreement. We are already seeing Nick Clegg standing firm on various aspects of the NHS reforms. The Tories can complain about what they perceive as "grandstanding" on this as much as they like but they have brought it on themselves. Clegg having a recent undisguised dig at Cameron on the NHS was only responding to the new ground rules laid down by Cameron during the AV campaign. Cameron is now a legitimate target for this sort of thing and it is his own fault. If he is going to allow attacks on the Lib Dems for "betraying their principles" then he is going to have to expect the party to damn well stand up more strongly for its principles.

Cameron probably felt he had no choice but to pull out all the stops to win the AV campaign and he may have been right. Had he lost it, defenestration may not have been far behind. But the way he went about it has poisoned the well of the coalition, certainly as far as I am concerned.

And he is going to have to get used to the Lib Dems now publicly as well as privately speaking their minds on all sorts of issues. After all, that's what his No2AV campaign demanded should happen didn't it, rather than "behind the scenes stitch ups"?

What's wrong with our politics in a single paragraph

2011-05-19T14:00:00.000+01:00

On the Spectator Coffee House blog today, in a piece ostensibly about Ken Clarke's current woes, James Forsyth mentions the following in the opening paragraph:

Dominic Grieve’s fate as shadow Home Secretary was sealed by a lunch at News International headquarters in Wapping. Grieve went to lunch with various Sun executives and rather than talking tough on crime he laid into the paper for how it covered the issue, claiming that it stoked fear of crime. The word then came back to Tory high command, via Andy Coulson, that the paper would not endorse the Tories as long as Grieve remained in that job. He was duly replaced by Chris Grayling in the 'pub-ready reshuffle' of January 2009 after less than a year in the job.

Doesn't that just sum up a big part of what is wrong with our politics in a single paragraph?

It shouldn't be for executives of national newspapers to decide who is or is not appointed to cabinet and shadow cabinet positions. Sadly it is all too easy to believe what the extremely well connected Forsyth states above.

This is why subjects like drugs policy, crime and the like can never be debated rationally as part of political discourse because politicians are terrified of what newspapers might say and therefore how discussing controversial subjects may well terminate their political career. So they generally steer clear. When they don't they are crucified as Ken Clarke is finding out today.

I just wish politicians, including those right at the top would grow some backbone and stand up to the vested interests in these newspapers. I guess though whilst they have the circulation and the implicit power that gives, this pattern will continue.

The big winner from last Thursday is George Osborne

2011-05-10T08:10:00.001+01:00

There has been a lot of talk about how (apart from Alex Salmond of course) the biggest winner from last Thursday's election and referendum results was David Cameron. Indeed Cameron is certainly in a strengthened position now having incredibly increased his share of council seats despite being a year into a government that has made big public spending cuts and increased taxation. And the fact that the AV referendum failed by such a large margin shows that Cameron can be a winner when he puts his mind to it (albeit slightly late in the day in this case).

But I think the biggest winner from last week is Chancellor George Osborne. It is widely known that Osborne was the one who stiffened Cameron's spine and got him to focus on the consequences of a Yes vote for the party. In this excellent comprehensive account of the No campaign by Tim Montgomerie on Conservative Home at the weekend he explains how it was only when Osborne starkly relayed this message to Cameron that he properly got it.

And once the brakes were off I have been told that Osborne then put a bit of stick about (to coin an Urquhartism) within the No campaign making it clear that they had to pull out all the stops to win. His interventions during the latter part of the campaign will doubtless have been music to the ears of many Tory activists too.

Allied to this is the fact that he is a Chancellor that is responsible for the biggest spending cuts this country seen in modern times and yet the public does not seem to want to blame him for them. Some deft political footwork (and a bit of luck - always important for a putative leader) has led to the Lib Dems getting the lion's share of the blame. Witness how it is Danny Alexander who ends up going onto the media regularly to defend Treasury decisions, not Osborne.

When you weigh up the fact that the Tory base are very happy with his performance, coupled with his behind the scenes successes during the last few weeks of campaigning it becomes more and more clear that at the moment at least there is no serious alternative challenger for the Tory leadership. Hague does not seem to want it and there are no other obvious contenders. Were Cameron to fall under the proverbial bus tomorrow I suspect Osborne would walk it.

But longer term Osborne is in a great position too. It is often assumed that the retention of FPTP and the boundary changes will benefit Cameron. And indeed they will to an extent, but they will equally benefit his successor, perhaps more so. I think it is quite likely that Cameron will step down during the next parliament. As I recall he has hinted that may well happen. The Tories are likely to still be in government after the next general election if the economy comes good before 2015. And of course if the economy comes good it will be Osborne who will get the lion's share of the credit, you can bet on it.

Had AV passed, a Tory majority (or even coalition or minority) government would have been a fair bit less likely after 2015. No wonder Osborne felt the need to get involved!

A lot can happen over the next four years and none of what I have said above is guaranteed. But Osborne's star is rising rapidly. If events pan out for him we could well find our next Prime Minister is another Chancellor who used careful behind the scenes manoeuvring to win the ultimate crown.

The AV campaign was a disgrace from both sides

2011-05-06T09:22:00.001+01:00

I am writing this just before 9am the morning after the AV referendum ballot. As of yet the result has not been announced. Polls just before the start of voting showed a very strong lead for the No camp. It is still possible Yes could win, after all we don't often have referenda in this country and polling is not an exact science. However on balance it is looking quite likely that No will win the day.

I expect that as a strong Yes supporter I will be accused by some regarding what I am about to write of sour grapes. However I hope most will take it in the spirit in which it is intended which is an attempt to look at the consequences of the way this referendum campaign was run for future referenda. And I am afraid it is not looking good.

Politicians often bend the truth during election campaigns. It is in the nature of the game. However it is very unusual for them to outright lie about things. Partly because there is always the chance that something like what happened to Phil Woolas last year can happen if they can be shown to have knowingly lied about an opponent. There is an ultimate body to answer to. Partly because most politicians know they will be facing the electorate again in a few years time and if they have lied there is always the chance they will be called on this and exposed which could damage their credibility and chance of re-election.

Neither of those sanctions exist for referendum campaigns in this country. The Advertising Standards Agency do not police referendum campaign advertising. And the Electoral Commission do not rule on referendum campaigns either. This was made clear during the campaign. That effectively means that as far as I can tell, both sides in a referendum campaign can pretty much say what they like and it is up to the other side to rebut these claims.

That is what we have seen happen in the last few months. Neither side has covered itself in glory. I am very, very disappointed with the Yes campaign. I have largely kept my powder dry during the campaign as I did not see the point in saying anything publicly when we were still trying to win but it has struck me as unfocused and completely failing in what should have been its primary function which was to educate people about how the AV system works and what it would mean for people's votes. Instead they have been distracted by adverts making out all MPs to be venal and endless "petitions" to the BBC about semantics, the No campaign about its donors etc. which nobody outside of the campaigns would have been interested in at all. Masses of wasted time and energy. The Yes campaign is also guilty of bending the truth in a number of respects and also not being clear enough in its messaging. The message about MPs getting "50% of the vote" should have been clarified from the start. Something like a rider saying "of those preferences remaining in the final round" would have stopped the No camp from being able to portray this as untrue. Basic, basic stuff surely? There are other things about the Yes camp too which I will likely blog about in the aftermath.

But against this, the No campaign is the worst and most deceitful campaign it has ever been my misfortune to witness at close quarters. There are two of the main planks of the No campaign that are by any yardstick I can think of, out and out lies.

The first is the claim that AV would cost £250 million. This was made up (literally) of the £80 million already spent on the referendum which would be spent whichever way people voted, £130 million for electronic counting machines that simply will not be needed and the rest on voter education and other expenses. The whys and wherefores of these figures have been debated endlessly and I for one am sick to the back teeth of even talking about them any more. Fact check after fact check from various sources (including HM Treasury) have made it clear that there is absolutely no need for counting machines. The vote counting process is relatively straightforward and even for several rounds of redistribution will only take a few more hours of manual counting. The only cost that moving to AV would incur is some voter education (a few million at most) and a little bit more overtime for counting staff in some polling stations. Perhaps £20 million at absolute most. So I repeat, the £250 million figure is a lie. And yesterday, David Blunkett, one of the leading lights of the No campaign admitted as much in a unguarded moment. He stated that it was made up and seemed to try and excuse this by dint of the fact that this was a campaign. Alas his candour was likely much too late to make a difference to many people's votes despite attempts by Yes supporters to virally promote his admission on Twitter and other social networks.

The other main element of the No campaign that is untrue is the claim that voters get multiple votes if they choose candidates that drop out. Of all the claims, this is the one I am most sick of arguing with people. So I will just say it once here. In every round, everyone who has expressed a preference that is still attached to a remaining candidate will still have their ballot counted. Everyone. Including those who vote for the eventual winning and runner-up candidate. This claim seems to rely on the fact that it takes maybe 30 seconds or a minute to explain how the counting process works and as long as they shout "KEEP ONE PERSON ONE VOTE" loudly enough, people will believe that some voters get more than one vote. Sadly, it looks like as a tactic it has worked.

But there is no point now in complaining about the behaviour of the No and Yes camps. They ceased to exist as of 10pm yesterday.

And that is my broader point. There is no accountability for what either side did. Some have suggested to me that the result will count as the verdict on the campaign but can that really be true when such distortions and downright lies have been bandied about from the Prime Minister and Chancellor down? How can we be confident that they way people have voted is based on a fair and balanced assessment of the merits or otherwise of sticking with FPTP vs switching to AV?

The truth is we cannot. This is why I am now questioning whether referenda in the UK has any future. What we saw happen during the AV campaign is all the worst elements of our political system (spin, distortions, soundbites as substitute for actual debate) writ large with no accountability.

There are some very important questions that may need to be decided in the UK in the next few years. Scotland may be asked if it wants to be independent from the UK. We may want to decide whether to join the Euro or more likely leave the EU. After the only referendum campaign in my political lifetime has been executed in such a dreadful manner, irrespective of the result, I cannot see how we can go through this sort of thing over and over again on such important questions and consider any result to have real legitimacy.

