Is this one of the reasons why the Tories are not doing better?

In 1997, one of the things that underlined how much Tony Blair had changed his party from the one that had lost in 1979 (and been out of power for 18 years) was how few members of his shadow cabinet had been members of that previous administration.

I did a bit of research on this last night and as far as I can tell, the only members of Blair's Shadow Cabinet in the run up to the 1997 General Election that had been a member of the 1979 losing government were:

• Margaret Beckett: She had held a number of junior positions under Wilson and Callaghan.
• Michael Meacher: He also held a couple of junior positions in the 1974-1979 administration.
• Gavin Strang: Ditto.
• Ann Taylor who was an assistant whip from 1977-1979 under Callaghan.

Donald Dewar had been a junior member of Wilson's administration in the late 60s but not in the 70s as after the 1970 election he lost his seat and did not get back into parliament until 1978.

So that is 4 shadow cabinet members who had held rather lowly positions in the most recent Labour government and 1 who had been a lowly member of a previous, non-contiguous Labour administration from almost 3 decades earlier.*

I think it is also significant that no former Labour cabinet ministers at all were in Blair's 1997 shadow cabinet.

For a putative Prime Minister such as Tony Blair who was trying to demonstrate how much his party had moved on from the discredited government that lost the 1979 election, the fact that there were only a very small number of shadow cabinet members associated (in a fairly small way) with that former government I think sent a strong message. It was that the old ways of doing things were out and his party had fundamentally changed. He was rewarded with massive poll leads and as we now all know a huge landslide victory in 1997.

Now contrast that with David Cameron's shadow cabinet. Ten of his shadow cabinet held ministerial positions under John Major and 3 of them were cabinet ministers. I have listed them below with the former cabinet ministers in bold:

• William Hague
• Liam Fox
• Sir George Young (he was also a minister for a short time under Margaret Thatcher)
• Cheryl Gillan
• Francis Maude (he was actually out of parliament after 1992 but was a minister under Major until then)
• Andrew Mitchell
• Kenneth Clarke (he was a minister all the way through from 1979 - 1997)
• David Willetts
• Lord Strathclyde
• Patrick McLoughlin

Now this is probably a slightly unfair comparison because it is less than 13 years since the Major government fell compared to 18 years between the Callaghan and Blair governments. However, the electorate won't be factoring this differential into the calculations when deciding to vote. Elections are often down to tone and how voters feel about parties, sometimes in ways that they cannot even quite put their finger on.

I also know that in the case of both William Hague and Kenneth Clarke, despite having been cabinet ministers under Major that they are quite popular and well respected. I am not questioning that, what I am drawing attention to is the message that having them and so many other former ministers on board sends out.

I would suggest that despite David Cameron's efforts to try and modernise his party in the last few years and dump much of its baggage, the fact that nearly half his shadow cabinet served in a widely discredited government does send out a subliminal message and it is in contradiction to the one that Cameron is trying to get out there. It suggests that his party and its leadership since 1997 has not changed as much as he might like to think.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why the Conservative poll lead is not as high as that of Labour's at a similar point in the electoral cycle in 1997.

*It is also worth bearing in mind that the Labour Party rules in opposition mean that the Shadow Cabinet is elected by the party and therefore Blair actually had little choice as to who he had, only over the roles they had. It is noteworthy that upon becoming Prime Minister, Blair refused to appoint Meacher to the cabinet and instead made him a junior minister. Although Strang was appointed as Minister of Transport in the cabinet in 1997 he was sacked in 1998 and has remained on the backbenches ever since.

Pod Delusion Podcast - Episode 17

This week's Pod Delusion podcast is now out (embedded below) and is up to its usual very high standard. I did the final item on how ITV could improve its future by looking to its past (expanding on one of the themes I wrote about in this post).

Contents:

David Cameron’s Face (0:55) by George Poles
The Big Freeze (4:15) by Martin Robbins
Google Owns Our Souls (9:23) by Liz Lutgendorff
NHS IT Systems (15:16) by Simon Howard
Douglas Adams (20:26) by Misty
Dan Brown and Tony Robinson (23:10) by Billy Abbott
ITV and the Regions (26:42) by Mark Thompson

It's all good stuff but Misty's piece on Douglas Adams in particular is wonderfully warm and yet made me sad as she imagines how good he would have been with things like Twitter and appearing on QI if he had lived. Also, Liz Lutgendorff's voice and style of delivery is always great to listen to whatever she is saying!

"Cameron Direct" event in Reading - review

I attended David Cameron's "Cameron Direct" event in Reading yesterday. It was held in one of the conference rooms at the Madejski Stadium.

There had been some problems with the organisation and it had been postponed from last Friday because of the weather. I have also heard that some people struggled to get places booked as it was necessary to pre-register. The fact that it started at 5:15pm on a weekday probably didn't help with maximising the possibility of all those who wished to attend being able to.

Anyway, I found the whole experience fascinating from the perspective of someone who is very interested in politics. It was good to see a face-to-face political event with one of the party leaders (I know that Nick Clegg has also done lots of these sort of events too) and it felt a bit like I guess the sort of town hall meetings there used to be many years ago.

Cameron was briefly introduced by Alok Sharma the Conservative PPC for Reading West and then he came on and rather than make a speech, pretty much straight away went into taking questions from the floor.

Being on the second row and directly in his eye-line when he asked for the first question as my hand went up, I managed to get selected first. I asked him about drugs policy and in particular I wanted to know why he had changed his position from one of supporting liberalisation of drugs laws before he was party leader and was a member of the House Affairs Select Committee to being in favour of the status quo now.

The way he responded to my question, I felt was representative of the way he answered quite a few of the questions during the evening in that he rather deftly and subtly shifted how he talked about what I had asked in a way that avoided directly answering the question. He first said about how the report that he had signed up to when a member of the committee was a great report but that the call for the UN to relax its legal approach (which I referred to in my question) was not a part of it that he thought was particularly useful. He instead suggested that the important thing to do is to focus on treatment and improving people's access to that treatment rather than on banging people up but he refused to countenance any change in the legal status of any illegal drug because of the message that that might send out.

I countered with a follow-up question suggesting that his aims are contradictory in that he is trying to improve access to treatment within a legal framework that makes that more difficult and that sometimes even people trying to help addicts find themselves falling foul of the law and even sometimes arrested and prosecuted. I also reiterated my initial question asking him why he had changed his mind. His response was that he does not think that the legal situation makes it difficult for people to get treatment and he restated his belief that the legal framework as it stands is correct. He again did not answer my question about why he had changed his mind.

I have to say that David Cameron is a very impressive individual in the flesh. I have found this with a number of senior politicians when I have seen them live giving speeches and taking questions. He is very charismatic and has the ability to inject humour at the right level to lighten his tone when it is appropriate. There were no questions that seemed to phase him.

