Can MPs really be trusted on Lords reform?

Imagine that you work for a medium sized organisation. Imagine that you like your job, it gives you status and respect and that there was a real battle for you to get the position in the first place. Also, every few years there is a big reorganisation and you have to reapply for your role.

Now imagine that there is another sister organisation just over the road from your one. The pay isn't as good but it provides similar status and respect within society. And even better you don't actually need to apply for a job or go through a grueling selection process to get in there. Once you leave employment with your current organisation there is a roughly 50/50 chance that your boss will simply give you a job for life in the sister organisation.

Now, finally imagine that you and all your colleagues are given the chance to change the way the sister organisation works. Instead of having an evens chance of being given a sinecure in that place, you can instead vote for the selection process to be thrown open to everyone and for it to be as grueling to get in there are it was to get into your current organisation.

That is pretty much exactly the dilemma faced by most MPs as they consider the Lords reform bill which is being published this week. There are noises off from Labour and Tory MPs that they are going to give this bill a rough ride. Indeed it is not at all clear that a Commons majority can be mustered to pass it despite a commitment for reform being present in all three of the main parties manifestos.

I'm sure that there are some MPs who have genuine concerns about the proposed reforms and really do fear the loss of a scrutinising chamber with expertise. I'm also sure that some of the arguments used against reform such as risk of constitutional deadlock are well meant. But the problem is you cannot separate these out from the massive conflict of interest faced by a huge swathe of MPs. If they vote for the bill they are kissing goodbye to a cushy semi-retirement.

For those of us observing politics there is a useful precedent here. MPs used to be in charge of deciding their own expenses regime. They came up with all sorts of arguments as to why this should be the case (primacy of parliament etc.) and many of them fought tooth and nail to prevent publication of the details for years. They wanted to remain in charge of one of the main conditions of their employment.

Of course when The Telegraph finally published the details of the expenses it precipitated the biggest political scandal in decades. It wasn't just a few MPs, but hundreds of them who had abused the privileges of their office at the expense of the tax payer. It became abundantly clear that MPs could not be trusted to decide their own expenses regime. It is now administered by an external body.

But in the end, MPs are only human. A sort of group think appears to have emerged whereby they collectively thought what they were doing was acceptable. Yes, we expect MPs to be held to a higher standard but I would however suggest that any group of people left in charge of their own conditions like this will consciously or subconsciously gravitate towards a solution that suits them.

We are in the same sort of situation again with Lords reform. I am far from convinced that we can trust MPs to come to an impartial decision about something that so directly affects the future political careers of so many of their number. Whatever arguments they use, there will always be the suspicion that self interest lies at the heart of their opposition whether that is conscious or otherwise.

There is no easy answer to this. The Commons is supreme and ultimately if MPs will not allow the reform it will not go ahead.

But they should tread very carefully. They have already seen the political explosion that can result when blatant self-interest against the public good takes hold within their institution.

If I was an MP I would want to avoid any risk of appearing to put my own personal desires above what we would expect from a fully functioning and accountable democracy.


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

I blame David Davis

On the 12th June 2008, the Conservative opposition front bench spokesperson on Home Affairs did something very unexpected. He resigned his seat as an MP.

The reason he gave for this was to spark a national debate on the issue of civil liberties which is an issue close to his heart. He fought the ensuing by-election on this issue and won with 72% of the vote (albeit on a 34% turnout).

But the net result of this somewhat inexplicable action is that from the day he resigned to this David Davis has been a backbench MP. He would have been a shoo-in for Home Secretary in 2010 had he simply remained in post.

His decision to give up that front bench position is thrown into sharp relief by recent events. The Home Secretary Theresa May has released a draft bill which seeks to allow the authorities powers to intercept pretty much any and all communications between citizens of this country. It is more authoritarian than anything Labour dared propose I'm this area and would be a fundamental change in the relationship between the people of this country and the government. It is exactly the sort of thing that Davis was hoping would not happen when during the 2009 Convention on Modern Liberty he implored his party to "keep my promises".

It is thanks to Nick Clegg's diligent actions behind the scenes that this bill is only in draft form and hence can be debated and modified. I know that the parliamentary Lib Dems led by the impeccably civil liberty credentialed Julian Huppert will fight tooth and nail to ensure this bill is consistent with the party's principles.