I don't know what the answer is. I can see there are big problems in trying to make sure referendum campaigns are regulated but surely to God we have to do something to make sure we don't go through another campaign like the one we have just had to endure?

The main reason to vote Yes to the Alternative Vote today #Yes2AV

2011-05-05T07:38:00.001+01:00

There have been lots of arguments bandied back and forth about the Alternative Vote versus First Past the Post in the last few months, some of which are good and sadly many of which have been pretty poor.

However there is one argument that for me at least is the overriding reason why I will be voting Yes later on today.

It allows people to vote for who they actually want to vote for.

I know there are some who will claim the current system allows you to do that but there are far too many cases where that is not true, at least not if you want to be able to make a difference to the final outcome. In far too many seats a vote for a candidate that has little chance at the moment of winning is effectively wasted. And worse than that is the fact that under those circumstances a voter can easily end up with an MP that they and many of their fellow constituents actively strongly dislike and disagree with but because all they have been able to do is put an X next to one candidate, they have not been able to express this view.

So in lots of cases, what people do under FPTP is to vote "tactically". In other words they vote for a candidate that is not really their first choice but has a good chance of winning in order to keep out a strongly disliked candidate elsewhere on the slate. FPTP already forces many who want to make a difference to the outcome to do an AV type ranking in their heads but then further complicates it by requiring the voter to then work out who of their most preferred candidates is most likely to win. At least with AV this will become unnecessary. Because a voter could then rank their candidates in order of preference they will no longer have to choose between voting with their heart and voting with their head. They can choose their most preferred candidate as their number 1 but still select other candidates in positions 2 and 3 in order that if their 1 drops out they still have a say. To my mind that is much more democratic than the current system.

There are other good reasons to vote Yes too today but the one above is the main reason I will be doing so.

Excellent AV vs FPTP post from an award winning mathematician

2011-04-22T10:13:00.001+01:00

I don't often do a post which essentially just links to another blog post but I am making an exception here.

This is simply one of the best blog posts I have ever read from award winning mathematician Tim Gowers. He goes through all of the arguments for and against AV and FPTP and with intelligence and humour analyses each one from a mathematical perspective but in an accessible way. He is clearly in favour of a switch to AV but he is not afraid to point out its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

It is a very long post and will probably take 20 or 30 minutes to read in full but it is very much worth it. If you are still undecided about AV (and even if you think you aren't) I heartily recommend it.

Why "the secret AV escape clause" won't work

2011-04-15T15:09:00.000+01:00

Sadie Smith has an interesting post on the Total Politics blog today where she highlights how even if there is a "Yes" vote in the AV referendum that Conservative MPs would still have the chance to thwart a change to the voting system. She explains how because AV can only be implemented if the new boundary changes are voted through that were that legislation to be voted down, AV would not come in:

Imagine that AV has been backed by a narrow majority in the referendum, on a very low turnout. For many Tories, especially David Cameron, that’s a nightmare scenario. In those circumstances, would he be able to convince his own side to trigger the implementation of AV by voting through new boundaries?

Don’t forget, the Tories aren’t expected to get off scot-free when the Commission presents the new constituency map; at least thirteen Conservatives look set to lose their seats, and many more will be expected to campaign within vastly changed boundaries with no guarantee of success, especially under AV.

Come 2013, the price that Tory backbenchers are being asked to pay in order to keep Nick Clegg in Ministerial cars might begin to look a tad high. They would have the power to stop the introduction of AV by voting down the implementation of the new boundaries, if they joined forces with Labour. That would surely be a coalition breaker, but it’s not inconceivable.

It's a thought provoking post, and fair play to Sadie for highlighting this anomaly but I am afraid in reality I just cannot see it happening.

Irrespective of the technical whys and wherefores, as far as the public are concerned they are voting in a referendum to change the voting system. If there is a "No" vote then we stick with First Past the Post. But if there is a "Yes" vote, no matter how narrow and no matter how low the turnout, people will expect the change to be implemented. If through some parliamentary alchemy the Tories manage to prevent this from happening I expect there would be a constitutional crisis. The will of the people through a referendum would be being thwarted.

We don't often have national referenda in this country but were parliamentarians to so blatantly override the result in this way in order to preserve a voting system that keeps them in their jobs then the backlash seen from the expenses scandal would look like a minor spat. I suspect even plenty who voted "No" would be disgusted by such a manoeuvre.

And that's why I just cannot see it happening. MPs will surely know the political dynamite they are playing with under these circumstances and hence would not pursue something so obviously anti-democratic.

If it is a "Yes" vote next month then I am sure AV will become the electoral system within short order. Vox populi, vox Dei.

Using animals to explain why AV is better than FPTP

2011-04-11T10:32:00.000+01:00

Over to the excellent C. G. P. Grey:

Birth should never be destiny

2011-04-10T19:16:00.001+01:00

I was intrigued by a section from Nick Clegg's Spring Conference speech last month. Specifically this:

Life chances should not be determined by background.

Prospects should never be narrowed by the postcode of the home you are born into.

Birth should never be destiny.

As liberals, we believe in an open society

Where the power to shape your own future is in your hands

Where all roads are open, to all of our children

I couldn't agree more with this.

The problem is, on the 29th of this month I suspect Nick Clegg along with lots of his political contemporaries will be attending a wedding in Westminster Abbey. A wedding of a woman to a man who once his grandmother and father have died will become our head of state. He will achieve this office very specifically because of who he was born to. In other words a very clear example of the exact opposite of what Nick Clegg believes should happen. This road is not open to all. Instead it is only open to a very select group of people, all of whom are closely related to each other.

Nick should not attend the wedding. I am not suggesting he makes a big thing of it (although I would!) but I am sure he could quietly find something else to be doing that day. Otherwise he is helping to validate and perpetuate the system that props up the entire class structure of this country and that contributes to the problems highlighted so eloquently by our Deputy Prime Minister in the above quoted speech.

Does Cameron feel beholden to Lansley?

2011-04-04T20:30:00.002+01:00

With the news that Andrew Lansley's NHS reforms are going to "pause" for more "consultation" it is worth reflecting on how we reached this point.

David Cameron has been a lot more relaxed than his recent predecessors as PM regarding tightly controlling the activities of ministers and their departments. And good on him I say. I think ensuring ministers have proper power to implement their programmes is generally a good thing and should lead to less "government by tabloid headlines".

However I do think in the case of the NHS that Cameron perhaps should have been a bit more attuned to what was happening. The health service has an absolutely pivotal role in the lives of the people of this country and like it or not, the Tories are not well trusted in this area of policy. It was always likely that any reform of it would receive a lot of focus and scrutiny and that the government was going to need to tread carefully. Instead Andrew Lansley has been given free reign to push ahead with a very substantial programme of reform.

I do wonder if the dynamics between the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health may have had some role to play in this. David Cameron's first proper political job was in the Conservative Research Department from 1988 - 1993. And the head of that organisation from 1990 onwards was none other than Andrew Lansley. It can be odd to find yourself in a position of authority over someone who was previously in a position of authority over you and this can do funny things to relationships. Is it possible that Cameron has felt less able to intervene with Lansley's activities than his instincts may have been telling him because of the fact that many moons ago he used to be his boss?

I expect some will dismiss this as nonsense but human relationships are very complex things. It would not surprise me if, even only at a subconscious level, Cameron has been less inclined to pull Lansley up because of their history.

It would seem clear that Cameron's political antennae is now amply registering the danger and he has somewhat belatedly become heavily involved to try and avoid a potential legislative car crash.

PMs have to have a ruthless streak even when it comes to former bosses. Perhaps it has taken this episode to bring that home to the latest holder of the office.

There are more important things than AV, so....

2011-04-04T08:31:00.000+01:00

One of the arguments I keep hearing against the Lib Dems regarding AV is that there are loads of more important things than electoral reform (the economy, the health service, schools etc. etc.) and that it is disgraceful that the party should have insisted on a referendum on AV as part of the coalition agreement above all these other things. Margaret Beckett was at it on Any Questions this week, although Lynne Featherstone rightly pointed out that lifting the lowest earners out of tax and the pupil premium and green investment were all considered of equal importance too given they were the 4 things on the front of the manifesto.

So straight away this line of attack is untrue. However I accept the point that some people will view wanting to change the electoral system as of less importance than various other things. The problem is that is not peculiar to now. There are always things that need to be sorted out and the argument that "now is not the right time" could be used in perpetuity.

And this is why that particular argument irritates me. Because it is a cheap way of trying to retain the status quo without even trying to argue based on the merits or otherwise of the systems on offer. It is simply an attempt to paint those who advocate change as doing so in bad faith and distracting from "real" issues. Like the method used to elect our primary legislative chamber (that the British people have never had a say on) is completely unimportant.

Anyway, I have a suggestion for all of those in the No2AV camp who think the referendum is a distraction and that there are more important things to focus on. If you take an average of the polls it would appear that a majority is already in favour of AV. So how about we change the voting system to AV without a referendum? This will certainly take less time and be less of a "distraction" from other legislative priorities.

We can keep it for future elections and then, at some point in the future where everyone agrees that there are no other pressing priorities, we can have a referendum to see if we stick with AV or switch back to FPTP.

Does that sound fair?

No, didn't think so. I think we all know we would never reach that mythical point where there were no other issues that some would consider a higher priority than voting on the electoral system.

As I keep saying, the No camp should be arguing for the merits of FPTP. After all, that's what we will be stuck with if No wins the day next month. Instead they seem determined to argue on spurious costs, illogical nonsense about multiple votes, erroneous claims about the influence of the BNP under AV (in that case why are they campaigning against it?) and arguments that we shouldn't be having this vote in the first place.

Oh and the latest one that Yes leaflets are somehow dodgy because the people used on them have been regionalised and hence a black Londoner is not on the West Country leaflets.

I just hope the level of debate gets better in the remaining weeks of the campaign. I suspect my hope is forlorn though.

FPTP is more complicated than AV in reality

2011-04-01T08:34:00.000+01:00

Excellent post here from Anthony Smith highlighting how under First Past the Post, the tortuous decision process you have to go through in order to make your vote actually count makes it more complicated than it would be under Alternative Vote.

