Osborne cocaine allegations highlight political hypocrisy on drugs

Guido has details today of a story about how someone who knew George Osborne when he was in his early twenties is claiming that she saw him take cocaine on multiple occasions.

Osborne has had these allegations made to him before and has always strenuously denied them. It is possible that this latest round of allegations will come to nothing too. It is not clear if there is a smoking gun.

But if it turned out to be true would Osborne have to resign?

If it was up to me he would definitely have to. Not because I think taking cocaine as a 22 year old is such a terrible thing, I don't and I know many young people take all sorts of illegal drugs and go on to have completely normal lives. The only person he was likely to harm is himself and if he was willing to take the risk, it should have been up to him.

But Osborne is one of the most senior members of a government that supports punitive measures against people who take cocaine. In fact it is possible for someone caught in possession of a small amount of a "Class A" drug such as cocaine to be sentenced to 7 years in prison. The same sentence you can get for armed robbery.

So if it turned out that he had taken cocaine, by the terms of the drugs policies that he himself supports he has committed an offence equivalent to this. That's why he should have to resign. Because he himself insists that anyone caught doing what he is alleged to have done can have that sentence imposed on them.

Of course we already know that people like Louise Mensch have admitted drug use in the past and Nick Clegg and even David Cameron himself have refused to deny similar allegations. Cameron insisted that he is entitled to a "private life before politics".

The fact that Osborne could survive something like this, and that numerous of his colleagues have survived too demonstrates the truth of the matter. That despite the "tough on drugs" rhetoric, politicians actually understand that drawing a parallel between a crime like armed robbery and ingesting a powder that affects nobody but yourself is ludicrous.

If you don't believe me, ask yourself whether Mensch, Clegg, Cameron or Osborne could still continue as MPs if there was a strong suspicion that any of them had been involved in an armed robbery.

Of course not. Robbery is a real crime.

Howard Jacobson should read more blogs before attacking them all

Booker Prize winner and Independent columnist Howard Jacobson has taken it upon himself to make some comments about blogs:

“When I wander off from the newspaper and into the world of blogs I’m a bit chilled.

What you read is extreme ignorance and pure poison. It is a poisonous, poisonous medium. You can’t believe how malicious, how ignorant, how stupid… and you do wonder if they don’t have anything better to do than attack people who have written articles. And you do wonder whatever happened to the idea of the critic; of the reviewer… people who have given their lives to honing the art of what they do.”

This is a ridiculous tirade. To assume all bloggers are one homogenous mass is a fundamental error. To follow this through imagine if I was to apply to same reasoning to his own profession of newspaper columnists.

I often have problems with the writings of Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens, Richard Littlejohn, Liz Jones, Jan Moir and others. Perhaps not every single column they have written, sometimes each of them will have interesting points to make but I am very sure I could quickly pick out several from each of them that I could characterise as poisonous, ignorant, malicious and stupid. And then I could use this as a stick with which to beat all columnists with and dismiss them all.

But that would be to dismiss the writings of people like Matthew Parris, Matthew D'Ancona, Danny Finkelstein, Steve Richards, Mary Ann Sieghart, Julian Glover and countless others whom I respect and admire and who usually produce thought provoking columns of a very high standard. So of course I would never do something as crass as this.

For Mr Jacobson to make a statement like this suggests that he has not read many blogs at all which for an intellectual such as him who doubtless considers himself very widely read is odd. I mentioned this on Twitter and sometime contributor to Dale & Co Louis Barfe sagely suggested that it is probably because he has only ever read blogs that people have pointed him towards that are being negative about his writing. Hence he would be getting a very distorted view of what is out there.

If Mr Jacobson gets pointed towards this article, in an attempt to balance his experiences, can I suggest that he tries the following blogs:

People's Republic of Mortimer (wonderful writing on politics and lots of other subjects from Lib Dem Alix Mortimer)

Scarlet Standard (relatively new blog from a long term committed Labour activist who is thought provoking and highly politically aware)

Ellee Seymour (Ellee has been active in Conservative politics and works in PR - she usually has an interesting take on stories of the day)

I would argue that all three of these bloggers on their best days are up there with the best of the columnists I cited above and there are countless others out there too political and non-political. The idea that it is only people who are being paid to write their opinions and analysis that are worth reading is I am sorry to say ill-informed elitist nonsense.

And I am sorry if that is construed as a poisonous comment!

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

This Lib Dem conference vetting farce cannot happen again #ldconf

Cast your mind back to October 2007. A fresh faced recently elected MP is running for the leadership of his party. One of the most eye-catching and in some ways audacious comments that the MP made was on ID cards which he was clearly completely opposed to:

“If the legislation is passed I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the identity cards programme … I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register.”

The MP was Nick Clegg and as we know not long afterwards he was elected leader of the Lib Dems. And now he is Deputy Prime Minister leading a party of 57 MPs as part of a coalition government.

The party's federal conference in Birmingham is due to start in a couple of weeks time. And in a new twist, delegates registering to attend have to submit themselves to a police check.

The noises from the top of the party are very much in the vein of "that is the price we have to pay for being a governing party". I have read that without such checks the party would not have been able to get insurance for the venue. I have also read various comments of the ilk that because we have cabinet and junior government ministers wandering around conference we need to have more stringent security than we had previously.

Regarding the insurance comments I am afraid I am going to call BS on that one. I cannot believe that it is not possible to find insurance that will cover such an event without intrusive police checks on every single attendee.

Regarding the comments about ministers being in attendance, I know for a fact that at other events such as Nick Clegg visiting Newbury recently there were no such checks needed. You only needed to bring your party membership number. So why on earth is police vetting required for federal conference all of a sudden?

There is something deeply unsettling about the party that I joined over 3 years ago precisely because it stood for such strong liberal values such as being completely against ID cards acquiescing so easily to police vetting checks for its members and democratically elected conference representatives.

I really do not see why they are necessary. As Caron rightly points out there is already airport style security and scanners at the entrances to the conference venue. Surely that should be sufficient to ensure protection?