However there was another theme to the way he answered a lot of the questions. He frequently went out of his way to insist that there was very little money around and that made it difficult for him to promise anything. He included this in virtually every answer he gave. There was a particularly odd answer (or so it seemed to me) when one of the audience members who identified himself as a floating voter asked for Cameron's "elevator pitch". Cameron then spent most of his answer explaining what he was not able to do or promise rather than on what he was going to be able to do. I am not convinced that is a winning pitch and Cameron seemed to suggest as much himself with a little self-deprecating jibe at the end where he quipped that he probably hadn't convinced him.

There was a very moving segment when a headteacher of a local special needs school asked about a putative Cameron government's priorities for special needs provision. He made reference to his son Ivan who was severely disabled and who died last year. I think everyone in the room was touched by the way he handled this; he even seemed close to tears as he talked about his experiences of trying to get the right schooling programme for his son.

Stylistically it was impossible for me to watch Cameron in the way he answered the questions with his injection of humour and confidant charismatic style without seeing very strong echoes of Tony Blair. Cameron himself even gave a nod to this at the start when he took his jacket off expressing the hope that he was not coming across too much like Blair which got a good natured ripple of laughter. It is clear to me that he had almost completely modelled himself on our former Prime Minister. This was underlined even more starkly in the flesh than when I have seen him on TV.

A couple of Blair-like rhetorical examples that stuck in my mind:

• He was asked a question about the "third sector" (i.e. voluntary sector). During his answer he suggested that it should really be referred to as the "first sector" as they often historically got there first e.g. setting up schools and things like Barnardos etc. There were a disproportionate number of people in the room from the voluntary sector and this received a number of approving comments.
• He was given a hard time on the Iraq war by one questioner who wanted to know if he regretted having voted for it. He refused to say that he regretted it and at one point used the formulation: "Am I glad that Saddam has gone? - Yes!". That wasn't the question that was asked and is a classic Blair way of responding to a question by asking another related but different question that he is more comfortable answering.

All in all, I felt it was a very worthwhile event and it was good to have seen the man who the bookies think will be our next Prime Minister.

However, I do think that he is going to have to hone his message in the run up to the election. I think people are looking for a leader who can inspire them and I was just not quite getting that yesterday. I think he is going to have to focus much more on what he can do and less on what he can't do.

As someone once said he needs to try a bit harder to let sunshine win the day.

Sara Bedford and Jack of Kent on House of Comments Podcast - Episode 10

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 tenth episode which we recorded across Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th Jan is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes 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 Sara Bedford from the "Always win when you're singing" blog and Allen Green, convenor of Westminster Skeptics (which I will get over at some point soon!) and who also blogs at "Jack of Kent" largely on legal issues.

We covered the Greg Stone case that I recently blogged about, the banning of Islam4UK, Britain's stop and search powers, last week's attempted coup against Gordon Brown and a computer game that attempts to engage children with the work of MPs and parliament.

If you are a political blogger and would like to participate in the future, please drop me an e-mail (address in the sidebar near the top of this blog).

BBC Question Time Live Chat - 14th January 2010 - #bbcqt

#bbcqt is BACK BABY and as usual the Live Chat on this blog will start tonight at 10:30pm.

The panel will include the senior Labour politician Peter Hain, the Conservative shadow secretary of state for business, enterprise and regulatory reform Ken Clarke MP, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs Chris Huhne, the comedian and writer Shappi Khorsandi (Mmmm.. Shappi..) and the columnist and former newspaper editor Kelvin MacKenzie (for Jaysus' sake...).

It's being broadcast from Finchley which is Thatcher's old stomping ground.

I will be back in plenty of time from attending a "Cameron Direct" meeting in Reading this evening and if you ask nicely on the chat I'll tell you how airbrushed his face looks in real life!

Join us from 10:30pm below:

Haiti Earthquake Appeal

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti this week where the government fears 100,000 could be dead I have been e-mailed the details of the following appeal:

SOS Children Appealing for funds for Haiti Emergency

Although we, as a well established charity in Haiti since 1982 have not managed more than brief contact with our offices and field workers in Haiti, it is clear that there will be a massive need for emergency relief work after the earthquake yesterday. Therefore we have decided to appeal for funds to help the people of Haiti.

After the massive earthquake in Haiti yesterday evening, brief communication has been possible with the national director, Celigny Darius. He informs us that all staff at the national office in Port-au-Prince are uninjured but the national office has been partially destroyed and we have not been able to move from the office. Unfortunately, since all communication lines are down and all roads are blocked, there has been no possibility of communicating with any of the SOS Children's Villages or other programmes as yet. There are severe damages to some of the team's own homes and some of them have not been able to contact their families. The epicentre of the quake was just 10 kilometres from the capital Port-au-Prince, where the national office, one village and one SOS Social Centre are located.

An Emergency Programme is being developed and immediate support will be coordinated from SOS Dominican Republic where we still have working facilities.

Our track record in emergency relief speaks for itself. We have staff and infrastructure on the ground and we will be one of the first to offer assistance. In all likelihood, as with the Asian Tsunami and with the Kashmir Earthquake and so many other places, as we are already registered to care for lone children, in the short term we will probably be entrusted by the government to run emergency shelters for children who have been orphaned or separated from their family (in Kashmir we ended up as temporary guardian for all unaccompanied children). We expect to be involved in trauma care and family tracing. We are in Haiti long term and we will probably (as is usually the case) end up providing the long term home for children who have been orphaned by the disaster. This is a well established pattern.

In all events we undertake to spend 100% of all funds generated by this appeal helping in Haiti, with absolutely no deductions for UK costs such as administration or fundraising.

If you would like to contribute to this appeal please donate here and enter "Haiti" into the instruction box. We will keep you informed of news and of what we achieve with your funds.

Is Gordon Brown now less powerful than when he was Chancellor?

Steve Richards had an interesting opinion piece in The Independent yesterday where he asserted that Gordon Brown is now less powerful than when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Here's an excerpt:

As a mighty Chancellor, Brown had a big say in who got what job and who did not. If he disapproved of a ministerial appointment he made sure that his or her space for manoeuvre was limited. When Blair elevated the likes of Mandelson and Alan Milburn in cabinet reshuffles Brown despaired. As one of his close allies told me, "Tony's reshuffles were highly charged affairs as far as Gordon was concerned". In particular he needed to lie down in a darkened room when Blair promoted Mandelson to be President of the Board of Trade in 1998. Even so, once Brown had recovered from the shock he was so powerful as Chancellor he made sure Mandelson had no space to put the case for the euro or to say very much on the economy.

With an almost comical symmetry, as Prime Minister he was so weak he buttressed his precarious perch by giving Mandelson a more wide-ranging and powerful portfolio than Blair would ever have dared to offer his friend. During an earlier crisis Brown also discussed with Milburn the possibility of a return. Since becoming Prime Minister his powers are so diminished that his enemies have flourished more than they did when he was Chancellor. In contrast, even before last Wednesday Brown was not powerful enough to make Ed Balls Chancellor, although he is the figure whose judgement he rates above all others.

