Are Tory proposals designed to fatally wound Labour?

Paul Richards has a piece on LabourList today entitled "Tory proposals are designed to fatally wound Labour by 2015". In it he discusses three Tory pledges and links them together to form a theme that he claims will make it much harder for Labour to win any subsequent election.

He starts with the pledge regarding only English MPs being allowed to vote on legislation affecting English seats:

In 2008 Ken Clarke MP, then chair of the Tories’ 'democracy taskforce' published a proposal for restrictions on non-English seat MPs voting on some of the stages of bills which affect England. David Cameron said recently: "for English-only legislation, we would have a sort of English Grand Committee. That is our intention and what is likely to go in the manifesto."

Such a move would endanger the Union, and create a two-tier Westminster Parliament, and so the Tories’ policy should be opposed on principle. But it would also massively favour the Conservative Party, because if it is in a position to enact its plans after the 2010 election, it will have won scores of new seats in England. English votes for English laws in effect means Tory votes for English laws.

If such a move would "endanger the union" then Labour have only got themselves to blame. The West Lothian Question has been widely discussed since 1977 when it was first named as such via Tam Dalyell it so it is not as if they have not had time to work out how to resolve it. The current settlement is not fair. I have my concerns about the Tory proposals on this but at least they are trying to sort the problem out. The effect might be damaging to Labour but they had their chance to ensure the current anomalies were ironed out and chose not to for reasons I suspect of political expediency. They will reap what they have sown.

On Paul's second point I have a little bit more sympathy albeit qualified:

The second announcement is Cameron’s plan to cut the size of the House of Commons by around 60 MPs. Speaking to the Financial Times in January, Cameron said "I think the House of Commons could do the job that it does with 10% fewer MPs without any trouble at all." He said the Tories could legislate in their first term for an urgent boundary review so that all seats had roughly the same number of electors in time for the general election that followed. Cameron will propose this in the general context of anti-Parliamentary feeling in the country. I pity those who might have to oppose the idea – arguing for the status quo against such a seemingly radical policy. Cameron’s spin doctors have since confirmed that this would be a "first-term priority". But where would the axe fall? On Wales, and the English cities, where Labour would have most of its MPs, even after a Conservative win. That means Cameron would fix the system by abolishing Labour seats in the first term to make it easier to win a second term. Analysis by John Curtice at Strathclyde University suggests a smaller Commons would exaggerate swings, and "would improve the Tory chances of winning".

As I have argued before, Cameron's proposals on this are tinkering with a hopelessly broken electoral system. From my perspective it is taking an appalingly bad electoral system which allows parties to get a majority of seats on a minority of the votes and fiddling with it in order to improve the chances for the Conservatives to get a majority of the seats on an even smaller minority of the votes. At the same time deploying any and every argument he can muster to completely refuse to countenance that there might be a fundamental problem with a system which gives the third party 10% of the seats on 22% of the vote and ensures smaller parties fare even worse.

Having said all this, I am sorry to say that again Labour had their chance to reform the electoral system properly (indeed they promised they would in 1997) but Tony Blair kicked it into the long grass claiming it would be "quixotic" to change the electoral system that had just delivered them a huge majority.

Paul's final point is on funding of political parties:

The third announcement appeared in the Telegraph last week, and it concerned Cameron’s desire to reform party funding. Since the cross-party talks on party funding reforms broke down in 2006, Cameron has made it clear that the Tories will legislate to cap all donations to parties (£50,000 is the latest figure). That means any individual or institution can only give up to £50,000. It makes sense if your party is funded by rich people and companies. If your party is funded by trade unions, it sounds a death knell. Cameron’s point-man on the negotiations Andrew Tyrie MP made union funding the sticking point, and the casus belli for the Tories breaking up the talks. The Labour Party is now reliant on the big four trade unions, not just for election posters and leaflets, but to pay the staff wages and utilities bills at head office. If each union could only give £50,000, Labour would cease to exist as a functioning organisation.

I think Paul has a more clear-cut case here. The effect of a change like this would be choke off funding for the Labour Party. I expect over time they would find other sources of funding. I don't pretend to have any easy answers myself here except to say that I think lots of the money thrown around by the parties is wasted on silly, negative advertising campaigns and they could save money by not doing them and/or being smarter about how they spend their money. I do wonder in the end though if it would be politically possible for Cameron to bring in a measure that so disproportionately affected his primary opponents in this way. Surely it would look dreadfully partisan and spiteful, exactly the sort of thing that his party regularly accuses Gordon Brown of?

So in summary I think Paul has a case for his final point but I am much more dubious about his first two. Labour have to accept responsibility for the open goals they have left a putative incoming Conservative government. They behaved for many years as if they would be in power for ever and didn't need to worry about fully following through on their reform rhetoric.

Well it is looking like they may now pay a high price for this calculated inertia.

Jack of Kent and Skipper on House of Comments Podcast - Episode 14

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 fourteenth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 9th Feb 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 one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Allen Green, convenor of Westminster Skeptics who also blogs at "Jack of Kent" largely on legal issues and Bill Jones, Professor of Politics at Liverpool Hope University who blogs at Skipper.

We discussed the Simon Singh libel case appeal which is scheduled for next week and more widely about the libel reform movement, Joanne Cash and the problem of perceived parachuted in parliamentary candidates, we asked if great campaigning (and the related skills most likely to get you into parliament) is really the best grounding for ministerial office, Gordon Brown's ITV1 interview with Piers Morgan and an assessment of the Twitter "outrages" of the week.

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

Sir Nicholas Winterton and standard class travel

I have just heard what Tory MP Sir Nicholas Winterton said about standard class train travel on Stephen Nolan's 5 Live show this morning. You can listen to the highlights here.

He said that the sort of people you get in standard class are "a totally different type of people" to those you get in first class. He said that there is too much noise and people would be looking over his shoulder all the time. He also suggested that that is why business people travel first class. Stephen tried to point out to him that business people often travel standard class too and gave him opportunities to row back from what he was saying but Sir Nicholas was having none of it and insisted that he was entitled to first class travel.

Now I know he is going to be jumped on from all sides for this. To be fair, I actually think there is a kernel of a fair point in what he is saying. There is more room in first class, a guaranteed power point for a laptop, less people, it's quieter etc. When I have been travelling on business I do try and get a first class seat. However, I do it by booking well in advance. If the price differential is only a few quid between first and standard (which it sometimes is if you book far enough ahead) then I will go for the first class option. Often though I am unable to do this.

However I suspect that Sir Nicholas travels first class all the time, even when the cost is much more than standard class. The sense of entitlement comes through loud and clear. He is almost indignant that his "need" for first class travel could even be questioned. His remarks also echo those of former transport minister Stephen Norris in the early 1990's when he described his dislike of public transport and having to put up with "dreadful human beings". Even worse, the out-of-touch-ometer is pushing past the display by Eric Pickles on BBC Question Time last year when Pickles was adamant that MPs had to be in Parliament at a certain time because (banging the desk) "it runs like clockwork", completely failing to understand that lots of people are under severe time pressure and don't get the benefits that MPs get.