I have heard stories of people having their clearance rejected for various reasons. In some cases it is clear, in others not so much. Gareth Epps for example, a 3 time PPC and former councillor from Reading appears to have been rejected because of a problem with his photograph. I really wonder what danger Gareth will be deemed to pose if his picture is slightly indistinct. I guess the problem lies in the possibility that someone who is not Gareth but looks like him attempts to gain access to the conference. But even if that bizarre scenario was to occur, like I say there is ample security at the venue to prevent weapons etc. from getting in.

Perhaps even more fundamentally, should it be up to the police to decide who does or does not get to attend the main conference of a democratic party? Not to mention the fact that some people (e.g. transgendered) may not wish to submit themselves to a clunky process that may reveal information about themselves that they wished to keep private.

But aside from the principled objections I have there is a practical objection to the way this whole thing has been administered. Lots of Lib Dems have been commenting and tweeting that they have still not had the clearance they need to attend. With two weeks to go this is completely unacceptable. Hotel rooms get booked up in conference season and prices for booking at the last minute can be twice as much (or more) as if you are to book longer in advance. Train tickets are much cheaper in advance too and can be prohibitively expensive so close to the date of travel. I expect there will be people who wanted to attend and will ultimately be cleared to do so but will not be able to because of cost considerations. Not to mention those who take a chance, pay for the train ticket or the non-refundable hotel room only to find they cannot attend after all and have completely wasted their money. And bosses are sometimes not sympathetic towards people who book time off and then need to change their plans at the last minute etc. etc. etc.

None of this is liberal or democratic. I cannot believe that the Nick Clegg of 2007 would have been happy with any of this and I very much hope he is not happy now.

The upper echelons of the party need to reflect long and hard on the problems their attempts to adhere to more stringent security have caused. There are lots of activists who are pretty disgusted with it frankly, myself included.

There is a motion proposed by Stephen Gilbert MP at 9am on the Sunday morning of conference which will hopefully go some way towards redressing this woeful situation for the future. If you are attending conference I urge you to attend and make your voice heard and to vote for it if you have voting rights.

I can only hope that good sense eventually prevails and this sort of farce never happens again.

Tuition fee myths need to be challenged

Through a mutual acquaintance, I recently heard someone I know outside the world of politics (yes I have ordinary friends!) had been bemoaning the "fact" that he was not going to be able to afford to pay £9,000 per year for his daughter (who is soon going to be 18) to go to university.

This person is pretty well educated and I suspect does regularly watch the news but the fact that the money is paid back over 30 years following graduation by the recipient of the degree, not the parents of the recipient seems to have completely passed him by. He's not the only one from what I can tell. Various vox pops on radio and TV in recent months that I have heard and seen suggest that this misconception is pretty widespread and infuriatingly often not corrected by interviewers or presenters.

That such a basic aspect of the new system is so widely misunderstood is a pretty damning indictment of how the policy has been communicated. Lib Dem and Conservative ministers and MPs need to accept some blame for this. But another big problem as far as I can tell is that the media narrative has focused on the most negative and politically contentious aspects of the scheme. This has led to headlines such as "UNIVERSITY FEES TREBLED" and "LIB DEMS IN DISARRAY OVER FEES". Both of those things were true to an extent but the Lib Dem woes on this topic were focused on so much around the time of the parliamentary vote as well as the protests that I honestly think the substance of the policy was not properly covered. Which given how much airtime the subject was supposedly given is frankly absurd.

For me, the 2 main aspects of the new system that seem to be regularly misunderstood are:

1) It will cost parents £30K+ up front to send their kids to university. This is palpably untrue. The graduate, not the parents pays the loan back at 9% of income above £21K. And they don't pay anything back after 30 years regardless of how much they have paid to that point. So quite a few, probably most will never pay back the entire loan anyway.

2) Graduates will be worse off under the new scheme just when they need disposable income the most, in their 20s making it harder to get a mortgage. This is completely wrong too. Compared to the previous system, graduates will be much better off in their earlier years when trying to build a deposit for a house etc. It is of course true that they will still be paying through their 30s and 40s too (assuming they earn over £21K) but that's the trade-off.

There are loads more (see FOOTNOTE) but they are the two that have most irritated me.

I suspect there will be some who accuse me of being a government patsy on this as I am a Lib Dem but the truth is I would be saying this no matter who was in government. I am always happy to debate the consequences and fairness of policies with anyone but in order to do this properly, the facts need to be clear.

And far too often in this debate they are inadvertently or in some cases I suspect deliberately distorted.

FOOTNOTE: The widely respected Martin Lewis of the Money Saving Expert website who himself is no fan of the changes is nevertheless appalled at the terrible reporting on the subject (I heard him bemoaning it on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 show recently) and has taken it upon himself to produce a "20 Key Facts" page which goes into great detail and busts a number of myths about the new system. It's definitely worth a read if you have half an hour.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Vote for meeee! (Total Politics Blog Awards 2011)

The Total Politics Blog Awards for 2011 are open for voting until the end of this week.

I've been a bit tardy with my annual "shameless grubbing for votes" post this year but here it is in in all its glory!

If you have liked what I have blogged here or elsewhere then please consider voting for me in the poll.

This year there are two sections, favourite political blog and favourite individual political blogger. I would be most obliged if you could consider me for both categories. You need to nominate at least 5 in each section for that section to be entered in the poll and you nominate a maximum of 10 in each category.

You can vote here.

Cheers!

Mark.

Rebuild Reeves

Like many other people I was very moved by the dignity of the Reeves family in the face of what must be an horrendous time for them in the last couple of days. For anyone who is not aware, they own the family run "House of Reeves" furniture store in Croydon which was burnt to the ground on Monday as a result of the riots that took place.

The shop has been in their family for almost 150 years and it was burnt down in only a few hours. I suspect that building ablaze for a long time before fire-crews could get to it (because their safety could not be guaranteed) will become a symbol of this period of civil unrest.

I felt compelled to try and do something to help the Reeves family and to demonstrate that there are lots of people in this country who also want to help. They have already indicated that they intend to rebuild their shop which I find immensely heartening so I have set up a Pledge Bank page where I have pledged a small amount of money to contribute towards this and am asking others to pledge what they can too.