But it will be a difficult battle. The starting proposition is a terribly illiberal piece of work and May has already set the terms of the debate with talk of how we need this bill to deal with terrorists and paedophiles and how we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide. Exactly the sort of thing we used to hear from Labour authoritarians.

Imagine how much easier this battle would have been if the Conservative Home Secretary had been someone whose political identity was very strongly linked with liberty. In fact I'd go further than that and suggest the draft bill would never even have been published. I suspect Davis would have strangled it at birth or his civil servants would never have even tried to suggest it in the first place.

The fact he is not in that position is entirely his own fault. He voluntarily gave up his chance at being the minister who decides these things to instead be one of the muted voices on the sidelines.

That quixotic decision just over 4 years ago has led to the situation we now find ourselves in. At the time I could not fathom what Davis thought he was going to achieve and the intervening period has if anything made it even less explicable.

And the strangest thing of all is that I'm far from sure David Davis himself truly understands what he was trying to achieve.




This post was first published on Dale & Co.

My name is Dave and I am a pressaholic

Something fascinating has happened in the last year or so. Many senior politicians have effectively been coming clean and admitting an addiction. They have been confessing that they have been addicted to a rather dysfunctional relationship with the media, the press in particular.

That's good. The first step to dealing with a problem is admitting you have one. It is a necessary precondition to recovery from an addiction. But it is not sufficient.

What needs to come next is a full and frank admission of what exactly was wrong with these relationships. Indeed if we imagine these politicians as equivalent to alcoholics, we know from the 12 step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous that one of the most important steps involves admitting the exact nature of the wrongs committed. I'm not really seeing that anywhere here.

Sure, we get a lot of earnest language about politicians having got "too close" to the press and vows to not let it happen again. But so what? I don't really care if they got a bit "too close". It doesn't matter if Cameron had 1000 "country suppers" with Rebekah Brooks. Unless of course that closeness led to some sort of undue influence. But all the politicians who have been asked about this have flat out denied that they have allowed this sort of influence to take place.

Something does not add up here. It's like someone turning up for counselling and saying she wants to stop drinking but then denying there have been any negative consequences from her behaviour relating to this. In which case why does she want to stop?

In order for it to be credible that these politicians are truly on the road to their recovery from the scourge of their addiction we really need more specifics. But of course the problem is that if for example Cameron was to come out and say that his Ofcom policy changed in 2009 in order to fit in with what James Murdoch wanted or if politicians from all parties admitted that their approach to drugs policy is to accord with the agenda of tabloid editors they would terminate their political careers.

Perhaps in private they will be able to properly admit in detail to how deeply in thrall they were to their rapacious Fleet Street creditors.

But unless they confide in us, their electors then they shouldn't be surprised if we behave like a suspicious spouse who's heard it all before and doesn't really believe they have learned much if anything.

Peter Hitchens learnt something from his days as a Trot

In recent years I have noticed that Peter Hitchens, the right-wing columnist who is steadfastly against any relaxation of the drug laws has come up with an eye-catching formulation regarding this policy area.

He claims that there is no "War on Drugs". His argument is that liberal society is turning a blind eye to drug use and the police and authorities talk a good game but essentially pedal softly. His further argument is that until we crack down "properly" on everything to do with drugs then the problems will continue.

It's a neat way of trying to justify why the current policy has failed. It's not because as people like me would have you believe, prohibition of drugs causes many of the problems but because we haven't had enough prohibition. Or at least we've had the wrong sort of prohibition. Do you see? Those of us who are campaigning for an end to our nonsensical drug laws have got it totally arse about face.

Of course I disagree with Hitchens on this. Tell the thousands of people every year who are locked up for minor drugs offences and/or have their lives ruined with a criminal record that there is no War on Drugs.

But the more I have heard Hitchens pedal this line, the more it has reminded me of something from my youth.

In the 1980s as I was coming of age politically, as the USSR was clearly in decline and other countries where Communism had been experimented with such as Cuba showed how such states always seem to degenerate into some sort of Totalitarian dystopia a curious thing happened. Proponents of Communism argued that "True Communism" had never really been tried. Despite the evidence staring them in the face that their One True Way simply did not work they raged against the dying of the light essentially saying that the problem was we hadn't had enough Communism.