Overall this was a woeful performance. It demonstrates that some MPs (especially it would seem long serving ones) just do not get it. He is not entitled to first class travel as a right and he ill-serves his constituents and the public through this sort of petulant display.

I expect David Cameron will be furious about his remarks. Sir Nicholas probably couldn't care less though given that he is standing down imminently.

Cameron better hope that this is the last such display by the dinosaurs on his back-benches this side of the election.

What is the point of the PCC?

I have just learned that the Press Complaints Commission has ruled in favour of Jan Moir with respect to the article she wrote last year following the death of Stephen Gately (I blogged about it at the time here). There is some analysis of the ruling from Andrew Reeves here and Stephen Glenn here.

25,000 people complained to the PCC about this article, more complaints than they have ever had about any single article which left many people repulsed at the unfounded comments about a man who had just died.

If the PCC think that this article was fine then I seriously wonder what the point of it is. I also think that it is high time the composition of the upper echelons of the organisation were reviewed. Can it be right that Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail is chairman of its "Editors’ Code of Practice Committee"?

If we are going to have a PCC, it should be a robust, independent organisation which strives to uphold the highest journalistic standards. Otherwise, why are we even bothering to have one? It currently just seems to act as a veneer of accountability without doing very much to justify its own existence.

Top 10 iPhone Apps

Since I got my iPhone in January 2009 it has become an invaluable gadget for me. I thought it might be worthwhile to share the top 10 iPhone apps that I regularly use and why I like them so much.

Here goes then:

1) Instapaper

This is an invaluable little app. Instapaper is a service that allows you to press a button in your web browser which instantly stores the URL from a web page for later reference. You can then go to your Instapaper page and see them all listed. So far so good. However the iPhone app "scrapes" the textual content from your bookmarked pages and stores them locally. This means that you can very easily and quickly have a load of web pages you are interested in reading the content from cued up on your iPhone for long journeys etc. even if you are out of signal area. I use this application multiple times every day. The only problem I now have is too much content stored to have time to actually read!

2) Tweetie

This is the best iPhone Twitter client I have found so far and I have tried a few of them. It does cost money (unlike some of the other ones) but it is well worth it for the ease of use and the features it has. There are elegant touches like swiping across a tweet revealing various options for replying, retweeting etc. Highly recommended.

3) Shazam

Imagine going back in time 20 years and explaining to somebody that you had a device in your pocket that could listen to a 15 second snippet of music and tell you with well over 90% chance of success who the artist was, what the title of the song was and what album it was off. Oh and also provide you with a way of purchasing the song there and then. It would have sounded like something out of science fiction. But this is exactly what Shazam does. It listens to the snippet, encodes it and sends it off to its servers which pattern match the audio with its huge database and most of the time tells you everything you need to know about the song. Great for impressing your mates down the pub. Or at least it would be if they didn't all already have it on their iPhones too!

4) TV Guide (warning - link opens iTunes)

Neat little app that tells you the current and next two programmes on UK TV channels (including digitial, satellite and cable) in a synopsis page with the ability to give you even more detail for each programme as well as being able to scroll up and down through the entire schedule and also skip forward to future days. It's actually quicker than picking up the paper and flicking through to the relevant page as well as having much more detail. Oh, and it's free.

5) Drop7

I hesitate to publicise this any further. Ariane Sherine drew my attention to this little gem of a game in a Guardian CiF piece a couple of weeks ago. You control the position of balls dropping into slots with numbers on. If there is a contiguous number of balls to the same total as that on the ball then the ball disappears. There are also grey balls without numbers that need to be "cracked open" by exploding balls next to them twice in order to reveal their numbers. It sounds complicated but you get the hang of it pretty quickly and as Ariane warned it is hopelessly addictive. She told me on Twitter than she has now deleted it from her phone as it was just taking up too much of her time! And now I have infected you...

6) Classics

Over 20 classic books such as The Time Machine and Treasure Island on a virtual bookshelf and with a very pleasing interface which allows you to swipe across or tap to turn the pages. And it's free.

7) Reeder

The best RSS reader for the iPhone I have seen. It caches and stores the feeds locally too. Although it can take a while to update but that's probably down to the sheer number of RSS feeds I follow!

8) Wikipanion

Quick and easy interface to access Wikipedia which has good predictive completion, gives section headings to jumps between and related articles in easily accessible menu options as well as the ability to change the font size and search within a page amongst other features. I use this application several times a week.

9) LineUp

The game I was addicted to before I found Drop7 (It's like swapping heroin for crystal meth!). Simple game which fills the screen up with random coloured blocks and you clear them by tapping on any continguous grouping of 3 or more blocks of the same colour with scores related to the number of blocks you clear with each tap. You only get 100 taps per level (1000 points threshold each time) and need to keep the ratio of score to taps high because as you get closer to each threshold it speeds up! There is a free and paid for edition of this game.

10) Conquest

Risk for the iPhone. I used to have a version of this for my iPaq by the same author (Sean O'Connor) and it is the best mobile variant of this game I have found. There are different maps as well which means you don't just have to play the battle out across the world, it can be on alien worlds with different numbers of territories.

I should just reiterate that is my personal view about the best iPhone apps I have found but there are bound to be loads I haven't even seen.

Feel free to point out other good ones you use in the comments.

I would also like to thank Stuart Sharpe who pointed me in the direction of numbers 1, 2 and 7 on this list.

Is The Fink wrong on negative campaigning?

Danny Finkelstein has an opinion piece in The Times today entitled "The Tories will get burnt fighting fire with fire" in which he argues that they should stop going negative against Labour in their campaigning and instead be more positive about what they would do:

Question this approach and senior Conservatives will remind you that they are not unilateralists. A multilateralist sees Mr Brown's favourite technique and knows how to respond. The PM likes to make up a Tory policy and then attack it. He likes, for instance, to assail the Conservatives for planning to take away tax credits from poor people, a policy he simply invented. Surely, the Tories say, we have to fight fire with fire. We have to make the same sort of attacks, if only as a deterrent.

Yet if the Tories are multilateralists, they are also free traders. They know that if one country protects its goods, it doesn’t make sense for a trading partner to retaliate. The protectionist country suffers (through high import prices) whatever other traders do. If you introduce tariffs yourself, all you do is join in the suffering.

And so it is with negative attacks. Mr Brown’s attacks often make him seem petty, partisan and mean-spirited. Sometimes they make him seem completely out to lunch. If Mr Cameron responds in kind it could make him seem the same. Associating Mr Cameron with personal attacks endangers the Conservatives’ most important asset — their leader’s image as a more generous, broad-minded sort of Tory.