I have already had people asking me whether they are insured and I am not yet clear on what the situation is there but irrespective of that I thought this was a good way of showing solidarity with them at this dreadful time. Also, I know that insurance can take a long time to come through whereas I have set a deadline of two and a half weeks on this pledge to reach 1,000 people to give a small amount each which would I am sure be of good practical use to them in the meantime.

I suspect lots of other initiatives to help other business in particular and generally affected by the riots will be underway soon too and I will donate what I can to those too and would encourage everyone else to do so as well. I just felt this was a specific way to help one of the most visible symbols of the riots be restored.

Where's Cleggy?

Before I start this post properly, I know politicians can't really win. If they take regular holidays they are swanning off leaving the country in the lurch and if they don't they're workaholics out of touch with ordinary people.

However that aside I was a little surprised to hear on the news on Friday that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne were all on holiday at the same time. Apparently William Hague was the most senior cabinet minister still in the country and he was taking charge of the initial response to the current turmoil in the financial markets.

That strikes me as a little bit odd. Nick Clegg is the Deputy Prime Minister. His role includes deputising for the Prime Minister when he is not around, e.g. on holiday. So why did Cameron and Clegg schedule their holidays for the same time? Surely they could have divvied it up so that one of them was around in the country and available during the summer at any one time?

Clegg has made it almost to the top. He is second in command of the government, a position that his predecessors as Lib Dem and Liberal leaders would have given their eye teeth for. And given the position of the third party, second in command is the best we are going to get for a very long time. Yet when Clegg has the opportunity to fulfill one of his primary duties in this role, standing in for the Prime Minister, he has chosen not to do it.

As a Lib Dem I find this quite frustrating. For years we have been told that our party cannot be trusted with the levers of power and now when our leader has the chance to do just that and show those naysayers they are wrong he decides to go on holiday. And this is not the first time it has happened. Back in February he was quoted as having "forgotten" that he was in charge of the country whilst Cameron was abroad and that he was going to head off on holiday at the end of the week so "someone else would have to do it" then. I did not like the casual implication of that comment then and I like even less the pattern that seems to be emerging.

I know that people, especially senior politicians are never fully out of touch these days but the fact that Hague was chairing meetings in London last week demonstrates that there are some things that require a physical presence, especially when there is a crisis.

I hope that next time the PM and his deputy are planning their time away from the country, a little more thought is put into coordinating it.

This post was originally published on Dale & Co.

Has Guido got this #restore campaign all wrong? #retaintheban

The Guido Fawkes blog run by Paul Staines and Harry Cole has been pushing a campaign recently to try and get 100,000 signatures on a government e-petition for bringing back capital punishment for the murderers of children and on-duty police officers.

I am personally not in favour of this but others have written extensively about the arguments against and I am not going to focus on that today but instead on the approach that Guido Fawkes has taken.

Both Staines and Cole are very experienced media performers and campaigners, especially when it comes to new media. And there is no denying that they have stimulated a debate about the issue. But thanks to Lib Dem campaigner Martin Shapland there is a big fly in their ointment.

As I write the "Restore Capital Punishment" petition has 8,949 signatures. But another petition on the same site that Shapland introduced recently entitled "Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment" has 15,881 signatures. Also it is worth noting that the Shapland petition was introduced a while after the Guido backed one and hence has not had as much time to garner signatures.

It is true that there are other pro-death penalty petitions on the site which may be "splitting the vote" to an extent but there are also multiple anti-death penalty petitions too so effectively both votes are being split. But it would appear that the anti-death penalty supporters online are in the ascendancy.

We shouldn't be too surprised by this. Although there has been a long vaunted majority in favour of the death penalty amongst the public (although I have always felt this is somewhat overstated and once the debate is engaged with the liberal argument is there to be won) that majority is highest amongst older people and lower amongst younger people who are more likely to be active online. Also, as we have seen from previous surveys of things like Twitter there are lots of people with liberal views active on there, perhaps not in proportion to their make-up of the population.

Which brings me back to my main point. I think Guido may have got this one wrong by trying to use new media to push an illiberal measure like the death penalty. Although the initial petition has been a good springboard for provoking a debate, it is looking increasingly likely that online at least the anti-death penalty petition has more momentum behind it. If this continues to be the case then it could be dead in the water before any parliamentary debate even takes place because the government (who probably do not want this distraction) can point to the fact that the petition site is showing we should keep the status quo. And any complaint about this only focusing on the online population could be skewered because the only reason the subject is even being discussed is because of the original e-petition. Which is online. The existence of the more popular opposing petition is a huge spoiler.

The biggest spoiler of all would be if the Shapland petition could reach 100,000 signatures before any other one and especially the Guido one.

I've just signed it and if you are opposed to the reintroduction of the death penalty, you should too.

Louise Mensch has missed an opportunity on drugs

Following Conservative MP Louise Mensch's excellent work on the Culture Media and Sport Committee, pursuing News International with robust questioning about the activities of their newspapers the tabloids have recently tried to strike back. They have of course tried the tactic that they know best. Muckraking.

They apparently have evidence that during the 1990s, Louise took drugs whilst partying with violin virtuoso Nigel Kennedy amongst others. Louise's response was swift and was clearly an attempt to cut the story off at the knees:

"Although I do not remember the specific incident, this sounds highly probable... since I was in my twenties, I'm sure it was not the only incident of the kind; we all do idiotic things when young."

As I heard this on the radio I found myself vocally praising her riposte to this. Essentially she was saying "so what". She was young and she did what young people do. She went up in my estimations.

However later on that same day I spotted this tweet from her account:

She is using the old politician's trick of admitting having used drugs when she was younger but insisting they should remain illegal now. This has been the standard way that MPs have recently tried to avoid charges of hypocrisy by distancing themselves from their previous behaviour using their former "stupidity" or "youth" as an alibi.

This is particularly disappointing in Louise's case because this tactic is usually used by MPs to keep the tabloids at bay. But she and her committee have the papers on the ropes at the moment. If ever there was a time to break free of the ridiculous strictures the print media in this country impose on public discourse about drugs, now would surely be it? She could easily have said something like "I did take drugs when I was younger as did many of my contemporaries and I think we need a mature debate about this subject rather than these salacious attempts by the tabloid press to use it as a means to push their agenda.".

