House of Comments - Episode 125 - The Challenger Debate

The latest House of Comments podcast is now out.

This week I am joined by Isabel Hardman the Assistant Editor of The Spectator to discuss the challenger's debate, the growing influence of the SNP on UK politics and what would happen if no stable government can be formed after the general election

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

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Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 125 - The Challenger Debate’ on audioBoom

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboom for hosting the podcast. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

Seven awkward questions for the Lib Dems

My friend Isabel Hardman of The Spectator Coffee House blog wrote an interesting piece yesterday entitled "Seven awkward questions for the Tories" which was itself prompted by the seven questions Tony Blair had recently posed for Labour.

I thought I'd have a go at posing seven questions for my own party as we move into the final two years of this parliament.

1) How can the party fight the next election running against numerous Tory policies that they don't like but have allowed through?

There is a difficult and delicate line to be trodden between making it clear what distinctive Lib Dem policies look like and distancing ourselves from those measures we would not have implemented ourselves whilst not looking like we are trying to run away from our record in office. Politics is so often filtered through a binary prism. The idea that a party may have compromised on measures does not sit easily within this system. We need to find a way to make this argument without constantly fighting a rearguard action against accusations of "betrayal" which Labour (and indeed the Conservatives) will throw at us. This will be particularly true if leader debates go ahead in advance of the election. If Clegg is still the leader in 2015 he will not have the luxury he had in 2010 of being able to attack the Conservative's record as he will be attacking his own! It will take a great deal of political skill to navigate this and not come out looking hypocritical or ridiculous.

2) How can the party restore its much vaunted internal democracy?

One of the reasons joining the Lib Dems was attractive to me several years back was that the members made the policy. Recent events such as the parliamentary vote on secret courts which led to a number of significant figures quitting the party have shown the limits of this. I actually submitted one of the emergency motions on this to the recent conference (mine was not picked but the other one by Jo Shaw was) and the point was repeatedly made to me that it is against our constitution to "mandate our parliamentarians". This point was also made from the floor during the debate on Jo's motion. But if our MPs can essentially do what they like in direct defiance of the will of the party membership then this shows that we are not so very different from the other two main parties with a de facto top-down structure. This is one of the biggest crises the party faces. We all thought we as voting members determined the policy programme. The party needs to find a much better way of reconciling a restive membership with being in government.

3) What do the Lib Dems stand for?

Alex Wilcock set a challenge last month for Lib Dem bloggers to set out what in their opinion the Lib Dems stand for. I did not personally participate in this and I think this fact is rather telling in that I am struggling to answer the question at the moment. Before 2010 I would have had no problem talking about civil liberties, social justice and all of the other good stuff referred to in the preamble to our constitution. But after all the compromises of government it is getting harder and harder to point to a distinctive theme for the party. The next manifesto needs to make this clear and give us all something to unify behind and fight for.

4) How can the party make sure it is still heard in the run up to the next General Election?

The last three years have been anomalous in terms of how much coverage the party has had. We have 5 cabinet ministers including the Deputy Prime Minister and over 20 junior ministers. What we decide really matters in a way it hasn't for 65 years or more. But as May 2015 approaches I expect we will start to see a squeeze on this. That binary prism effect will kick in once more as the media focuses on "who do you want to be the next Prime Minister". The increasingly presidential style of our media coverage and the fact that no major publication is likely to back the party directly means we will once again have to fight for every column inch and soundbite.

5) How does the party deal with its Northern problem?

I've nicked this one directly from Isabel but it is an important question for the Lib Dems as well. We have numerous seats in the North many of which have relied on "borrowing" votes from Labour leaning voters. How many of them will be willing to still vote for a Lib Dem after 5 years of being part of a Conservative led government? Incumbency can be a powerful tool but the anger of the electorate can be stronger still.

6) What is the party's position on electoral reform?