I wish that Danny was right but I fear he is wrong. People often say that they do not like negative campaigning but from what I can tell the research evidence is far from clear. Of course people are going to say they do not like negative campaigning but sometimes the person themselves is not a good judge of their own motivations. They may not even realise that they are responding to it. I also think that if this sort of approach was doomed to backfire as Danny suggests then parties simply would not do it. They would have learnt this lesson by now. They want to win after all.

However, like Danny, I still hope that the coming election campaign will be more illuminating than it has been so far. We are in a crisis at the moment and the electorate deserve to have the policies of the main parties properly explained to them.

Something that may help here is the TV leaders debates. With 4.5 hours of scrutiny, it will simply not be possible for them all to just spend their allotted time slagging each other off! I think in that particular forum that approach will get very tiresome very quickly and that they will need to spend the majority of their time saying what they will actually do.

My view on the "scum-sucking pigs" Twitter debacle

The current reverberations echoing around the Blogosphere and Twittersphere about the Labour MP David Wright's alleged Twitter transgression where he is said to have described Tories as "scum-sucking pigs" is in my view being blown out of all proportion. This is what he is alleged to have written:

#ivenevervotedtory because you can put lipstick on a scum-sucking pig, but it's still a scum-sucking pig. And cos they would ruin Britain.

Some Tory Twitterers and bloggers have reacted angrily to this and demanded an apology. For his part, Mr Wright has tried to claim that he never wrote the scum-sucking parts and that someone has hacked into his account to edit his original tweet (which has since been deleted although cached copies still exist). Frankly his claims about someone hacking into his account do not seem very robust. As far as I know, tweets cannot be edited once they have become part of the Twitter timeline.

Eric Pickles, the Tory party chairman has also waded in writing a letter demanding an apology from Mr Wright. Am I alone in thinking that Mr Pickles' time could be much better spent?

To be honest, I cannot really see what all the fuss is about. Yes, Mr Wright's use of language was ill-advised and his attempts to distance himself from the worst part of it do not seem to stand up to scrutiny. However we are in the run up to an election. The #ivenevervotedtory and #ivenevervotedlabour hashtags were being used by hundreds of people yesterday on Twitter to throw insults at each other. The febrile atmosphere is bound to throw things like this up. Are we going to have senior politicians from every "wronged" party wading into every single one of these little transgressions?

Last month, as I blogged about at the time, Greg Stone the Lib Dem PPC for Newcastle East was forced to stand down after he made a few ill-advised remarks about some of his opponents on a live-chat. I thought that was an overreaction too.

Can we please stop the focus on these spats? I don't think I can cope with 3 or 4 more months of this sort of thing!

How diverse is opinion within the Conservatives?

Iain Dale made an interesting point on his "Seven Days Show" podcast on Tory Radio this week. In a discussion about religion and its place in politics he mentioned that the only thing we have in the UK that is close to a religion relating to politics is Euroscepticism in the Tory party. He said:

If you actually came out at a selection meeting and said that you believed in a federal (European) union you just wouldn't get selected.

I suspect he is right. In fact I suspect that a prospective Tory candidate wouldn't even have to go that far in order to scupper their chances of selection. I would have thought that even a moderately Europhile position would be enough to do the job in most cases.

I wonder though if this will ultimately be damaging to the Tory party. It is true to say that the vast majority of its parliamentary ranks in the Commons are steadfastly Eurosceptic. There are a few exceptions but they tend to be people who have been MPs for a long, long time, probably most famously Ken Clarke. However there must surely be aspiring politicians out there who instinctively feel like Tories but who harbour warm feelings towards Europe and the EU. Perhaps even (horror of horrors!) the European currency. These people will either have to keep very quiet about their true feelings on this issue or choose another party if they wish to progress their career.

Now some, perhaps many Tories may think this is a good thing. But I wonder if one of the most Eurosceptic Tories would agree with them.

Daniel Hannan today writes on his Telegraph blog that as well as ethnic and other forms of diversity within political parties there should also be ideological diversity within them. I agree with Daniel here. It is the sign of a confident and mature political party that it can tolerate differences of opinion within its ranks.

It would appear however that the subject of Europe is one that has polarised opinion within one of our largest political parties. It seems to be a legacy of Margaret Thatcher's latter years as PM and the bitter splits that came to the fore in the party in the 1990s. I cannot see the former diversity of opinion on this in the Conservative Party returning any time soon and I think that will ultimately be to the party's detriment.

Andrew Mackay and the old ways of doing politics

In observing the behaviour of my current (and soon to be ex) MP Andrew Mackay I have found him to be an interesting case study in the old ways of practising politics. His actions in a couple of respects were acceptable and worked for politicians 20 or 30 years ago but completely fail to take into account how the modern political world works.

The first one is how he behaved during and directly after his now infamous public meeting in Bracknell in May last year. I blogged about it extensively at the time as I was one of the attendees and asked some of the questions. The 200-odd audience of constituents was overwhelmingly hostile to him, I estimated 85% or more were againt him and wanted him to stand down. The interesting thing from the perspective of "old politics" though was the way he tried to media manage the event. There was an attempt to prevent video cameras from being taken into the hall where the meeting was to take place. I witnessed this first hand where one of the officials tried to physically bar someone from taking one in with him. However the chap argued quite forcefully that he was serving a public duty by recording it for all the constituents who for one reason or another were unable to make it to the meeting. I backed him up as did others also queuing up and eventually the official relented. I know that at least two other video cameras ended up in the hall as I have seen the footage.

Straight after the meeting, Mr Mackay being interviewed by the media insisted that 75% or more of the meeting had been with him. That was completely untrue. Nobody who had just been in the hall could possibly have agreed with that statement. You can watch the clip here:

The gentleman who interrupts Mackay was spot on which was embarrassing for him. However it got much worse for him because of the footage from inside the meeting that was being uploaded from various sources within an hour of the meeting ending. Also a number of people who attended the meeting (including myself) were blogging about it within hours.

What Mackay was trying to do was media manage a public meeting in a way that might have worked 20 or 30 years ago but was completely inadequate for one where video cameras can be cheaply and easily used by members of the public and there is a channel available to them to distribute them across the country (and the globe) within a few minutes of them getting home. He clearly thought that if he could just stick to his line that the meeting was largely with him then he could hold onto his job.

We now know that David Cameron called him the next morning and left him in no doubt that his position was untenable. Mr Cameron fully understands how the new world works and I expect the decision took him a few minutes at most. Rumour has it that he had watched one of the video recordings of the event.

I knew it was all over for Mr Mackay as soon as I saw the above TV clip. It was just too easy to prove that he was totally misrepresenting the mood of the meeting. It's the technology that did for him.

The second occurrence that makes it clear Mr Mackay is still practising politics in the old way is something that happened last week. He has accepted a position with a political lobbying firm. It has been reported that he will earn a six-figure salary and the statement from the company who will employ him makes it clear that they expect him to be able to wield influence within David Cameron's inner circle.