Now it is of course possible that Louise genuinely thinks that taking drugs as her and her contemporaries appeared to have regularly done (judging by her own comments) was idiotic and anyone doing the same today should be prosecuted and potentially imprisoned. But if that is true then then anyone finding themselves today with a criminal record for having done this would find it impossible to ever get selected as a candidate for a party in a winnable seat, let alone get elected. So the logical conclusion is that she is saying that she is not really fit to be an MP but that she didn't get caught so was lucky. It is very hard to view this as anything other than hypocrisy.

Louise Mensch knows she is on safe ground using this sort of formulation. After all, the Prime Minister led the way with his "entitlement to a private life before politics" comments during his leadership campaign. It would appear today's politicians can have their cake and eat it on this issue.

To be fair to her, maybe she does not want to be fighting on multiple fronts given the current circumstances. That would be understandable in a way although regrettable in my view.

I can only hope that as the power of the press in general and the tabloids in particular continues to wane, partly as a result of Louise's (and others) sterling work that eventually other MPs in her position will feel emboldened to speak up honestly about their experiences and use it as a way to open up a serious debate about drugs policy.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Why Cameron discussing BSkyB with Brooks would matter

Yesterday, David Cameron repeatedly refused to answer whether he discussed the BSkyB bid with Rebekah Brooks on any of the multiple occasions he met with her since becoming Prime Minister. Instead he has relied on a rather precise formulation of words where he claims he had "no inappropriate conversations" with her and he also points out that he had been taken entirely out of the BSkyB bid process.

It is true that the ultimate decision lay with Jeremy Hunt the Culture Secretary and that he is supposed to be following a quasi-judicial process.

But it still matters if (and I repeat if) Cameron did discuss the BSkyB bid with one of News International's most senior executives. The fact that the relationship between the Prime Minister and Brooks (and also Andy Coulson) was so close provided almost deafening mood music as a backdrop to the bid. Hunt would have to have a particularly tin ear not to have picked up on it. And of course Hunt is relying on Cameron for future promotion and preferment. I am not saying there is anything provable about how one may influence the other, there almost definitely will not be. The main protagonists may not be consciously aware of it even if there was; it could happen on a subconscious level. They are only human beings.

So Cameron should never have discussed the BSkyB bid with Brooks. At all. If she had started to go near it he should have cut her short and insisted it would be wrong to discuss it. If he had done this though I imagine he would have had no problem saying so in the Commons.

Cameron's attempt to draw a line under the affair yesterday with his statement to the House and the questioning he faced afterwards appears to have been partially successful. For the first time in two weeks the "hackgate" saga is not leading the bulletins. But his refusal to answer this properly yesterday has opened up more questions about precisely how close the relationship was and casts further doubt on his judgement.

After all, why would a Prime Minister put himself in a position where he is having to use terminological contortions to obfuscate on this question when he should just be able to say unequivocally that he never discussed the bid?

What if this is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems?

In the recent local and devolved elections, the Lib Dems polled around 16% of the vote. This was down around a third on the 23% the party polled at the last General Election. Lots of very hard working councillors lost their seats and as a result of this the party's local base has doubtless been damaged. Of course I feel desperately sorry for those people. Fighting against a national trend is very difficult and can feel like one hand is tied behind your back before you even get started.

However what I wanted to focus on today is how the national political picture is likely to pan out over the next few years and to put this into historical context.

Since 1945 there have been 17 General Elections and of the 16 up until 2010 the Lib Dems or Liberal Party achieved precisely 0% of the power in the aftermath of each of them. There was a brief period of influence at the fag-end of a Labour government in the late 1970s with the Lib Lab pact but that was a mere blip and did not result in ministerial office for any Liberal MPs. So effectively we were looking at 65 years when the third party had no executive power to implement its policies.

That historical trend was well and truly bucked last year however when the Lib Dems formed a coalition government with the Conservatives. They got a little over 20% of the cabinet positions including Deputy Prime Minister and a chance to implement all sorts of policies across the political board, even in departments where they did not have the Secretary of State. Indeed recent BBC research suggests that so far the indications are that 75% of the Lib Dem manifesto is being implemented in the government programme vs 60% of the Conservative manifesto! That is an incredible achievement when you consider that the Lib Dems have 57 MPs against 307 for the Conservatives.

But that context is thrown into sharp relief by the opinion polls which regularly have the party in single digit or low double digit figures and the local election results in May which were not quite that bad but still well down from last year as I mentioned at the start.

I suppose there are a number of reasons why the party is doing so badly in the national polls now. Amongst them will be the way Lib Dem MPs mostly signed a pledge promising to vote against a rise in tuition fees and then as a governing party did the opposite (although plenty of individual MPs kept that promise of course), the fact that the party has signed up to a deficit reduction programme that is rather at odds with what was said during the election campaign and so on and so on. The party is in coalition and has had to make compromises but some of them have been hard for Lib Dem inclined voters to swallow.

This would have been the case whoever the Lib Dems had formed a coalition with though. Even if a Lib/Lab coalition had been feasible (and from what I have read I remain convinced it was not for various reasons, both political and mathematical) the Lib Dems would have ended up in a similar position now as well. Lots of people who had voted for the party as an anti-Labour protest vote would have been disgusted that it had "propped up" Labour and would have gone off to vote for another party or not voted at all.

And I think this is the crux of the matter. We have to face up to the fact that a decent chunk of our support in 2010, and for many years before then was made up a protest vote of various kinds. Anti-Conservative certainly, but also Anti-Labour and perhaps even anti-politics. After all, people could vote Lib Dem safe in the knowledge that they would never be in power to do anything about it. Couldn’t they?

Because of the vagaries of the First Past the Post system for Westminster, a drop in support of a third can produce outcomes whereby the number of MPs lost is much more than a third. On some projections, current Lib Dem polling could see us with 15 MPs at the next General Election or perhaps even less. Now in reality there are likely to be local issues and incumbency factors at play that mitigate this somewhat but if the polls stay roughly where they are (even assuming a bit of a bounce if the economy improves by 2015 and the Lib Dems get some credit for this) the number of MPs the party has the next time the voters are asked could easily be half or even less than now.

