The day the blogosphere went mainstream

I had an interesting experience this morning in my car. I was listening to Today on Radio 4 and one of the main stories was that three Conservative cabinet ministers had called for the health bill currently going through parliament to be scrapped. One of them was also calling for Andrew Lansley to be sacked as Health Secretary.

Seismic stuff. Of course it was all anonymous but there is no doubt that a call like this is very serious for the government. I would now be surprised if the health bill is not radically changed if not dropped altogether.

But the most eye-catching thing for me as a blogger was the medium through which these ministers decided to air their views. It wasn't through a national newspaper. It wasn't through one of the political correspondents of one of the TV channels. Instead it was via the Conservative blog ConservativeHome.

In a post entitled "The unnecessary and unpopular NHS Bill could cost the Conservative Party the next election. Cameron must kill it." the site's editor Tim Montgomerie reveals the thoughts of the ministers that contacted him and calls for the bill to be scrapped and Lansley to be moved on. He argues forcefully that Cameron's best move in opposition was to detoxify the issue of the NHS and his biggest mistake in government has been to allow this work to be reversed.

Everyone who has had dealings with Tim will tell you that he is very polite and very straight dealing. He is also generous and has linked to posts on my blog on numerous occasions. Nobody will be in any doubt about the veracity of what he has reported.

You could almost hear the gritted teeth from Nick Robinson as he explained about the grass roots blog and how it had the exclusive on the radio!

There are many from the fourth estate who still think that blogs are for cranks and losers in their mother's basement. You only have to listen to some of the testimony at the Leveson inquiry to hear this. But what Tim has done with ConservativeHome is build up a website with a very wide readership (from politicians and people who are supporters of all parties and none) where Conservatives can air their views in a frank way and get feedback on them. Even before today it was very good at setting the agenda but today for me is the day it went mainstream. By giving the story to Tim the ministers have allowed him to frame how this debate is being covered in the wider media today and also has the hook of being from a site that is predominantly grass roots. It could well have fired the starting gun on a process that will kill one of the government's major pieces of legislation. You don't get much more mainstream than that.

I expect other correpsondents from the press, TV and radio media will be taking note of this and they may well not like what they see.

Why I know (some) drugs will eventually be legalised

There was a storm in a pint glass this week in Westminster over a beer spotted in the Strangers' Bar called "Top Totty" featuring a cartoon of a scantily clad woman wearing bunny ears. There had been a furore after Labour MP Kate Green highlighted the nomenclature and styling of the beverage in the House of Commons. It has now been withdrawn from sale.

This spat reminded me of something that I have always been aware of but had sort of crept to the back of my consciousness for the last few years. Part of the story was quoting how the drinks within the Palace of Westminster are subsidised by the tax payer. Quite substantial amounts of money are spent on subsidising food and drink (including alcohol) each year. A recent newspaper article showed that pints of beer can be subsidised by up to £1, reducing their cost to politicians and their aides and guests by around a third.

So, law makers take taxpayers money to subsidise their consumption of a dangerous mind altering drug. One that is known to cause the death of thousands and thousands of people every year.

Contrast this with how users of cannabis amongst the population that elect those representatives are treated. This is a mind altering drug that is by most scientific opinion less dangerous than alcohol (although still of course not without its risks). Users and suppliers of the drug can be fined and in some cases imprisoned. They can receive a criminal record and can potentially have their lives ruined by this. In the vast majority of cases the much bigger risk of harm to the individual from cannabis is from the way the law will deal with them than the intrinsic danger of the drug.

The imbalance in this situation comparing the two has always been glaring but is thrown into even sharper relief in the context of those same law makers taking money from tax payers to subsidise their drug of choice whilst incarcerating others who choose a less harmful drug.

In the long term this cannot persist. I can understand (even though I do not agree with) those who think drugs such as heroin should remain illegal. But ruining the lives of users of cannabis with criminal records is utterly unjustified by any scientific or moral yardstick. The same in my view applies to drugs like MDMA (ecstasy), magic mushrooms and newer "banned" drugs like mephedrone.

Even public opinion is swinging in favour of legalising and properly regulating cannabis use. A poll commissioned by Lib Dems for Drug Policy Reform 18 months ago demonstrated 70% of people would like to see that in one form or another.