Andrew Mackay was one of the worst offenders in the MPs expenses scandal. Out of the more than 300 MPs who had to pay money back, the amount he was judged to have wrongly claimed was over £30,000 (and his wife a similar amount) which puts him third in the list of worst offenders. Against this backdrop, to go straight from being an MP to work for a lobbying firm earning the sort of money most people can only dream of specifically because of his perceived influence with the man the bookies have odds on to be our next Prime Minister leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.

What makes it worse for Mackay is that the announcement came two days after David Cameron made a speech railing against the secretive lobbying industry and vowing to clean things up:

"We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism.

"So we must be the party that sorts all this out. Today it is a £2bn industry that has a huge presence in parliament. The Hansard Society has estimated that some MPs are approached over 100 times a week by lobbyists.

"I believe that secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people's worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works."

That is a damning indictment of what Mackay (and the firm employing him) expects to be able to do straight after the election. Yet in the public utterances from my MP on the subject there appears to be no recognition of the reality of how badly he is coming across and how inappropriate it is for him to be making huge amounts of money from the influence he clearly thinks he still has (although I think his new employers might be in for a shock on that front).

These are two prime example of how an old political fixer has come unstuck for completely failing to understand the modern political landscape and how MPs need to behave in the age of YouTube and blogging and following the expenses scandal.

Mr Mackay's successors would do well to take note.

UPDATE 22:20: Paul Waugh also has a good post on Mackay and his wife (Julie Kirkbride) this evening where he draws our attention to the pretty devastating verdict (albeit couched in civil-service-ese) of Sir Paul Kennedy in his ruling on both of their appeals regarding their expenses.

Nick Clegg is right to rule out a coalition

So it looks like Nick Clegg has decided to go for option 3 as I highlighted in this post back in November. He has ruled out a formal coalition with either of the other main parties. Instead he would look to support a Queen's Speech that included the following:

1) Investing extra funds in education through a pupil premium for disadvantaged children.

2) Tax reform, taking 4 million out of tax and raising taxes on the rich by requiring capital gains and income to be taxed at the same rate.

3) Rebalancing of the economy to put less emphasis on centralised banking and more on a new greener economy.

4) Political reforms, including changes to the voting system and a democratically elected Lords, that go further than proposed by Labour

I think on balance that this sort of approach is the right move. I have been asked numerous times by both Labour and Conservative activists which party I would want to go into coalition with and I have seen our senior MPs asked this over and over again. There is a danger that if we don't nip this in the bud it will dominate any discussion featuring the Lib Dems in the next few months and we find ourselves constantly being put in the position of defining ourselves in this way. Instead, Clegg has now set down the red lines in terms of what we would want to see before offering cooperation and has also eschewed the possibility of ministerial office for himself and colleagues.

I do wish that number 4 had been defined a bit more clearly though. Electoral reform can mean all sorts of different things. Far better to have said Single Transferable Vote and leave people in no doubt what we mean.

The interesting thing about this list though is that from what I have seen and heard I would imagine the Conservatives would have problems with some of these, especially number 4). It might mean that the party cannot support a Queen's Speech from them, however frankly that's their problem. There seemed to be a feeling around a few months ago that a hung parliament could be a nightmare scenario for the Lib Dems as pressure was put on us to agree with or vote down a putative Queen's Speech. As I said at the time:

The idea that Cameron could try to corner the Lib Dems ... I do not think is likely to work. It would be perfectly reasonable for us to support the things we agree with and oppose those we do not. If that meant voting down a Queen's Speech (if we were forced into that position) then so be it.

Now that Clegg has laid out the terms by which we would be willing to discuss supporting a minority government (of either main party), I very much hope spokespeople of both red and blue hues are regularly put on the spot and asked if they would be willing to support the Lib Dem principles outlines above.

That would make a nice change and I think people would be interested to hear their responses...

Why the Tory teen pregnancy stat error is damaging

There is a bit of a hoo-ha this morning about an attack document that the Conservatives have produced called "Labour's Two Nations" in which they have claimed that in the most deprived areas of the country, 54% of women are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18. They had misplaced a decimal point because the actual figure for these areas is 5.4%. This erroneous figure was mentioned three times in the document.

Now anyone can make a mistake. However there should have been a review of this document before it was released. If there wasn't, then they need to improve their processes. If there was, somebody should have noticed that they were saying in some areas over half of all women under the age of 18 were falling pregnant. That immediately fails the "does this figure even seem vaguely plausible" test.

And that is why it is so damaging. The Conservatives have already been taken to task recently by the Economist which pretty comprehensively rebutted their "Broken Britain" narrative by analysing the evidence. The Tories are giving the impression that they don't really understand what is happening out there in the real world. The fact that they could release a document which states such a wildly wrong figure just lends more credence to the idea that they are totally out of touch.

They need to be more careful and avoid making mistakes like this that play into this out of touch narrative.

Who will be the next Labour PM?

Before I start it is worth considering that there may never be another Labour PM. If they fall into internecine squabbling after the general election it is always possible that the hollowed out husk of what's left might eventually implode. For the purposes of this post though I am assuming that this does not happen.

I just wanted to run through a bit of the history of the last 50 years to show how the more recent trend for the next PM after a party changing election has not been obvious.

Here is a quick list of General elections and where the next opposition PM was at the time when power changed hands:

1964 - When Harold Wilson became PM, Edward Heath had already been an MP for 14 years and had been Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, Lord Privy Seal, Minister for Labour and Secretary of State for Industry. It was no surprise when a year later he became Leader of the Opposition.

1970 - When Heath became PM, the next opposition PM was the outgoing PM, Wilson himself!

1974 - When Wilson became PM again, Margaret Thatcher had been Education Secretary. It was a bit of a surprise when she became Leader of the Opposition in 1975 and not many would have laid money on her being PM in 1979 back when Heath first lost office. The smart money would have been on someone like Willie Whitelaw.

1979 - When Margaret Thatcher became PM, the next opposition PM, Tony Blair was completely unknown and was still a few years away from even entering parliament. At that point nobody would have guessed that the next Labour PM was 18 years away. People like Denis Healey, David Owen and even Michael Foot were being touted as future PMs at this point. Indeed Healey is still viewed as one of the best PMs we never had.

If David Cameron becomes PM this year... In 1997 he was a former junior party advisor and strategist who was working in the PR department for Carlton TV. He didn't even have a seat in parliament. All the talk in terms of a future Tory PM was of when Michael Portillo was going to get back into the Commons and seize the leadership.

The reason I am going through all of this is because a lot of the discussion in and around the Labour Party is focusing on who will succeed Gordon and who might be the next Labour Prime Minister. Could it be Ed Balls (*shudder*), James Purnell, David Miliband or even his younger brother Ed? But the recent history shows us that when a party loses power, there really is no telling when they will get back in again and who the leader will be when they do. The odds are that if Labour do have a Prime Minister again in the future, he or she may not even be an MP yet. Perhaps it would be more fruitful to look at some of the junior advisors to the current cabinet or even some of the Labour activists currently making a splash in the blogosphere if you were looking for a long term bet. You'd certainly get good odds!