It is no surprise to me that Peter Hitchens was a Trotskyist in his youth. And even though he has repudiated much of what he learnt during that phase of his life he has certainly kept some of their rhetorical tricks in his arsenal. He should not get a free pass on this.

There is another interesting parallel here. Those who so passionately argued that we needed more or proper Communism were blind to the fact that the actual outcome of their ideology was what had happened in real countries time and again in the real world. They weren't anomalies, they were the evidence of what happens when you try to follow that route.

Exactly the same applies with the War on Drugs. Country after country after country has tried prohibiting many, many substances. The end result has been an explosion in drug use and violence from criminal gangs across the world in the last 40 years. These are not side effects from the "wrong sort of War on Drugs". They are the end result of the current policy.

Exactly like the solution to the problems with Communism was not more Communism, so the problems with the current drug laws cannot be more of the same, even in a more hard line form. That would simply exacerbate the problem.

What we actually need is Glasnost and Peristroika in our drugs policy where we are honest about what has failed and are open to what we need to do to improve them.

Why is leaving things alone never an option?

Michael Gove has been sticking his oar in in recent days. He's decided that he wants children to start learning foreign languages from the age of 7. Also he's announced that he wants 5 year olds to recite poetry to each other in class.

I'm not going to dwell on the merits or demerits of these specific proposals. Except to say that if there was strong evidence that these things would increase the wellbeing of British children I suspect it would have been done a long time ago.

What I'm more interested in today is what this says about how governments approach governing.

Gove is an intelligent man. I know this because he used to sit on the Newsnight Review sofa regularly and intellectually spar with the likes of Germaine Greer and Paul Morley. And also I sometimes didn't know what he was on about. OK, maybe that just makes him more intelligent than me. We'll draw a veil over that.

But what makes him think that he knows best about how to micromanage the national curriculum for everyone in the country? The answer is quite simple. He is a politician.

Politicians have to do something. Anything. It's how they get elected. It's no good them standing for election and saying "Vote for me and I'll leave things pretty much as they are.". They'd be vilified by their opponents and would be a laughing stock. Politicians get elected by promising to change things.

But the consequence of this is that things keep getting changed all the time whether that's a good thing or not. Labour embarked on goodness knows how many sets of reforms of the NHS. I think it was at least 3 in 13 years. Now the coalition is at it all over again. Schools have had lots of fiddling in recent years too. Curriculum changes, Key Stages tweaked and meddled with, targets, league tables, new powers, powers taken away, Academies, Free Schools, tighter Ofsted regime, slackening of Ofsted regime etc. etc. etc. And that's just two departments in the last few years. The same pattern is repeated all over government.

Here's a thought. What if we just left things largely alone for a bit? Maybe if we allowed things to settle down, for doctors, nurses, teachers, managers etc. all to get used to the latest way of doing things for say 5 (or shock horror 10) years perhaps we might find performance improving. You know, because so much time and money wouldn't need to be spent reorganising everything every 3 years.

Of course this is fantasy land. But it is worth pondering why we demand politicians always have to campaign on a platform of major change. Because until we allow them to be more reasonable and sometimes say things like "In this area we're doing OK and we propose no major change" without shooting them down in flames we will keep getting these huge shake ups right across all departments.

But if we did this then Gove would have to go back to debating the work of Gilbert and George with Greer and Kirsty Wark.

That's a price I'd be willing to pay.....


This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Cameron cannot get away with this political sleight of hand on Hunt

Why is Jeremy Hunt not being investigated for breaching the ministerial code?

Let's just take a few steps back here and look at the chronology of events.

Firstly a mass of communications between Hunt's SpAd (Adam Smith) and News International were released into the public domain. From this it was abundantly clear that Smith had overstepped the mark in communicating privileged information to a commercial party with interests in the decision that his boss was going to have to make in a quasi-judicial role. Despite his initial protestations, Hunt eventually sacked Smith acknowledging that he had gone too far although denying any wrongdoing himself.

Then there were calls for Hunt to be sacked. Many, many people pointed out that the ministerial code makes a minister ultimately responsible for everything that their SpAds say and do. But Cameron declined even to refer Hunt to the ministerial code adviser for investigation claiming that Hunt should have his chance in from of the currently running Leveson inquiry.