Here is his flowchart that explains it all:

When will the Tories change their leadership elections to FPTP?

2011-03-27T11:27:00.001+01:00

In the last few months I have lost count of the number of senior Conservatives who have gone on the record as claiming that AV gives some voters "more than one vote". Indeed the No2AV campaign which is being led from the front by the Conservatives is soon to launch their next phase entitled "Keep One Person One Vote". Look, Matthew Elliot the No2AV campaigns director has just been given a plum spot on ConservativeHome today to evangelise about this.

Now I have always thought this argument is a load of rubbish. AV just gives one vote to each person but that vote is transferable. It means all electors have the chance to have their say about who is ultimately elected by being able to express a preference about who is chosen from candidates in later rounds even if their initial first (or second etc.) choice is eliminated.

The funny thing is that the Conservative Party understands this as well. Given their blanket statements about how preferential systems give "more than one vote" they actually use a preferential system to elect their own leaders.

The rules are that there are a number of rounds in which all Conservative MPs can vote and each round the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. This continues until there are just two candidates left and these then go forward to a ballot of the party membership in the country.

OK, I grant you it is not identical to AV but it certainly shares similar hallmarks and is far closer to AV than FPTP. But one thing that cannot be disputed is that the Conservative leadership election rules by their own terms give the voters in the initial rounds "more than one vote".

In the 2005 Conservative leadership election there were two rounds of MP voting before the candidates were whittled down to two to go to the country. In the first round the results were:

David Davis: 31.3%

David Cameron: 28.3%

Liam Fox: 21.2%

Ken Clarke: 19.2%

So Ken Clarke was eliminated and the MPs got to vote all over again.

But hang on a minute! That means that all the MPs who voted for Ken Clarke who was eliminated got "more than one vote". They were able to go on to vote for one of the candidates who still remained in the contest. That is precisely what the Conservatives are claiming is anti-democratic now and why we should keep First Past The Post.

I know people will say that the systems are different and also claim that it is invalid to compare electing a party leader to electing an MP but I am afraid that does not wash. The Conservatives and the No2AV campaign have made it very clear that it is fundamental point of principle that in an election no voter should have "more than one vote". There is no difference between electing a leader and electing an MP when it comes to fundamental points of principle.

So to give the Conservatives the benefit of the doubt for a minute, perhaps they have not really realised until now how anti-democratic (by their own terms) their leadership election rules are. Fair enough, everyone makes mistakes. But now that pretty much every Conservative cabinet minister has been banging on for months about how voters should not be allowed "more than one vote" there is no further defence of their leadership election system that will cut any ice. It is imperative that they change the system to First Past The Post. The only way they can avoid the terrible consequences that they themselves have highlighted in future leadership elections is to put all candidates immediately to a ballot of the party in the country where each voter only gets to mark an X against the candidate they want to win.

Of course doing it this way might mean that their leader only has the support of a third or perhaps less of the electorate (a bit like we get with some MPs now) but that is a small price to pay to ensure that no voters get "more than one vote".

The fact that the Conservatives have made no moves at all to change their leadership election rules in the light of what they must surely understand is a serious anomaly I think tells you all you need to know about how much they really believe that preferential voting breaches some fundamental democratic principle. Indeed it makes it clear that they understand the value of allowing every member of an electorate the chance to influence which candidates go through to the final round.

We should judge the Conservatives by their actions, not their words. And by their actions with respect to their own leadership elections they damn one of their main arguments against AV.

Moving the centre of political gravity

2011-03-22T08:15:00.002Z

My friend Emma from off of Scarlet Standard wrote a blogpost the other day entitled: "What is the Cause of Labour’s Cuts Problem?". I'm not going to try and answer that in detail here, but something Emma mentioned in her post regarding how a majority of the public still appear to blame Labour for the cuts got me thinking:

The problem I have, is that we don’t know why they blame us.

Do they blame us because the Tory narrative that we overspent on public services has caught on? It’s a populist narrative that probably does have a lot of traction despite both a lack of serious veracity and the fact that until the crash the Tories were planning to match us for spending.

It is (sort of) true that until the crash the Conservatives were planning to match Labour for spending. I say sort of because they were talking about "sharing the proceeds of growth" which I always took as a tacit signal they would be looking to alter the balance of spending and taxation even if only marginally (at first!).

But what the comments above fail to take into account is how the political centre ground gets moved by a government once in office. Labour in government were very adept at doing this not least in the language they used. They always characterised spending as investment and any opposition from the Conservatives to any individual spending commitments was always characterised as mean spirited and often described with labels such as "same old Tories". Almost irrespective of whether there may have have been good arguments against some of the spending such as it might have been cost ineffective etc.

I am not casting value judgements on any of this by the way, just observing that is what happened.

So Labour managed to move the centre ground of politics onto their investment territory leaving the opposition with little choice in the end (after 3 election defeats) to talk the same language and eventually even promise very similar policies to them.

The Conservatives had managed a similar trick in the mid-90s. After 4 bruising election defeats for Labour, when Tony Blair took over in 1994 he set about trying to neutralise the Tory charge of Labour hiking up taxes (the centre ground was in a different place then) by promising to match Tory economic plans for the first two years of a Labour government.

But over the course of the 13 years following Labour's 1997 victory despite a tentative start they did eventually succeed in increasing public spending overall by quite large amounts in the end. Just because the initial signals they sent in opposition implied they would not do this, I think most people recognised that if you get a Labour government they will try and shift the balance towards more public spending.

I think the same situation happened in reverse in the last few years. Cameron (as is his wont) very closely followed the Blair play book by trying to hitch himself and his party to Labour's spending commitments. Not because he had any deep convictions that it was the right thing to do but for politically expedient reasons. It was only the economic crisis that interrupted this plan and caused him and his government to reduce spending as dramatically as they have done. And to be fair, Labour would have reduced spending quite dramatically too, just not as much. That of course would have been them keeping the centre ground positioned more in their direction.

So to unpack Emma's comments a little bit further, the problem I have is that I do not understand why she does not understand why people still blame Labour. It was Labour who had been in power for over a decade when the crisis hit. They had been in control of where the political centre ground was. Blair (and to be fair Brown) were past masters as it. Cameron was only promising to match Labour spending because that is where that centre of political gravity was.

If you don't believe me, try a little thought experiment. Would public spending have been at the same level as it was in 2007/2008 if Michael Howard had won the 2005 election? Or if William Hague had won the 2001 election?

It is only fair that Labour take their share of the blame for the cuts that are needed now given that it was their government that was presiding when the crisis hit and their levels of spending facilitated by their political acumen.

If Labour are looking for some comfort from the current situation though it is that the electorate tend to have fairly short memories. I confidently predict that as the cuts really start to bite it will be the current government that moves into blame pole position and that will continue to get worse over the next 2 or 3 years.

Why NI and income tax rates should be harmonised

2011-03-21T21:04:00.000Z

I was going to write a long post about how our currently overly complex tax system is crying out for simplification and that despite the fact that there will doubtless be some anomalies that need to be ironed out, the putative harmonisation of NI and income tax rates would be a good thing.

And then I came across this post on the Adam Smith Institute blog with this table describing NI and tax rates when currently taken together that illustrates more eloquently than I could articulate in words why the current situation is crazy:

If Cameron can't explain AV his education was wasted #Yes2AV

2011-03-17T10:45:00.001Z

Something in David Cameron's anti-AV speech a few weeks back stood out for me:

It's not my job to tell you exactly how the system works - that's for the 'yes' campaign to explain.

But even if it was my job, I'll be honest with you, I don't think I could.

David Cameron got a first class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. He was taught by Vernon Bogdanor, one of the UK's foremost experts on constitutional matters. It seems rather implausible that someone could get that qualification, from that university and then not be able to explain how a relatively simple electoral system works (there are far more complicated ones out there).

One of the things that has happened in the last few decades in political life is that the upper echelons of all the main political parties have become disproportionately filled with people who have been down the Oxbridge PPE route and/or those who have been political bag carriers. Whilst I am very unhappy with this, one consolation is that at the very least they should all be fully aware of things like political and electoral systems and be able to communicate this information to the electorate. After all, being a good communicator is one of the most fundamental skills a politician needs.

So for Cameron to blithely claim he is not able to explain AV suggests one of two things to me. Either he is not being honest, or his extremely privileged education was wasted on him.

No2A Balanced Debate

2011-03-12T11:36:00.005Z

On Thursday evening I attended what was billed as a "Fair, Impartial AV Referendum Debate" in Reading.

I had been anticipating a balanced debate where well informed and experienced campaigners from both sides locked horns and I hoped to hear some thought provoking arguments. Although I am already decided as a "Yes" I am still interested to hear principled arguments from both sides and to try myself to engage in this sort of thing.

However the event turned out to be anything but balanced. It seems that the debate was actually organised by the "No" side. I unfortunately arrived just as it was starting so didn't have time to speak to anyone beforehand but the "Yes" side had not sent anyone to the debate. I thought this was a bit odd at first but as I have subsequently discovered each time these "No" organised debates take place, an official invite is only sent to the "Yes" camp on the morning or afternoon of the debate itself (*see update below for the "No" camp's response to this). So given such short notice and the way they are organised it is not altogether surprising that they do not send people.

So the line up was:

For the "No" side:

Mark McDonald, a human rights lawyer.

Sam Gyimah, Conservative MP for East Surrey.

For the "Yes" side:

Charles Hindhaugh, a year 13 student from Reading school who was pulled in from the audience at the last minute.

I think you can see where this is going.

Both Mark and Sam are clearly very experienced debaters. They pitched their cases which to my mind contained the odd fair point but mainly lots of spurious and in some cases totally misleading information. But packaged very well and of course with all their experience they were able to use debating tactics to sidestep rebuttals and change tack deftly when necessary.

