This week I have been mostly reading... 5th - 11th September 2009

Saturday 5th September

The most important thing that Paul Walter will ever write.

Sunday 6th September

Peter Black AM debated about debating the BNP

Sara Bedford wrote about why "No Platforming" is no solution. I couldn't agree more.

Cicero's Songs thought that on Lockerbie, the wrong target is being shot at.

Monday 7th September

Christopher Lovell questioned how much you should actually talk about on your blog.

The Half-Blood Welshman counted the cost of voting. Includes a fascinating ancedote about Arthur Balfour I had not heard before.

Tuesday 8th September

Sara Bedford asked if The Daily Mail is guilty of a contempt of court.

Ali Goldsworthy on Freedom Central thought she had spotted an inconsistency in the Conservatives approach to two related issues.

Soho Politico thought it was time to give voters the power to sack the Prime Minister.

Wednesday 9th September

Garbo wrote on The Wardman Wire about Cameron the political mastermind but questioned whether it was right.

Caron wrote a beautiful piece about her grandmother who is no longer with us.

Mark Littlewood explained why he won't be following Gavin Webb over the top.

Thursday 10th September

Alison Wheeler debated the arguments about filesharing.

Anders Hanson considered blogging, the insatiable time-eating monster. I have no idea what you mean Anders....

Friday 11th September

Bracknell Blog had news of Tory plans for an open primary to replace Andrew MacKay in my local constituency. The bad news is I cannot go to it as I am on holiday!

Three bonuses this week (you lucky people). Roll up, roll up:

Marvel at Will Howells' lyrical genius regarding Tube passengers:

Gasp at how newly minted Minnesotan Senator Al Franken draws a map of the USA entirely from memory:

And finally gape at another brilliant song from Mr Howells, this time on Derren Brown's lottery "prediction":

This last one has been widely and deservedly linked to. Well done Will! You are teh new Tom Basdens mixed with John Hegleys.

Dangerous until "proven safe"

The latest government proposals requiring all adults who regularly drive children to sports or social clubs to undergo criminal record checks come as no surprise. It is part and parcel of the sort of measures this government keeps bringing in.

What are they actually trying to achieve here though? Presumably they think that their plans will make children safer. However as usual there will be unintended consequences from this new law. I will have a quick stab at some of the things that will flow from this:

1) Some (perhaps many) adults will be highly insulted to have to go through a criminal records check in order to run their children's friends to clubs and will therefore not bother.

2) Children will become even more overweight. There will be fewer adults to run the kids to their sporting events and therefore over time, fewer of them will participate. And when children get less exercise they get fatter.

3) There will be more anti-social behaviour from children. Because they won't be going to as many clubs they will have more time and their hands. And what happens when some kids have more time on their hands?....

4) Perhaps worst of all, society will just get that little bit worse. The bonds that form between parents of a child and that child's friends will get weaker because the law is making the adult feel like a potential danger until they can "prove" themselves to be safe.

I weep a little bit every time I see another one of these measures drifting onto the statute book. If I saw an unaccompanied child fall over in the street and start crying I would be reluctant to directly intervene. I would likely try and find the parent or do something from afar to assist but the idea that I would walk over, pick them up, dust them off and check if they are OK is frankly for the birds. I have grown up as an adult in a culture where that sort of thing is frowned upon. However when I was a child 30 years ago this was a lot more likely to happen and I think we were stronger as a society for it.

This latest measure will by degrees make our culture a little bit worse.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this post was inspired by Radio 5 Live's Nicky Campbell's tweet explaining that is the topic of their phone-in this morning. Anyway he very kindly read out my points from the blog on the breakfast show this morning as Dazmando has just informed me on Twitter. You can hear it here from around 2:50:45.

"Bonfire of the Quangos" event review - #Bonfireofthequangos

I attended a panel discussion organised by Editorial Intelligence yesterday evening where the topic was Quangos (Quasi autonomous non-governmental organisations) and what if anything we need to do about their proliferation.

On the panel chaired by Martin Bright of The Spectator were Neil O'Brien from Policy Exchange, Peter Grant from the Cass Business School, Conservative MP Douglas Carswell (a renowned Quango reform advocate who I recently interviewed for this blog), Chief Constable Peter Neyroud the CEO of the National Policing Improvement Agency (a Quango) and Phillip Stephens Chief Political Commentator for the Financial Times.

Here is a synopsis of what each covered in their opening speeches.

Neil O'Brien suggested that the figure spent on Quangos is anywhere between £32 billion and £64 billion depending on how you count it. He suggested it is easy to mock organisations like the "Potato Council" (which he said was his own personal favourite Quango to mock!) but there are some Quangos that do an important job. He also thinks that the public don't accept that government needs to do everything currently within its remit and dislike of Quangos is a manifestation of this. He said it is notable that many Prime Ministers including Gordon Brown and Margaret Thatcher have pledged to get reduce Quangos and failed. The problem as he sees it is that as a country we like the sound of independent bodies but their creation reduces accountability and gives political insulation to ministers. He sees that there are 4 tests for Quangos:

1) Do we want this Quango at all? It is not always that easy though and he suggested that the way government tries to prune when it does it to chop fingers and toes off rather than go on a diet.

2) When are Quangos right?

3) Is this Quango value for money? For example he said that there are 68 Quangos whose CEOs earn more than the Prime Minister.

4) Is there too much proliferation and duplication. He offered the example of the Potato Council encouraging people to eat more potatoes whilst simultaneously other Quangos are trying to get us to eat less in order to lose weight.

Peter Grant said that one of the problems is that Quangos often expand well beyond their original remit and more need to be brought back to their original purpose. He thinks that for example the Parole Board and the Lottery Distributors could and should be totally independent of government. Some Quango bodies appear to think they should kowtow to every whim of government whereas others get too political and oppose the government or even try to create policy themselves. Like Neil, he also thinks that value for money is an issue and gave as an example the fact that the lottery distributors are now three times as big as they were originally with no significant improvement. Peter said there are 3 questions that should be asked:

1) What is the function of this Quango?

2) Can an intermediary body add value?

3) If the answer to 1 and 2 is yes then what government functions can assist? In his view this may not always mean Quangos although he is not sure that we have the correct infrastructure in place to facilitate alternatives.

Douglas Carswell made a number of rapid-fire points initially:

• Sometimes there can be good Quangos (this was in response to a direct question from Martin Bright)
• The number of Quangos has increased hugely
• Tony Blair said he would consign them to the "dustbin of history" and failed
• It has become a political cliche to say there will be a bonfire of the Quangos (first coined by Michael Heseltine) but why?
• You cannot rely on executive fiat or government to curtail itself
• The loss of faith in our politicians is down to lack of accountability
• There are so many Quangos that we are running out of letters, e.g. there are now two FSAs
• The Taxpayers' Alliance claim that there are between 2,000 and 2,500 Quangos (the higher figure includes Primary Care Trusts).
• There is an inherent "leftlist bias" amongst Quangos
• There is no such thing as a "disinterested expert" and someone who has spent their entire life in a specfic field is the last person who should be put in charge of it as sometimes happens with Quangos

Douglas' solutions are taken from his book "The Plan".

Firstly he suggests making Quangos justify themselves to the legislature, but only after reforms to the Commons to make the legislature truly independent. They would need to have confirmation hearings and have their budgets agreed by select committees with the chairman elected by secret ballot.

Secondly he thinks that with properly devolved local powers (e.g. elected sheriffs) the need for Quangos to administer a lot of what they do now will dissipate and in some cases vanish.

Finally, he suggested that there would be a lot of resistence to his proposals and that Quangos should be banned from doing what he perceives as "lobbying government using taxpayers' money".

Peter Neyroud said that in forming the NPIA they actually got rid of lots of other Police Quangos in the process. He gave an example that one thing they have done is reduce the amount of different ways that fingerprints were processed from 43 to 1 and hence reduced the average amount of time it takes from 17 days to 24 hours. They cut costs in half by rationalising; people, process and technological change all need to be managed together. In response to Douglas' suggestion he said he would welcome the opportunity to justify his budget in an open accountable forum. In order to have trust he thinks that Quangos need to be transparent. He also thinks that given the current financial situation, now is the right time to be having this debate.