Now, several weeks on, that has happened today. Hunt had his chance and despite it being a pretty ropey performance (where for example he seems to be admitting he didn't really understand what quasi-judicial actually meant until very recently) the PM clearly thinks he has done enough to hold onto his job as he has stated again that Hunt will not be referred for a ministerial inquiry.

The justification for this looking at the commentary in the media seems to be that there was no further "smoking gun" in the evidence today.

Let's just imagine that Leveson had not been running. When the Smith e-mails had broken, Smith would have been sacked but the political pressure would immediately have moved onto Hunt. With there being no way to dissipate this pressure Cameron would have had to refer him for a ministerial code inquiry I am certain of it. Instead he was able to deflect calls for that by effectively saying "Let him have his say at an inquiry that is already set up". Then the fact that it has taken several weeks, the media have had plenty of other things politically to get their teeth into (budget cock-ups, Euro crisis etc.) the pressure seeped away. Now that Hunt has "had his chance" the PM clearly thinks that he can get away with effectively saying "nothing new to see here, let's move on".

This is classic political sleight of hand. We already have the smoking gun. His special adviser was leaking privileged information to a potential bidder in a process worth billions of pounds. The ministerial code is clear about who has ultimate responsibility for SpAds.

Cameron should not be able to get away with using the time delay and Leveson as a smoke-screen to try and obfuscate the key issue here.


Leveson is a sideshow with respect to Hunt. He should be referred for a ministerial inquiry and given what we already know, I struggle to see how the ruling can be anything other than his position is untenable.

So Cameron talks to Blair. I should bloody well hope so!

The "news" has been reported today that David Cameron has talked to Tony Blair on the phone about affairs of state and running the country on 8 occasions since becoming Prime Minister.

Why this is considered worth publishing in a newspaper is beyond me. There are very few people who understand what it is like to be PM. Cameron should consult widely and the expertise and experience of the longest ever serving Labour Prime Minister who only stood down 5 years ago is very valuable to the current holder of the office.

Running the country is not a game. It's deadly serious and the more advice Cameron can solicit from those who appreciate what it is like to be in his position and having to take those decisions, the better as far as I am concerned no matter which party they are in.

Frankly I would say the bigger story here is that he has only spoken to him on average once every three months.

I would have expected it to be more often than that!

What does this picture tell us about how modern politics works?

1992 and all that

This picture was taken on 16th September 1992. That is the day that subsequently became known as "Black Wednesday" when sterling came crashing out the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It features then Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont explaining to the massed ranks of the media what had just happened regarding sterling.

But the reason why this picture has become more historic in recent years is because of who is lurking in the background. It is a fresh faced, 25 year old David Cameron (the one who looks a bit like he doesn't know where to put himself).

He was a special adviser to Lamont at that time which is why he is hovering there like a ghost at the feast.

Ever since Cameron's rise to prominence as Tory leader in 2005 I have found this picture quite fascinating for what it tells us about how modern politics works. As it has turned out, on the worst day of his career, Lamont happened to be standing next to the man who would end up being the very next Conservative Prime Minister after John Major. And yet at that point, that man was not even a Member of Parliament. In fact he wouldn't become one for nearly another nine years.

Of course some of that coincidence is down to the fact that the Tories were out of power after 1997 for a long time. If they'd got back in in say 2002 it would have been a different story. But if we think about the odds against the very next Conservative PM happening to be with the Chancellor on the darkest economic day for at least a generation (at that point) we start to see how strange that is if our politics is properly meritocratic.

If we start with an assumption that it is let's just look how unlikely what that picture tells us actually is. At any one time, there are around 40 million people in this country who are eligible to become Prime Minister. Let's say (being generous) that half of them have a conservative leaning and hence might at least agree with the party politically. If we had known on that day that the next Tory PM would be elected in 18 years time it could pretty much have been any of those people (or their demographic equivalents 18 years hence).

But it wasn't any of them. It was the man standing next to the Chancellor.

Our politics isn't very meritocratic. A fair few MPs get their seats because of who they know. Cameron followed a familiar path which was PPE at Oxbridge (or other high calibre university), special adviser, short period in private industry followed by selection for a safe seat for the 2001 election. From there he impressed his parliamentary colleagues (of course he knew the ropes well given his history) and by 2005 was Leader of the Opposition.