As Prime Minister he finally acquired formal powers of patronage. Yet he was able to hand out more jobs to his allies when he was Chancellor and he had no formal powers at all.

The whole piece is certainly worth a read and he touches upon other aspects as he makes his case.

I agree that Brown is now a less powerful and diminished figure compared to what he was 5 or 10 years ago. However the tenor of Steve's piece almost seems to be that Brown should rue ever having become Prime Minister which I very much doubt he does.

I think what Steve is overlooking is that the reason why Brown is so much less powerful than Tony Blair was as PM is because the Labour Party itself is now so much weaker as it slides towards what seems like inexorable defeat.

It is true that ministers including Alistair Darling now appear to be able to strut around and make comments that are at variance with what Brown says and there is not really anything that Brown can do. But that is largely because Darling et al know that their party is going to be out of office in a few months time. If they thought they had a good chance of still being in after the general election (or like in 2005 and 2001 a near certainty) then things would be very different and the patronage Brown has at his fingertips would be much more potent. They would toe his line for fear that he could sack them. That's how it normally works and what has broken down in recent times.

So I suppose I am saying that although Brown is less powerful than he used to be, he would be even less powerful still had he remained Chancellor and Labour were shuffling towards a defeat. It's all relative.

I do agree with Steve's final comment though:

He (Brown) will never enjoy the immense power he wielded at the Treasury when he yearned, every minute of each day, to make the move to No 10.

It probably never occurred to him at the time that he was at the pinnacle of his powers at that point but looking back it is almost certainly true (perhaps we could include the first 4 months of his premiership too until "the election that never was").

Maybe he should have spent more time enjoying it rather than scheming to get his next door neighbour's job....

An audience with Professor David Nutt

The Reading University Lib Dems have invited Professor David Nutt, the former head of the government's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (see previous posts) to speak at an event on Monday 25th January.

They have very kindly asked me to chair the event which I am pleased to do. According to the invite, all are welcome to attend.

Here are the details from the Facebook page for the event:

Professor David Nutt is one of the most highly respected, yet controversial figures in drugs research and is the former Chairman of the government advisory body on drugs policy, the ACMD (Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs).

In this role he was seen to be outspokenly critical of the classification of some drugs, publishing several papers in noted medical journals on the correlations between Dependence/Self Harm; risk assessments between taking some drugs and other activities (f.e. horse riding and taking ecstacy); and speaking out on these and similar topics in public lectures.

He has been a vocal critic of the move to reclassify Cannabis from Class C to Class B based upon the evidence of the harm it can cause.

After being dismissed by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, he has setup his own independent drugs advisory board The Independent Council on Drugs Harms.

This will be one of his first public appearances since establishing this board.

The discussion will be chaired by Mark Thompson, campaigner within the Liberal Democrats for Drugs Policy Reform group.

All are welcome, time will be allotted for questions at the end of the talk.

So if you are local to Reading please sign up and come along. It should be a very interesting talk.

Has Greg Stone paid too high a price?

Greg Stone has resigned as Lib Dem PPC for Newcastle East as a result of the fallout following some lewd comments he made during one of Guido's PMQs live chats a year or so ago. Amongst other comments were a reference to whether Hazel Blears was on Botox and asking whether she had had a stroke and describing a Labour MP as a "sour-faced bitch"

There was various coverage of the comments last month in the press (for example here) and there had been calls for Mr Stone to stand down.

So on the surface, a PPC makes some ill-advised comments in public that have offended people and as a result has stood down. Fair enough eh?

Except, except I feel a bit uneasy about this. I will try and articulate it here. Apologies if it seems a bit disjointed.

Before I start I should mention that I did meet Greg during Lib Dem conference last year and had a drink with him. I thought he came across as a nice bloke and he was good company for the hour or so I spent sitting at the same table as him.

As far as I know, Mr Stone has not made comments like this in his capacity as a councillor or as a candidate. He has apologised on numerous occasions and I suspect he will be much more careful in future.

Now I have been following politics long enough to understand that Greg's position had pretty much become untenable. His political opponents in Newcastle East had started to put out leaflets drawing attention to the comments. It was going to be very difficult for him to continue his campaign in that context and it is therefore not surprising that he has gone. I also am sure that members of the Lib Dems would have done the same had it been an opponent that had made these comments.

I want there to be a wide range of people in parliament. Indeed if you speak to people about the sort of MPs they want to see they will often say they want people who are ordinary. Like it or not, there are lots of people who enjoy engaging in lewd banter when they are amongst friends. I expect if you went into many of the pubs in the Newcastle East constituency you would hear the sort of things described above.

I suppose what I am saying is that I wish our politics was mature enough for people to be able to have the odd lapse like this showing that they are human like the rest of us and not be punished by effectively having their political career destroyed. Sadly that is not the case but we reap what we sow with our politics.

I know some people will think I am just saying this because he is a Lib Dem but I really am not and am on record as having defended members of other parties when they have made mistakes too (e.g. here).

Help me choose my BBC Mastermind specialist subjects!

For a while now I have been thinking about applying to go onto BBC's Mastermind. I usually do OK in my armchair at the general knowledge rounds but the sticking point has been picking a suitable specialist subject. Or, as the application form makes clear, the four subjects. It looks like you have to declare enough subjects to take you all the way through to the final!

Anyway, Dazmando from Bracknell Blog suggested that it might be fun to get my reader's views on which subjects would be best and/or the most appropriate. Therefore I have decided to run a poll. It just below the header at the top of the page.

The subjects I think I could do either straight away or with a bit more boning up (fnaaar!) are:

• UK politics 1997 - 2007. I lived through Tony Blair's reign and pretty obsessively followed the politics programmes and comment pieces. Also, I have read numerous biographies from the period recently and intend to read more over the next few months.
• UK politics 1990 - 1997. I did also live through John Major's period as PM and was politically sentient throughout although I am doubtless going to be a bit rustier on this due to the passage of time. It might give me an excuse to re-read some of the political biographies of the time though...
• Punk rock 1976 - 1979. Now this is before my time but in my late teens I got very interested in the music and social history behind punk. I have read numerous books including the definitive and excellent "England's Dreaming" by Jon Savage. I think with a bit of revision I could be very strong on this.
• The TV show "Red Dwarf". I used to be obsessed with this show when I was a kid and am certain I could answer pretty much anything on the first 5 series. I am less sure about the last 3 series and the recent specials though but it wouldn't take much to gen up on those.
• The TV show "Friends". I have now watched every episode of this several times so I should be pretty good.
• The TV show "The Simpsons". I am an expert on about the first 12 seasons. After that I would be more patchy but I am sure a bit of intensive catching up would sort that out.