For the individual MPs and the local parties they represent this will be very difficult. In many cases decades of extremely hard work will have been put into winning and retaining the seat.

But to put this into the historical context I mentioned at the start, all those decades of work, the long, long march from fringe party with only enough MPs to fit in the back of a taxi, never being able to execute any of the 16 manifestos since 1945, to a position where 75% of the 2010 manifesto is actively being implemented is worth considering very carefully. In a way, the investment that those who put all that effort in over all those years is now being realised in terms of political capital, power and policies.

So what if this is as good as it gets? Maybe the party gets one shot at power when the electoral cards fall in a certain way under FPTP and it has to make the most of that when it happens. And that will never be easy for all the reasons mentioned previously. There will always be some voters who will feel betrayed by a party of protest becoming a party of government. And maybe also, the party will lose seats at the next election even if things go very well for the economy and the strong influence the party had had on the government produces very positive outcomes. Nobody ever said life, or politics was fair!

I have talked a lot about positive outcomes of policy but I still think there are plenty of things the party in government could do much better. I certainly think as I have said before they need to make it much clearer to the public what difference they are making (which to be fair to him, Nick Clegg seems to have belatedly realised). And we should certainly keep fighting for as much of our programme as we can get.

But if this is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems when they are in power then I suppose the party has a choice. It can, perhaps after another round or two of bad local election results (which seem inevitable, certainly as the cuts bite) decide it has had enough and withdraw from the coalition, maybe even defenestrating the public face of the Lib Dem compromises on the way in an attempt to shore up its political position. And let’s not kid ourselves that that route would be a panacea. Electoral meltdown could easily follow then too.

The other choice available to the party is to take the long view that this is its chance to make a real difference for the remaining years of this parliament. That difference might not yield immediate political dividends and might leave the party having to rebuild its local base for years to come but at least all the years of hard work in achieving those Westminster seats would have resulted in a very heavily Lib Dem influenced government in the first half of the decade that started with such a remarkable General Election result and one which the party embraced in the national interest.

That is the route I would choose.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Will Cameron's honesty on press influence spread to drug policy?

Something struck me during David Cameron's press conference about the "Hackgate" scandal last Friday. It was this particular passage:

Because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers, we turned a blind eye to the need to sort this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated.

It's a bit like MPs' expenses.

The people in power knew things weren't right.

But they didn't do enough quickly enough – until the full mess of the situation was revealed.

Now, when the scandal hits and the truth is plain for everyone to see ... there are two choices.

You can downplay it and deny the problem is deep – or you can accept the seriousness of the situation and deal with it.

I want to deal with it.

I was a bit surprised, although pleasantly so that Cameron should admit that politicians have been too much in thrall to the tabloid press and the Murdoch press in particular. It is one of those aspects of public life that has been so prevalent for so long that it barely even merits a mention and of course politicians would never have admitted what Cameron has just done in public. Ed Miliband has also said something similar publicly too.

Cameron is of course responding to the current firestorm around the News of the World and tabloid phone hacking allegations. But the influence of the press generally and the tabloid press in particular runs much deeper.

Already Lance Price, Tony Blair's former spin doctor has off the back of this said that Murdoch had a very strong influence on Labour's attitude to the Euro during his time in office.

But there are lots of areas of policy where there is a strong suspicion that the influence of the tabloids and The Sun/NotW in particular has held sway. One of the most obvious has been in drugs policy.

I have become fairly active in campaigning for a relaxation of the drugs laws and lobbying for a more evidence based approach in recent years and have blogged about various aspects of it on many occasions. Given the fact that in his early days as an MP, David Cameron had put his name to a Select Committee report that recommended a more liberal approach to drugs I had hoped his election as Conservative leader would have heralded a new way of dealing with this. But by the time of the leadership campaign in 2005 his views were downgraded to "options should be considered" and by the time I questioned him on the subject in early 2010, just before the General Election he had very firmly distanced himself from his former views.

The strange way in which politicians seem willing to engage with and consider evidence based approaches to the subject of drugs policy when they are a long way from power and how that changes to backing the status quo as they get closer to power is somewhat hard to understand. Unless you factor in the way the press treats the issue with labels like "Soft on drugs" and appeals to emotion regarding keeping children safe (despite the fact that more children than ever can get drugs now under the current regime). Any senior politician who steps outside the narrow tramlines permitted for debate regarding drugs is apt to find themselves hounded by the tabloid press.

Here is what former Conservative Minister Phillip Oppenhein told me about the subject when I interviewed him a couple of years ago:

I think that politicians would be surprised at the response they would get to a serious debate on the subject. My experience is that a lot of Tories now favour reform, but they are terrified about being seen as soft on drugs by the media and prejudicing an almost certain election victory. Cameron had a chance to start a real debate when his own drug taking experiences became an issue, but I guess he was too timid to do so.

If politicians from the PM down are now genuinely throwing off the shackles off the tyranny of the tabloid press then they should no longer have anything to fear from an open and honest debate on this subject.

If that was to happen, perhaps something very good could come of this horrible scandal with the harm caused by drugs in our society greatly reduced under a liberalised, controlled regime rather than leaving it to the gangsters backed by screaming tabloid headlines.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Outline of a No2STV campaign

Now that the AV referendum has been lost, those of us who supported the change are licking our wounds and wondering when the next opportunity for electoral change for the Commons may present itself.

At the moment it is looking like a long way off. However I think in the aftermath of the failed AV bid it is worth having a look at what those of us in favour of electoral reform can learn from this campaign to be borne in mind in the future, whenever the next opportunity may present itself.

The system I and most other Liberal Democrats (and more generally most in favour of electoral reform) favour is Single Transferable Vote. It is much more proportional than FPTP (or AV) but importantly it is similar to AV in that you rank candidates in order of preference. The big difference being that more than one MP is elected for each larger constituency (between 3 and 6 is optimal).

Having witnessed at close quarters the tactics used by the No2AV campaign I think we are in a position to at least have a stab at predicting what the outline of a No2STV campaign may look like further down the line. I think this will be a useful exercise in order to ensure that those campaigning for a Yes vote are ready to handle the sort of things that are likely to be thrown at us.