It is a well trodden route and once you understand how the political parties groom these bright young things and smooth the way for them into parliament and up the greasy pole, far from being surprising that Cameron ended up leader and PM it starts to look almost inevitable that him or one of his kind was quite likely to make it there. It is no coincidence that George Osborne also took a similar route to the top.

But the Tories have always been like this haven't they? Words in ears about "good chaps"? Funny handshakes etc.? We'd expect better from Labour wouldn't we?

1997 and all that

Uh oh....

This isn't just any "Council Tax Freeze". This is a Bracknell Forest "Council Tax Freeze"...

I don't often write about local issues on this blog but this one has really pissed me off.

Our local council (Bracknell Forest) has just started charging £30 per year for collecting garden waste. They introduced a garden waste collection scheme back in 2006 where the options were to purchase a sturdy paper bag for 50p a pop each time or spend £30 on a plastic bin which we were promised would be a one-off payment entitling us to have our garden waste collected every fortnight.

It turns out that these promises were worthless. According to the council's leaflet on this garden waste collection is "discretionary" and they don't have to provide the service, hence the charge. That seems very strange to me. Before the recycling scheme started, everything just went in the same bin. Now garden waste that must surely be produced by a large proportion of local residents is deemed not worthy of collection without an extra charge?

But what really gets my goat about this stealth tax increase is how it has been slipped under the radar whilst our local MP, Dr Phillip Lee writes in our local paper about how proud he is of the "fact" that his council has been able to "freeze" council tax this year.

It makes me wonder what other services we all thought we paid for are going to turn out to be  discretionary in future.

"Come on Mark" I hear you argue vituperatively. "Not everyone has a garden. It's only right that you pay your fair whack!".

And that is where this extra charge for us on our estate is adding insult to injury. Because we live on a new estate that was built in 2004 we have to pay an annual "estate management charge" to a private company which pays for things like upkeep of the grass in the communal areas and a play area. Those charges are around £300 per year. But for people who happen to live in older houses/estates in our constituency there is no such charge; those things are paid for out of the council tax. That I contribute to. It's a scam as far as I am concerned that new estates when they are built now often have these covenants put into the contract between the builders and the council to limit what the council has to pay for. But of course we get no discount on our council tax for this. So frankly that argument cuts very little ice with me.

Of course I totally understand that times are tough and councils need to save money, I don't have a particular problem with that in principle. I do however have a problem with our council introducing stealth charges on the quiet whilst loudly shouting about how they have "frozen" our council tax bills.

No they haven't. They've just increased it by around 2%.

Cameron and Fruit Ninja-gate

I think this story about how David Cameron has been spending "crazy" amounts of time on his iPad playing "Fruit Ninja" is wrong on two levels.

Firstly I simply don't believe that he spends very much of his time playing games (and what is the definition of "crazy" in this context?). No modern Prime Minister ever really has that much spare time.

But secondly and much more importantly, even if it was true, so bloody what? It is continually lamented that our politicians do not act like normal people. What could be more normal than a middle aged man getting a little bit too into a piece of new technology? I've done it, and if you asked you'd probably find millions of people in this country had got more diverted than they probably should have done by something like this.

This week a "story" was also reported that Cameron had gone out for a meal with his wife. And ate CAKE! You might be wondering why this is even newsworthy (it isn't) but it was juxtaposed with comments from William Hague about people having to rein in their spending. Even people economising will often find a bit of money to go out for a one-off celebration of something. Again, the PM is being castigated for something that normal people do all the time.

It makes me wonder what those who deem these pieces worthy of reporting on actually expect from a political leader. Because if they want an utter obsessive who spends every waking second on politics getting very little sleep and finding pretty much no time for anything else I believe the member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath is available for a comeback.

No, I thought not, so lay off Cameron for doing the normal stuff. There's plenty of other things he can be legitimately criticised for. This nonsense is a tabloidesque distraction from properly holding him to account.

The day I was sort of Nick Robinson for a few minutes

One of the highlights of blogging for me has been the opportunity to appear on the radio. It's not something I've really covered on here much. Most other bloggers seem to take it in their stride and most "normal" (i.e. non-political) people I know are a bit nonplussed as to what it's all about.