At previous elections this has been a no-brainer. We want STV with multi-member constituencies for a more proportional parliament. The problem is AV was overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate and whilst I will to my dying day keep shouting that "AV is not PR" the plain fact is electoral reform for Westminster is off the table for the next decade or two at least. There are some like me who say we should focus more on reform for local council elections. There are very strong arguments for this such as stopping the all party fiefdoms that too many of us live under locally but we need to be careful not to appear like pig-headed ideologues ignoring the will of the people. At least that's how our opponents will paint us if we're not careful.

7) How do you solve a problem like Nick?

I like Nick Clegg. He's a nice guy and a much better politician than many of his opponents in the media claim. But there is a simple fact that he is the politician most closely associated with the compromises and difficult decisions of government. I know there are a fair few former Lib Dem voters who will never vote for the party again whilst he is still leader. There are also plenty within the ranks who feel bruised and battered and as 2015 moves ever closer will start to wonder if a Cable or a Farron might help heal some of the wounds.

James Forsyth's contorted logic

There's some rather specious reasoning going on over on the Spectator blog today. Fraser Nelson has posted a piece where he refers to an article by James Forsyth in the paper version of the magazine entitled "The true meaning of Osborne's budget".

Some of the points from James that Fraser highlights are quite incisive but this one is not:

"During the election campaign, nearly every Tory candidate despaired at how so many families on £50,000 a year were voting Labour to protect their £545 child tax credit — despite the overall cost of a Labour government to them being far higher than that. Osborne’s Budget dealt with this directly. Within two years, no family earning £30,000 a year or more and with one child will receive tax credits. That class of wavering Labour voters, so irritatingly prevalent in marginal seats, will be no more."

According to James this is part of the process of reversing dependency on the state and trying to ensure that the Tories win outright next time. But just look at what he is saying. Some families in marginal constituencies who were on around £50K per year were worried that if the Tories got into power then they would lose their child tax credit. That is exactly what has now happened so by those terms they were right to be worried and if enough of them had voted Labour then they would perhaps not have lost it (although of course we cannot be sure Labour would not also have made this move).

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think that in the current economic circumstances this adjustment was the right thing to do. But to then make the leap to suggest that because the benefit is not there any more then the Tories will benefit electorally from exactly those people is contorted logic to say the least. Unless everyone just forgets that they used to get those tax credits. If anything it's likely to be the other way round, after all Labour will surely bang on about this at every opportunity they get.

Is there something I am not spotting here?

Alex Massie and Alex Smith on House of Comments - Episode 20

The latest "House of Comments" podcast with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the Nineteenth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 30th March is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Or you can listen to it right now here:

The format is to invite political bloggers on each week to discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Alex Massie who writes and blogs for The Spectator and by Alex Smith, editor of LabourList and Islington council candidate.

We discussed the "Ask the Chancellors" debate, the return of Tony Blair, what Labour would do with a fourth term if they unexpectedly won, whether the Tory lack of campaign experience is telling and the experiences of the two Alexes during the US primaries/election campaign in 2008 and whether we have learned the lessons from those in the UK.

Me and Stu are taking a break next week for Easter but will be back the week after (WB 12th April) with a new episode.

If you are a political blogger and would like to participate in the future, please drop me an e-mail here.

Why is our democracy so broken?

I know I have blogged about this sort of thing before but I still get exasperated when I see comments like this from Peter Hoskin on the Spectator Coffee House blog today:

Cameron & Co. say that they would cut further and faster – but, when it comes to the details of what to cut and when, the similarities between them and Brown's government are striking. Indeed, as I've said before, we're largely taking it on trust that the Tories have a plan sufficient to the scale of the debt problem – even though there are timorous signs that that trust will turn out to be well-placed.

In the meantime, the think-tanks and other non-party political bodies, like the CBI, are doing most of the running when it comes to identifying specific candidates for chop. Perhaps that's all we should expect with an election around the corner. But, for the time being, the debt markets look on nervously.