Now I'm not even sure if all of these would be eligible so you might want to bear that in mind when voting. You can vote for more than one BTW, after all as I said I need four!

I will post the results when the poll closes on 17th Jan.

Myleene Klass and that knife

It is being widely reported this morning that Myleene Klass has been warned by police after wielding a knife at some intruders who were in her back garden attempting to break into her shed.

The Telegraph reports it as follows:

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" – even in her own home – was illegal.

Jonathan Shalit, Miss Klass's agent, said that had been "shaken and utterly terrified" by the incident and was stepping up security at the house she shares with her fiancé, Graham Quinn, who was away on business at the time.

He said: "Myleene was aghast when she was told that the law did not allow her to defend herself in her own home. All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off.

"She is not looking to be a vigilante, and has the utmost respect for the law, but when the police explained to her that even if you're at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself, she was bemused.

"Her questions going forward are: what are my rights, and what are you actually allowed to do to defend yourself in your own house?"

When I lived in Manchester in the mid-90s as a student there was lots of crime and students were often the victims. I myself was mugged at one point and I knew lots of other students whose houses were broken into (including one that I had lived in although after I had left for the summer), sometimes terrifyingly when the people were in. Indeed one friend of mine was tied up and kept prisoner along with some of her housemates whilst the thieves ransacked the house for several hours and they went out to use their cash-cards to withdraw money. To be honest I never felt particularly safe in any of the places I lived whilst I was there.

There was an incident in the house I lived in in my third year which reminds me of the Klass incident. I was not in the house at the time but one of my housemates was and he told me what happened when I got home. He had been home alone when he heard the doorbell ring. However it was not a normal ring, it was someone continuously holding down the doorbell. Instantly fearing something untoward was happening, he picked up the biggest kitchen knife he could find and went out into the hallway. There was a large and menacing looking bloke staring through the glass whilst still holding down the bell. My housemate was a reasonably well built chap himself and he looked at the man through the glass who continued staring and holding down the bell. It was obvious to my housemate that this bloke was up to no good. He sat on the stairs facing the door holding the knife and staring at him. He continued to hold down the bell for a little while but in the end he stopped and walked away. My housemate stayed at the bottom of the stairs with the knife for quite a while until he was fairly sure that the bloke was not going to come back.

Now when I heard this story later on I was pretty disturbed. I don't know for definite what would have happened if my housemate had opened the door but I can take a pretty good guess given what had happened to so many of our fellow students in this sort of situation. So I think what he did was actually very brave. Not least because if the bloke had forced entry he then would have had to take a decision about what to do next. As it was, I suspect he walked away in the hope of finding easier pickings where there was not someone willing to defend their home with a knife. So in other words, the fact that he was willing to defend our home probably prevented a burglary or worse. And that would seem to be the case with Myleene Klass too.

From what I have read about the Klass case so far, if it is true then I think what she did was right in that same way as I think what my housemate did was right. We should be able to defend our own property and posessions. Indeed, I have seen on many occasions the police and politicians claim that we are entitled to do this. I remember a few years ago on a TV discussion programme a senior police officer was being interviewed and he was given a number of scenarios of increasing extremity regarding someone defending themselves against an intruder in their own home and in each case he stated categorically that the measures suggested would be fine. I am certain that had he been given the Klass scenario or the other one I have highlighted here that he would have said they were acceptable measures too.

There will doubtless be further questions now about the law and whether it needs to be changed. I suspect that what is actually needed is just for the public and perhaps as importantly the police to be more clear. We should be allowed to defend our homes against intruders and I think the law as it stands currently allows for this. It's just that comments like this from the police allow the water to be muddied.

I hope the police are able to clarify this ASAP.

The "House of Comments" podcast has moved house

We have had to move the URL for the "House of Comments" podcast to houseofcomments.com. If you want to know the details of why this has happened, Stu has a detailed explanation on his blog. Because of the way iTunes works, your old subscription will now not update any more so you will need to resubscribe. You can do this very easily via this link. Apologies for any inconvenience.

For the uninitiated, it is a podcast hosted by me and Stuart Sharpe of the politically unaligned "Sharpe's Opinion" blog. Every week we also feature one or two other political bloggers and we cover various stories that have been making waves in the blogosphere during the previous week. The format is a fairly relaxed open chat. We have done 9 main episodes so far since October last year.

So if you haven't listened to it before, why not subscribe now? You can have a listen to old episodes and will be all cued up ready for future ones. And if you have listened before, why not recommend it to a friend? You know it makes sense!

What if Iain Dale's prediction was right?

Iain Dale has done a fun (and presumably very time consuming exercise) where he has gone through every individual seat in the country and made a prediction about who he thinks will win based on gut feel in each case. He says that the overall result surprised him:

Conservative 331

Labour 216

LibDem 69

Plaid Cymru 5

SNP 7

Green 1

Others 3

Northern Ireland 18*

Which would give the Conservatives an overall majority of just 12 seats.

Various posters on Political Betting question some of Iain's assumptions, the main one being that they think he has overestimated the number of Lib Dem seats, perhaps due to his own personal experience in North Norfolk against Norman Lamb in 2005.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to think through what an election result like this might mean for the parliament that ensued. I think there would be several main effects:

1) I do not think that David Cameron would go to the country again soon afterwards. Although a majority of 12 is very small, it is a majority. Technically he would be able to govern with no assistance needed from any other party (assuming his backbenchers hold the line!). It would be a very brave Prime Minister who gave that up in the hope of something better when it could instead be snatched away from him altogether. However...

2) Because he would have such a small majority he would have to listen to the views of his backbenchers much more keenly than the Labour government has needed to. It would be the sort of situation that I remember from the dying years of the Major government. Because there is quite a sharp divergence between some of the Conservative leadership's policies and its MPs (e.g. on climate change and Europe for example) this could start causing problems very quickly. I can imagine that Mr Cameron might even need the support of the Lib Dems and even Labour in order to get some of his measures through.

3) Related to point number 2, although the Lib Dems would only have increased slightly in number of seats, they would have greatly increased influence because of the arithmetic of the parliament. Cameron, knowing that he may need support from outside his own parliamentary ranks would likely take account of the views of the Lib Dems when drafting legislation.

4) Because some of the decisions that Cameron would have to take would be pretty unpopular (on the economy etc.) it is likely that any by-elections triggered in existing Conservative seats could easily be lost. It would only take 6 or 7 of these before his administration would become a minority one. That is perfectly possible - indeed it happened to John Major (although some of his loss of majority was due to defections which are much less likely).

5) This would make the subsequent general election in 2014 or 2015 all to play for. Because of this, I would expect that the Labour Party would not tear itself apart in opposition as the possibility of a return to power in 4 or 5 years time would be very real and this would focus their minds. One of the reasons that the Conservative Party was such a basket case from 1997 onwards is because they were so far from a return to power and they knew it.