Of course my argument here is based on the assumption that changes of party in government happen quite rarely which has been true for the last 30-odd years but may not be true in the future. Indeed I hope it is not. But if Cameron does squeak a majority then we already know he is going to try and redraw the electoral map to make it easier for the Conservatives to win in a subsequent election and incumbency can be a powerful weapon if used well.

So don't be surprised if the next Labour PM is someone that you won't have heard of even several years from now.

1992 "Tax bombshell" scars go deep for Labour and Conservatives

As Stephen Glenn pointed out yesterday, both Labour and the Conservatives are apparently thinking about raising VAT to 20% after the election in order to help try to reduce the budget deficit. There was a quote in The Times saying:

Though Labour and the Tories have denied having any current plans to increase VAT, neither will rule it out and The Times understands a rise in the tax is being considered by both parties.

The problem with VAT rises is that they do not spread the pain evenly. They disproportionately affect people on lower incomes because it effectively increases the amount of tax they pay overall as a proportion of their income far more than on more wealthy people. However the tax is not as visible as income tax. People do not see it directly taken out of their salary and hence if it goes up, they will not be able to compare last month's pay slip with this month's and see the extra amount the government is taking. They don't feel it as keenly even though it still affects them. That is why governments raise these indirect taxes, because it is politically less painful to do so.

But to understand why income tax rises are considered to be so politically poisonous we have to go back to the 1992 general election campaign. During that campaign, the Conservatives ran this poster campaign based on their calculations of what the Labour manifesto and the promised income tax rises would mean for the average family:

The poster was widely credited with having had a big impact on the result. Some, including Tony Blair even think that it was Labour's tax promises and the very effective way that the Tories highlighted them that directly led to them losing that election. The scars of that loss run very deep within the Labour Party and it was these that led to Blair's iron conviction to do everything he possibly could to avoid raising income tax rates. The line has been softened slightly under Brown with the pledge to introduce a 50% rate of tax for those earning over £100,000 but this only affects a very small number of people. The idea of raising income tax rates for many is still considered politically suicidal by most senior politicians in the two largest parties.

So the result of this toxic legacy is that instead of going for the fairest and most transparent tax rises which would be solely based on ability to pay, they are instead thinking about the best way to sneak them in through the back door.

Nobody likes tax rises. Indeed I wish we were not in a position where we were having to contemplate them but hardly anybody thinks we can get through the next few years without them in some form. So given that, the least any prospective government can do is to pledge to introduce them in the most equitable and transparent way possible.

H/T to Conservative Home for the image used above

Owlsmoor council by-election campaign update

I have been campaigning in Owlsmoor for 3 weeks now following my selection as a candidate to fight for the borough and town council seats for the Liberal Democrats

I have done plenty of door-knocking and canvassing in the past both in the Bracknell constituency and also more widely in surrounding areas but this is the first time that I have been the candidate too. It has been an enjoyable experience so far. I have been pleasantly surprised at how many people are willing to talk to me about issues. Although I have tried to make sure they understand that I can only represent them regarding local issues they often want to talk about national issues too which I am happy to do.

The message that seems to be striking the loudest chord with people is that we really need to have some more opposition voices on the council. The borough council here is dominated by the Conservatives who currently hold 38 seats, Labour hold 3 and there is no-one else. This is not a healthy state for any local council to be in to be so dominated by one party. I would say this about any party having that much dominance and indeed I have seen similar situations in northern England with councils dominated by Labour.

I have also been struck by how little the people I have spoken to have seen of their councillors in the last few years. Not one person to whom I have asked the question "Have you seen your councillors around here in the last few years" has responded yes. The Lib Dems I know who are councillors in neighbouring council areas (Guildford and Reading for example) never stop going around their wards and talking to people. The idea that the people of Owlsmoor never see their councillors is just wrong and is definitely something I would remedy if I was elected.

I have knocked on hundreds of doors so far but there are hundreds more still to go between now and the 25th of February!

BBC Question Time Live Chat - 11th February 2010 - #bbcqt

It's #bbcqt day and as usual the Live Chat on this blog will start tonight at 10:30pm.

Coming from Belfast, the panel are the Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward MP, Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly, Northern Ireland's finance minister and DUP member Sammy Wilson, the former Northern Ireland First Minister Lord Trimble and Jim Allister of the TUV.

Join us from 10:30pm below:

Mark Pack on House of Comments Podcast - Episode 13

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 thirteenth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 9th Feb 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 one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Mark Pack, co-editor of Lib Dem Voice and contributor to more blogs than you can shake a stick at!

We discussed whether political blogging can make a difference, the relationship between blogging and newspapers and whether political alignment is important with respect to blogging. Also, will bloggers be more careful about what they say as the general election hoves into view?

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

What difference does political blogging really make? - Event review

I attended a "Westminister Skeptics in the Pub" event titled "What difference does political blogging really make?" last night.

It was a panel discussion with Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes), Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy, Jonathan Isaby of Conservative Home, Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole and journalist Nick Cohen of The Observer. It was chaired by Allen Green of the Jack of Kent blog.

Nick Cohen started by asking why bloggers do not cover things like select committees. He also made the point that he thought that bloggers would not ultimately fill the gap left behind as local (and national) media ebbs away in the coming years. A concern he expressed several times during the evening was that there is very little money in blogging and therefore it impacts on the ability of blogs to do proper investigative journalism which requires time and resources.

Jonathan Isaby was introduced as the first journalist to have left a national paper in order to devote his full time to blogging professionally (he worked on the Daily Telegraph until about a year ago). He suggested that blogs and newspapers have a symbiotic relationship with them both feeding off each other and also that blogs often bring emerging stories to the sharp attention of the public via the mainstream media. In his opinion blogging is a great democratisation of the space and it largely removes the barriers to entry that used to exist for people to have their voices heard and read in print.

Sunny Hundal spent much of his initial contribution rebutting Nick Cohen's claims about investigative blogging by listing examples of bloggers he knows such as Tim Ireland and Adam Bienkov who have regularly broken stories that have then made the national or regional media. He also said that Liberal Conspriracy's main objective is the "destroy the right".

Mick Fealty (who based on the two times I have now seen him live is a very good public speaker) suggested that the ability for all to be able to publish is a "disruptive technology". He said that lots of bloggers do try to pull things down and that often skeptical questions can stray into cynicism. In his view there are also not enough blogs discussing positive things that governments could actually do. He also thinks that the government and establishment response to blogs has so far been pretty poor and that they are hampered by an 18th Century structure trying to respond to something that is only a few years old and constantly evolving. Quite a nice line he came up with is that "blogging gives opportunities to opportunists". He then discussed how his blog was able to forensically examine the statements of Gerry Adams regarding the Liam Adams case (he described it as a qualitative analysis) of the kind that the media often don't do. He rounded off by saying that bloggers are "emotionally free" to explore stories that the mainstream media are not.