Phillip Stephens thinks that in these debates about Qunagos there is often a lot more heat than light. They exist because politicians want them to and when you look behind them, there is almost always a politician who wanted it created for some reason. He thinks there are 3 types of Quangos:

1) Must haves: e.g. Competition Commission, Nuclear Safety Board etc.

2) Nice to haves: e.g. NICE, Audit Commission etc.

3) Discretionary: e.g. Regional Development Agencies

He thinks it is a good idea for an incoming government to review all Quangos to decide how and if they are needed. he sympathises with Douglas' ideas but suggested that the Bank of England did report to a select committee and this did not prevent the financial crisis. He is also slightly worried by David Cameron's proposals which include creating a new Quango for Fiscal Responsibility.

There were then lots of questions from the audience (some very good) and answers from the panel but generally from what I could discern the answers were variations on the same points the panelists had already made.

I did manage to ask a couple of questions myself. I wanted to know if Douglas had any alternatives to the radical ideas in "The Plan" given that they many not be implemented for many years (or ever) and trying to get a grip on Quangos seems to perhaps be a bit more urgent however he did not really address my question. I also asked if there was a way that we could do something to help avoid politicians from having the knee-jerk response to create a Quango when the heat is on but again nobody seemed to have much of an answer to that. Ultimately government is supreme and if they want to create Quangos there is little that can be done to constrain them.

My summary of the debate is that everyone accepts there is a need for Quangos but there are differing views on which ones are needed and not. It is a very difficult issue and trying to generalise across hundreds (or depending who you listen to possibly thousands) of bodies like this is an invidious task. Apart from some perhaps easy targets (The Potato Council for example) there will be all sorts of reasons why individual Quangos exist and trying to get rid of them will be very tough. There could also be all sorts of unintended consequences and the role of government itself could get more bloated as a result.

Some of Douglas Carswell's radical ideas may have some effect (if they ever get implemented) but I think Phillip's point about the Bank of England is instructive and it would not be a panacea. I also think that MPs would find it difficult to scrutinise all the functions and budgets of all Quangos in enough detail to be able to make a good judgement call in all cases. They do have other things to do!

It was an important and interesting debate to have which I enjoyed and one that I suspect will be had over and over again in the coming years but it is clear that there is certainly no silver bullet.

UPDATE: There is a podcast of the event now available here. If you are interested, my question is from about 49:30 for around 2 minutes.

Would the BNP "No Platform" this?

Peter Black AM draws our attention to a very interesting suggestion from a correspondent to The Guardian yesterday regarding the BNP's appearance on BBC's Question Time:

If the BBC is to invite the BNP on to Question Time, might I suggest that the other political parties all send non-white Britons to represent their point of view, to further emphasise how extreme is the BNP view of the country. Also, it is likely that the BNP would in turn "refuse to share a platform" with such people.

Andy Hunter

Hull

Peter thinks this is well worth a try and I am inclined to agree. The question is as Andy asks, if this was what was on the table, would Griffin "No Platform" the idea?

The future of newspapers

There has been a lot of discussion in the last few years about the future of newspapers. The advent of the internet with online news (via services like Google news), Twitter and the rise of citizen journalism through blogging has thrown into question the long term viability of our current model.

The truth is that none of us can really know what is going to happen and how the media landscape will look in 5 or 10 years time, let alone 20 or 50 years. However we can look at the current trends and try to discern from them what will and won't work as we move forward which could help to inform this debate.

For the purposes of this post I am going to discount physical paper based sales of newspapers which are in long term decline. Whilst they may survive in some niche and/or local form, the huge cost of production and distribution of physical papers when compared with the zero cost of online equivalents will surely lead to their demise as a mass dissemination mechanism over the time frame being discussed.

I will start with Rupert Murdoch's recent announcement that he intends to move all his online news content behind a pay-wall. So far there has been no detail of exactly what this will entail but I am going to stick my neck out here and say that whatever model Murdoch comes up with will ultimately fail.

The internet is built on links. The system it uses is called "Hypertext Transfer Protocol" (that's what the HTTP you see at the start of web pages means) and hypertext is the traditional name for these links. Google for example uses links between websites to determine their rankings. If you move content behind a pay-wall the first thing that will happen is that your traffic will drop severely. Culturally, the internet is now almost universally seen as a "free" medium and most people are not willing to pay anything at all for content. The second thing that will happen is that people will stop linking to you. At the moment, The Times and The Sun are linked to from all over the place on the web. Once the content can only be accessed through payments, there will be little point in linking to it any more. This will then become a downward spiral as you fall down the rankings of search engines like Google, thus less people know about you, hence less future subscribers.

At the same time as all of this is going on, blogs will be reporting about issues and giving opinion and content to the world for free. Services like Twitter will be used by millions to communicate with each other, indeed it is already rivalling news services as a means of breaking stories (I found out about the death of Michael Jackson for example on Twitter before the BBC had even reported it).

So if payment systems won't work as a viable model for newspapers, how about advertising? Advertising is already used by newspaper websites but there are some problems with it, the principal one being that it does not bring in anywhere near enough revenue to support the cost of maintaining the site and its content. Another one is that if they are too intrusive, people very quickly get tired of them and your visitor numbers can be adversely affected. Of course if they are too unobtrusive then they are next to worthless. It is a difficult balance to strike. Content providers are not as in control of how users consume online media as they are in say TV or traditional print media.

Taking the above into account, I can discern a few straws in the wind which lead me to think that the way forward will be as follows.

Firstly, newspapers will have to get by on less money than they do now. I cannot see any way around this. The competition from blogs and other free online sources has already reduced the money available to them and this will continue. The days of very highly paid newspaper executives and star columnists earning hundreds of thousands of pounds will one day be viewed as an historic curiosity. However in their favour is that once the physical distribution media are put to one side, the cost of distribution for newspapers also falls to zero. They still have in their favour the fact that they will have some very skilled people available to them who should be better informed and connected than most bloggers. They should also generally be better at structuring and writing the content. It is just that the main premium these services used to command was down to scarcity and that advantage is now gone.

Secondly, I think that the source of this money will largely come from advertising but that it is likely to be better targeted and customised. At the moment if I go to a newspaper website I will probably see a banner advert that everyone who is viewing that site is seeing. Eventually I can see this method being replaced by smarter adverts that are targeted at me based upon what I have read and perhaps what I have indicated to the service provider that I wish to know about. There are privacy issues here which are outside the scope of this post but unlike newspapers or broadcast media, the possibility of targeting in this way exists online and I feel this will be exploited. The result of this will be to increase the revenue from online advertising to some extent from where we are now.

Thirdly, I think we will see a blurring of the lines between professional and amateur journalism. We are already seeing this happening anyway. Many bloggers have written articles for the regional and national press and many journalists have blogs of their own. As Clay Shirky points out in his book "Here Comes Everybody" journalism has only been considered a profession up until now because it has required a specialism of effort and access to resources that could only be provided on a business size scale. Of course now, anybody with a computer and an internet connection can set up a blog for free and be communicating with the world in a matter of minutes. Maybe as time goes on, journalism will become less and less a profession and more something that some people do some of the time.

The final point I wish to make is to echo what I said at the start. I have had a stab here at trying to divine what will happen based upon what I have seen so far but 10 years ago how many would have predicted the success of Twitter, a system that restricts you to 140 character communications? 20 years ago how many would have predicted the rise of blogs? 50 years ago how many would have predicted the internet itself? The technological acceleration continues apace and will be much faster in the next 50 years than it was in that last 50. Therefore I confidently predict that there will be other advances and inventions that nobody is thinking of right now that will impact upon this area over the time-frame I have discussed.