Charles on the other hand is an 18 year old schoolboy. He did his very best and frankly I was impressed with what he managed to do given his age and the fact he had had about 1 minute to prepare but inevitably some of the very reasonable points he tried to make got a bit lost and he did seem to lose his train of thought at times. Completely understandably mind. I very much doubt as an unprepared 18 year old schoolboy facing a Member of Parliament and a human rights lawyer I would have been able to do any better.

At first I thought that despite the clear imbalance on the panel, once the debate was opened up to the floor it would be possible for members of the audience to redress this. And those of us in the "Yes" camp in the audience did try. However the dynamics of the structure of the debate very strongly mitigated against us. Every time someone from the audience got a minute or two to make a point, the panel then got at least as much time to respond and because the panel, with the microphones and the advantage of the platform was biased in numbers and strength in favour of "No" the "Yes" argument struggled to get a fair hearing.

I was one of those who tried and I made a couple of points regarding the 50% threshold that Sam made great play about and also tried to skewer the cost argument. To be perfectly honest my contribution was not the best. Had I been on the platform I would have prepared and also brought a pen and pad with me to make notes. Instead I was trying to respond to points from memory from the audience. I do not think they responded to my 50% point and my cost argument was effectively ignored as Mark continued to claim it would cost over £200 million and also derided by point about Women's Suffrage (which I have made before here) which is easy to misrepresent and of course I had no real come-back once the microphone was taken from me. When I did try later to chip in and rebut his continuing misrepresentation of the facts he was able to then portray me as a heckler whose interventions were out of order in the format. He was also able to do this with others who tried similar interventions. In a way he was right of course. I was just an audience member. But the complete imbalance in the panel made a mockery of the usual rules of a fair debate.

I am sorry to say that after less than an hour I had had enough of this farce and I left.

I think what annoyed me most is that I have very little free time these days and this turned out to be a complete waste of it. I was interested in seeing an impartial and balanced debate and what we got was a travesty of this. I expect No2AV campaigners will claim that the "Yes" side should have sent people but from everything I can tell the late invitations and the whole structure of the way these events are set up are an attempt to maximise the chance that this will not happen.

To anyone else from either side or from a neutral perspective thinking of attending a local debate, I would strongly urge you not to attend any debates organised by the "No" camp. They are the ones listed on the http://avdebates.com website.

Unless of course you want what is effectively a rally for the "No" side. In which case fill your boots.

If you want to watch a video of the Reading "debate" from Thursday and judge for yourself, it is available here. I am the bloke on the front row who gets involved about half way through.

*UPDATE 14/03/2011: @LaraSmallman on Twitter has drawn my attention to the following claim by the "No" camp that they had actually invited the "Yes" camp to their debates back in January. I only reported what I had heard but in the interests of fairness here is a link to the "No" camp's post on this subject.

PS: Incidentally I didn't see this Liberal Conspiracy post until after I got back from the debate on Thursday evening and @JamesGraham on Twitter told me about it. Had I seen it and realised the nature of what I was walking into I almost certainly would not have bothered.

PPS: I have had my attention drawn to another review of the event by PoplarMark here. He thinks my intervention was a bit too aggressive. I had suspected it did not come across as I had intended!

Why David Cameron may secretly want AV to pass

2011-03-06T12:02:00.000Z

The primary focus of the reporting of the Barnsley Central by-election result has been on the fact that the Lib Dems came sixth. This is bad news for the party and there is no point in Lib Dems claiming otherwise.

There has been plenty of coverage of that elsewhere though. In terms of how the result may affect politics more broadly I think the fact that UKIP went from fifth last year to second with over 12% of the vote is even more significant.

It is difficult to be sure of the motivations of those who voted UKIP and doubtless some of their vote has picked up the protest element that previously would have gone to the Lib Dems. However the fact that so many people were willing to vote for a right-wing party that wishes to leave the European Union must be giving David Cameron great cause for concern. UKIP already came second in the European elections in 2009. Now they are beating the Tories in by-elections. There are predictions that UKIP could actually come first in the European elections in 2014. Given how unpopular the government may be in the run up to those elections as the cuts will have been really biting at that point I would not want to bet against that possibility. And if that, or anything approaching that happens, UKIP would have a lot of momentum behind them for the 2015 general election.

The problem for Cameron is one of simple parliamentary arithmetic. In order to form a majority government in 2015 his party will need to actually win seats. That is an unusual position for the Conservative Party in government to be in. Usually they would have a majority and if they lost a few seats they would still be able to retain power. That is not the case now. So if they find they are not just fighting Labour but also a rearguard action against UKIP in their marginal seats that could easily be the difference between getting enough seats to form a government (either in majority or in coalition) or losing power. The right wing vote could find itself split in a similar way to how the left wing vote split during the 1980s because of the SDP. It's unlikely that UKIP would win many seats or the sort of vote share nationally that the SDP achieved but they would only need to improve moderately on their 2010 showing to cause major problems for the Tories and that is looking increasingly likely.

So what is the solution? Cameron could try tacking further to the right to appease UKIP leaning voters in the hope of bringing them back into the fold. The problem with that is his coalition partners would not stand for that sort of thing for long and it could precipitate the collapse of the government at the worst possible electoral moment.

There is of course another solution to Cameron's UKIP woes. The main reason UKIP are such a problem for the Tories is because the First Past the Post system makes any voters who plump for UKIP by definition not able to support the Tory candidate in a constituency. That is why a UKIP surge is such a potential threat to them. But if the AV referendum passes then a good UKIP showing in 2015 would no longer be a disaster for the Tories. It is a fair assumption that many of UKIP's second preferences will go to the Tories. It will give right-wing voters the chance to show what they would ideally like without splitting the right wing vote and allowing other parties to come through the middle.

When UKIP were polling in the very low single figures the risk to the Tories in this respect was slight. But with their stunning Barnsley Central surge they are becoming a potent threat to the Blues retaining power.

And with David Cameron's limited room for political manoeuvre on the right I suspect he may well now secretly want the AV referendum to pass.

Ed Hall seems very confused about AV and FPTP #Yes2AV

2011-02-28T19:37:00.001Z

Conservative activist Ed Hall wrote a piece on Conservative Home over the weekend where he sets out why he thinks First Past the Post is a simple, comprehensible and fair electoral system.

Fair enough. He is entitled to his opinion and it is clearly genuinely held. However I do wonder why so many people within the No camp seem to make so many factual mistakes when making their case.

I am not going to perform a full fisking here. There are however three arguments he uses that are just plain wrong:

1) "If you have a 'normal' constituency election with three or four mainstream parties, two or three genuine local campaigners, a couple of extreme parties from either side, and a Loony candidate, then the ballot paper lists them all and the voters will have to list them in preference. I have to say I am not sure precisely in which order I should rank the Vote Muesli candidate and the True Love Party candidate, but issues such as that will start to trouble us if the referendum goes in favour of AV."

No you won't Ed. The AV system that will brought in if there is a yes vote is one where it is optional to list all your preferences. You could if you wish just put a "1" next to your most favoured candidate and leave it at that. You are not forced to vote for more than one person. You can even put an X next to them if you like. There is provision in the bill for this to count as a "1" (and as anyone who has attended counts knows even without specific legislation, returning officers would use their discretion to count this anyway). So this point is utterly, factually wrong. Perhaps Ed is confusing us with Australia where they are made to rank all candidates. We will absolutely not be.

2) "In modern politics, a winner should be a winner. Try it round your dinner table or next time you watch the X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. Everyone votes for their favourite book, film or act: surely the candidate with the most votes wins? How would the BBC or ITV possibly explain or justify a programme format with public voting in which the candidate that got the most votes did not win?"

This is such a bizarre comment. X Factor and Strictly both use run-off voting systems where week by week candidates are eliminated. It is mathematically far closer to AV (which in some countries is called "instant run-off voting") than FPTP. If these programmes used FPTP the winner would be decided in week one and could win with perhaps only 15% of the vote. I wonder how many viewers would consider that fair.

To be fair to Ed he sort of acknowledges his error a couple of paragraphs later saying:

"Of course you do get to vote again in the TV formats as the candidates are knocked out, and the next week's programme starts..."

But then he goes and spoils it all by saying:

3) ...but do we really want General Elections every week until we get a winner? That would be the only way to give equal weight to everybody’s second choice votes.

No Ed, it's not the only way. The sensible way to achieve this is to give the public the AV system! It allows us to emulate knock-out voting rounds without people having to go down to the polling booth several times. Because each ballot paper can be carried through each round with the second, third etc. choices being used as and when necessary. So multi-round voting is not the only way to give equal weight to second (and third etc.) choice votes. AV does it already!

I have heard the argument from numerous people in the No2AV camp that AV is "nothing like" knock-out round by round voting. The only difference I can see is in the point at which people cast the votes. Admittedly it is possible that some people's further choices might have changed had they known who was still going to be in (but it is highly debatable how many would change their choices - I suspect a very small minority) and so it is not identical but it is far, far closer to AV than FPTP is. And as Ed himself acknowledges making people go down again and again to the polling station for the same election is not feasible so AV is a good way of achieving a very similar end through slightly altered means.

There are arguments for and against AV that deserve to be properly debated. For example I was asked an interesting question from Labour activist Emma Burnell (who blogs at Scarlet Standard) at the weekend where she questioned about whether candidates under AV might all start to converge on the centre ground or "mushy middle" as she termed it over time. A good question worth debating.

But I keep coming up against false arguments like those listed from Ed Hall above from No2AVers again and again. It makes me wonder if some of them even understand what they are arguing against.

PS: Sunder Katwala has written an excellent post here on Next Left skewering Ed Hall's claims about X-Factor type shows and AV/FPTP in far more detail than I have time for!

How a campaign against women's votes could look today #Yes2AV

2011-02-17T09:43:00.002Z

Inspired by:

Iain Dale highlights the Lib Dem plight

2011-02-14T09:25:00.000Z

Iain Dale wrote a piece for the Mail on Sunday yesterday entitled "Nothing to do with us, Guv - It's those wicked Tories!" in which he claims that some Lib Dems in government are essentially trying to have their cake and eat it by being in power but trying to shirk responsibility for the unpopular decisions.