I can't say when it will happen. Perhaps the catalyst will be more and more US states decriminalising cannabis use which is increasingly likely to happen in the next few years. Perhaps more countries such as Portugal will demonstrate the benefits of treating drugs not as a criminal justice issue, but a health issue for those who struggle with problematic use. But one way or another things will have to change eventually.

And the hypocrisy of our MPs taxing us to subsidise their use of a mind altering substance whilst jailing those using a less harmful one will end.

As natural justice says it must.

Is Climate Change really happening?

We seem to have ended up in odd place regarding the debate about Climate Change.

It appears that the majority of scientists that work in the field of climate say that the climate is changing and that there is a large anthropogenic component to this change caused by greenhouse gases emitted by human activity.

There are however a significant minority of scientists and others who think that either the whole thing is overblown and/or that there is either no, or very little evidence that humans have contributed to this.

Both sides have lots and lots of data to back up their assertions. And it seems to me that often these data contradict each other even when they seem to be talking about the same thing. For example I often see seemingly authoritative statements that several of the hottest years on record have occurred in the last couple of decades. But then there are articles like this one from James Delingpole in the Daily Mail that claims there is evidence from the Met Office that there has been no warming for 15 years. Both of these cannot be true.

There is then the political dimension.

Broadly speaking those on the left and liberal wings of politics tend to believe that Climate Change is real, man-made and a serious threat. Broadly speaking those on the right think either it's not that serious a problem or in some cases that the whole idea is a left wing conspiracy. I'm talking about grass roots and activists here by the way. The leaderships of all the main political parties are broadly in agreement that there is a problem and it needs to be tackled.

Now I understand this is a highly complex issue. The ecosystem of the entire planet is not something that can be easily understood. But the point of science is to run experiments and tests to try and find the truth. However difficult this is, it is made much harder if views on the potential reality of the situation are informed by ideology.

But that is what appears to be happening. As far as I can tell, the left wing seems to be happy with the fact that the solutions to the problem are essentially collecitivist in nature. We all need to stop using as much energy, use renewables more locally, share resources more, restrict what business can do for the good of the planet etc. And the right are deeply unhappy with most of these solutions. So they question the fundamental nature of the premise and conclude that it is a stitch up.

I am a Lib Dem. I run a business that deals with energy efficiency in buildings. I basically believe from what I have seen that mankind has contributed to this problem and that we need to do something about the problem.

But am I being hoodwinked? There are millions of people who think I am.

At core I am a rationalist and I also have a strong skeptic streak. I am certainly open to the possibility that I am wrong about this. If the scientific consensus started to shift based on the evidence I would certainly consider doing so.

The problem is that is not happening. Instead views are polarising. Terms like "Climate Change Denier" and "Leftie Conspiracy" are tossed around like confetti. Both sides seem unwilling or unable to really listen to the other. I strongly suspect there is a large element of confirmation bias going on at the very least in the political arena. Those who want to believe it find the evidence that backs them up. Those that don't want to believe find evidence of the opposite.

Maybe that is the way it has to be. I tried engaging with James Delingpole on Twitter this morning after he tweeted a link to the above article. I was interested in his response to a question I had about how he responded to a broader question about scientific evidence relating to medicine on a BBC programme a while back. I tweeted:

@JamesDelingpole When you were asked about adherence to science in the context of if you were ill on that programme you didn't seem...
@JamesDelingpole ..to have a very convincing answer. Why do you trust it for your health but not for this?

His response was:

@MarkReckons Lib Dim activist asks straw man question about parti pris, scientifically inaccurate BBC propagandist stitch up?

Maybe I was a bit too confrontational in the way I asked the question but I am genuinely curious about how someone would happily accept the scientific consensus when it came to say treating them if they had cancer but be utterly convinced it's wrong and a conspiracy when it comes to the climate.

Like I say, it seems to be very difficult to engage in a debate that does not quickly degenerate into ad hominem attacks.

So is Climate Change really happening? Or am I falling for a socialist conspiracy designed to take us all back to the dark ages?

Is Lib Dem MP gender balance problem exacerbated by FPTP?

I am very unhappy with the number of female Lib Dem MPs. 7 out of 57 is not good enough and we need to improve. The leadership programme which assists those from underrepresented groups to become candidates will hopefully help.