One thing that I am certain of though is that it will be an exciting time to be alive and engaged with this ever changing and improving model of human communication.

Half the parliamentary seats have not changed hands in my lifetime

Dr Mark has done a great post on The Wardman Wire today which highlights some fascinating and very telling statistics about how often parliamentary seats have changed hands.

For all 4 home countries, here are the stats for how many seats have never changed hands since the end of the Second World War in 1945:

England 30%

Scotland 19%

Wales 33%

Overall 29%

So almost a third of seats have not changed hands in the 17 general elections we have had since then.

Even more shocking though as far as I am concerned are the figures for how many seats have never changed hands since 1970:

England 50%

Scotland 42%

Wales 43%

Overall 49%

I was born in 1974 and so in the country I have lived in all my life (England) half of all seats have not changed hands in all the general elections we have had since then. It is virtually the same for the UK as a whole. I am actually quite shocked by those last figures. they certainly give the lie to the idea that our system is dynamic and allows change. Not for the 50% of people in those seats it doesn't.

This is the result of our "First Past the Post" electoral system that is propped up by Labour and the Conservatives. They want to keep it because it suits them. Most of the seats that don't change hands are theirs and they want to keep it that way.

Remember this the next time you hear Cameron banging on about reform like he was doing today. He might advocate some baby-steps reform to look like he is doing something but he will not do anything significant to tackle this as it suits him and his party too well.

Cameron wants fewer backbenchers if he becomes PM

The collective orgasm from the right-wing blogosphere that has greeted David Cameron's announcments today to reduce the cost of politics has been a sight to behold. There seems to be much glee regarding the proposals, especially those regarding reducing the number of MPs from the soon to be total of 650 to around 585.

Now I have a problem with this anyway because it is part of Cameron's attempt he has discussed previously to "rebalance" the bias of the system back towards the Tories and away from Labour. They portray this as fair, completely ignoring the fact that the First Past the Post electoral system is inherently massively biased towards the top two parties in the first place. It is that that needs urgent reform but no such proposals were forthcoming on that of course.

Anyway, that isn't what I wanted to post about today. Cameron wants to remove 65 MPs or 10% of the total. However I have not seen any reference to reducing the size of government. Therefore he will still need the same number of cabinet and junior ministers as well as whips, bag-carriers etc., all of which make up the "payroll" vote, i.e. those that have to vote with the government. If I have understood his proposals correctly then the effect will be to reduce the number of backbenchers he has to put up with by about 35 and yet still be able to have the same majority.

That could make a big difference to how easy his life is made if he becomes Prime Minister. The fewer non-payroll MPs he has to worry about, the easier it will be to get his legislation through.

Viewed in this way, his announcements today look a bit less altruistic and a lot more self-serving.

Another symptom of Flat Earth News syndrome?

Sara Bedford asks a good question today: "Is the Daily Mail guilty of a contempt of court?". She noticed on their website a story about the "Torture Brothers" case that a court illustration had a caption which included the surname of the boys. She has a screen capture of it with the surname blanked out to illustrate what she saw (see right).

The offending page has been taken down and as far as I can tell any google cache references to it have also been cleared - I guess The Mail asked them to wipe their caches when they realised what had happened. So it seems like it was an error that has been rectified.

This does however throw up some interesting questions. In "the good old days" ((c) Daily Mail) when men were men and papers were papers I think something like this would have been much less likely to happen. That's because sub-editors and proof-readers would likely have been more involved and a clanger like that would have been caught. But nowadays with the much more compressed news cycle and the pressure to get the online content published and out I wonder if some of these steps are no longer there? Otherwise surely someone would have spotted this?

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News covers how the modern press is so overwhelmed with deadlines and lack of resources that mistakes frequently occur. I wonder if this is another example of this problem?

I have contacted the Mail to ask for their comment about what happened here but they are yet to get back to me. I will update this post when they do.

"Gordon Brown resign" petition now in all time top 10

A notable milestone has just been passed by the "Please go" petition on the No 10 website. It has just gone into the top 10 for all petitions (both open and closed) on the site. I am sure Gordon Brown's staff will be aware of this.

Interest in the petition has waned since its heady first few weeks when the number of people signing it rocketed up. I wonder if a further wobble by the Labour party around its conference in early October could see renewed interest. If wavering Labour MPs who deep down know it is all over for Brown need their spines stiffening perhaps they should take a look at the 70,677 people who have signed it so far. We all know that a petition like this represents many more people than the ones who have signed it.

If you haven't added your name yet then you have until the 22nd October to do so. Go on. It's in a good cause.

Interview with Bridget Fox, Lib Dem candidate in Islington

Last weekend, I took a trip over to Islington to meet Bridget Fox, the Lib Dem candidate for Islington South & Finsbury.

I had got to know Bridget a little bit via Twitter and blogging but I thought it would be interesting to meet her. She seemed like a strong campaigner from what I could tell and with the Labour incumbent Emily Thornberry only having won against Bridget by 484 votes in 2005, the seat is one of the party's main targets at the next general election.

I helped out during the day with some leafletting and canvassing. In between the morning and afternoon sessions I took the opportunity to interview her outside the Market Cafe on Whitecross Street. Below is the transcript of the interview.

Before you read on I should warn you that this is the unedited version of the interview. I have included it here for completeness and for those who want to know more about this very impressive candidate who could well be a Lib Dem MP in less than a years' time so it is pretty much a straight version of the full half-hour discussion we had. For those who don't want to read the full interview there is an edited version which has been posted on Lib Dem Voice here (although the juiciest stuff about her views on the sexiness of libraries is only in the version below!).

My questions are in bold and Bridget's answers are in italics. Interview begins:

What first sparked your interest in politics?

Well, I grew up in a political household. My dad was a local councillor when I was a small girl and a local campaigner in the Labour Party. Both he and my mum were very active in all sorts of community groups and single issue campaigns like anti-apartheid and the world development movement so I grew up kind of thinking it was a normal thing to do.

So was it the Labour Party that you initially got involved with then?

I helped my dad out with his campaigns when I was still too young to vote. Then when I went to university, I always assumed that I would join the Labour Party but I ended up joining the Liberals because I found they were closer to my own views. Still committed to social justice but much more interested also in the individual and in the environment, two things that I was increasingly concerned about.

Was it a wrench for you to join a political party that was not the one that you were brought up with?

I was very worried that I would be hurting my dad’s feelings. It was quite funny because it was just after the formation of the SDP and my parents had discussed that a lot and my dad had decided to stick with the Labour Party although he agreed with a lot of the criticisms of it that were made by the SDP. So then a couple of years later when I went and joined the Liberals I was worried he would be very hurt but he has always respected my decision. Then 50 years after he joined the Labour Party he ended up leaving them over the Iraq war anyway and ended up helping me out in my election campaign. Returning the favours!

Did you consider joining the SDP?

I might have done but I was doing French at university at the time that it was all happening and hence I was abroad at the time of the 1983 general election. So I came back and the first campaigns that I got involved with really were later than that so I kind of missed that moment. But I think because I was in a Labour family that had decided not to join the SDP, it would have been harder for me to join them than the Liberals.

Because of the damage that they were doing to Labour?

Yes, although Shirley Williams always was and remains my political heroine. Also, with hindsight what the SDP founders did was both necessary and very brave.

You’ve been involved with Islington and lived here for a long time, nearly 20 years. What do you like about the area?

I think it’s amazing. It’s virtually in Central London yet it has a really village-y feel. It’s got very rich resources in terms of cultural opportunities and leisure opportunities. It’s also very diverse, both ethnically and socially. So it’s an area where anyone can live. It’s also where my dad’s parents were from originally so I’ve got roots here as well.

I noticed that you are a council leaseholder. Do you think this perhaps gives you an insight into how people in the constituency live that some PPCs and MPs who perhaps do not live in that sort of situation wouldn’t have?