6) Finally, I would suggest that whilst the Labour leader would not be Gordon Brown within a few months of the election, the Lib Dem leader would remain Nick Clegg right through the parliament. Having increased his party's share of seats, this would cement his (already pretty secure) position.

As it happens, I also think Iain is overstating the Lib Dem total (I think our vote share will remain about the same as 2005 but our seat number will slip slightly) but I actually think Labour will hold up better than he thinks too and as I stated in my 2010 predictions, Cameron will form a minority government.

This is all good speculative fun of which I expect much more as we move ever closer to the election.

Congratulations to Daisy Benson - Lib Dem PPC for Reading West

I just wanted to say a huge congratulations to Daisy Benson who was selected as the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Reading West in a selection hustings last night.

Daisy regularly tops the list of the most hard-working councillors in the borough, in fact you only have to look at the top few posts she has done on the Redlands Lib Dem blog to see how much she has been doing in the last few days alone during the cold weather. I am sure she will apply the same dedication and tenacity to trying to with the seat for the Lib Dems.

I wish Daisy the best of luck and I am sure she would appreciate any help that anyone who lives locally (or further afield) can offer in the run up to the election.

Labour's internal democracy could bite some ministers after the election

Paul Waugh has a very interesting piece just published on his blog reminding us that when Labour is in opposition, the Shadow Cabinet is elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Apparently, people like David Miliband and Douglas Alexander might struggle to get the votes to remain a member of the Shadow Cabinet should Labour lose the next election. It could also lead to some interesting appointments such as Jon Cruddas and perhaps others currently languishing on the back benches.

It's one of those things that I expect Blair and Brown intended to change at some point (given their centralising and controlling tendencies) but given that neither of them expected to be Leader of the Opposition after 1997 it was probably way down the list of priorities.

I think it is a good thing for the democracy of their party and I wonder what the effect might have been if these rules also applied to the Cabinet when the party is in government.

Frozen Britain picture taken from space

I have seen this fascinating picture on the TV and on various websites in the last 24 hours. I think it is going to become one of those iconic images that sums up an entire news event, in this case it being the weather in January 2010 in the UK.

It was apparently taken by NASA's Terra satellite and shows the entire country covered in snow.

Cross-post: Prohibition is a cowardly, immoral idiocy that we can not afford

This piece is by Ewan Hoyle, founder and head of Liberal Democrats for Drug Policy Reform and is cross-posted from his blog Ewan's Liberal Musings:

It's motion submission season for the Spring conferences and this year the conference committee will have the opportunity to allow conference to debate drug policy reform for the first time since 2002.

In the last decade the drug-related death rate has doubled in Scotland, while in countries like Switzerland and Portugal death rates have fallen by half since they had the bravery to adopt heroin prescription and decriminalisation policies respectively. It is perfectly reasonable to conclude that British reluctance to engage with drug policy has caused hundreds of the most vulnerable, desperate Scots to die.

A great many more Britons will have encountered illegal crack and heroin dealers, developed a habit, and descended into shameful lives of theft, prostitution or be dealing drugs themselves, creating more desperate addicts to steal from us and fill our prisons.

We can stop these people piling misery upon our communities. Were the government to control and regulate the production, distribution and sale of drugs, existing addicts could be managed in such a way that theft, prostitution and dealing would be entirely unnecessary. If problem drug users were treated medically rather than abandoned to wreak havoc, we could potentially reduce domestic burglary by 80% and virtually eliminate street prostitution. A well controlled market could come close to eliminating the illegal market for all drugs, greatly diminishing the chances of children and teenagers encountering anyone who might seek to profit from luring them into that lifestyle.

Far from "people who have kids going "Oh God no, anything but that" " (an assumption of Anita Anand on the daily politics), they should recognise that control and regulation is the best way to keep drugs out of the hands of children. Illegal dealers don't ask for proof of age. Control and regulation might require everyone buying drugs to have a licence to buy that drug and might allow systems to be put in place that allow drugs found in the possession of children to be traced back to their purchaser to aid in prosecution. In Switzerland heroin prescription has been credited with giving heroin the status of "loser drug". Controlling and regulating drugs should not be seen as consumption being approved. Rather legalising should hopefully remove the rebellion from drug use and establish it as a behaviour that responds to medical treatment, a behaviour which occurs as a result of unhappiness and is a symptom of failure.

It is true that control and regulation cannot happen until reform or rejection of the UN drugs conventions. This should not mean that we should not hold it as our aspiration. Decriminalisation may encourage people to seek treatment and may vastly reduce unsafe drug use and drug-related death in Portugal, but in Mexico, Colombia, the Caribbean and many other regions people are dying in their thousands because of the billions of pounds to be made from trafficking from and through these countries to meet Western demand. The only way to eliminate the illegal market is for states to control and regulate legal markets. Britain can be the first to announce this as their intention, and the Liberal Democrats can be the first party to gain considerable electoral success from holding it as policy.

If we do nothing to hasten reform, we are morally responsible for all the crimes and the prostitution that drug users engage in to fund their habits and all the distress that criminality causes in our communities. We need to take responsibility for the millions of pounds the Taliban are raising from the opium trade, money they are spending on the bullets and bombs that murder our troops and the innocent civilians of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Britain can grow our own poppies. We don't need to allow our addicts to be funding Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. We don't need our "recreational drug users" to be funding the criminal drug gangs that terrorise our own streets either.

There are no other policies that will reduce spending while improving public health, reducing crime, creating jobs, increasing freedom and undermining international criminal gangs and terrorists.

This is a stunningly beautiful policy flower breaking through the snow, patiently waiting for the party smart enough to pick it and present it to the people.

The nearly final draft of the motion can be found on the Liberal Democrats for Drug Policy Reform blog. If you are an elected rep and wish to support the motion's submission or you wish to propose the motion to your local party or SAO, please e-mail me at ewanhoyle@gmail.com

Not with a bang...

... with a whimper is how the Labour government's spell in office is going to end.

Following the failure of the so-called "Snow-plot" yesterday it is now clear that the Labour Party does not have the collective will to get rid of Gordon Brown despite how disastrous he has been as a leader and how he is taking them to defeat.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson did something quite surprising last night in that he named six cabinet ministers who he says believe that a change of party leader was needed and would act accordingly in the right circumstances. Apparently the Hoon/Hewitt initiative was an attempt to flush them out. According to Nick they are Harriet Harman, David Miliband, Bob Ainsworth, Douglas Alexander, Jack Straw and Jim Murphy.

If Nick is right about this then those cabinet ministers this morning must surely understand that they have bottled it for the last time. David Miliband in particular has had three chances to do something about Brown and has signally failed each time.

Doubtless they will publicly profess loyalty to Brown but by their inaction they have now sealed their collective electoral fate. They have had multiple chances to try and do something. Anything would surely be better than the awful leader they have at the moment but they have all refused to do so and so now they are all complicit in his continued leadership.