Paul Staines started by saying that there are about 3,000 people who run the UK (politicians, financial people and the media) and about half of them regularly read his blog. They are the people he is trying to reach although his primary purpose in writing it is to amuse himself. He suggested that there is very little readership for special issue blogs. He also quoted Alex Smith (editor of Labourlist) as having recently listed the different categories of blogs: influential, policy based, and interest group. He said that despite Nick Cohen's lament we really do not need parliamentary reporters any more as everyone can get Hansard on their laptop if they want to know what was said although he did concede that the specialist interpretation would not be there for that. He also pointed out that his Sunlight Centre for Open Politics had originally reported Labour MP Jim Devine to the police with the implication being that blogs and associated organisations are often ahead of the curve.

After a short break it was opened up to the floor for questions. There were lots of them and the event ultimately went on for two and a half hours.

I managed to make a small contribution myself where I explained about the impact that my work last May on MPs' expenses and the apparent link to the electoral system had had on the national debate at which I was amazed given that it was just me blogging in my pants in my bedroom. I also suggested that some of the work that e.g. Conservative Home and Left Foot Forward do on policy development are examples that address some of Mick's concerns. Finally I asked if the panel thought blogs would get more polarised and mud-slinging or whether there would more and more policy analysis. The consensus seemed to be more the former than the latter.

Here are a few of the points made by audience and panel that stuck in my mind:

• In response to a specific question Paul said that he does not read the comments on his blogs. He also said that half of the 400,000 comments annually are made by 50 people! He thinks that people who complain about comments on blogs should "f*ck off". In contrast Mick came straight in and said that he does read and value his comments.
• In response to a question about science coverage on blogs lamenting how the Climategate e-mails were covered Mick pointed out that like journalists, bloggers are generalists.
• Paul thinks that the New Statesman is read by old tramps in the corner of the library!
• Mick suggested that when the history of this period is written, there will be an analysis of how Paul has been able to deconstruct the character of Gordon Brown and strip him bare in a way that the mainstream media is just not able to do.
• In response to a question specially for Paul and Sunny: "Nadine Dorries, snog, marry, avoid", after briefly threatening to read out some of Nadine's texts to him Paul said that his relationship with Nadine was private. Sunny said "avoid".

For a political blogger like myself it was an absorbing discussion although I think it probably could have been half an hour shorter. I noticed a number of people having to rush away just before and bang on the end (me included) which was a shame as there were loads of people there who I would have liked to have talked to afterwards.

I am not sure the main question was thoroughly addressed by the panel but there were some interesting vignettes on how blogging functions from some of its leading lights.

Thanks to Allen Green for organising the event and I will certainly try and get to more Skeptics in the Pub events in the future.

How much difference does political blogging make?

...will be the subject of an interesting looking panel discussion tomorrow hosted by Westminster Skeptics tomorrow and moderated by House of Comments podcast participant Jack of Kent.

Here's the blurb:

Leading political bloggers on the impact and lack of impact of blogging

When?

Monday, February 8 at 7:30PM

Where?

The Monk Exchange
Strutton Ground
London
SW1H 0HW

Who?

Panel Discussion

What's the talk about?

Four accomplished political bloggers:-

Guido Fawkes: http://order-order.com/

Jonathan Isaby of Conservative Home: http://conservativehome.blogs.com/

Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy: http://liberalconspiracy.org/

Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole: http://www.sluggerotoole.com/

will join mainstream media journalist Nick Cohen http://nickcohen.net/ to discuss whether political blogging is actually making any difference to the course of political events.

Moderated by Jack of Kent: http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/

I originally thought I wasn't going to be able to go to this but I have moved a couple of things around and will hopefully be able to make it now.

See you there...

Janice Small is fighting a losing internal battle on electoral reform

Janice Small of Conservative Action on Electoral Reform (and also now Conservative PPC for Batley & Spen) wrote a piece on Comment is Free recently where she discusses the merits or otherwise of the Alternative Vote system that Gordon Brown is now trying to push through for Westminster. She rightly identifies that AV is not proportional and can actually be worse than first past the post.

However her post seems a bit muddled in places. She criticises Brown for his latest move, dismissing it as cynical political positioning (and urges the Lib Dems not to fall for it). She does also identify Single Transferable Vote as the best way forward (citing Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan as supporters of it) and urging her own party not to be afraid of PR pointing out how well they have done out if it in Scotland and Wales. She then also advocates open primaries for all new and sitting MPs in order to eliminate safe seats. But STV would largely do this job anyway and would be part of the actual election rather than something tacked on beforehand. She also reiterates Cameron's mantra of reducing the number of MPs by 10% and resize the current constituencies but she skips Cameron's real reason for wanting to do this which is in order to tip the balance of the existing electoral system back towards the Tories.

But the part that took my breath away was this:

If we are to have electoral reform, then the various voting methods should be put to the public and debated on their individual merits, not shoe-horned in by a government in its last days of power.

I couldn't agree more Janice. I think that is exactly what is needed. However whenever David Cameron opens his mouth on this issue it is to pour scorn on the idea that the First Past the Post System needs to be changed and to muster any argument he can find (often deliberately obfuscating the issues and misleading as I pointed out here) to shoot down any alternative system. And the vast majority of Conservative MPs and activists agree with him.

I am willing to bet a sizeable amount of money to Janice, or anyone else that if David Cameron becomes Prime Minister he will never open up this debate to the public and have a referendum on changing to a proportional electoral system for the House of Commons.

There is however a party who would do precisely that. I wonder if Janice, as she clearly feels so strongly about this issue has considered that she may be in the wrong one....

The electoral system and the expenses scandal correlation - Legg update

This post is co-written by me and Will Straw, editor of Left Foot Forward.

Last May, Mark did a series of blogposts which analysed the data from the expenses scandal and suggested that there could be a link between the first-past-the-post electoral system and the likelihood of an MP being involved in the scandal. New evidence from the Legg report suggests this is the case.

As the graph below shows, the average majority of the worst offenders is higher than that of those expenses-sinners who wrongly claimed smaller amounts.

Mark’s first post was published on May 17 at which point The Telegraph had named 74 MPs. The second post (an update to the first one) was published the next day and the number of MPs implicated was 94. The methodology used was that if an MP had been mentioned negatively at all in The Telegraph’s coverage with relation to expenses then a 1 was put next to their name otherwise there was a 0. The groups of MPs were then split up into quartiles ordered by how safe their seat was. The initial analysis suggested that MPs in the safest seats were 3 times as likely to have been implicated in the scandal as those in the least safe. A further update a week or so later by which point the number of MPs implicated had almost quadrupled to 243 suggested that the figure had come down to a bit less than 2 times as likely.