I think it’s important in Islington, the vast majority of people here live in flats and a majority live in council estates even if they are not council tenants. If you roll back a decade, it was two thirds of the constituency were council tenants and “right to buy” has gradually eroded that. I think it is important for people to know that life on estates is like. To know what dealing with the council as a landlord or a freeholder is like and also just to have that day-to-day experience. It’s much easier if you know what it’s like to deal with issues than if you’re just experiencing it as a visitor I think.

And have you had any problems that may have given you further insight?

Yes, I think I have seen the good and bad side of living on an Islington estate. I haven’t always lived there though, I have lived in a variety of different sorts of accommodation in my time in Islington and I think that is good experience. But yes, my estate has had its share of anti-social behaviour. At the moment we are having improvement works done by the council and I have seen the good and bad side of how that is handled from a leaseholder point of view. I think that if you do have people coming to you with casework then it is much easier to handle it if you have been there yourself?

How do you think your background as a librarian might have influenced your politics and helped inform it?

(Laughs) Well, librarian sounds like a very old-fashioned unsexy job title these days but when I trained, we were at the forefront of the freedom of information movement and we were all about giving them the information to empower them in their lives. That’s absolutely central to my philosophy as a liberal and also what I think people in politics should be about. So to me it’s absolutely seamless with my outlook on life and how I try and live it. Public libraries are like street-corner universities and they are still how many people find out about what’s going on in terms of their access to public services and their access to information as well as a nice place to borrow a novel for your holidays. So I think there are very positive links there. Also, starting my life working in public libraries, it does mean that you meet all different kinds of people and trying to meet their needs which does is very good training for being a community politician.

You say libraries are unsexy but if you believe the comedian Rob Newman, they are a hotbed of sexual tension because of the enforced silence and people, you know all sitting there in close proximity...

(Laughs) Well there are interesting people in all walks of life but I wouldn’t say I’d ever found libraries terribly sexy! However I do think freedom of information is a very sexy concept!

I noticed one of the issues that you feel very strongly about is tuition fees for students. What do you think about the latest noises from the Lib Dem party leadership about this?

Well there have been various sets of noises. Firstly I think for me it is an absolutely touchstone issue because it is about whether you think education is something worth society paying for as opposed to the individual paying for and I think it is. It is also about whether you want the life changing experience of higher education to be availble to all on the basis of merit, not ability to to pay and I do. So for me it’s a no-brainer. Having said that, I was alarmed when it looked like the party might be changing its opposition to tuition fees and I am glad it’s been seen off...

But has it been seen off though?

Well, I think it was seen off in the policy thing and we had Stephen Williams came to one of our pizza and politics evenings to debate the issue with us and I was confident it had been seen off at that stage. I think now the position we’re in is that we are looking at a situation where the next parliament which I hope and expect to be a member of is going to have to make tough decisions because there isn’t going to be enough money to go around. In a context where at the moment people do pay tuition fees, I think it is understandable for the party to say of the things we may want to change, spending a lot more money on this now may not be something that we are able to do immediately even if it is something that we want to do. To me, it’s not a cut, it’s can’t spend more money yet which in a time of recession I think is understandable but it is still something I believe is right in principle and I hope we would do when the money is there.

That answer implies that you think there are more important things that money could be spent on.

I don’t know what the state of the books will be and I think maintaining the core public services we’ve already got and tackling climate change and dealing with globalisation are as important for the future of the country as higher education. I wouldn’t want to cut primary schools to pay for higher education for example because clearly more people benefit from primary schools but I hope, well we do have plans to invest in both and that is what I would like to do. Certainly I am going to be an MP on the progressive left of the spectrum, I will always be defending and advocating public services.

My biggest objection to tuition fees is, as you indicated at the start of your answer, is that their existence favours young people from better off backgrounds, it’s bad for social mobility and it means that people for whom £20,000 or £25,000 is a lot of money end up with those sort of debts before they even enter the job market.

Absolutely.

Given that, would you be receptive to the idea of something like a graduate tax whereby although they wouldn’t have the debt hanging over their head. There would be maybe a 1% or 2% premium on the tax that graduates pay which would overall have the same effect in terms of pay-back but it would be over a very long period of time and if they never achieved a particularly high income then they wouldn’t pay very much back on that at all.

I think that last bit would be crucial. I wouldn’t want a system that discouraged graduates from going into socially useful work, or discouraged them from writing novels, painting paintings, writing poetry and living in a garret while they did it. I certainly wouldn’t want a system where the social payback effectively from funding people’s higher education is that they went to work in the city. That doesn’t seem to me to be what we are trying to achieve.

But if it was a small-ish percentage premium...

I wouldn’t have a problem with that. The other argument of course is that if you get a better job you pay more income tax anyway but I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with a graduate tax as part of a fairer taxation system.

Do you still work full time?

I do at the moment, I work 4 days a week. I have chosen to and I am lucky that I have an employer who has been supportive of me doing that.

And how long have you been doing that for?

In my current role for about 2 years now.

Is the reason for that so you have more time for your campaigning as the parliamentary candidate?

It is yes. I mean we don’t know when the general election campaign is going to be. I was reselected as the candidate for this highly winnable seat in January 2007 and I said then that I would work in a way that enabled me to support campaigning so I work 4 days per week and I work largely from home which is in the constituency. That means I am available both to experience maximum time in the constituency which I think is important and also to do campaigning. Frankly, sometimes I use that extra day in the week to do things that normal people do at the weekend, I might be just doing my laundry or whatever. I won’t necessarily be campaigning all the time but it gives me that flexibility that I can attend community events and go campaigning which is what I want to do.

Do you think that if you weren’t able to do that and you did have to work a 5 day week or even as quite a lot of people have to do these days work even more than a 5 day week, with some evenings and weekends do you think that would hamper your ability to campaign?

It would certainly hamper the style of campaigning I like to do. I spend a lot of my time door-knocking. Even now in “peace time” I door-knock three nights a week and every weekend, not always all weekend but certainly either Saturday or Sunday and sometimes both and I think that is important. This is a constituency with a high turnover of residents so we can’t rely on the fact that the people we have met before will necessarily be the electorate this time round and even though a lot of people are online we also have quite a digital divide with a lot of older and poorer people who are not online. I think people are cynical about not meeting politicians and them being remote and detached. That’s not me and that’s not how I want to be. I love campaigning and I have chosen to take a back seat in my previous career to enable me to spend more time on the campaign trail.

What’s the hardest thing about being a parliamentary candidate?

There are huge benefits and the more winnable the seat, the harder you work to become the candidate so no-one should ever complain about being one! There are hard things. There are never enough hours in the day. The other thing is that if you are the candidate, it’s different from being a council candidate even when you’re part of a team; it can all feel very personal as if it’s all about you. So if something goes wrong, operationally or there’s a row about something or some negative feedback on something you’ve done it’s very hard not to take it personally and think “Ohhh, we’re all doomed!”. Of course the great thing about Islington is that it’s not two steps forward and one step back it’s like five or six steps forward and one back but even so the one back can feel very personal if you’re the candidate. So managing that and the constant self-motivation is very important. I don’t find it a problem, I love what I do and I feel privileged to do it but it is potentially extremely demanding. And it takes over your life, it’s the first thing you think about in the morning and it’s the last thing you think of when you go to sleep at night. If you can sleep!

Yes, but I suppose that the prize at the end of it is very, very great isn’t it?

And with a 0.8% swing to win, it’s very doable here.

Indeed. All the Lib Dem parliamentary candidates that I have met who are in winnable seats, and I have met a fair few now, seem very, very driven. There’s something that unites them and I guess even if I hadn’t have known that you were a candidate, I think after having spent 5 or 10 minutes with you I would have sussed that you were at least “the type”! Have you noticed that yourself and did you always feel that eventually you would want to stand for parliament?

When I was about 15 or 16, I really wanted to be an MP. Then I thought I would be a Labour MP. Then I kind of went off the idea party because I thought it wasn’t a realistic aspiration possibly for a Lib Dem – anyone in the party at the time of merger would have thought being an MP would be a rather remote career goal!