His thesis runs thusly:

...too many (Lib Dems in government) seem to believe they can cherrypick the government decisions they can bring themselves to support. Their attitude to the coalition’s more unpopular policies seems to be “nothing to do with us, guv, it’s those wicked Tories.” Collective responsibility doesn’t work like that.

That’s why David Cameron was happy to accede to Nick Clegg’s request for a LibDem minister in almost every government department. He knew it would bind them in, with no get out of jail free card.

All political parties are coalitions within themselves. No politician can ever agree with 100% of what their own political party does. But the LibDems have taken wearing their hearts on their sleeves to new extremes as they try to salve their collective consciences. And some of their major figures, who showed so much promise in opposition have struggled with real power and real responsibility.

There is a big problem with that though. Accepting full collective responsibility for decisions that a Lib Dem government ruling alone would not have taken is essentially misrepresenting what the party is about and making them look a lot more right wing than they actually are.

This is a problem for the Tories in government too the other way round but less of a problem for them for two reasons. Firstly they have not had to make as many compromises as the Lib Dems as they have much greater parliamentary strength. And most importantly, secondly, compromising with the Lib Dems brings the Tories more onto the centre ground which is where David Cameron wants to pitch his tent anyway (like his political idol Tony Blair (or "The Master" as Cameroons refer to him) was so adept at doing) and which is to their electoral advantage. It is very much not to the Lib Dems electoral advantage to be seen as more right wing than they are.

Later in his piece, Iain seems to hit the nail on the head himself:

The problem for Nick Clegg is that it will be difficult for him to differentiate himself from the Conservatives at the next election.

That is the exact point I am making too! So Iain seems to recognise that the party needs to differentiate itself from the Tories somehow and yet castigates Lib Dems who try to maintain their distinctiveness. It is the classic dichotomy that minor coalition partners face.

We need to find a way to square the circle. There are no easy answers but the longer we are unable to, the harder it will be to convince the public that we can both govern responsibly and at the same time still stand for something distinctive.

Why did I trust David Davis on liberty?

2011-02-11T10:27:00.000Z

Two years ago I attended a day long event in London called "The Convention on Modern Liberty".

It was bustling with activists and politicians from various parties and had a number of interesting debates in the main hall and in fringe meetings. The theme was civil and other liberties and one of the leading lights of the event was Conservative MP David Davis. He had become something of a darling of the liberty movement following his resignation from the Shadow Cabinet and forcing of a by-election on the issue of detention without trial and liberty more generally.

Indeed such was his high profile that he gave the closing speech of the event. I remember it well. It was littered with calls to arms for those of us who strongly believe in liberty and freedom in this country. There was a particularly memorable passage where he castigated the then Justice minister Jack Straw for his authoritarian stance on issues such as ID cards.

So it was particularly disappointing in the last few days to see him joining forces with Straw to lead a parliamentary campaign to deny the rights of any prisoners to have the vote. For me, the issue of votes for prisoners and someone's reaction to this is indicative of how liberal or authoritarian and reactionary they are. It is not an easy issue. The tabloid press have a very clear view on this issue and are on a hair trigger ready to publish headlines like "MP WANTS MURDERERS TO HAVE THE VOTE". Local opposition parties to MPs will also be hovering over the leaflet software with similar headlines. And of course public opinion in this country is quite strongly against such an idea at the moment.

Now have a look at the speech David Davis made at the Convention two years ago. These sections in particular leaped out at me when I re-read it:

We’ll have to fight the principle of expedience every time. It sounds easy does it not? Actually sometimes you will find you are on the unpopular side. I repeat ID cards, 42 days, control orders, DNA databases, all popular when they started. But we won the arguments. You won the arguments and we have to win those arguments time and again over and over.

.....

Lincoln once said ‘to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men’. This is not going to be easy: it is not going to be straightforward . We are all here with people who agree with us: they don’t all agree with us out there. It is not matter if the case is difficult. If the argument is unpopular and if your opponent is intimidating we have to fight it time and again.

He was right. The causes of liberty are often unpopular. I'm sure I will get a fair bit of stick for having published this blog post for example. However I didn't think when I heard David Davis utter those words that within two years he would be one of the "intimidating opponents" that those who value liberty are going to keep having to fight "time and again".

I think the thing that annoys me the most about the vote in the Commons yesterday (which passed by 232 votes to 22, a crushing margin) is how blunt it is. No prisoners, under any circumstances should have the vote. Ever.

Before anyone starts asking me if I want Ian Huntley to have the vote, or others murderers, paedophiles, or rapists the answer is no. I do not agree with giving all prisoners the vote whatever the circumstances. I do however think part of the reintegration into society of those who are in prison under some circumstances should include being able to cast a ballot. I think it would help some feel more like a citizen of the country and help with their rehabilitation. We should bear in mind that the prison population is made up predominantly of the most marginalised in society. Should we really be taking the vote away from people who have committed minor offences? They have already lost their freedom and are banged up for 23 hours a day.

Winston Churchill once famously wrote that you can judge a country by how it treats its prisoners. Well in this case, 100 years on from when he wrote that our parliament with a crushing majority has decided to keep all prisoners disenfranchised under any and all circumstances.

And one of the main cheerleaders for this has been David Davis. The former Conservative darling of the liberty circuit, lauded by Shami Chakrabarti and feted as a voice of reason on this from the right. No more. Having joined forces with his erstwhile authoritarian enemy he has shown his true colours when it really counts on an issue that divides those with true liberal credentials from those who are just play-acting.

It is now clear which camp Mr Davis falls into.

Could the 40% threshold tactic badly backfire for the #No2AV camp? (#Yes2AV)

2011-02-10T10:22:00.002Z

Morus has a fascinating post on Political Betting today where he highlights a rather obscure feature of the AV referendum legislation which is that Nick Clegg, who is responsible for the bill and its implementation is actually more empowered by the 40% threshold clause. It means that he can make a judgement call about whether the turnout justifies the change. The 40% threshold is not binding.

Of course if the turnout is very low and the victory is small, with the threshold amendment in place it may be politically very difficult to put the change through. However I can well imagine were the amendment to stand that because the No camp would then have a real incentive to dampen down turnout that we could well find a large majority for change albeit on a turnout below 40%. Let's hypothesise that the turnout is 32% (a good few points below the 40% threshold) but that the figures are 65% for and 35% against. Were the threshold to stand, an outcome like that would be very possible because of how the voting dynamics could be affected. However if you then look at what the actual percentages of those voting yes would be compared to the voting register it would actually be 65%*0.32=20.8%. In other words more than enough to have won the referendum even if the final 8% of abstentions that would have taken us up to the 40% threshold had all voted no. Under circumstances like that I would expect implementing the change would be widely seen as democratically and morally correct.

Of course this is all speculation and the most likely scenario is that the amendment will be overturned and no threshold will apply. That is basically what David Cameron said would happen at yesterday's PMQs.

But there is another twist here. Because the 40% threshold has had so much publicity over the last few days even if/when it is overturned there will be some people who will not be aware of that fact and will still think it applies. Therefore some who were planning to actively vote "no" may well be tempted to sit on their hands assuming an abstention is tantamount to voting "no" or at the very least is a help to the cause. They will be wrong about this and will in fact be helping the "yes" camp. At the same time, of those who were planning to vote yes, if any mistakenly think the threshold applies the incentive will work in the opposite direction and they will be more inclined to vote! And with things so tight, that could make all the difference.

It could be that the 40% amendment tactic by the Lords, even if it doesn't actually make it onto the statute books is the thing that helps this referendum to pass.

Wouldn't that be an irony?

If Ed doesn't want to share an AV platform with Nick, that's fine (#Yes2AV)

2011-02-07T09:42:00.000Z

The news reported yesterday that apparently Ed Miliband is indicating he does not want to share a platform with Nick Clegg in the AV referendum campaign, despite the fact that they will be campaigning for the same side has caused a bit of a stir. Some of my fellow Lib Dems seem a bit put out.

As far as I am concerned though this is fair enough. The Lib Dems are below 10% in some polls. Miliband's suggestion that Nick Clegg is politically "toxic" is taking it a bit far but equally he is hardly flavour of the month either. I suspect there is a fair bit of truth in the concern that sharing a platform with Clegg would make some wavering Labour supporters tip into the no camp.

At the same time part of Miliband's motivation could be to try and damage Clegg a bit more. I would be surprised if that had not formed part of the behind the scenes strategy. That's politics though and it was ever thus. It doesn't mean he is wrong to distance himself from Clegg if he wants to maximise the Labour "Yes" vote.

What I want to see is a "Yes" vote on AV in May. If Miliband's actions help with this cause, which I suspect they will then we should let him get on with it, his own way.

#No2AV Finance Director is ambivalent about preferential voting (#Yes2AV)

2011-02-05T10:58:00.001Z

Recently I have had a number of Twitter debates about the AV referendum with Charlotte Vere (@CharlotteV), the Finance Director of the No2AV campaign. They have usually consisted largely of her claiming that nobody really wants AV and me pointing out that most reformers, and certainly all of those backing Yes2AV genuinely think AV is an improvement over First Past The Post.

However yesterday the discussion took a turn for the interesting. I realised that Charlotte was the Conservative candidate in Brighton Pavilion in the general election last year. What makes this pertinent is the fact that the Conservatives ran what they called an "open primary" in that constituency to choose the candidate (it was actually more like an open caucus as the voters had to attend a meeting but it was still an open process with any voter from the constituency able to attend). And in this selection process, they used, wait for it, a "run off" system. The way it worked is that there were 6 candidates and the voters chose the one they wanted in the first round. The lowest placed candidate was then eliminated and the voters then voted again for one of the remaining 5 candidates. Then the lowest placed was eliminated and the 4 remaining candidates were voted on etc. etc. until we ended up with two candidates and ultimately one winner.

Sound familiar? It sounds remarkably like the Alternative Vote to me. The only real difference with the run off system is that the voters vote in multiple rounds. With AV all the rounds are combined into one ballot with all the preferences (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) listed at the start of the process. I really cannot see a fundamental difference between the systems. They both allow the voters to choose 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. preferences to ensure that their views can influence the final round of voting.