Devil's Kitchen and Will Straw on House of Comments Podcast - Episode 9

The first "House of Comments" podcast of 2010 with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the ninth episode which we recorded on Monday 4th Jan is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes 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 Chris Mounsey from Devil’s Kitchen and Will Straw from Left Foot Forward and covered the #KerryOut campaign, climate change, full body scanners at airports and profiling of terror suspects.

If you are a political blogger and would like to participate in the future, please drop me an e-mail (address in the sidebar near the top of this blog).

This is their last chance to get rid of Brown

Twitter and the blogs are ablaze with discussion about the letter that Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt have sent to Labour MPs urging a secret ballot leadership contest. Guido has the full letter here.

I watched the coverage on The Daily Politics earlier as the story unfolded with Nick Robinson saying what he thought was going on even though he had been in the dark as everyone else. James Lansdale who reported from Central Lobby during the programme suggested that Labour MPs were telling him, in private, on lobby terms that they did not want this.

Fraser Nelson is suggesting that the lack of cabinet ministers coming forward (now that the story is over 2 hours old) is noteworthy and he also points out that Alistair Darling is close to Geoff Hoon. Apparently Peter Mandelson is due to appear on the media later on and I await what he has to say with interest. Could this be the moment that he strikes?

What I would say though is that this is absolutely, positively the Labour Party's last chance to get rid of Brown.

If they flunk this one then they fully deserve their fate.

PCC rules that The Sun was wrong to smear Prof Nutt's children

Just seen on Lib Con that The Sun has been forced by the Press Complaints Commission to publish a letter from Stephen Nutt regarding the disgraceful smear published by the paper late last year about him and his siblings purely because they are related to former government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt that I blogged about here.

Here is Stephen's letter:

FURTHER to your article about photographs of me on my Facebook site, (November 14) I would like to make clear the pictures were not posted by me and while I had been drinking I was smoking a rolled-up cigarette which did not contain cannabis as the article insinuated. My younger sister Lydia was not intoxicated, so was not drinking under age.

My older brother lives in Sweden where it is custom to use a sauna followed by a ‘romp’ in the snow in winter. He was neither drunk nor under the influence of intoxicants. Innocuous photographs were taken out of context in an attempt to discredit my father’s work.

Whilst the retraction of the original article online and The Sun publishing Stephen's letter is welcome, it hardly seems like much of a punishment or deterrent.

The original article was very prominent in both the paper version and the online version. Surely the apology should be given equal prominence rather than buried in the letters section which will not be read by anywhere near as many people who saw the original article.

I can't imagine anyone at The Sun will have lost too much sleep over this and this outcome is unlikely to give them pause for thought the next time they decide to run a smear story about the family of someone they have taken a dislike to.

The PCC needs to do much, much better than this.

Lib Dems give best value for money during elections

Duncan Stott has produced a brilliant little graphic which succinctly highlights how cost effective the Lib Dems are at fighting elections compared to Labour and the Tories using 2005 election figures and spending totals and relating it to how effectively the party would spend taxes:

I think Cowley Street would be well advised to include a version of this message in their planned advertising campaign for the upcoming election.

Keith the Sandhurst Snowman

I've just been out in the snow with the missus and the dog. It's coming down in bucketloads round here, so much so that after only about an hour we were able to do this:

Say hello to Keith, our temporarily resident Sandhurst Snowman.

Anyway, I must dash. Chess, our Cocker Spaniel (featured) is currently whining at the front door desperate to go outside for some more fun!

Stats show Man United get more time added on when they need it

Patrick Kidd has a good piece in The Times today describing Alex Ferguson as a "dyspeptic bully" with reference to how he reacts when his team loses.

Despite getting nearly six minutes of stoppage time in their 1-0 FA Cup 3rd round defeat to Leeds United, a team two divisions below his own team on Sunday, Ferguson was furious and insisted they they should have had more time and the fact that they did not is an "insult to the game".

What an absolute load of rubbish. As an armchair Liverpool fan (and believe me, we have had our fair share of defeats in the last 20 years!) I have seen on countless occasions Ferguson making it abundantly clear he wants the whistle to be blown as soon as injury time starts when his team is ahead. And the exact opposite when he is behind.

So what, you might say. All managers do this, he's just the most high profile.

Except that it has an actual effect. I was going to do some research on this myself but first I tweeted to see if anyone had already done some and @BinaryDad drew my attention to this article from The Guardian last September entitled "Revealed: Manchester United get more injury time when they need it".

They analysed the results of every Man United league match at home since the 2006-2007 season and discovered:

On average, there has been over a minute extra added by referees when United do not have the lead after 90 minutes, compared to when they are in front. In 48 games when United were ahead, the average amount of stoppage time was 191.35 seconds. In 12 matches when United were drawing or losing there was an average of 257.17sec.

It seems to be getting worse too:

In 2006-07, for example, United were winning 15 times on entering stoppage time and referees added an average 194.53sec. In the four games when United were not winning there was an average of 217.25sec. The following year the disparity was greater, Opta's figures showing an average 178.29sec added when United were winning and 254.5sec when they were not. Last season it was 187.71sec compared to 258.6sec.

So last season they got almost 38% more stoppage time when they needed it at home. I am sure Ferguson's antics on the touchline must contribute to this.

On Sunday, Alex Ferguson's team lost to the better side on the day. Leeds had more of the possession and within the rules and the ample amount of extra time, they won. He should accept that and stop moaning, after all, this research makes it clear he gets more than his fair share of "luck".

Cameron is going to have to raise his game

I expect there will be a few furrowed brows in CCHQ tonight regarding what David Cameron said earlier today and then later had to clarify.

Regarding recognising marriage in the tax system he first said:

It’s something within a parliament I would definitely hope to do... We’re not able to give people absolute certainty on everything.

So in other words an aspiration that could not be guaranteed.

But by later this afternoon, lo and behold it was described as something he felt very strongly about and:

It’s something we will definitely do in the next parliament.

So he went from "not able to give people certainty" to it being something they will "definitely do" in the space of a few hours.

The run up to the election is when people really start focusing on what the party leaders are saying. Cameron cannot afford too many more moments like this. Before he knows it the "dithering" line he has used against Gordon Brown will be coming right back at him.

I noted in a piece I did for Lib Dem Voice recently that none of the 3 main party leaders have yet been tested in the fire of a general election campaign. To be honest though I was not expecting Cameron to be found wanting so early in the opening salvos.

He will need to raise his game and quickly.

Fraser Nelson and numbers shorn of meaning

Fraser Nelson wrote a piece on the Spectator blog yesterday where he took David Cameron to task for what he described as a new year's speech that was "vapid nonsense". I quite agree, however I wanted to focus on something Fraser said towards the end of his article in response to one of the points that Cameron made:

“Since I started speaking today, more than half a million pounds has been added to our national debt.” I have to hand it to Cameron, I do like that line. He should use that more often.