But I have really enjoyed the times that I have been asked to go onto various radio stations and debate politics. Sometimes it has been over the phone but often it has been in the studio which has been a particularly fascinating aspect of it for me. I have always been very interested in broadcasting and although I never pursued it academically or career-wise (I always assumed it would be too difficult to break into and I'd be far better off following a safer bet - in my case software development) to have been able to see behind the scenes and be involved in radio shows has been a real privilege. It still happens a little bit nowadays. Only last week I was on with Jacqui Smith on LBC discussing the local election results (down the line). It's more infrequent nowadays though. Partly because I get less offers and partly because I am less able to get to studios these days and have to turn more offers down.

Through this process I have met and debated with some of the most interesting people involved in politics and political commentary including James Forsyth, Mehdi Hasan, Shane Greer (many, many times!), Lance Price, Iain Dale, Tim Montgomerie, Steve Webb, Olly Grender, Alex Hilton, Harry Cole and Kate Hoey (who is one of the nicest people I have ever met in politics) amongst dozens of others.

Some of the highlights for me of this rather unexpected facet of my political commentator life have been:

• The chance to meet and (slightly) get to know Ken Livingstone. He used to present a show on LBC (sometimes with David Mellor) and I was invited on several times around the time of the 2010 General Election. I got the feeling that both Ken and David quite liked me - indeed David even said as much on air, the old flatterer! Ken Livingstone is a political hero of some in my family who are of a bit more of a socialist bent than me. I told him so after the first time I was on (thinking it might be my last) and he had a big grin on his face. My scariest moment on air with Ken was when I was doing a paper review with him and we were talking about sects. He mentioned how the Scientologists once tried to recruit him and he referred to them as a "cult". I said "They don't like to be called a cult Ken" and for the rest of the show I was paranoid that I had tripped over my words and "done a Naughtie"! I think it was OK though...
• Being part of 5 Live's coverage following the final leader's debate during the 2010 election. Tony Livesey was the presenter and I was on the panel with Iain Dale and Will Straw. That was tremendous fun, especially the part where we were asked to answer questions as if we were our respective leaders. I mimicked one of the things Clegg had done during the debate (making out I couldn't see the questioner) which got a big laugh from the assembled audience. I also saw the way Will was able to handle a very hostile question with charm and skill which certainly made me think he will be an MP some day and could well go far.
• Being asked a few months ago to go into BBC TV Centre and be on about 15 different BBC local radio stations over the course of two hours discussing the "Cameron veto" and the Lib Dem response to it. It was fascinating being a part of how so many different local breakfast shows were being made. Some were pre-recorded but many of them were live. They all had the same introductory script for the piece but it was also interesting to see which ones stuck to it, which ones paraphrased and which ones just leapt straight in. It showed me there are all sorts of different ways to cover the same story and certainly kept me on my toes. I pretty much used all the notes I had prepared for that day.

But perhaps my most surreal moment occurred the day after the 2010 General Election. I had been up all night in the National Liberal Club with Mark Valladares and our then party president Ros Scott (which in itself was a turn up for the books) watching the results roll in. I had had no sleep and had been on 5 Live from College Green in the morning. Then at 1:00pm I went over to Bush House (a remarkable building by the way) to be on the BBC World Service Newshour programme. I turned up and was on at first with Mehdi talking to Claire Balderson about the results and what we thought might happen next. Half way through the hour Mehdi had to go and his seat was taken by John Kampfner. Then just as we restarted the debate we suddenly got interrupted by a statement from No 10 Downing Street. Gordon Brown came out and announced to the assembled media that he would also like to make an offer to the Lib Dems. This was following Cameron's "open and generous" offer to the party in the morning. After the short statement Claire came straight back into the studio. She spoke briefly to John and then said something like "Mark Thompson, would you like to interpret what just happened for us?"

I am a software engineer who 18 months earlier had started dabbling with a bit of blogging in my bedroom as and when I could find the time. Now I was being asked to interpret fast-moving political events on one of the most important political days in the UK this century on a live radio show being broadcast to millions of people around the world. Surreal is probably an understatement for the situation I found myself in.

I said something along the lines of "Gordon Brown clearly doesn't want to be left as a political wallflower and is showing a bit of ankle to Nick Clegg and fluttering his eyelashes." and tried to put that into a bit more context regarding Brown's mention of PR.

At least I now know how it feels to be Nick Robinson.