Here are variations on five campaigning messages that I expect we would face:

1) "It's too expensive". This was one of the No2AV campaign's most pushed lines certainly in the early days. Having spoken to people it would seem that this message was resonating. The claim that AV would cost £250 million was bunkum. But it worked this time so you can expect it will be tried again. And of course next time it is likely to be harder to rebut as we already know that counting machines are used for some STV elections. I would suggest that the response to this has to be firmly and consistently on the basis of principle. Moving to STV may cost a little more but what price democracy? I have made the point previously that moving to the universal franchise (twice as many ballot papers to print, issue and count) was more expensive but nobody seriously argues now that women should not have the vote. I have found when trying to make this point that I have faced scorn for appearing to try and conflate votes for women with electoral reform but I maintain it is a fair comparison because to argue it is too expensive to change the electoral system is a diversion and this highlights it. A Yes2STV campaign would definitely need to get on the front foot regarding this message from the off.

2) "It's too complicated". Again, this is a message that was used to apparently good effect against AV. And let's be honest, if AV is considered too complicated then STV could arguably be even more so. Even though I certainly think most people can grasp the concept of what is going on in both cases, a big failure of the Yes2AV campaign was in educating people about how it works. Instead of the first referendum broadcast featuring people shouting at "MPs" using megaphones they would have been much better off explaining how AV actually works (there was none in that broadcast) and highlighting a small number of key reasons why it is better than FPTP. Similarly for STV it will be vital that the system is concisely explained as often as possible and with key messages as to why this is better. With STV I actually think the second part of this will be easier because there is a very clear message regarding fairness with the proportionality factor.

3) "It will help the BNP". Or substitute BNP for whatever extreme party (or parties) exist at the point of the campaign. It proved remarkably difficult to shake this accusation against AV during the recent campaign. This was particularly surprising to me because the BNP was actually in favour of keeping FPTP. However the No campaign rather deftly managed to sow confusion by discussing how lower preferences from those voting BNP as their first preference could end up "deciding elections". I am not going to deconstruct the counter arguments here, it has been done elsewhere many times (best example I have seen is here in this excellent post by mathematician Tim Gowers which incidentally rebuts pretty much all the No2AV campaign's claims) but I will make the point that if the No2AV campaign was able to make this message stick when the BNP are against the change themselves, then I think we can have a pretty good guess at how hard they will push this message when the BNP are likely to be for the change. And I would imagine moving to a more proportional system, even STV would be something that extremist parties like the BNP would be in favour of. I actually think it would be pretty hard for parties like the BNP to get any MPs under STV because it is preferential and therefore makes it very hard for parties that are actively strongly disliked by most people. However having seen what happened during the AV campaign I would expect this message to be drowned out as it relies on a fairly detailed understanding of the underlying counting process for STV. What I would suggest for this message right from the off is that it needs to be rebutted with the argument that the way to beat parties like the BNP is not to rig the electoral system against them. All that does is make them look like martyrs. Instead the way is to beat them by arguing against their extreme and unworkable policies. There are other arguments that can be deployed here too but I think the one of principle is the one that is on strongest ground and should fit in with other campaign messages well too.

4) "Under STV, candidates that come first can end up losing". This was another effective message from No2AV. Of course it all depends on what your definition of "coming first" is. No2AV was relying on the number of votes after one round of counting which is what we are all used to under FPTP. Because under STV there would be multiple seats up for grabs it would be a little different. But I can certainly imagine them trying to argue that STV is "unfair" because a candidate that is way behind when first preferences are taken into account could still eventually end up getting a seat. I expect because the move would be to multi-member constituencies that the change is quite wide reaching and therefore a direct comparison with FPTP is harder. But I am certain No2STV will find a way, and probably quite an effective way of portraying this as unfair. It would be tempting for Yes2STV to try and rebut this claim with technical details but I think instead the "fairness" mantle has to be seized immediately by Yes regarding the proportionality argument. Once people understand that the proportion of MPs elected will be much closer to the number of votes cast, any claim about fairness regarding second, third and so on preferences would hopefully have much less potency.

5) "It will lead to weak and unstable government.". The Yes2AV campaign expended quite a lot of energy trying to claim that coalitions and hung parliaments were no more likely under AV than FPTP. This was a very defensive approach and they may well have been better off trying to argue in favour of coalitions in principle rather than the rather muddled messages that ended up coming across. At least a Yes2STV campaign would have little choice but to argue from the off in favour of coalitions as STV is certainly much more likely than FPTP to produce them. Indeed that is precisely why most campaigners for reform want it!

This is obviously just a very first pass by someone who is admittedly biased but followed the campaign from both sides with great interest. I was disappointed by both AV campaigns as I have blogged about in detail previously. But I still think it is worth thinking ahead whilst the wounds the Yes campaign are licking are still very fresh! I expect others will have their own ideas and I have almost certainly missed some important lessons here. One that springs to mind instantly is the "multiple votes" argument. But I am very tired of rebutting that particular one and let's face it, we have a lot of time to learn all of the lessons!

In conclusion, in some ways STV will be easier to argue for than AV. It has some advantages over FPTP (from a reformer's perspective) that are probably easier to sell than AV. Its proportionality is whatever your view certainly a clear change, rather than the rather mixed change in this respect that AV would have given. However the counting process is harder to explain than AV and that is the area in which I expect No2STV would try to make the most capital (I plan to come back to this point in a future post where I will discuss some other potential broader consequences for the electoral reform movement from the AV No vote). I think another thing that is clear from the AV failure is that more time would be needed to ensure the new system could be explained and understood much better than AV was by 5th May 2011.

Oh, and one more very important lesson. Please, please, please let's not have the referendum on the same day as any other elections!

FOOTNOTE: I have made the assumption for the purposes of this post that an STV campaign would follow roughly the same blueprint as the AV one did, i.e. a single question referendum with only two choice with a No and Yes campaign batting for each side. I actually think there are much better and more sophisticated deliberative processes that could and arguably should be used for something as important as changing our electoral system but that argument is for another day.

This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Almost two thirds of people think drug users should not be criminalised

Interesting result from a recent YouGov poll on drugs. The following question was asked:

Suppose people use illegal drugs but have not committed any other crime. In general, should such people be treated as criminals and brought before the courts, or should they be treated as people who may need medical treatment and other forms of support?