From this report in the Brighton Argus it would appear that the vote during the Brighton open process was quite close. Two of the lower placed candidates were eliminated simultaneously and there were audible gasps when one of the lower placed candidates went out suggesting there was significant support for them. We do not know the exact numbers as the totals from each round were kept secret but I think it is fair to say from the way the voting went to the final round that no single candidate had a big lead throughout the process. Therefore there is a significant chance that if instead the winner had been chosen at the end of the first round of voting which is what happens under First Past the Post, Charlotte may well not have won at all and the candidate could have been someone different. Ironically had that happened, her profile would not have been so raised and she may not have been chosen as the finance director of the very organisation that seeks to deny the electorate a very similar preferential process for Westminster elections!

Charlotte herself claims that different elections require different systems but when I pressed her on the specific reasons as to why an open primary type vote and a constituency election should use such differing systems she did not respond. To be fair, she may have been pressed for time and of course Twitter is not the ideal medium for lengthy explanations so Charlotte is quite welcome to use the comments below this post to respond. I hope she does as I am genuinely interested to know what her reasoning is on this.

Whatever the response is though I think it is fair to say that Charlotte Vere, such a vocal opponent of a preferential voting system for Westminster is actually pragmatic enough to recognise that such a system has real strengths. Which suggests to me that in reality she is fully aware of the benefits of such a system having been the beneficiary of it herself just over a year ago. I am basing this on the fact that as far as I can tell she has not decried the system used to select her and her opposition to preferential systems was certainly not strong enough for her to refuse to participate in the selection process.

So why do the Conservative party more generally so vociferously oppose a preferential system for Westminster whilst simultaneously using a preferential system for their own open selection contests? I suspect it is down to the dynamics of the two processes. In the case of an open selection, what they are trying to do is select a candidate with the broadest appeal. After all they want that candidate to ultimately win the subsequent election. Therefore if they were to use FPTP for the selection there is a real risk that the candidate selected would appeal to a minority of the electorate in the constituency but a majority of that same electorate would not want to vote for them. By using a preferential system for the selection they try to ensure that their candidate has broad appeal. Or at least the most broad appeal of the 6 or so candidates they put up. It is a good indication that they are likely to be fairly popular.

However when it comes to the election within the constituency, they think the best way to ensure a win is to use First Past the Post. And in a good year for the Conservatives they are correct. Last year they won just over 47% of the seats on 36% of the vote. A significant number of their MPs did not get at least 50% of the votes cast. Which means a majority of the voters in the seats of many of their MPs did not vote for them.

I of course understand that political parties want to win seats and the Lib Dems are often accused of wanting to change the electoral system to suit them. I think the big difference is one of consistency. The Lib Dems always advocate preferential systems. We use AV for our internal committee and leadership elections and ultimately want STV* for all other elections, both local and national.

Whereas the Conservative Party seem to want to have their cake and to simultaneously eat it. They choose a preferential system where it suits them in open selections and strongly oppose it where they think it would not benefit them for Westminster elections. Which suggests to me that deep down they are not opposed in principle to preferential voting. Only when they think it will not help them.

If one of the leading lights of the No campaign is ambivalent about the benefits of preferential systems, which also reflects the inconsistent view of her party does this not undermine the credibility of the Conservative opposition to a change?

*STV is AV with multi member constituencies.

UPDATE: After a further Twitter chat with Charlotte she has declined to come onto the blog to give her side. She claims that this post is a "ridiculous personal attack" which makes me look stupid. I of course disagree! She also claims that AV and runoff in rounds are different systems and that AV is not suitable for national elections. I am still none the wiser as to how she justifies the use of a preferential system for a selection and yet fervently opposes a similar (albeit not identical granted) system for a constituency election. And it looks like I will remain none the wiser as she is not going to explain. Which I think is a pity.

Why the Labour Party could be gone within a generation

2011-02-04T09:49:00.001Z

The Labour Party could be largely gone within the next generation.

I realise this is quite a provocative statement and I am fully aware that with the current state of the opinion polls there will be plenty who would contend that my own party, the Lib Dems are more likely to disappear before Labour.

I should also point out before I start that I do not want the Labour Party to die. I was brought up in a family that had great respect for the party and its socialist foundings and tradition. If I had joined a political party before about 2000 it would almost certainly have been Labour. I was delighted and genuinely excited in 1997 when Tony Blair won a huge landslide and I think that the Labour government did some very good things in its early years. The minimum wage amongst others for example was a great change and the fact that all the major parties are now signed up to it has ultimately vindicated it.

Also, if the economy tanks in the next two or three years then Labour will very likely get in by default. I accept that is the case and what follows is predicated on the assumption that the economy does improve and the coalition's policies are ultimately seen as successful. What then for Labour?

If that happens then I think that within the next couple of decades we could see the demise as a serious political force of the party of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan.

There are a number of reasons why I think this could be the case.

Firstly, despite some recent signs that they are moving in the right direction the party leadership still has too much sway over policy making. This may seem like an arcane point but policy making is the lifeblood of political activists. Without it participation in political parties is reduced to trying to sell policies largely imposed from on high. Of course some of these policies, perhaps many will accord with the views of the membership. But there will always be some that just do not. A good example would be the 10p tax rate being abolished by Gordon Brown in 2007. Eventually that move was mitigated by a number of measures to appease Labour back-benchers but it was immensely damaging and I can imagine how difficult it was for Labour activists trying to convince people to vote for the party when it was an active issue knowing there was no way in hell the party at large would have allowed the leadership to adopt such a policy had they had a veto on it. I know from discussions that many Labour activists are unhappy with how little chance they have to influence policy within the party and some look with some envy upon how the Lib Dems and other smaller parties are more internally democratic. The longer this goes on, the more in the long term I am convinced that the party membership will atrophy and wane. After all, I am sure there will be some who will decide it is not worth their time volunteering if their views will make little difference to the policies. A quick aside here - I know that some of the policies being pursued by the current government were not endorsed by the Lib Dem party membership but there are a good number that were and that is the compromise of coalition. If the Lib Dems had had a majority like Labour did between 1997 and 2010 then the government programme would have been essentially created and decided by the party.

Secondly, the Labour party does not seem to know what it stands for any more. I think it has been very instructive to observe the manoeuvrings of various senior Labour politicians since the general election. It is clear that there are deep divisions on questions such as how to tackle the deficit (Ed Balls and Alistair Darling were at loggerheads over this) or tuition fees with Alan Johnson being set against a graduate tax only to come round at the last minute to Ed Miliband's way of thinking but with no real enthusiasm. When this is coupled with the two year review that is going on at the moment which is scheduled to fill in Ed M's "blank sheet of paper" it does feel like the party has somewhat lost its way. Don't get me wrong, it is a good idea for political parties when rejected by the electorate to take stock but to see a party that once held such a clear vision for the future and founded the modern welfare state to be so directionless is quite sad and does not bode well for its future.

The third reason I think Labour could well find themselves waning as a political force is down to their innate tribalism. Now I have been misunderstood when I have used this word before so I will try to be precise here. I am referring to the tendency for Labour politicians and activists to push their own party line to the exclusion of everything else and to rubbish those of their opponents, even to the point where had their own party introduced a measure they would be supporting it but because it comes from somewhere else they are suddenly apparently viscerally opposed to it. I know all political parties do this but from what I have observed Labour are the worst at this. And it matters. A recent report by the IPPR reinforces other things I have read that even if First Past the Post is retained for Commons elections, hung parliaments are going to become more and more likely. But the way Labour acted in the coalition negotiations back in May 2010 (which I have gleaned from multiple sources) reflected this more tribal attitude and made it clear that they would have been very difficult to work with, even if you put the mathematics to one side. If coalitions are going to become more and more frequent then a party that seems unwilling to compromise is going to find it difficult to get back into power. I am basing this also on my observations of how they have gone about attacking the coalition. There is no recognition of the compromises necessary, just blindly attacking the Lib Dems for "selling out" or "betraying" people. Now I am aware that as a Lib Dem activist I am biased here and maybe the public at large like this sort of thing but I hope that is not the case. It feels outdated to me and smacks of a party that is still mired in a binary way of approaching politics that again does not auger well for them.

My final reason (I will stop in a minute!) is a bit more subtle but perhaps the most important one of all. An important part of Labour's parliamentary strength in recent decades has been how its core support has been concentrated more in heavily populated and predominantly northern areas. But a day of reckoning on this was always going to come. The fact that they were able to get 55% of the seats on 36% of the vote in 2005 may have been blithely brushed aside at the time but there was always going to be an adjustment to mitigate this inequity at some point. And with the boundary changes likely in the next few years to equalise constituency sizes this reckoning is almost upon us. Now as far as I am concerned this is the right thing to do. I think a proportional system would be ideal in terms of fairness but whatever system we have, the constituency sizes should be as equal as possible. That is also fair. But a consequence of this will be that Labour will find it harder to retain and win seats that it previously would have taken for granted. Over time this will erode its base unless it broadens its appeal. It will also reduce the "my father, grandfather and great-grandfather voted Labour" enclaves as those voters will be diluted with others often from more suburban or rural areas. All this is doing is evening things up but the effect for Labour will likely be to make their job harder.

So what can Labour do about this? I would suggest four things would help mitigate this and assist it in returning to power at some point:

1) Give the party members back their absolute right to make and veto policy. I know this caused the party damage in the past especially in the 1980s but the pendulum has swung too far the other way. If activists are going to slog their guts out in the cold and wet month after month, year after year to put the MPs into parliament the least they can expect is to be able to collectively decide the policies. It would be a bold move but the activists would love Ed Miliband if he did this and I suspect his leadership would be secure for many years. After all they are the ones who can keep him in his job were he ever to be challenged.

2) This is probably related to number 1 but a clearer statement of principles and direction of travel is needed. Labour used to know what it stood for but there seems to be a muddle at the moment. If 1 was implemented then the guiding principles would bubble up from and be reinforced by the party membership. That in itself would send a very powerful and democratic signal. In the absence of that though for now the public need to know what they would be getting from the Labour party. This may mean being very frank about some of the big mistakes the party made in government in its latter years but so be it.