Yes, what did we have about 12 MPs or something?

Yes, and I had grown up in a part of the world where we were third place politically and then it was about fifteen years ago I suppose I got into the idea. Originally I have to say I was partly spurred on by the fact the party went for mixed gender shortlists. The idea was to encourage more people to stand and it worked because local parties turned around to their best women activists and said “have you thought about going for candidate approval” in a way perhaps they hadn’t done before. So I was given some helpful shoves and they were pushing at an open door in terms of what was happening in the rest of my life it seemed to be a realistic aspiration. I do love it. You have to have a lot of energy to do it but I find it gives me energy. I think if you are doing something you like, you get energy from it and if you are finding an activity is taking energy out of you then it might not be the right thing for you to be doing.

Yes, I understand that. So have you noticed this “common bond” between candidates or aspiring candidates?

Yes. I think you have to be motivated. I think some people come across in their manner as more driven than others and I think we all have times when we’re not. But when I am on the campaign trail yes I am very upbeat and driven. I’m sure there are times when I’m at home with my feet up when I hope I’m hopefully not so driven! I mean I talk to my fellow candidates quite a lot – we have a very strong network of key seat Lib Dem candidates which is an invaluable network...

Does that include incumbent MPs as well?

Yes it does, but there is sort of a cohort that we all hopefully expect to get elected together and we work very closely together even though some of us are quite geographically disparate. My buddy for example is a candidate in Scotland but in this age of the internet and telecoms we talk to each other all the time and compare notes.

Who is that by the way?

Katy Gordon from Glasgow.

Oh yes, she’s just come onto Twitter hasn’t she?

Yes she has. She’s a great girl and we are both fighting urban seats and we compare notes a lot. We often find that we are doing it in the small hours certainly both she and high have a high metabolic rate and don’t need much sleep, or get much sleep! Maybe that is a common factor. Every candidate says they need more hours in the day and maybe we make more of them by not sleeping much!

You do know that Margaret Thatcher got by on only 4 hours sleep a night don’t you?

Yes I know but it doesn’t make her a role model!

OK! Let’s move on from that one! What would you say is your number one political passion?

Oh goodness! It’s very mean to ask somebody for one you know!?

You can say more than one then!

I’ll give you three then. Education, the environment; fighting climate change and civil liberties. I think that’s a pretty good Lib Dem mix!

So, the environment. That’s a subject very close to my own heart as well both politically and also professionally. I run a company and we help design buildings in a more energy efficient way and provide software for the same purpose. So what particularly in that area have you campaigned on and focussed on?

Well it’s a whole range of things. I’m a supporter of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and I’m concerned about climate change. I spent 8 years as a councillor in Islington and for 4 of those years I had the environment brief on the council and 2 of which I had the same brief in opposition. So it’s something where I have been privileged to put into place lots of environmentally friendly measures. For example all the street-lights in Islington are now powered from renewable sources – that was a decision that I took when we changed the contract on those. We’ve also got very strong green planning rules in the borough about requiring people to have green roofs where appropriate and so on. So I feel that this is practical stuff and also campaigning on things like clean air which are very important in an urban borough. Promoting sustainable transport, you name it. I think one of the things is that people can feel that climate change is such a big and scary issue, they either don’t want to think about it or they think there’s nothing that can be done. I believe that we’re the generation that has a chance to do something and because of that we absolutely must. But there are things we can all do.

But how do you deal with people who say that man made climate change doesn’t really exist and that it’s down to sun-spots or it’s cyclic?

Well they can continue to think that but in the meantime the rest of us have got to try and get on and save the planet.

But they would say to you that you’re going to have an impact on the economy that’s unnecessary because it’s unproven and the science isn’t there?

I understand there is a concern out there that with the end of the cold war, the anti-capitalist movement has just moved on and hijacked the green agenda and is using it to attack a consumerist capitalist society.

Do you think there is an element of that going on?

There may be an element of that. However that doesn’t mean that this whole business about climate change is wrong. I believe it to be right and if it is, it would be inexcusable to do nothing about it. I don’t have kids but I have nieces who I love more than life itself and this is the world in which they are going to be living their lives and I want it to be there for them. Also in terms of global social justice. We’re talking about the adverse effects of climate change as something in the future for us but it’s already happening in parts of the world and there are Bangledeshi constituents here whose relatives are already struggling to live because of changes in flood patterns due to climate change. It is happening and if we have a chance to do something about it... and I’m not a hair-shirted environmentalist, I’m a freedom loving person but I think the great thing about the market which is why I favour it above state planned provision, certainly for anything that isn’t a natural monopoly is that the market responds to the demands of the age and that is for green technology and sustainable solutions. There are whole new entrepreneurial opportunities there and creating opportunities for science and design and think that is exciting. It’s not about saying stop doing X, it’s about saying we’ve got a great opportunity to do Y and Z and save the planet so why wouldn’t you want to do that?

How did it feel to win a scholarship to Oxford?

(Laughs) Well it was more honour than money. I mean I think the scholarship was sixty quid a year which didn’t go very far even in those days. But it was a great honour. My parents went to university but neither of them went to Oxbridge and no-one from my school had ever gone to that college before.

It was Balliol college wasn’t it?

Yes, a political college and it was my first choice and I got it so I was very pleased.

But you didn’t do PPE!?

I didn’t do PPE no! Well I loved French, that was my passion at school and I wanted to carry on doing it but you couldn’t do just French at Oxford so I had to combine it with something. So I was very happy to combine it with History which actually now, on a day to day basis is probably more of a passion than the French so it worked out well. No, I didn’t do PPE...

Good! There are too many politicians around who have done PPE!

Although there isn’t much more to my life than politics at the moment, I do believe there is more to life than politics!

Oxbridge is renowned for turning out our future leaders. Do you think it’s helped you, or hindered you or had no effect at all?

I think what was good about Oxford, well first of all it was great academically obviously and it was a fantastic opportunity to get some great teaching. Looking back now, the number of fantastic lectures I missed because they were at 9:00am, you know makes you weep! I came from an all-girl school to a college that was 70% male! I was quite shy but going there was a confidence builder. Also, going there did fuel a very strong sense of obligation in me, I don’t want this to come out wrong but to use my skills for good. I wouldn’t say I am a good “Oxbridge networker” but I have still got friends today who I met there. I suppose that I did meet some of our future leaders as well, for example I was a contemporary of Boris Johnson...

You weren’t a member of the Bullingdon club were you!?

No! I don’t think girls were allowed in! I also got my first experience of practical politics at Balliol with student elections and my first party conference. There was also a great summer in 1985 that I spent driving around and helping out with the Brecon and Radnor by-election, which we won! It taught me that politics could be fun!

What is it that makes you a Liberal Democrat?

Well I joined the party because Labour’s method of social justice was not acceptable to me. I do not want to trade freedom for equality. Also, I could see the havoc that the Tories were wreaking. I have never doubted that it was the right choice. I think we have the right balance and I have seen how good we are at a local level, especially where poorer people have lost out because of Labour’s approach. The rich can buy themselves out of these problems but the poor can’t.

During the course of this interview, you have said more than once that you expect to be the next MP for Islington. How does it feel to be that close to achieving your goal and what would you want to achieve in your first twelve months?

Well I certainly would not to be so arrogant as to say I definitely will win. It’s of course up to the voters but there is only a margin of 484 votes and we need a 0.8% swing to get there. I would spend my first year being a good constituency MP – Islington deserves this.

Some question whether we have the balance right at the moment of the work that MPs do in their constituencies versus spending time at Westminster holding the government to account. Do you think the balance is right on this at the moment?

Well the job is both. Having spent time as a councillor I feel that is a good grounding to be able to represent the people here in parliament. I think it is easier for London MPs as they are closer and there is not as much time spent travelling back and forth. MPs are servants of their constituents though and the two jobs feed each other. Parliament should not be about abstract “what ifs” it should be about “what is”.

You are very active on Twitter and you also maintain a blog. How do you find using these sort of technology helps with your campaigning?