And the responses were:

• They should be treated as criminals and brought before the courts: 30%
• They should be treated as people who may need treatment and other forms of support: 62%
• Don't know: 7%

So more than two thirds of those who expressed a view and nearly two thirds of all respondents think that drug users should not be criminalised.

Given this sort of finding, I find it bizarre that politicians and ministers are still unwilling to enter a serious debate about decriminalising or legalising drugs. The reasons I hear again and again are that it is politically difficult to do so and that's why most senior politicians are not willing to engage with it. But how on earth can that be true when the majority of people actually think drug users should not be being criminalised? And what does it say about our political structure that these people and that view are largely being sidelined? A shrewd politician would surely be able to find the words and the approach to go with this very strong grain of public opinion?

So who from the senior ranks of all parties is going to step up to the plate and speak for two-thirds of the British public on this subject?

51p per person per year vs 1000+ nurses

Paul Waugh from Politics Home has just tweeted the following:

Osborne says Royals cost us 51p per person per year.

I have no doubt that George Osborne's figures are accurate for the direct cost of the Royals*.

But isn't it interesting how when Osborne is talking about something that he wants to spend money on (and you can't get much more Royalist than true blue Tories like our beloved Chancellor) it's presented in a way that tries to make it look miniscule? Almost as if it would be churlish to disagree that the Royals are worth every darn penny and anyway it's less than the cost of a mars bar don't you know and didn't she look radiant on the wedding day and sure the Duke occasionally says the wrong thing but he's been such a good consort for her etc. etc. etc.?

For example, I don't remember the (made up) figures for the cost of switching to AV being presented by the Chancellor in the format of cost per person per year (the real figures for this would have been less than 51p per person per year). Oh no, it was how many sick babies will suffer and how many soldiers will (implicitly) die because of lack of the millions that were supposedly going to be spent.

What what does this figure of 51p per person per year actually mean? Well the figures have just been released for the UK population last year. It was 62,262,000 (see here). I am assuming he is using the most up to date figures so this would be a total of £31,753,620. Or if you want to look at it another way, and a way that politicians like Osborne usually love to do it is approximately 6 new primary schools every year at a cost of just over £5m per school (source).

But the currency politicians simply adore using regarding public spending is nurses. How many extra nurses could we employ each year for the cost of the Royal family? Well according to salarytrack.co.uk the current average salary for a nurse in the UK is £26,123 per year. Let's add on 13.8% for employers' NI and that gives us a total salary cost of £29,728. So we could get around 1068 extra nurses each year. Imagine how many more lives each year could be saved and how much more comfort and care could be provided for that amount of money.

Suddenly that 51p per person per year seems a lot bigger doesn't it?

I know what I would rather spend the money on.

*I say "direct cost" because this does not include the cost of things like security and civic receptions etc. It's hard to know what the total cost is but I have seen estimates previously (e.g. here) of around £100m. So maybe the real cost is more like 3000 nurses.

UPDATE: Millennium Dome in the comments has correctly highlighted the following which I thought was worthy of putting the main post:

I agree with you, but actually I'd say you can get even more nurses for your Royal Family buck!

You've ADDED the employers NI cost - and fair enough that IS a cost to the Dept. of Health... but not to government spending overall because the Treasury, obviously, gets that money back. The actual cost to the exchequer of a nurse (or ANY public sector worker) is their salary NET of tax, so in the case of a nurse on £26,123 that's c£20,150 net of tax and NI.

So I reckon the government could afford 1575 extra nurses a year for £31,753,620 :)

Whataboutery

Mark Pritchard is an MP whose existence had not imprinted upon my conscience until this week. He holds the seat for The Wrekin for the Conservatives and on Thursday the Commons decided in favour of a ban on circus animals following a motion moved by Mr Pritchard.

The decision is not binding on the government but it does put them in an awkward place politically given their current position on this subject. Much of the coverage has been about how the MP was allegedly threatened and bullied by the No 10 machine to try and get him to withdraw the motion (which he stood up to and refused).

But the thing that caught my eye most about the story was how a number of Labour activists and sympathisers on Twitter started making comments like "It's all very well sticking up for circus animals, but what about people on benefits.." etc.

This is something I see happening a lot in politics. I have seen it referred to in the past as "Whataboutery" which I think is an appropriate term. It is a way of attacking something without necessarily disagreeing with it but diverting the discussion onto different terrain. Probably lots of the Labour people who were doing this actually agree with the proposal but are trying to make out that Mr Pritchard is somehow wrong to be focusing on it.

I disagree. Lots of MPs have special causes that are dear to them for particular reasons and they should be commended when they use their positions to spark an honest debate and ultimately persuade lots of their colleagues to agree with them and perhaps do something about it.

I confess I do not know much about the details of the motion or the current state of how circus animals are treated but I admire the fact that this back-bench MP has been able to make the weather on a subject that he clearly feels very passionate about. I would certainly not try to diminish what he has done on the grounds that there are other causes that are more dear to me (which of course there are as regular readers of this blog will know!).

I am sure there will be plenty of time to debate all the other things that the activists who piped up last week also want covered. It doesn't mean it is wrong to try and make changes in other, possibly less important areas too.

Am I the only one bored by political defections?

A Conservative councillor in Cornwall has defected to the Lib Dems (reported here on Lib Dem Voice).

Every week or two there will be some political defection reported somewhere at some level. Often council, sometimes MEP, occasionally MP (although we haven't had one of them for a while - I think Quentin Davies was the last one) or MSP, MA etc.

Is it just me or is this sort of thing, you know, well, boring? I know the dynamics that have been behind some defections in the last few years and there are often local factors at play and of course personal ambitions and all sorts of things that would never be admitted to in whatever official statement is released. In other words it is going to be pretty much impossible for an external observer to get the real reasons behind the defection.

Often as well I find that the party receiving the new convert goes well over the top in highlighting the significance and we sometimes get the counter-spin operation from the jilted party. Yawn, yawn, yawn.

People change their mind about stuff all the time in real life and change jobs to work for competitor organisations too. Why, when it happens in politics do people think it means anything significant?