3) The party leadership should do everything it can to ensure a "Yes" vote for AV in the referendum in May. The one person most likely to make the difference between and Yes and No vote is Ed Miliband. And if the referendum passes then Labour will be encouraged to engage more with other parties (partly to try and get second and third preferences) and over time to not be so tribal.

4) They should reform their leadership election system so it is one Labour party member, one vote. No longer should MPs have more say than anyone else and the third/third/third split between the three parts of the electoral college (MPs/members/unions) should be abolished. It would be brave for Ed Miliband to do this given he was elected under the existing system (and may well not have been under a reformed one) but it has to happen before the next leadership election.

I know the polls currently have Labour in a strong position but Labour also seemed well placed in the early 80s and it took them nearly two decades to get back into power from that point, and only after lots of painful soul searching and reform. I suspect something similar will need to happen again before they are serious contenders for government. The question is how quick the current leadership are to grasp the various necessary nettles.

Surely it's too early to tell on the economy?

2011-01-30T14:37:00.000Z

The surprise news this week that the initial figures for Q4 2010 showed a 0.5% contraction of the economy caused a lot of comment.

Labour claimed that it proved the government was going in the wrong direction and that the cuts are damaging the economy. The government claimed it showed no such thing and tried to shift much of the blame onto the cold weather (although independent economists calculate that even without the cold snap growth would have been "flattish" (down from 0.6% growth in Q3)).

So who is right? Do the figures prove that the government is heading in the wrong direction and that Labour was right? Or is it a statistical blip that will be ironed out as we forge ahead.

I would suggest neither response has this right. In fact I would suggest it is far too early to decide one way or the other.

Let's look at the facts. The period Q4 runs from October-December 2010. At the start of the quarter the coalition government (AKA Teh ConDems) had been in power for just over 4 months. The CSR was not even announced until 20th October. The way people behave and the decisions they take simply do respond immediately to these anyway. It takes time. If anything it could be argued that people were still largely responding in Q4 to decisions taken earlier in 2010 and even earlier than that. I know new governments love to blame the previous administration and it does get ridiculous (I still remember Labour blaming the Tories for things in 2005 for example) but after only a few months this is surely still legitimate? At the very least it is fair to say that the current administration cannot be solely to blame for economic behaviour towards the end of the year when they only took office in May.

It will be a while before it becomes clear exactly which direction the economy is going in and whether Q4 2010 is a blip or a trend. Michael Portillo said something interesting on This Week on Thursday. He suggested that from his experience, the way the government has reacted and the other economic indicators suggest that they really do believe this is just a blip and even that when the revised Q4 figures come out they will tell a better story. Otherwise, if they really thought we were heading for a double dip they would be forced to act as it would be politically very damaging.

Having said this I return to my main point. We just do not know.

And anyone who claims Q4 2010 is at this point clear evidence one way or the other is being misleading. They don't know either.

Paint and the Alternative Vote

2011-01-24T15:34:00.000Z

This clip from Auf Wiedersehen Pet has being doing the rounds sparked by a post from Mark Wallace where he claims that it shows how AV is not a good system.

The clip shows the lads trying to decide what colour paint they should use to paint the hut. Because they can't agree on a colour Barry suggests they use a preferential voting system whereby everyone gets 2 choices, their first is weighted with two points and the second is weighted with one point. They then total them up to decide which colour wins. The result is yellow which was apparently nobody's first choice. Cue much hilarity from Mark and others who claim this shows AV is unfair. Mark does concede that the system is not AV but that the same result would have happened under AV too*.

According to Barry in the clip, of the 6 who voted, none of them chose the same first choice colour. Three of them chose yellow for second place so it wins with 3 points vs 2 for all the others that were first placed. We also need to assume that all the other second placed colours were different from those that came first, otherwise at least one of them would have had 3 points and hence it would have been a tie.

I am not so sure that this clip shows AV as being wrong or unfair. Mark implies that AV has chosen the wrong winner as yellow was nobody's first choice but in such an election with such a disparate variety of views amongst the electorate, how else were they supposed to choose the colour? Surely allowing preferences like this is fairer than just one person imposing their first choice view on everyone else despite it only being the first choice of under 17% of the electorate?

In fact, if anything a proper AV system would have been even more fair allowing each voter to express more information about their preferences and hence having an influence on the outcome.

Let's just move this scenario into the voting world for a minute. Let's imagine a constituency with a very diverse range of views amongst its electorate like this. Let's also imagine that like in the example from AWP above that first choice vote is very close, say around 16% to 17% for 6 parties. Something like:

Conservative 17.1%

Labour 16.9%

Lib Dem 16.7%

UKIP 16.6%

Green 16.4%

SNP 16.2%

This is about as close to the AWP example as the real world could ever get (it's never going to be an exact 1/6th split amongst all parties) and it is an extreme example but useful to work this through.

In a real world scenario it is statistically highly improbable that 0% of the electorate would opt not to choose a specific party as its first choice but that 50% would choose that party as its second choice as in the AWP example. Far more likely is a party that did not come first in first preferences overtakes the one in first place (but well short of 50%) after the second (and third and so on) preferences are taken into account.

Under First Past the Post the Conservative would take the seat with less than a fifth of the vote. Even if most of the supporters of all the other parties would prefer to have had a Labour MP, no account is taken of that.

So far from "proving" the case for FPTP, this example actually highlights the pernicious effect of First Past the Post.

*Incidentally, Duncan Stott in the comments on Mark's post refutes this claim in that if yellow had received no first preferences it would have been eliminated after the first round.

Three reasons why Ed Balls will not make as much difference as some think

2011-01-22T14:32:00.001Z

With the resignation of Alan Johnson and the promotion of Ed Balls to the shadow chancellor brief Labour now have someone with an economic background in the most important role outside of the Leader of the Opposition's office. In fact given the current economic situation it could be argued that the shadow chancellor is even more important than the LOTO right now.

He is being heralded to great cheers by most within Labour and is lauded as an economic big hitter by much of the media. However there are three reasons why I think Ed Balls may not make as much of a difference as many people think. And in fact he could become a millstone around Labour's neck.

1) The obvious first point is that he is very closely associated with Gordon Brown. He was his chief economic and political confidante right through from opposition in 1994 to when Brown became PM in 2007. Even then he was still one of his closest political allies. Given how much influence he had over Brown it is going to be quite easy to paint him as culpable in various ways for the economic problems the country now finds itself in. The only way to extricate himself from this is to denounce important parts of what Gordon Brown did and I cannot see that happening. So he is damaged goods before he even starts.*

2) The economy is in a bad state. There is a huge deficit and a growing public debt. The coalition government has embarked upon a strategy that focuses primarily on cutting the deficit with the aim of bringing the public finances to order. There are risks involved with this approach and it might all go horribly wrong in the next few years. Labour in its first 8 months in opposition have made it clear that they would not have enacted many of the cuts announced by the government and whoever is shadow chancellor it is clear that Labour's message in one way or another is going to be less cuts and more "investment" with growth being the driver to reduce the deficit. If the economy does go south and it can be demonstrated that the government's plan has failed then the governing parties' strategy will be shot to ribbons. If however it does work then Labour will find it very difficult to win the next election, after all they will be seen as not only having presided over the problems in the first place but also to have been on the wrong side of the argument as to what to do about it. And frankly it does not really matter too much who is in the role of shadow chancellor for how this will play out. It is largely dictated by economic events over the next few years.

3) The hype is too great. I have lost count of the number of times I have read phrases like "economic big hitter" and "he will land punch after punch on Osborne" in the last 48 hours. Yes he is an economic expert (although point 1 does diminish his claims on this somewhat) and he did well at attacking the government during the Labour leadership campaign but the expectation management has gone seriously awry. If he does not come out of his corner and continually land knock-out blows on Osborne and the government in the next few weeks then the narrative could very quickly start to turn. Stories about him having been a damp squib and perhaps not such a great candidate for the role will start to filter up. The press love to knock people down off pedestals and the way he has been built up so far leaves him very exposed to this possibility. If I was Ed Balls I would be furiously trying to play down my likely initial impact. The truth is that there are not so many opportunities for opposition economic spokespeople at this stage of the electoral cycle anyway. Even when the budget comes around, lest we forget it is the Leader of the Opposition who will stand up initially in the House of Commons to respond to the Chancellor. Balls will not actually get the chance to even try and land punches directly after the showcase economic event of the year. We are more than 4 years from a general election. Balls' value to the opposition is likely to be in building a strong and coherent economic policy basis to move forward on but if the hype continues he may not even get the chance to do this before he is already deemed a failure.

Don't get me wrong, I think Balls is a smart appointment to the role (although I actually think appointing Yvette Cooper would have been smarter for various reasons which I may blog about in future) but he is unlikely to live up to expectations and he comes with probably the heaviest political baggage of anyone else on the Labour front-bench.

*I am aware that a similar charge could have been levelled against David Cameron as he was an adviser to Norman Lamont in the early 1990s and was even pictured hovering behind Lamont when he made his now fateful Black Monday announcement. Indeed Gordon Brown relished making this connection over and over again and it never seemed to do Cameron much harm. The big difference is that Cameron was a very junior adviser to Lamont for a relatively short time after which he went off to do other things in the private sector before coming back as an MP in 2001. The link was pretty weak and hence the attacks were quite ineffectual too. Balls' situation is very, very different and attacks on him for his links to Brown are much more likely to stick.

How big will the "voting with their hearts" problem be?

2011-01-20T08:15:00.001Z

Listening to some interviews with Old & Sad voters following the recent by-election I was struck by some comments from one woman who was very annoyed about the tuition fees issue.

She explained how for various reasons she could not vote for Labour but that also she could not bring herself to vote for the Lib Dems because of the fact that the party had helped triple tuition fees. And instead she voted Conservative.

Yes, you might just need me to repeat that. She voted Conservative.