With the release of the Legg report yesterday – possibly the most definitive word we will get on the scandal – we decided to have another look at this situation and whether there still seems to be a link. The main problem is that more than half of all MPs are implicated in the scandal. There is also a disparity between the lowest erroneous claims, from Mike Gapes in Ilford who was asked to pay back 40p, and some MPs who are paying back £30,000 to £40,000. For this reason, and given all the data we now have, the original methodology seemed a bit blunt. Using Mark’s original analysis, there is still an observable effect but it is now very small (there are 87 MPs in both the safest and second safest quartiles, 74 in the third and 80 in the safest) as the Chart below shows.

In the original Telegraph data it was not possible to be robust about the amount of money MPs were going to have to pay back. This is because the amounts were not always listed or were disputed. Now, however, we have all the amounts down to the very last penny.

We thought about introducing a cut-off point to isolate the worst expenses excesses. If you take only those MPs who claimed £5,000 or more then the ratio of 2-1 between the highest and lowest quartile is still there (the figures are 21 MPs from the safest quartile, 13 in the second, 11 in the third and 11 in the safest). The selection of the cut-off point though is arbitrary and hence probably not greatly robust.

So in order to try and find a better way to see if the safety of an MP’s seat could be correlated with the amount of expenses money claimed we listed the 328 MPs who (after appeals and adjustments) have been asked to pay money back and ordered them by size of payment. This way we are now taking into account this wide range of difference in amounts paid back and including all the implicated MPs.

We then split this data into quartiles and looked at the average size of the majority for the MPs in each quartile. What we found is that for MPs in the top quartile (including Barbara Follett, Andrew Mackay, and many of the most controversial claims) the average majority is 8,678. In the second quartile the average majority is 7,534. In the third it is 7,705. And in the lowest quartile (including people like Mike Gapes and his 40p) the average majority is 7,276. So there is a fair bit of difference here but there is another point to note. The average size of majority for all 328 MPs implicated is 7,798 (7,613 for all MPs). This means that the top quartile is quite a way above this average (by nearly 1,000 depending on from which point you measure it) and the bottom quartile is a fair way below it (by close to 500). The two middle quartiles are clustered near the average(s).

As with Mark’s original posts, there will likely be debate over what these figures tell us the degree of statistical significance, but we feel that, at the margin, they show that there is a link between the expenses scandal and the size of an MP’s majority. Of those MPs implicated, on average the safer their seat, the more they wrongly claimed.

Credit: Jessica Asato and Bhumi Purohit of Progress for compiling the data.

Also cross-posted here on Left Foot Forward.

UPDATE: For those interested in doing their own statistical analysis, the data is available here.

BBC Question Time Live Chat - 4th February 2010 - #bbcqt

It's #bbcqt day and as usual the Live Chat on this blog will start tonight at 10:30pm.

The panel are the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions Theresa May MP, the former Labour and now Independent MP Clare Short, the Respect MP George Galloway and the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips (*shudders*). So no Lib Dem (again) and 3 current or former Labour parliamentarians. Nice.

Given the release of the Legg report today, expect fireworks if it's anything like the last expenses themed edition.

Join us from 10:30pm below:

Legg Expenses stats by party

Following the release of the Legg report on MPs' expenses today, I have been taking a closer look at the breakdown of the amounts by party.

I have listed below the highest amount that has been decided should be repaid, the average amount for each of the 3 main parties (averaged across all their MPs who have been told to repay something, after appeal) and the percentage of MPs from each party who have to pay back something.

No party comes out of this well, I just thought it would be interesting to see the figures.

Thanks to Left Foot Forward and also Jessica Asato and Bhumi Purohit of Progress for helping with the data.

I was this week's guest on John Pienaar's podcast

I was this week's guest on John Pienaar's Radio 5 Live political review podcast this week. We covered PMQs and focused on the legacy of Gordon Brown's time as Chancellor with respect to the defence budget, the Lib Dems questions on Trident and what may have caused Gordon's Damascene conversion to being a staunch advocate of the (non-proportional) Alternative Vote system for Westminster and how it might relate to the MPs' expenses scandal.

You can download the podcast from here. You can also subscribe to it on iTunes via this link here.

Mick Fealty on House of Comments Podcast - Episode 12

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 twelfth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 2nd Feb 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 one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Mick Fealty, founder and editor of the Slugger O'Toole blog which focuses on Northern Ireland and politics.

We discussed the current political crisis in Northern Ireland and how the various recent events have contributed to it, the problems that David Cameron and his Shadow Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson have experienced, Cameron's recent wobble(s) and just what is Gordon Brown up to with his plans for the Alternative Vote system for Westminster?

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

I am standing in a council by-election

I am standing as a candidate in a local town and borough council by-election here in Owlsmoor, Sandhurst for the Lib Dems. The election is on the 25th February and was called following the sad death of councillor Ray Simonds.

I did tweet about this a couple of weeks ago but did not want to blog until the candidate list was officially announced which it now has been. I am intending to do some blogposts about how the campaign is going over the next few weeks.

It is the first time I have stood for elected office and I am finding the whole process so far fascinating. I have already had some pictures done (see above right for an example with our local PPC Ray Earwicker) and we have produced an election focus leaflet with my name and face all over it. That was a bit surreal at first but I am getting used to it!

I spent a good few hours canvassing last weekend and generally got a very welcome reception. Lots of people I spoke to said that they have not seen their Conservative councillors for years (they dominate the local councils) and certainly not between elections. I find this quite odd as I know from Lib Dem councillors in neighbouring constituencies that they are always out and about knocking on doors and speaking to people. That's certainly the sort of councillor I would be if I was to be elected.

Anyway I will keep you updated as to how it all goes between now and the 25th...

Oh and any help from any Lib Dems who can get over this way would be greatly appreciated! Drop me an e-mail if you can.

Is AV even worth campaigning for?

With today's announcement that the government is going to prepare the ground for a referendum on changing the electoral system to the Alternative Vote system in a Commons vote next week I, like many Lib Dems I suspect, have very mixed feelings about it.

As I have blogged about previously, AV is not proportional. In fact it can be even less proportional than the current First Past the Post system. In 1997, Labour could have had an even bigger majority under AV.

However it is reform and it does greatly reduce the need for tactical voting which is one of the pernicious features of our current system. It would be churlish to deny this. Also, the Lib Dems would probably benefit electorally from the change. However it would be a bad idea for the party to back a change to a still very unfair system just because it might be a bit better for us.

My view is that it would be better to hold out for a proper change to a proportional system, Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies. Chris Huhne appears to agree although he is leaving the door open to potentially supporting the move to AV as a first step. The big problem with this approach is that even if we were to get this change, any further electoral reform would be off the table for at least a political generation. People would feel that we have already had reform and therefore why would we need more?