I am afraid I very much disagree. The big problem is that how is someone supposed to relate half a million pounds in the space of a few minutes to their own lives? It is basically meaningless shorn of context and mentioned in this way.

In fact I did a piece for The Pod Delusion podcast a few weeks ago where I talked about precisely this sort of way of representing figures, the contents of which I have reproduced below:

Numbers! They’re great aren’t they? 98. 65536. Pi. E. Brilliant!

Something’s been bugging me for a long time though in the way that they are used, especially related to politics and economics.

A few years ago there was a big hooha in the media when the total amount of personal debt (which includes things like loans, credit card debts and mortgages) in this country went over £1 Trillion for the first time. There were all sorts of doom mongers on the news decrying this fact and explaining how terrible it was that this had happened.

The thing is, as I was watching how this “news” story was unfolding I started to realise that I had no idea whether it was a bad thing or not. What were they comparing it with? How did this relate to me as an individual or to my household?

£1 Trillion is a scary amount of money. It’s way, way more than I will ever earn in my lifetime, even if I worked really, really hard. Even if I won the lottery. So I can’t really conceive of what it means. So in the end I sat down and worked out a few figures myself.

I took the headline figure and then divided it by the population of the country which I knew was roughly 60 million. So the amount of personal debt for each person in the country turned out to be £16,666.67. Ish. Or perhaps a better figure would be to divide it by the number of people in employment which was around 30 million. That would give us £33,333.33. Or maybe it would be better to divvy it up between households given that a decent chunk of this debt is going to be mortgage related. So that meant dividing it by 21.5 million to give an average debt per household of £46,511.63.

Now I don’t know which one of those is fairest but one thing I do know is that it is much easier to relate those sort of figures to people’s ordinary lives. I have to say that once I went through that quick exercise I came to the conclusion that given these figures include mortgages, an average debt of less than £50K per household was not too bad relatively speaking given that average wages were around £23K. Seemed like a manageable amount of debt although you wouldn’t think so listening to the apocalyptic headlines. By the way I am well aware that there will be individuals who will have an unmanageable amount of debt for them and I’m not trying to minimise their problems. I’m just talking about averages in the context of trying to make sense of the figures.

Another thing that’s worth noting here is why it was newsworthy in the first place. 1 Trillion is a fairly arbitrary amount. The only reason it is even significant at all is because we have 10 digits on our hands. That’s why we use the base 10 number system and hence why 10 to the power 12 is a noteworthy figure. Incidentally it has always bugged me that The Simpsons characters have 8 digits on their hands and yet don’t use octal. Anyway, I digress.

The media is just looking for a hook to hang these stories off and £1 Trillion worth of debt is that hook. £46,511.63 average household debt is not a nice round figure and more importantly is not scary enough!

The acid test of these sort of figures for me is to imagine if they were an order of magnitude lower or higher. Imagine if the figure was £100 Billion or £10 Trillion. Would most people know what a reasonable figure for household debt was when described in these sort of terms? I would suggest not.

I was reminded of this recently when someone I follow on Twitter who was trying to highlight how high government debt is tweeted:

Let's not forget UK government debt still growing at £32,000 every 5 seconds. More than the average worker's annual salary.

Now to be fair, he was trying to relate it to ordinary people by pitching the figure above the average workers salary. There’s something to compare it with eh? Unfortunately not. How many people know what they earn in 5 seconds? It fails my acid test straight away. Would a figure of £3,200 per 5 seconds or £320,000 per 5 seconds mean anything to most people? No. I didn’t have a clue. I had to multiply the figure by the number of 5 second intervals in a year and then divide it by the number of people in employment which then gave a figure of around £6,700. Now that does seem quite scary that in one year the government would be running up debts equivalent to that amount for every working person in the country. THAT would have been a much more effective message and indeed when I tweeted him about it he then tweeted the more understandable figure himself.

I long for the day when the media put all their figures into a more meaningful context like this. Until then I guess I’ll just have to ready with my calculator.

So, to apply my acid test to Cameron's figure, if it had been £5 million debt racked up in the few minutes he had been speaking or £50,000 would most of us be any the wiser? I suspect not. Like I said, the way he is presenting the figures is basically meaningless without context.

You can listen to the whole episode of the Pod Delusion that this was a part of here:

Hung parliament negotiations. From 1974.

I came across a fascinating document earlier today via Gary Gibbons' blog.

It is a contemporary account of the internal machinations of the Heath government in the immediate aftermath of the first 1974 election which led to a hung parliament written by Robert Armstrong (Heath's principal private secretary from 1970 - 1974 - his Bernard Woolley to Heath's Jim Hacker if you will). It was apparently released after an FOI request from the Thatcher Foundation. Perhaps she was interested in the details of Heath's fall from power that ultimately led to her inexorable rise!

It details how Heath tried desperately to hold onto power and the discussions he had both with the Ulster Unionists and also Jeremy Thorpe, the then leader of the Liberal Party. There are some fascinating insights for political geeks like me such as the lengths Thorpe went to to avoid journalists as he travelled back from Devon to London and the constitutional consequences of the various courses of action that were being considered.

Towards the end it almost becomes like an excerpt from a novel as Armstrong details the wordless trip to the Palace with Heath and how he almost broke down in tears as Sir Martin Charteris, The Queen's Private Secretary of the time sympathised with him.

It's 22 pages of scanned in type with manual corrections in PDF form and it is well worth reading here.

Who knows, Gordon Brown may find himself in a similar position to Heath in a few months time...

UPDATE: The Hung Parliament 2010 blog has a much more detailed analysis of this document and its contents in this blogpost.

Gordon Brown - Liberals do not love you I am afraid

Following Cameron's recent attempts at love-bombing the Lib Dems, Gordon Brown was also at it this morning during his Andrew Marr interview. Here's what he had to say:

I think our policies appeal to liberal voters because you know we are for Alternative Vote system, we're for reform of the House of Lords, we're for the right of recalling members of parliament who commit fraud and equally at the same time we have policies on the environment and we've got policies on civil liberties that are not dissimilar to them (the Lib Dems).