They are really useful but it would be lazy to just rely on the technology. There are still a significant minority of people who are not online but I think that as a politician to not use it would be wrong. It is a way of communicating that I do like, I really like the genuine interactivity but it is part of the mix.

What kind of support do you get from the party centrally?

We do get some funding from them but we also get funding locally. The best thing we get from the centre is the training and expertise as well as visits from MPs. For example Nick Clegg was here yesterday and soon the number of times he has visited us here since he became leader will be in double figures. That’s a huge vote of confidence for me and the team here.

My final question. Can you say something nice about your Labour opponent, Emily Thornberry?

I would say that she is a good mother.

RIP general election night?

According to The Sunday Times, election night may be no more. Some councils are thinking of moving their counts to the next day for practical reasons.

Lib Dem Voice and Con Home are amongst a number of blogs who are trying to start a "Save general election night" campaign.

I have been a devotee of election nights (general, local, European etc.) since I first stayed up all night to watch the results of the 1992 general election roll in. I love the drama, the fact that the politicians sometimes don't know what is going to happen and to be able to witness history unfold only a few hours after the electorate has delivered its verdict like when Portillo lost his seat in 1997. I often book the next morning, or even full day off work so that I can enjoy the hours long results programmes and I for one would be very sorry to lose this.

You knew it was coming - however, I am of a slightly unusual breed. I am fairly obsessed with politics but I am in a pretty small minority. Most people I suspect would not particularly miss the overnight drama of the count and in fact many would not even realise anything had changed.

Mark Pack on the LDV post referred to earlier has a list of reasons as to why moving the count would be bad and I agree with them but I am not convinced that many people outside of politics would be persuaded by them.

Given how strongly I have argued for change in all sorts of other areas of politics (electoral reform, written constitution, devolving power etc. etc.) I think it would be a bit hypocritical of me to campaign to retain the late counts given that the main reason I would want them to remain is because I personally like and enjoy them. I am at least willing to listen to the arguments for moving the count (more time for checks against postal vote fraud apparently being the main one).

I hope ultimately that we do retain general election night counts and that perhaps other ways can be found to resolve the problems some have with the current setup but I accept that sometimes things need to change. When I argue for things like electoral reform for example, I am always grateful when others listen to and engage with my arguments as to why we should change so the least I can do is extend the same courtesy to those arguing for reform of the counts.

Continuing to "No Platform" the BNP would be a big mistake

Quick multiple choice question. What is the best way to deal with an opponent whose views you very, very strongly disagree with?

a) Engage them in debate and win the argument against them.

b) Refuse to have anything to do with them and hope they will go away.

There are still people (apparently including Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary) who think that option b) is the way to go when it comes to the BNP. I find it odd that anybody could still think that.

I have always in principle been against the "No Platform" policy whereby some opponents of the BNP have refused to share the same debating platform as them. The argument is that even being seen on the same platform as mainstream parties lends the BNP a legitimacy that they do not deserve. My view is that you win debates and arguments by taking on your opponents, not by banning them from the debating arena.

To the people who agree with "No Platform" and have been practising it all these years I just ask whether in all honesty they can say that following this policy has worked. Because from where I am sitting it has manifestly failed. It has allowed them to claim that they are being shunned by the mainstream parties and to play the political martyrs. It allows them to claim that they are representing something that the mainstream parties are not and they they speak to the "real concerns" of the electorate. I think this has contributed to their recent electoral successes at council and European Parliament level.

Of course I think that the BNP's ideas are abhorrent but I would share a debating platform with them and I would try to expose their incoherent, half-baked, racist policies for what they are.

Sweet and Tender Hooligan, Peter Black AM, Sara Bedford and Alistair Campbell are amongst a number of bloggers who seem to agree with me about this.

W(h)ither democracy?

There is an interesting vignette of what is wrong with our political system in one of The Times leader articles today on public spending:

Labour will not grasp this nettle, having failed to tackle the pension apartheid between the public and private sectors for fear of upsetting the unions. There is a hint, though, that the Conservatives may be preparing to do so. Although the party has not yet published any detailed proposals, and may not do so this side of the election, it is letting it be known that this is an area where it is ready to take action.

So on one of the biggest issues facing us, the Conservatives "may not" publish detailed proposals this side of an election. In which case how the hell are people supposed to make up their minds whether to vote for them, and what sort of mandate will they have even if they win power? And one of the largest circulation newspapers in the country just mentions this in passing in a leader article. Rather than being cause for outrage and insisting they must spell out their plans it's just accepted with a nudge and wink in the lobby that the detail may wait until after the election. In other words, we the public don't get any say.

No wonder people are disillusioned with politics.

This week I have been mostly reading... 29th August - 4th September 2009

Saturday 29th August

Andrew Reeves asked if Labour will ever learn in reference to their plans to cut housing benefit.

Sunday 30th August

Moments of Clarity asked if the housing benefit proposals fallout will be as bad as the 10p tax debacle.

Letters from a Tory was not happy about Michael Martin's peerage and he thinks it is symptomatic of a wider decision by politicians to shun parliamentary reform.

Monday 31st August

Peter Black AM discussed the rise of the career politician.

Liberal Bureaucracy thought that the idea of "Drink ASBOs" shows the government missing the point, yet again!

Stumbling and Mumbling analysed Peter Mandelson's contribution to the filesharing debate.

Tuesday 1st September

A Liberal Burblings trinity for Tuseday who had three excellent posts:

Firstly he eviscerated Clarkson with respect to his comments about female presenters.

Secondly he reckoned that Cameron has been indulging in disgraceful point scoring regarding the Al Megrahi episode.

And thirdly he suggested that Lib Dem MP Nick Harvey's comments about second homes were a damn disgrace!

Wednesday 2nd September

Costigan Quist asked if 12 year old girls should be taking folic acid.

My mum's favourite blogger, Constantly Furious had a proper rant about the green agenda.

Thursday 3rd September

Sara Bedford had a very thought provoking post about Senator Edward Kennedy's approach to terrorism.

Costigan again, this time pulling up The Sun on its misleading use of circles.

Liberal England had a great post about the Farage farago highlighting just how restive the Tories actually are under the surface if they are willing to give tacit or even explicit support to his attempt to unseat John Bercow in Buckingham. Also contains the best "wicker hamper" metaphor I have ever read.

Skipper (he used to teach me politics you know - sort of) laments Brown's lack of bottle.

My Two Penneth with a wonderful follow-up post to the one I featured on this roundup last week now seeing herself standing at a political crossroads. Although new to blogging, she's a great writer so please add her to your feeds. She is certainly one to watch for the future I feel if she sticks with it.

Friday 4th September

Moments of Clarity again, this time he asked why we are not standing against Speaker Bercow ourselves...

...and Stephen Glenn told him why.

A couple of bonuses this week:

1) Wired magazine recently reported on how the effects of placebos are getting stronger and scientists are desperate to find out why. Fascinating stuff.

2) I came across this little curiosity this week. It is a copy of a recent blogpost of mine "Older women are treated badly by TV" but with some of the words sustituted for other ones!? I have my suspicions regarding what this is about but would be interested in what others think and if other bloggers have noticed their own work being posted like this.

Open primaries are second best

I read with interest Shane Greer's recent piece in the Yorkshire Post about the benefits he perceives in open primaries. His basic argument is that they give voters in a constituency more power by enabling the local electorate to select the party candidates for elections to the House of Commons prior to that election.

The recent MPs expenses scandal has thrown up lots of issues about MPs and reform of the system is desperately needed to at the very least eliminate the safe seats that give too many MPs secure tenure irrespective of what they do or how good they are. However if we rushed to bring in open primaries, we would be overlooking a more extensive reform we could undertake to our electoral system and that would provide almost all the benefits of open primaries but would improve our representation in other ways too.