7/57 = 12.3%. So less than an eighth of our MPs are women.

The Conservatives have 48/307 = 15.6%. Labour have 81/258 = 31.4%.

Activists from the two other parties have pointed this out to me on numerous occasions. They are right to. It is embarrassing.

We definitely need more female candidates. In 2010 we only had 134 (21.3%). The Conservatives had 149 (23.7%), Labour 191 (30.3%).

But I looked more deeply into the 2010 general election data and discovered some interesting things.

Firstly, when you look at the total vote for each party, and then look at total votes for males and females for each party, Labour do best with 32.4% of their vote going to women. But second best are Lib Dems with 22%. The Conservatives, despite fielding more women and ultimately getting more female MPs proportionally than the Lib Dems only had 19.8% of their votes go to women.

I wondered why this was so I took all the votes for women for each of the parties and worked out what the average vote for females vs males was:

Conservative males: 17,811

Conservative females: 14,204

Labour males: 13,248

Labour females: 14,583

Lib Dem males: 10,739

Lib Dem females: 11,201

It would seem that Conservative women tend to be in seats that are more difficult for them to win on average than those for their male counterparts.

Finally a "what if" exercise. The other two parties have many more MPs than us. When it comes to improving female representation the marginal seats are endlessly discussed. But I just looked at the top 100 seats in terms votes won by each party. How many women were candidates?

Labour: 27/100

Lib Dem: 25/100 (although of course we only won 57 of them)

Conservatives: 9/100

We are only just behind Labour, even with their years of women only shortlists. The Conservatives are way behind. If for some strange reason their vote had dropped to a level where they only got 100 MPs they would have had 9 female MPs. Incidentally, if they had only 57 MPs like us they would have had only 5.

At the very least I would suggest this analysis shows things are more mixed than the "Lib Dems are worst at trying to balance gender for MPs" accusation you regularly hear. It would appear our old friend First Past the Post is exacerbating the problem.

That 22% of our votes went to female candidates but only resulted in around 12% of our MPs being female is typical of a majoritarian electoral system.  Perhaps if we had a fairer one, the representation of women and ethnic minorities would be further advanced than it currently is for all parties.

NOTE: Thanks to Pippa Norris for providing the electoral data.

This post was first published on Lib Dem Voice.

The £10K tax threshold could be one of those policies that sticks

Every now and then, a policy comes along from a government that in time, is accepted by the opposition parties and becomes entrenched in our body politic and hence country.

The Thatcher and Major governments did lots of things that subsequent governments have been able to unpick or slowly nudge back on. But policies like the Trades Unions reforms and most of their privatisations have stuck and become entrenched. It is not conceivable that a government of any stripe would roll the Union reforms back or for example renationalise British Telecom. By getting broad acceptance of these changes, the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s were able to make permanent changes to the way important aspects of our society work.

In 1997, the Labour government brought in a minimum wage. At the time the Conservative party was deeply opposed to this but over time a consensus was reached and it is now highly unlikely that the minimum wage would ever be repealed. Devolution for Scotland and Wales has also been accepted across the political spectrum from that government.

The truly entrenched policies are sometimes hard to determine until a good while afterwards. I would have included independence for the Bank of England to set interest rates in this list from Labour too until recently but with the financial crisis it is not guaranteed that that will remain and there is some suspicion that politics has been asserting itself in the process in the last few years.

So far, I do not think there is much that the current coalition government has done that one could consider entrenched. The schools reforms could easily be unpicked by a future government. The NHS reforms have not even reached the statute books yet and I would be amazed if they were not overhauled by the next government. The tuition fee reforms may stay in place but the vociferousness of Labour's opposition suggest they will try and do something on this if they get the chance.

There is one change though that I think we can already see falling into this category. The £10K tax threshold. It is undeniably extremely popular. A recent poll showed 83% support for it. But perhaps more importantly it is a very accessible policy. Everyone can grasp very quickly what not paying tax on the first £10K you earn means for them and their family and friends. It is also the reason why it will be very hard to change as any erosion will be equally noticeable. No party is going to want to fight an election on a platform of increasing taxes on low earners. So once the threshold reaches £10K it will never go back. If anything it may go even higher. There are voices off murmuring that the aim should be for the first £12.5K to be free of tax. This would roughly equate to the level earned by those on minimum wage.