It almost never does, whatever party is being jumped from and to.

Telegraph fundamentally misunderstands how the Lib Dems work

The Daily Telegraph had a rather forthright leading article yesterday entitled "Political failure has scuppered NHS reform". In it they took both David Cameron and Nick Clegg to task for having given in to pressure on the NHS reforms and regretted how in their view the essence of the original bill now "lies in ruins".

But the bit that leapt out at me was the section where they specifically criticise the Lib Dem leader:

Mr Clegg has pulled the plug on a set of proposals he was happy to go along with until his activists told him otherwise. That was a failure of leadership.

This is how a healthy political party is traditionally supposed to work isn't it!? The members who make up the grass-roots footsoldiers vote on and decide the policies. That's how Labour used to work. The Tories have always been much more top-down but I know many Tory activists who lament the fact that they are unable to decide on their own policy.

Irrespective of the other parties that is always how the Lib Dems have worked. It is one of the things that attracted me to the party in the first place, that I could have a real say in policy. And in this case it was a vital part of the way government policy has been altered. The coalition agreement was sketchy on the detail for the NHS and the recent Lib Dem conference made it very clear what the party in government needed to do to satisfy the party at large.

To attempt to characterise this as a "failure of leadership" by Nick Clegg is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the party that he leads. Other parties may impose policies from the top. The Lib Dems do not.

I think many people will start to realise this following the changes to this bill and perhaps some will consider it to be a much more democratic way of deciding a party's policy than it being cooked up by a cabal in Westminster.

It's the naming convention stupid!

I watched Panorama yesterday which was about whether banks had learnt their lessons from the various misselling scandals of recent years (e.g. Payment Protection Insurance).

They used undercover filming to show how financial advisers in various banks don't seem to be following the correct procedures or guidelines when it comes to advising people about how to invest their money. One of the biggest bones of contention was regarding people's attitude to risk. They had numerous examples of people who they interviewed who strongly felt they had been misled or even in some cases hoodwinked into investing in products that were much more risky than they had thought.

The undercover filming appeared to show the potential for this to happen. However I felt that the biggest problem the programme highlighted was in how the naming conventions used for products can be utterly misleading.

They followed an undercover reporter who had made it clear to the adviser that they wanted to make sure their investment was low risk. As the adviser took them through the process they kept referring back to how they understood the level of risk the person wanted was low. This happened a few times in the clips they showed. Then at the end of the process the adviser proudly announced that the best product for the customer was something called a "balanced fund". The customer agreed this sounded right.

Cut back to the experts watching the footage all of whom straight away made it clear that the "balanced fund" referred to was not appropriate for the customer and was too risky given what else had been said. Fair enough. They know best and I would fully accept their arguments.

But had this been a real life situation I would not be at all surprised if a real life customer would have accepted that too. Of course all customers should read the small print and be sure they are clear what they are getting into but a product described as "balanced" would seem to me on the surface to suggest a good balance between risk and safety. Of course the reaction of the experts demonstrates this is not the case at all.

So call me crazy, but maybe these sales-people keen to flog their risky products would have a much harder time of it if the products were named more accurately. For example I have read elsewhere that "balanced funds" can have as much as 80% in shares. Well maybe the percentage of equities should be in the title of the fund? That way it would be clear what they were selling and anyone who actually would be a lot more comfortable with say 50% or 30% shares would see straight away that the fund was not right for them.

Interestingly though, this was not picked up by the programme. Perhaps they needed a lay-person among the experts to point out that the definition of the word balanced that they all seemed to intuitively understand actually meant "pretty risky" doesn't mean that in plain English!

You can still watch the programme for a few days via this link.

I'll never accept the label tribalist

I've had numerous debates over the last few years with people about the definition of a political tribalist and the fact that I do not think of myself as one of them. I have had counter arguments posed such as the mere fact that I go out knocking on doors and delivering leaflets for a particular political party (in my case the Lib Dems) by definition makes me tribal. I disagree with this quite strongly.

For me, tribalism is the sort of "my party right and wrong" attitude that I see from the more partisan political activists, perhaps epitomised by the sort of person who opposes a policy simply because it is from another party. I had a discussion last year with a Labour activist who claimed that there had never been a Liberal/Lib Dem policy that he had agreed with. Ever. To me that just seems utterly preposterous and completely lacking in credibility, especially given that the overlap between Liberal/Lib Dem and Labour over the years must have meant in the past that plenty of those policies must have essentially also been Labour policies at various points. But that's the sort of thing I am talking about.

I saw another example yesterday in this piece from Luke Akehurst on Labourlist. At one point in the post he writes:

The worst day and the worst decisions of the Blair and Brown years would be better to live through again than the best day of the mob running Britain now.

That to me shows the mindset of a tribalist and one that I just cannot empathise with. Luke is saying that the day that David Kelly committed suicide following being named by a "outing" strategy devised by the Labour Party media machine is a better day to live through than the day David Cameron unequivocally and with widely praised Statesmanship accepted the findings of the Bloody Sunday inquiry in full. He is also saying that the day the records of 25 million people went missing from the Child Benefits system is a better day than when nearly 1 million of the lowest earning workers in the country were taken out of tax altogether.

I could go on. For me, that sort of thinking does not add up. Of course I accept that Luke thinks overall the 13 years of Labour government were better than the last year of the coalition. But to think every single individual day of the years running from 2nd May 1997 through to 11th May 2010 are all better than any of the days since then is what I define as tribalism. It's the sort of thing that in a speech from the podium at Labour conference would get great cheers but that does not stand up to scrutiny.

And I would say this about any government's record against any other. I grew up in a family that had very strong views about Margaret Thatcher and were against much of what she stood for but the day that the Falkland Islands were liberated from Argentine occupation would be high up there in the best days for this country of the last 30 years. And despite the fact that I have spent the last few years campaigning for the Lib Dems and against the Labour Party I would highlight the decisions to give the Bank of England control over interest rates and the introduction of the minimum wage two of the best decisions any government has ever made.

Tribalists exist in all parties. Sometimes they are interesting to listen to even putting aside the somewhat hyperbolic tendencies. Sometimes they bore the pants off me and I stop listening.

But I will never consider myself one of them.