Now putting aside the irritant that he continually referred to us as "The Liberal Party" (to coin a Ting-Tings-ism, that's not our name) let's have a closer look at the policies that he thinks appeal to liberal voters:

1. Alternative Vote system. The main reason that "liberal" voters as he terms it are in favour of electoral reform is because they want a more proportional system that delivers a much more fair and representative result. As I have blogged about on numerous occasions (most recently here), the Alternative Vote system is not proportional and can actually be even less proportional than our current First Past the Post system. I don't know any liberal minded people who think that what Brown is offering in this area will tempt them into voting Labour. Also, even if a few were tempted, look what happened the last time Labour promised a referendum on a change to the electoral system in 1997. They reneged as soon as they were in power.
2. Reform of the House of Lords. That's fair enough as far as it goes and we certainly do need to reform the upper chamber. However, again look at what has happened in the last 13 years. Labour abolished (most of) the hereditary peers but have left the rest of the chamber largely unchanged. It was kicked into the long grass because it suited them. Jack Straw recently suggested that it could take another 12 years at least before we could have a fully reformed House of Lords. It's far too little and far too slow.
3. The right of recalling MPs. Well I would be in favour of this but frankly, how can we even be in a position where that cannot currently happen? My current MP, Andrew MacKay has been was forced to stand down (for the next election) in May last year after a public meeting where hundreds of his constituents (including myself) expressed their fury at how much money he and his wife Julie Kirkbride had claimed for "second homes" by nominating each others houses as their second homes (it is estimated to be well over £100,000). And yet, he has not paid anything back and it is looking very likely now that he will get away with paying nothing back. In the meantime, from what I am hearing here in the constituency he is very rarely seen out and about any more. He appears to have gone into semi-retirement early but of course he is still being paid from the public purse and because he will be stepping down at the next election he will get a nice little resettlement allowance. People here are furious that he can do this and there is nothing that we can do. So whilst I am pleased that looks like it will now be addressed Brown should get no credit. He is only acting because his hand is being forced and did nothing in the long years when MPs like MacKay were filling their boots.
4. Environmental policies. Labour so seem to have some positive aspirations on this subject but look at how compromised they have become in office. Where is the massive investment in renewable technologies like there has been in some European countries? Where is the huge improvement in public transport infrastructure we were promised before 1997? Instead we have promises that nuclear power is the big answer which is in direct contravention to Lib Dem policy. We also have fake "public consultations" about airport expansion spun to make it look like local people are in favour.
5. Civil liberties policies that "are not too dissimilar" to the Liberals. Eh? How can he have the brass neck to even say these words? This is the most authoritarian government in British history. They are hell-bent on introducing ID cards backed by a massively intrusive database and have mustered (and lost) every argument they could think of for them. They have increased detention without charge to 28 days and have tried to increase it to 90 and 42 days respectively in the last few years. Photographers are regularly harrassed and sometimes even arrested by police for trying to take photographs of public landmarks. They have introduced the "Vetting and Barring" scheme which will likely lead to millions of people in this country having to be security checked before they can do favours for local groups and organisations such as giving lifts to children, hence many of them I suspect won't volunteer any more. They have introduced suspicion and fear into many aspects of our community life and it would not be an exaggeration to say that they have started to destroy our community cohesion*. The idea that Labour's policies are anything like Lib Dem policies on civil liberties is utterly laughable. Yet Andrew Marr didn't even bat an eyelid.

I am very much looking forward to the televised debates over the next few months. I expect that Brown will not have the balls to make these sort of statements during them because he surely knows that Nick Clegg will never let him get away with it and he would actually end up looking very foolish.

* Incidentally, Jenni Russell has an excellent piece on how Labour's policies are destroying communities in The Sunday Times today here.

The trouble with ITV

Nicholas Jones has an opinion piece about ITV in the Independent today. In it he explains how the TV station is in dire straits, steadily losing audience share year on year and doing worst in the the key demographic area of 16-34 year olds (incidentally I just exited this demographic a few months ago). The competition from other media such as the Internet and computer games etc. has also taken it toll.

Towards the end of the article, Mr Jones specifies what he thinks could help to revive ITV's fortunes:

The average producer will shout me down, but many TV production budgets can be slashed using competitive bids instead of the set tariffs each type of production is deemed to cost. Digital technology now offers tremendous potential, both to reduce the huge cost of editing – and to shoot a new kind of low-cost drama and comedy using the best lessons of the US independent film-making sector.

In this way, ITV can start to craft a more edgy, fresher kind of programming that will draw young viewers in the next decade, such as my daughter.

I think this could help but here are my ideas for what I would do:

1. Restore regional identity. I am old enough to remember when each ITV station had its own unique identity. I grew up in the Granada region but I was well aware of the other stations such as Thames, LWT, Yorkshire, Southern/TVS etc. before they all became merged into the corporate and bland ITV1. The stations used to be federated with lots of network programmes but also a number of regional variations and local programmes that we just don't get from them any more as well as regional continuity which had a more personal feel. I can still remember the personal connection I felt with some of the Granada (in vision) announcers such as Colin Weston, Charles Foster and Jim Pope (also the "voice" of University Challenge for many years). I know that going down this route would cost ITV money (one of the main reasons why they consolidated in the first place) but the technology is now much more geared to allowing a regional identity without it needing to cost an absolute fortune. It would also give them something that they are sorely lacking at the moment - a USP.
2. Revive World In Action or create a modern equivalent. World In Action was a groundbreaking documentary and current affairs series that aired on ITV from 1963 to 1998. It won all sorts of awards for its investigative journalism and some of our best known journalists cut their teeth on the programme. Compare that standard of journalism with the dross ITV currently pumps out in this area such as the risible tabloid fodder Tonight. If ITV could have a flagship current affairs programme again it could be part of them rebuilding their reputation as a heavyweight broadcaster. Lord knows, with the mess the BBC have made with Panorama recently (presumably following Tonight down the lowest common denominator route) the field is wide open.
3. More political programming. I know people will think I am just saying this because I am interested in politics but it is a disgrace that there are no longer any serious political programmes on ITV. They used to have a slot on Sunday which was variously filled over the years by Weekend World, Jonathan Dimbleby's eponymous political interview show, The Sunday Edition etc. Now there is no regular political programme. Again addressing this would add to ITV's reputation.
4. Sort out the "Sitcom" problem. When was the last time ITV commissioned a really good situation comedy show? Why is it always the BBC and Channel 4 who have the good shows? If I was Archie Norman, the incoming ITV chairman, this is one area I would try to tackle straight away. It must surely be down to how they commission their shows. What are ITV doing wrong that shows like Peep Show, Gavin and Stacey, The Inbetweeners and The IT Crowd (to name but a few recent examples) wind up on their opponents stations? The only recent ITV sitcom I can think of that is even vaguely OK is No Heroics but the chances are that you haven't heard of it because it went out on ITV2 and when it was repeated on ITV1 was on after 11:00pm with as far as I can tell virtually no advertising. It was quite risque but the BBC and Channel 4 manage to put out similarly "boundary pushing" shows in a way that builds an audience. I am not saying this is an easy problem to solve but ITV could try hiring some of the talent in this area from the other channels and seriously try to attack the problem. I would suggest completely ripping up whatever procedures they currently have for sitcom commissioning and starting again from scratch, because whatever they are doing at the moment aint working.

There is obviously a lot more than just these areas that need addressing but they would be a good start. Frankly, the alternative is continued managed decline as ITV disappears into the morass of the hundreds of digital channels. It's got to at least be worth a shot to try and restore some of its former glory.