I think what this demonstrates is that voters do not always vote rationally. If tuition fees is really such a touchstone issue for this woman, how could she possibly bring herself to vote for the party whose fault it largely was that tuition fees went up? If the Lib Dems had formed a majority then the fees would already be on the way to being abolished. As it was they had to compromise with a party who was implacably opposed to anything other than raising tuition fees. The Lib Dems took some of the harsher edges off the policy and made it fairer than it would have been. The Conservatives on their own would I am sure not have approached it in that way.

I just wonder how many people out there over the next few years with the various elections and referenda will follow a similar path to that and vote with their hearts rather than looking objectively at the decisions the parties in government have taken and weighing up the good against the bad.

I do fear that many will not do this and that may be why the Lib Dem polls are so low. I can only hope that over the next few years the party gets its fair share of the credit as well as the blame.

Dr Phillip Lee MP writes to me about AV

2011-01-18T13:19:00.002Z

I recently asked for the views of my local Conservative MP Dr Phillip Lee regarding the potential change to the AV system. I was hoping for some measured and nuanced views on this from someone who is undoubtedly an intelligent and thoughtful man. Instead I got a list of recycled canards which look like they have been cribbed directly from the No2AV campaign literature.

You can judge for yourselves as I have scanned the letter in and included it below. You can click on the image to enlarge it.

MPs against AV were on average worse expenses offenders

2011-01-17T07:42:00.001Z

In May 2009 I caused a bit of a stir when some analysis of the expenses scandal I published on this blog suggested that there was a correlation between the safety of an MPs' seat and their likelihood of having been involved in the expenses scandal.

Now we are less than 4 months away from what is likely to be the date of the Alternative Vote referendum, and given the noise the No to AV campaign are making about which MPs are against change I could not resist having a look at the data to see if there was any link between the size of the amount that MPs were made to repay by the Legg inquiry and whether they are for or against a yes vote on AV.

As my source I took the data published following the Legg inquiry. I then filtered out all the MPs who had either retired before the 2010 election (taken from this Wikipedia page). Then I filtered out all MPs who lost their seats in the 2010 election (using this Wikipedia page as a starting point to see which MPs are still around). The purpose of this was to come up with a list of MPs from the current parliament for whom we have a definitive ruling from Legg about how much they had overclaimed and for whom we also have a good idea what their views on AV are.

For the views on AV I applied the following:

1) I have taken the list of Labour MPs that the No2AV campaign recently claimed as against AV but removed those 5 MPs that Left Foot Forward since revealed are actually for AV. I have assumed that the rest are in favour of AV.

2) I have assumed all Conservative MPs are against AV.

3) I have assumed all Lib Dem MPs are in favour of AV.

4) I have assumed all Plaid Cymru, SDLP, and Green MPs support AV based on this article.

5) I have taken out of the equation all SNP, DUP and Sinn Fein MPs as they are declared as undecided at the moment based on this article.

Before the results, the caveats. I accept that this is preliminary and incomplete data. We do not yet have an absolutely definitive list of which MPs are for and against AV. What I have done is the best I can with the available data. There may be a few Conservative MPs who come out in favour of AV and there may be a few more Labour MPs who are against. However I did feel that we are pretty close to what the final position is and it may be the case that we do not actually get a definitive picture before the vote.

Using the above described data I found that there are in total 412 MPs whom we can consider having been in the previous parliament (and hence we have Legg expenses data for them) and for whom we have a good idea of their views on AV.

The average amount repaid by the MPs who according to my rules above are against a yes vote on AV is £1,784.34.

The total for those MPs who are for a yes vote on AV is £1,195.70.

Which makes MPs who are against AV on average almost 50% worse expenses offenders.

It also occurred to me that because many of the worst expenses offenders actually retired from parliament before the 2010 election, if we had been able to take a snapshot of opinion from the 2005 intake it is likely that this picture might have been even more stark. As a quick experiment I added back in all the MPs who I had filtered out as retired or lost in 2010 and indeed using the same assumptions as above, the figures were £2,408.30 on average for the No to AV MPs and £1,431.99 for the Yes to AV MPs. In other words on average the MPs against AV from the 2005 parliament are nearly 70% worse.

I am not sure what to make of these figures. There could be various reasons why the No MPs seem to have been on average worse offenders. I am also mindful that these figures could change a bit as a fuller picture of which MPs are for against emerges but I expect the final figures will be similar to this.

The fact is that neither camp comes out of this analysis looking great. The MPs in the Yes camp still on average had to pay back over £1,000 each. However at the very least I think we can say that the judgement of those in the No camp, (given the apparently significantly higher figure for them) is open to question. If they could not be trusted on their expenses, why should they be trusted on their views about the electoral system that gives them their job in the first place?

As I have stated before I want the AV campaign to be fought on the arguments, not personalities. However the No campaign seem determined to use lists of which MPs are against AV as some sort of argument to try and persuade voters to be against it. They should think long and hard before continuing this approach because as I have demonstrated here, it may backfire on them when those same voters see exactly which MPs are in the No camp.

Note: If anybody wants to contact me about this please e-mail me at markreckons@live.co.uk.

What a turnaround!

2011-01-16T08:47:00.001Z

It was fascinating listening to "Any Questions" on Radio 4 yesterday.

Sarah Teather was batting for the Lib Dems and the mellifluously toned Emily Thornberry was doing likewise for Labour.

During the course of the programme, Thornberry repeatedly tried to turn every question into one about the "harsh cuts" being imposed by the government. At no point of course did she make any attempt to highlight what she and Labour would have cut instead as indeed they would have had to have done.

In the end Teather called her on this pointing out that Labour continually attack every single cut without having a credible alternative plan for what they would have done instead (see Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer today for more on this theme). It is opportunism of the highest order.

But how strange that we find ourselves at the start of 2011 in a political world where a Lib Dem MP (and government minister to boot) is lecturing one of Labour's rising stars who only just missed election to the shadow cabinet by one vote on realistic politics and government! For decades we have heard Labour (and Tory) ministers claim high-handedly that a vote for the Lib Dems is a waste of time because they are not a realistic party of government and will never be in a position of power. They cannot credibly make this claim in the future.

As an aside, I also just wanted to draw attention to something else Thornberry said during the programme. At one point she claimed: "Being in coalition is not an excuse to break your promises". This garnered a fair bit of applause from the audience. However it is an easy line that like her claims about the economy does not stand up to scrutiny. As I have said time and again, coalition is about compromise and by definition it is impossible for two parties to come together and for both of their programmes/manifestos to be implemented in full. Some policies and ideas from both parties will have to be modified or dropped for it to work at all. So it is another example of Labour being totally unrealistic about the realities of coalition governing.

Emily Thornberry gets added to the ever growing list of Labour spokespeople and activists who by their words are effectively ruling out their own party from ever governing in a coalition at Westminster.

Mark Thompson

Have Labour just made a big mistake on the benefits cap?

Keep it simple, stupid.

Why is a recession a recession?

Does Labour have a charisma problem?

In praise of Douglas Carswell

If Scotland votes for independence it's game over, binding or not

Should politicians have a sell-by date?

Peter Oborne's "Tory moment" argument is full of holes

Imagine if a white MP had said this....

My Predictions for 2012

In which I disagree with Ewan Hoyle on alcohol pricing

How did I do on my 2011 predictions?

How much does geographical accident influence politics?

Ricky's too short. On ideas.

Aidan Burley should not have been fired

The logical endpoint of drugs policy

David Cameron is not a failure

Why electoral reformers should want boundary changes to fail

Should Nick Clegg have held out for the Chancellorship?

Lib Dems should not have whipped against EU referendum

Osborne cocaine allegations highlight political hypocrisy on drugs

Howard Jacobson should read more blogs before attacking them all

This Lib Dem conference vetting farce cannot happen again #ldconf

Tuition fee myths need to be challenged

Vote for meeee! (Total Politics Blog Awards 2011)

Rebuild Reeves

Where's Cleggy?

Has Guido got this #restore campaign all wrong? #retaintheban

Louise Mensch has missed an opportunity on drugs

Why Cameron discussing BSkyB with Brooks would matter

What if this is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems?

Will Cameron's honesty on press influence spread to drug policy?

Outline of a No2STV campaign

Almost two thirds of people think drug users should not be criminalised

51p per person per year vs 1000+ nurses

Whataboutery

Am I the only one bored by political defections?

Telegraph fundamentally misunderstands how the Lib Dems work

It's the naming convention stupid!

I'll never accept the label tribalist

Ed Balls is a proven liar

Do as I say, not as I do

Spot the irony

Not confident about "Confidence and Supply"

John Hemming MP abuses parliamentary privilege

How No2AV poisoned the coalition well

What's wrong with our politics in a single paragraph

The big winner from last Thursday is George Osborne

The AV campaign was a disgrace from both sides

The main reason to vote Yes to the Alternative Vote today #Yes2AV

Excellent AV vs FPTP post from an award winning mathematician

Why "the secret AV escape clause" won't work

Using animals to explain why AV is better than FPTP

Birth should never be destiny

Does Cameron feel beholden to Lansley?

There are more important things than AV, so....

FPTP is *more* complicated than AV in reality

When will the Tories change their leadership elections to FPTP?

Moving the centre of political gravity

Why NI and income tax rates should be harmonised

If Cameron can't explain AV his education was wasted #Yes2AV

No2A Balanced Debate

Why David Cameron may secretly want AV to pass

Ed Hall seems very confused about AV and FPTP #Yes2AV

How a campaign against women's votes could look today #Yes2AV

Iain Dale highlights the Lib Dem plight

Why did I trust David Davis on liberty?

Could the 40% threshold tactic badly backfire for the #No2AV camp? (#Yes2AV)

If Ed doesn't want to share an AV platform with Nick, that's fine (#Yes2AV)

#No2AV Finance Director is ambivalent about preferential voting (#Yes2AV)

Why the Labour Party could be gone within a generation

Surely it's too early to tell on the economy?

Paint and the Alternative Vote

Three reasons why Ed Balls will not make as much difference as some think

How big will the "voting with their hearts" problem be?

Dr Phillip Lee MP writes to me about AV

MPs against AV were on average worse expenses offenders

What a turnaround!

FPTP is more complicated than AV in reality