So Gordon Brown is now putting the Lib Dems in a tricky position. Does the party support the move to AV as a first step towards what we think is really the best system or does it oppose the move out of principle as nowhere near good enough? Brown of course knows this and is dangling what he thinks is enough of a carrot for the party to bite.

It will be interesting to see whether it does.

Is a significantly hung parliament really likely?

According to the latest ComRes poll, the Conservative lead over Labour has slipped to 7 points (fieldwork was done between 29th and 31st January - so after the 0.1% growth figures for Q4 2009 were released). The figures are Con 38% (nc), Lab 31% (+2), LD 19% (nc), others 12% (-2).

On a uniform swing, according to the UK Polling Report calculator this would give:

This would be very, very close to what in my view is the best it could get for the Lib Dems in terms of influence. The Tories would be 30 seats short of a majority as stated with the Lib Dems on 48 and hence able to give them a majority on specific issues. However Labour are only 50 short of a majority themselves and hence it would be very close to being able to vote as a majority on specific issues with the Lib Dems too.

Here's a quirk though. What would happen if the Lib Dems managed to go up one more percentage point at the expense of the Tories?

That's right, a dead heat between Labour and the Tories in terms of seats and the Lib Dems able to form a small majority with either of them.

I am not saying any of this is likely. It's still too early to call it but you can bet your bottom dollar that the leaderships of all the parties are war-gaming these scenarios right now. It's been a long time since the possible result of an impending general election was this close (18 years to be precise).

The next few months are shaping up to be a roller-coaster ride, for everyone involved with politics.

Interview with Professor David Nutt about UK drugs policy

Following on from my review of the event I chaired recently with Professor David Nutt, the former head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in Reading, here is the interview I did with him straight afterwards. It lasts just over 4 minutes:

It is clear from his responses about current UK drugs policy that he thinks we should be moving towards a Portuguese style decriminalisation system in the UK too. I think it is very significant for such a recent government drugs advisor to be advocating this. They can't go on ignoring the evidence forever...

Professor David Nutt at Reading University - Event Review

It was my privilege last week in my role as a member of the Liberal Democrats for Drug Policy Reform to chair a talk given by Professor David Nutt, the former chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (before he was sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson last year).

The title of the event was "An Audience with Professor David Nutt" and after a brief introduction, Professor Nutt did a presentation for about 45 minutes after which he took questions.

His talk focused on the medical and pharmacological aspects of drugs and the work he did during his time at the ACMD but he also discussed at length the sociological and political aspects of the subject too.

Here are some of the points he raised during his talk that I thought were noteworthy:

• One of the things he explained early on is that when he first joined the ACMD, he thought that the intellectual case for including alcohol and tobacco in the drug harm rankings was unanswerable and during his time there he pushed for it to happen.
• He explained that putting drugs in Class B of the rankings systems (such as where cannabis now is again) gives the police enormous (and in his view disproportionate) powers such as the ability to hold someone for 24 hours and to be able to search their home.
• He said that the usual justification for the criminality of drugs is harm reduction, however the results of this policy are difficult to reconcile with this aim.
• The way that party politics has got so deeply involved with drugs and the way politicians twist the issue is in his view "the saddest thing of all". He also said that this had got worse since Gordon Brown took over with for example his completely evidence free claim that cannabis is lethal.
• He had a chart which showed the "logic" of current drug policies which he said leads to a vicious circle where imprisoning people for use of drugs is much more harmful than the drugs themselves and also increases the likelihood of them using drugs again as they sink into the criminality trap.
• He said that the government regularly misrepresents evidence in this field such as Jacqui Smith citing "public concern" as a way of moving cannabis from class C to class B against the evidence and Gordon Brown having invented what the Professor rather amusingly referred to as a "new science" of "lethal skunk" again completely against the evidence.
• He quoted former Home Office minister Vernon Coaker as having once said in response to a question about evidence based policy: "We look for evidence to support our policy decisions"!
• He explained how the government had already said in advance that they were not going to implement any recommendations from the ACMD ecstasy review before they had even started it! He thinks the government policy on ecstasy is "an embarrassment" and completely unjustifiable.
• He discussed at length the "precautionary principle" which is often cited as justification for keeping drugs illegal but how that principle can be wrong and can devalue the evidence. He mentioned the MMR hoax in this context. He also explained how in some situations having for example cannabis illegal is worse than having it legal in terms of harm. There is a situation in the Shetland Islands where because they are so remote it is very difficult for cannabis to be smuggled onto the island because of its relative bulkiness and ease of being detected by e.g. sniffer dogs. So instead young people on the island cannot get cannabis and instead sometimes turn to harder drugs such as heroin which can be more easily smuggled there. Young people have died as a direct result of this.
• He talked about the "illegality logic loop" where a drug is made illegal and then politicians will claim that because of its illegality, it can no longer be compared with other harmful activities (such as horse riding). But the decisions about drugs are supposed to be related to how harmful they are so how was it made illegal in the first place without its harms being able to be considered and compared?

I was also pleased at a couple of quotes from J. S. Mill about freedom that he dropped into the discussion.

He finally suggested that the way forward was via the following points:

1) Ask whether the current drug laws are working.

2) Accept that kids will experiment, whatever you do to try and stop them.

3) Follow a policy that maximises harm reduction.

4) Expose moral posturing masquerading as scientific evidence.

There was another very interesting point that he made when he brought up a slide that showed statistics on deaths in recent years from various different types of drugs and how the media reported them. He explained how 1 in 265 deaths from paracetamol were reported by the media, 1 in 48 deaths from diazepam, 1 in 8 from cocaine, 1 in 5 from heroin and for ecstasy the figure was 1 in 1. That's right, every single death from ecstasy in the period discussed was reported by the media. He then made the point that this is why there is such fear amongst the public about drugs like ecstasy because there is a disproportionate focus on them and their adverse effects by the media.

He then took many questions from the floor which covered a wide spectrum of the issues he had raised. I was very encouraged by how informed many of the contributions from the floor were and just how many of the well over a hundred people who attended seemed to agree that the current drug legal framework is not fit for purpose.

Afterwards I took the opportunity to interview Professor Nutt on camera for a few minutes to ask him to summarise his views on how drugs are treated in this country and also to talk a little bit about the new body he has recently set up, the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

It is clear to me from everything that Professor Nutt said during his talk and in response to my questions during the interview that he basically thinks that possession and use drugs should be decriminalised. He is a stated admirer of the Portuguese system where this has already happened.

For someone who was until very recently at the heart of advising the government about the scientific evidence on drugs to hold this view is, I think extremely significant. The government can keep sacking people who tell the truth but it cannot go on ignoring the reality of the pernicious effects of their drugs policies for ever.

You can view the interview a separate blogpost here.

PS: Darren Bridgman who also attended last week has posted an excellent review of the event also on Bracknell Blog here.