As the piece I referred to earlier was for the Yorkshire Post, I thought I look at 5 Yorkshire parliamentary constituencies: Batley and Spen, Bradford North, Bradford South, Bradford West and Halifax. All of these seats are grouped together in the centre of West Yorkshire and all of them returned Labour MPs in the 2005 general election. However when you look at the total number of votes cast across all 5 seats you can see that actually Labour only received 43.9% of the votes, the Conservatives 27.5% and the Lib Dems 19.3% with others on 9.3%. Yet Labour got 100% of these seats and no other party got any of them.

This is as a result of our current "First Past the Post" system which gives the seat to the candidate with the most votes. It led in 2005 to the current government getting 55% of the seats in the House of Commons with only 35% of the vote in the country.

Single Transferable Vote however is a system which would stop this sort of injustice. It allows voters during an election to list their candidates by order of preference. These preferences are then allocated to the candidates and if your first choice candidate is not elected then your second and third choice (and so on) are taken into account. This means that your vote needn't be wasted as under the current system. The crucial difference though is when it is combined with a multi-member constituency system. Those 5 seats listed above could be combined into one seat (called say West Yorkshire Central) and then the likely effect would be to give a fairer result with say 3 Labour MPs, 1 Conservative and 1 Liberal Democrat. At the moment, Conservative and Lib Dem voters in those seats have their vote count for nothing. Under this new system they would get representation. There are a number of other countries including Ireland who already use a system like this.

Electing parliament this way would eliminate the safe seats that both myself and Shane wish to see the back of. In a multi-member seat system like this, there are no safe seats and several members of the same party can stand against each other in the actual election (not in a primary run-off beforehand) thus maximising the number of electors who can express their preference. This way, different strands of opinion within the same party can stand and the electorate can decide whether they want for example a Dennis Skinner or a David Miliband (or both, or neither) rather than have the party foist that candidate on the seat.

If rolled out across the country, a system like this would mean that the number of seats in parliament would roughly match the percentage of votes cast for each party across the country. This would eliminate the unfairness that is baked into our current electoral system and would mean politicians in every seat really had to fight for every vote rather than concentrate on the marginal seats as happens at the moment. This should have the effect of widening issues for debate at election time.

Things have gone a bit quiet recently from our elected representatives about reform following the expenses scandal. The main leaders made a lot of noise initially in response to the public outrage but nothing has really changed. Reform of the nature outlined here would demonstrate that the politicians really had listened to the public and that they are willing to change how they are elected even if it means their own political careers become more precariously balanced. If politicians had feared the ballot box more, the recent scandal may never have happened.

On that point, Shane and myself are in full agreement.

Nigel Farage - Tories should be careful what they wish for

Jonathan Calder has pointed out in an excellent post today that some of the leading Tory bloggers have been cheering on Nigel Farage in his bid to unseat new Commons Speaker John Bercow in his Buckingham seat. As Jonathan says:

"Yes He Can!" crows Tory Bear, complete with Obamaesque graphic.

"Go Nigel Go" cries Dizzy Thinks.

And Iain Dale says: "I'm glad I don't live in Buckingham." (I take this an admission that he would find it hard to maintain party loyalty if he lived in the constituency, rather than as a general assault on the this blameless Home Counties town.)

I suspect they reflect a much wider sentiment in the Tory party that John Bercow is not really a proper Tory and that he was imposed on them by Labour as a punishment for them getting rid of Michael Martin. They would shed no tears if Bercow lost his seat, and I think they would see this as just desserts.

However I reckon they are not thinking this through properly. As fun as it would be for them to see Bercow uncermoniously ejected from the Commons they would then have the leader of UKIP sitting on the green benches. This might not matter too much at first. On current polls Cameron is likely to have a healthy majority and should be able to bat Farage away during his honeymoon period.

But what happens when issues like Europe come to the fore? What happens when Cameron has to make the decision on what to do about the Lisbon Treaty? What about other issues where the political compass of the Tory Party is far closer to UKIP than its own leadership?

Currently Nigel Farage is an irritant outside the House to the Tories. Nigel Farage MP would have an even bigger irritant effect. You can imagine that eventually there could be defections to UKIP and with their leader already in the House the temptation for disillusioned Tories to make the break would be even greater.

The worst thing though for the Tories would be in the run-up to the election after next. After 4 or 5 probably very hard years in power as they have tried to drag the country out of the economic slump we are now in Cameron is not likely to be riding very high in the polls. The votes that UKIP will take from the Tories in that election could easily be the difference between keeping and losing power.

With Nigel Farage in the Commons, with or without possible Tory defections, UKIP's profile will be much bigger in a General Election than it is now. The extra kudos that goes with having their leader as an MP could easily tip the balance and force Cameron from power.

Those Tory bloggers who are currently giving overt or tacit support to Nigel Farage should think very carefully about what they are doing. They should look 15 moves ahead on the chessboard. Not 3.

Interview with Douglas Carswell MP about "The Plan"

I recently read "The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain" by the Conservatives Douglas Carswell MP and Daniel Hannan MEP. I found it an interesting read and whilst I did not agree with all the ideas proposed within it I certainly think it is a welcome addition to the debate on reform in the UK.

Douglas Carswell who runs a good and frequently updated blog here has been kind enough to grant me an interview about the content of the book which I have included below.

Particularly noteworthy for me is where he confirms that he would be willing in principle to campaign for electoral reform to Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies for Westminster. There aren't many Tories who would do that!

Interview below. My questions are in bold and the responses are in italics:

How many copies of the book have been sold so far?

Over 14,000 - and rising.

I was quite impressed to discover whilst reading it that the book is "Print on Demand". Do you think that eventually most books will be produced in this way?

Yes - and it won’t just be books that’ll be manufactured on demand.

As Dan and I were writing The Plan, I was reading Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. It gave us a eureka moment. Having written various books with various publishers previously, we realised that if we switched to print on demand, we could leverage off internet distribution ourselves directly.

We were convinced that the themes in our book would sooner or later become central to the political debate in Britain - we just didn't know when.

Then along came expensegate. The Plan suddenly seem prescient and demand took off. Print on demand meant that we were able to meet that demand 100%. The Plan wouldn't have been a bestseller had we published conventionally.

In Part One of the book you bemoan “declamatory legislation” based on emotive rather than proportionate evidence based responses to issues or events. What would you suggest is the best way to debate against this sort of political tactic?

The best way to ensure that the laws that are passed deal with real problems is to ensure that our law-makers are made more directly answerable to local voters. If we had a right of popular initiative, plus recall and open primaries to decide who gets to be the MP in the first place, we'd have wiser, more judicious people in our legislature, passing proportionate laws.

Part of your “Cleaning up Westminster” section suggests that select committee chairmen should be elected by the Commons in a secret ballot rather than appointed by the whips office. Wouldn’t the fact that the governing party generally has an inbuilt majority within the house restrict the effectiveness of this approach?

Not at all. That's what happens today. And its one of the reasons why the executive controls Parliament - rather than the other way round.

Using secret ballots to decide who gets to chair select committees would take power away from party whips. The executive would no longer be able to decide the shape of the legislature.

Even more profoundly, it'd change the chemistry of the Commons. Today advancement in Westminster comes through party whips. This encourages MPs to behave primarily as cheer leaders for the executive or shadow executive. It helps explain why the Commons generates much heat and noise, while at the same time being quite so supine and spineless.

Once you use free and fair ballots to decide who gets promoted, advancement would come from the degree to which an individual MP could command support and respect from across the chamber. It would encourage the fair and independent minded.

Another idea from the “Cleaning up Westminster” section is open primaries. You spend some time explaining how this would improve representation but you completely dismiss proportional representation saying: “it would make the problem even worse: a party list system concentrates yet more power in the hands of the whips”. This strikes me as a very selective and misleading representation of PR. Single Transferable Vote using multi-member constituencies, the PR system favoured by most electoral reformers requires no party list and many would argue actually puts even more power in the hands of the voter than open primaries as part of the actual election. What are your thought on this?

I'm increasingly open-minded about multi-member constituencies. Choice and competition are good in politics as well as business.