Why do we have to take it on trust, and why is that all we should expect with an election round the corner? Just think about the logic of this for a minute. The closer we get to the public having their right to decide who should govern us, the less likely the people who want to do that governing are to tell us what they intend to do.

I am not politically naive. I understand the pressures politicians are under and what could happen if they "say too much" especially from their political opponents. But surely something has gone seriously wrong when the result of our adversarial political system is that politicians just cannot or will not go into details about crucial things like where they will focus on for public spending cuts before an election?

What's even worse is that judging by the "that's all we can expect" comment, there are some in the media who seem to accept that that is just the way it is! They should be shouting very loudly that we are not getting the answers.

At this rate, neither the Tories nor Labour will have any mandate to make the necessary cuts if they get into government.

UPDATE 19:05: Peter Hoskin has been in touch with me to point out that he is not condoning the Tories and in fact he has been saying for months that they should be more honest on cuts. His comment about it being "all we can expect" was out of exasperation. I am happy to set the record straight.

James Forsyth highights problem with our electoral system

John Pienaar's guest on his 5 Live political podcast this week was James Forsyth, the new political editor of The Spectator (it is still accessible here for a few days). The discussion was about BBC Question Time, Nick Griffin and the BNP and James made a number of what I thought were good points about the programme and how it played out.

What caught my ear most though was when he highlighted what he perceives as a major reason why the BNP has increased in popularity. It is a short section from about 9 minutes in for about 20 seconds:

A colleague of mine went out canvassing with them (the BNP) recently and he said it is amazing to talk to people on the doorsteps who are voting for the BNP and they are voting because they haven't seen a politician because they live in a seat that is so safe for the Labour Party that no-one's been there for 20 years. That's what we've got to, you know, politicians have to realise that they can't take votes for granted.

I suspect the point that James was trying to make here is of a one with lots of right-wing commentators and bloggers who are constantly trying to make the point that the BNP is growing due to Labour's failures. Of course what he has inadvertently highlighted is one of the huge problems with our current First Past the Post electoral system. In areas that are very safe Labour, or Conservative or any other party, there is no real incentive for politicians of either the incumbent party or realistically main opposition parties to focus their efforts there. This is not being defeatist, it is being realistic. Parties are bound to target their resources where they think they can make the most difference and under our current system that is in the marginal seats and wards. This produces situations where people are effectively disenfranchised.

The political voids that this then creates can be filled by parties like the BNP who can step in and as they are the only voice that is being heard make council gains before the Labour and other parties who have sluggish or non-existent local party infrastructure even know what has hit them.

So James highlights a very real problem but makes no attempt to define how to resolve it, just a plaintive cry that "politicians cannot take these votes for granted". The reality is that the current situation will perpetuate. The weakness is systemic and even if the bigger parties plug the voids in a few areas, the BNP can just move into other areas. The solution is to remove the safe seats and wards by reforming the electoral system to make every vote count.

James didn't say this though and from what I can tell The Spectator's editorial line does not favour electoral reform either. I would therefore be interested to hear what alternative practical steps he thinks can be taken to avoid from what I can tell is an inevitable consequence of our existing system.

Fraser Nelson's misleading chart scales

Blog reader Matt Raven has drawn my attention to one of the graphs in this blog post by Fraser Nelson on The Spectator's Coffee House blog on Friday.

Now, before I start I want to make it clear that I am a big fan of Fraser Nelson. He is an excellent columnist and is often able to cut through the crap and get to the real issues especially when it comes to figures and statistics. He has been forensic in his dissection of government figures and long may he continue to do this sort of important work.

Unfortunately his high standards seem to have eluded him a little in one of the graphs in the post referred to. I have reproduced the relevant section here:

Look at the number of jobs in the private sector and split it down by immigration status:

So foreign-born workers account for all of the net job creation since 1997.