The only possible way I can it slipping back is through bracket creep but I expect there will be lots of campaigners and politicians who will be very wise to this and again I think any party trying that on will not get very far.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all then is that the only policy that currently appears to be in  position for this accolade of entrenchment is not from the senior partners in the coalition but from the junior partners the Lib Dems.

It is worth remembering that the next time you hear the Lib Dems are not achieving anything in government. It may be that looking back they actually achieved one of the most significant and lasting reforms of the entire government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep it simple, stupid.

Compare and contrast:

The candidate with the most votes wins.

and

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

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

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

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

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

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


Now compare and contrast these:

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep it simple, stupid.


This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Why is a recession a recession?

Consider these two hypothetical scenarios for GDP in the economy:

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

and secondly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I may take some convincing!

Does Labour have a charisma problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

In praise of Douglas Carswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was first published on Political Betting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should politicians have a sell-by date?

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

Dearie, dearie me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine if a white MP had said something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


UPDATE:

Diane Abbott has now tweeted the following "clarification":

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

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

My Predictions for 2012

Here are my predictions for the coming year:

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

Merry New Holidays people!

In which I disagree with Ewan Hoyle on alcohol pricing

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

His basic thesis is summed up in the final part:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did I do on my 2011 predictions?

The short answer is it's a mixed bag.

The longer answer:

1. Labour will win the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election but the Lib Dems will be a close second.
• CORRECT. They did indeed win and Lib Dems did indeed come a fairly close second. Certainly by the standards of later by-elections!
2. All 3 main party leaders (Cameron, Clegg and Miliband_E) will still be in post by the end of the year.
• CORRECT. 
3. The AV referendum will be (narrowly) won.
• WRONG. I could not have been more wrong really. We were trounced 68% to 32%. Polls in the months before really did make it look like it would be close but in the end it was not to be.
4. Sarah Palin will do something that will effectively end her chances of being a serious candidate for the 2012 US presidential election.
• CORRECT. Although there are various things she has done I think the "cross hairs" thing and the "Blood libel" comment in the aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting torpedoed her chances within a couple of weeks of me making the prediction. This Guardian article here from back in January pretty much sums it up.
5. A Lib Dem MP will resign the party whip to either sit as an independent or join another party.
• WRONG. Not even close. In fact despite lots of problems it looks like the coalition is determined to hold together without this sort of upset.
6. England will win the Rugby World Cup.
• WRONG. They deservedly got knocked out in the quarter-finals.
7. For the third year running I predict that Eddie Mair will become the new host of BBC Question Time.
• WRONG AGAIN! I think I might stop predicting this now although it's become a tradition and I might not be able to resist...
8. Liam Fox will no longer be a cabinet minister by the end of the year.
• CORRECTAMUNDO! I am extremely pleased with my predictive skills here! He is the only cabinet minister from the start of the year who was not in post by the end. And when I predicted it it was far from likely he would go. Indeed the bookies had him way down the list of likely casualties. To be fair I could not have predicted the nature of his downfall but the reason I chose him is because he has always seemed a little bit too hubristic and I just felt somewhere down the line this would trip him up as indeed it proved.
9. Including Old and Sad there will be 3 by-elections during the year.
• WRONG. Way out. There were double that amount. And to be fair, Harry Hayfield called me on the likelihood I had got this wrong in the comments on the original blog post straight away.
10. A petition signed by more than 100,000 people will trigger a debate in parliament about legalising cannabis.
• WRONG. There have been several debates in parliament triggered by the new e-petitions site but cannabis legalisation was not one of them. Probably a bit of wishful thinking on my part there!

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

2012 predictions coming soon...

How much does geographical accident influence politics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


This post was first published on Lib Dem Voice.

Ricky's too short. On ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Aidan Burley should not have been fired

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The logical endpoint of drugs policy

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

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

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

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

David Cameron is not a failure

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

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

It goes something like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Why electoral reformers should want boundary changes to fail

I know, I know! AV lost. Decisively.

So why am I still banging on about electoral reform?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Nick Clegg have held out for the Chancellorship?

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

I know, I know but bear with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


This post was first published on Dale & Co.