The key thing, however, is to recognise that with 7 out of 10 MPs coming from safe seats, we don't have enough choice and competition in our politics. I fear that some PR proposals would mean we ended up with a system where 9 out of 10 MPs stood zero chance of losing their seats.

But as I said, STV with multi-member constituencies avoids the list problems. I am very encouraged to see you being receptive to multi-member seats. Would you be willing to update a future edition of "The Plan" to include consideration of this?

Not sure there's going to be a Plan B! In October, I introduce a Bill in the Commons to allow open primaries in every constituency - and the right of recall. That's my number one priority for reform because it's a change we can bring in right now. And it'd change our rotten political system for the better right away.

So if there was to be a referendum for electoral reform to STV multi-member, would you support it and help to campaign for a "Yes" vote?

Yes - I think so. I'd want to see the detail first, but if done properly, I would campaign for change.

Part of the “A return to law, order and accountability” section focuses on the idea of locally elected Sheriffs (which I think would be a very good idea – I am certainly a fan of devolution). This reminded me of a book I read a few years ago by Jonathan Freedland called “Bring Home the Revolution” which coincidentally includes a 10 point plan for Britain too. Freedland includes radical ideas for devolving real power along the lines of the USA and popular sovereignty (as you do in “The Plan”) but he wants to go further than you wishing to change the UK to a Republic and creating a written constitution amongst other things. There are many potential changes like this that are not covered at all in your 10 points. Do you think “The Plan” is really radical enough?

I'm an admirer of Freedland. Like him, I also admire the United States greatly. But it is, as Freedland reminds us, an English system!

Public disgust with the political status quo in Britain is now so great, we stand a real chance of achieving some significant reforms. But the one way to guarantee that nothing changes, however, would be for the reformers to be overly ambitious. Rather than utopia, let’s actually achieve some bankable changes.

Instead of far reaching electoral reform, why not have open primaries right away to ensure our self serving politicians are held to account? Instead of a written constitution, why not do some pretty simply things that would ensure that those we elected held government to account properly?

The whole point of writing The Plan was to show what can realistically be done right away.

Some would argue that one of the reasons we are in such a mess now is partly because we do not have a written constitution and successive governments have been able to fiddle with no need for a blueprint or even a coherent idea of where they are heading with their changes. Isn't it therefore important that any changes that are made are at the very least properly codified as Freedland suggests?

I don't trust the kind of people who'd inevitably dominate the process. They'd be leftists and Guardianistas. So no.

We need to radically change our constitution in order to achieve the revolutionary aims that English radicals like the Levellers sought. It's not the American revolution we need to bring home - but the English revolution that we need to complete.

Starting from scratch with a written constitution wouldn't complete the English revolution. It'd put the vile elites - the quangocrats, human rights judges, Europhiles, remote technocrats and latter day Whigs - in control.

There are sections of the book where it seems to get dangerously close to describing what could be construed as right-wing revenge for perceived left-wing impositions. An example is in the section “Parliament should be supreme” where you claim that a “genteel coup d’etat” has been wrought on Britain by judges. You describe it as “Slow moving, genteel and from the Left.” There is also a list of right-wing dictators who have been subject to international indictment against left-wing dictators who have not. Do you recognise the potential problem here in trying to garner wide consensus (which you would surely need for the fundamental changes you propose) when the motivation for some aspects of your programme appear to read like this?

Actually the one thing The Plan never reads as is a narrowly Conservative work. Re-read the first few pages. It simply isn’t written as a Conservative book. It is very specifically not just aimed at a Tory audience.

It is aiming for something bigger than that. It is not saying this is what Conservatives need to do. It is saying this is what our country needs.

But it does recognise that the Left – as Gramsci recognised would happen - has captured key institutions. The Left’s long march through our institutions explains the leftist disposition of so much of the quango state – from the criminal justice system, to the BBC to the educationalists. The default settings of the quango state are well to the Left of the British people. That is why we need direct democracy – to recalibrate the state and undo the left’s creeping victory.

I think there is merit in a lot of your ideas in the “True localism” chapter. However some would argue that a land value tax would be a more fair and equitable way to raise local finance than a local sales tax. What are your thoughts on this?

How one localises control over tax revenues is less important than the fact one does it.

Fed up with old guard Tory centralisers, who said “it can’t be done”, “remember the poll tax” blah blah, I wrote an academic paper called Paying for Localism to show that it is possible to devolve control over finances. In my paper, I suggested turning VAT into a local sales tax. Doing so would ensure local councils became more or less self financing – and it’d not mean any new tax.

Have a look at it and let me know if you can come up with an even better model.

(Note: Link opens PDF document)

I found your ideas in the chapter “Putting patients in control” very interesting and I think they make a useful contribution to the debate which Mr Hannan has recently made ultra topical. However there are some (for example here) who say that the Singaporean model only works there because of its unique political situation where the government owns or very tightly manages most aspects of their economy and society. How do you respond to this?

I disagree. It’s not Singaporean exceptionalism that explains their better survival rates. Their system is better at ensuring that finite resources are allocated in a way that ensures everybody gets the medical care they need.

I particularly liked the part in the “Neighbourhood Welfare” chapter where you point out that benefit cheats would be much less likely to be as tolerated as they are by neighbours if the effect was felt in a local tax bill; I had not heard this expressed in this way before. Do you agree that if you want to try and sell your message more widely that you need to zero in on points like this that will resonate with people?

Yes. We need to keep showing that big, remote, central government actually harms the most vulnerable folk most of all. It’s made our country less compassionate and tolerant that it ought to be.

I think your “Direct Democracy” chapter where you call for the ability for referenda to be triggered by petitions of enough citizens is the best one in the book. However I feel that you do not go far enough. You spend time explaining how it will all work but you then pull back and say that parliament would retain an ultimate veto. If this was implemented, why should parliament be able to override the will of the people?

Because I still think you need a legislature. I want radical change to that legislature – so that you have citizen lawmakers, not professional politicians. I want the voters to have the ability to sack lazy, self-serving MPs by triggering by-elections. I want the people to help set the Commons agenda, and veto politicians and their endless folly. But I still think you need a legislature.

Once you’ve made the Commons properly accountable to the voter - and government properly answerable to the Commons – good luck to any MP who ignored what their local voters thought.

Ignoring voters is the default setting within our present rotten Commons.

I appreciate what you say and certainly agree with your final point about the Commons ignoring voters but you are still saying that ultimately parliament should be able to override the will of the people. There are places where a model similar to what you advocate is already used (such as Switzerland) where the legislature has no veto and it seems to work perfectly well; the government has to bow to the wishes of the people clearly expressed. Why should we be any different and instead have a compromised system?

The Swiss model allows referendums to veto what politicians want to do. As such the job of holding the executive to account has been democratised - its not just the legislatures role, but the citizens'. That is something I'd like to see in the UK, too. I'd also like people to be able to propose new laws - a right of initative.

But what I don't believe is that you can have a legislative process that starts with a right of popular initiative, followed by popular referendum - without the legislation passing through a legislature at some point.

Why do I think so? Well, look at my wiki-Bill experiment. I've used the wisdom of the internet to allow everyone to help me draft a Great Repeal Bill. It has been a tremendous success so far. A real Bill has been drafted by hundreds of citizens on-line - and the wisdom of the crowd has exceeded that of Westminster.

But even so, I think the wiki-Bill would need to be debated and scrutinised by a legislature in order to iron out one or two inconsistencies. Have a look here to see for yourself.

And my final question – if the Conservatives are in power after the next election, how much of your 30 point plan do you think will have been implemented after the first 12 months?

David Cameron has taken various ideas straight out of the book – open primaries or elected police chiefs, for example. His recent Milton Keynes speech about the need to decentralise power borrowed not only from the books ideas, but read as if it took from the actual text.

So far, so good. But never underestimate the power of the Sir Humphrey Appleby-types.

Hattip to Wikipedia for the image of Douglas used above.