Now I am not arguing with the figures or his conclusion that foreign-born workers account for all of the net job creation since 1997. I am sure Fraser and the ONS have been rigorous about these and I will take it as read that this is correct. What I am arguing with (and what Matt pointed out to me) is the presentation of these figures. Fraser has the two lines superimposed on top of each other which invites direct comparison but he uses different starting points for the scales on each one.

The scale for the UK born workers runs from 17.8 million to 19.4 million on the left hand side and the scale for the foreign born workers runs from 1.4 to 3 million on the right hand side. I can see what he is trying to do (contrast the relative changes) but I think that this choice of scales would give someone who only glanced at this chart and didn't look closely enough to notice the disparity in scales the impression that the foreign-born figures have actually surpassed the UK-born figures as the UK-born figures have dropped off vertiginously at the end of last year.

This seems potentially very misleading to me and unneccesary. Fraser has a good enough argument without resorting to visual distortions like this.

I have tried to come up with a fairer way to represent this data. Of course I do not have the source data but I printed out the chart and by pinpointing the plot points on it I have been able to reverse engineer an approximation of this data. I have then produced my own versions of it.

Firstly, in order to demonstrate that I am using approximately the same data as Fraser, here is the data presented in a similar way to how he did it:

Secondly I adjusted the scales so that they are both the same running from 0 million to 20 million. This is now what the updated chart looks like.

This gives quite a different impression. The relative sizes of the different types of labour force are much clearer. This is fairer but of course you cannot see the changes in the data so easily this way so if I had been doing Fraser's post I would have also included two more charts with his original scales but with each data set on separate charts which would have made it clearer that they were different scales. They would then clearly be "explosions" of sections of the final chart above. This could even be represented by circling the data sets and pointing an arrow from them to the two sub-charts.

Putting them on the same one was destined to cause confusion in my view. His point is strong enough without this sort of potentially misleading representation.

Fraser Nelson accuses Ed Balls of lying - Balls explodes!

It looks like this article by the always excellent Fraser Nelson on the Spectator blog this morning which accused Ed Balls of lying about the government planning to reduce national debt over the next few years has provoked a strong reaction from Mr Balls. He rang Fraser and "demanded" that he should take the article down!

There is a good summary by Fraser himself in this subsequent blog post.

I just wanted to briefly focus on one aspect of this spat that Fraser sums up here directed at Mr Balls:

Five years ago, you could lie like this on the radio and get away with it. Space is tight in newspapers, no one would devote hundreds of words and graphs - as we did - to expose a lie for what is. But the world has changed now. Blogging has brought new, hyper scrutiny. Blogs have infinite space, and people with endless energy, to expose political lying - no matter how small. Your claims can be instantly counter-checked, by anyone. If you stretch the truth, you can be exposed - by anyone. And if you plan to base a whole election campaign on a lie, as you apparently intend to do, then you're in for a rude awakening.

Fraser is bang on here. I don't think that team Brown have yet twigged how this new media world works despite having been burnt by Smeargate. They can't just swagger around bullying a few political journalists and get the line they wish out there. There are countless thousands of us now, bloggers, citizen journalists, call us what you want and we WILL hold them to account for what they say and do. We are not reliant on the lobby system for favours and we will tell it as we see it.

Even if Fraser had have been forced to take his post down you can bet that there would have been mirrored copies of it up straight away along with lots of blog posts referring to it. Trying to get the article taken down like this is politically cack-handed.

And finally, if Mr Balls does not like being called a liar, he and his colleagues should stop lying. It is as simple as that.

Martin Bright wants to know about "Classic" blog posts

At the "Commentariat vs Bloggertariat" event last night that I have already blogged about, Martin Bright of the Spectator said that he has not yet come across what he would describe as a "classic" blog post.

I disagree with him and have a few in mind that I intend to forward to him. However I thought it might be a nice idea for others to nominate what they consider to be classic blog posts. I think he is talking about posts that can compare with the best newspaper columns but feel free to nominate blog posts in the comments below that you think are particularly special for whatever reason perhaps explaining why you think so.

I will pass on the information to Martin.