Well, a sort of Z-list Nick Robinson.

From Runcorn.

The government thrashed the opposition on Thursday

What a strange title for a blog post you are thinking (yes, I am arrogant enough to assume I know your thoughts by the way). Surely it was a triumphant day for the Labour opposition in the local elections last Thursday and the Conservative and Lib Dem parties are licking their wounds?

Well that depends how you look at it. Yes, the Conservative party's share of the vote was only 31%. And the Lib Dems did as poorly as last year during the local elections and only ended up with 16% of the vote. Labour got 38% and are very pleased with their performance.

But let's take a couple of steps back here. For the last 2 years, Labour have done all they can to paint "the government" as being regressive and ideologically driven to implement the cuts agenda. They have berated "the government" as unfair to the poor and out of touch with ordinary people's lives.

That's right I hear you say (I'm doing it again), Labour have done that and they've done a good job hence your extremely poor showing last week you Lib Dem loser (I'm still doing you talking to me in case you're losing track).

But it strikes me that two different yardsticks are being used here. When Labour want to attack the government they attack it collectively. No quarter is given. No dispensation for the possibility for example that the Lib Dems might have to compromise in any way. No, they are fully complicit in every decision and hence fully culpable. And yet when it comes to the elections, Labour suddenly separate out the Tory and Lib Dem vote. But if we apply the same criteria as Labour normally do, lumping the governing parties together then suddenly the story is very different. In the middle of a parliament, with the government implementing the biggest cuts in several generations and having just tipped back into a recession the governing parties between them got 47% of the vote. The Labour opposition got just 38% of the vote.

Now just hang on a minute you say sharply (a bit too sharply for my liking to be honest), the Lib Dems are always going on about how they are a separate party. Yes indeed we are always going on about that and we are a separate party. But Labour never seem to make that distinction themselves. They are claiming that these local elections are a terrible verdict on the government*. If that was truly the case and the public agreed and enthusiastically wanted the alternative on offer from Labour wouldn't we have expected to see their share of the vote dwarf the combined share for the governing parties?

That didn't happen. Therefore it is hugely stretching credulity to claim that the elections last week prove that the coalition is on the ropes. It might be and there are doubtless lots of problems but the narrative that is being spun is just that, spin.

The reality is that using the criteria Labour usually use when it suits them, the government thrashed the opposition last week.


*I am well aware by the way that they were local elections and I get as annoyed as anyone that the results are automatically extrapolated into a picture of national reflection but hey ho, that's how everyone else interprets them and it would be like urinating into a hurricane to attempt to counter this.

Coalition Negotiations 2015. A Play.

Scene opens on a nondescript room somewhere in Whitehall, 9th May 2015.

Labour Lead Coalition Negotiator: "Well, thank you all for coming today. Obviously it's been a fairly gruelling election campaign but the fact that no party managed to achieve an overall majority has led us to this point. If we can come to some agreement over the next few days then we have a chance to form a majority coalition."

Lib Dem Lead Coalition Negotiator: "Absolutely. We very much hope that we can reach such an agreement between our parties. I have with me a document which forms our red lines if that would help."

LLCN: "OK, thanks. That might help speed things along a little bit!"

(Laughter)

(LDLCN hands over a document to LLCN)

LLCN: "Er, this is your manifesto."

LDLCN: "That's right."

LLCN: "I don't understand."

LDLCN: "They are our red lines. We insist on having every single thing in our manifesto implemented in full."

LLCN: "But surely you must understand that is not possible?"

LDLCN: "On the contrary. We thought you would actually insist that this be the case."

LLCN: "Er, I really do not understand what you are saying here. Why would we want that?"

LDLCN: "Well, for the last 5 years you and your Labour colleagues have taken every opportunity to tell the public that we have renaged on various parts of our 2010 manifesto. You have attacked us for not blocking tuition fee rises, for the NHS reforms, for allowing the Conservatives to reduce the top rate of tax and for putting up VAT amongst many other things. We have taken a big political hit for having compromised previously and as our chief critics for having done so we assumed you would totally understand how we are not able to budge an iota on our manifesto for fear of being accused of the same again."

LLCN: "Er...."

LDLCN: "We'll leave you to decide whether you want a coalition on these terms. It is a take it or leave it offer. Good day!"

(The Lib Dem contingent exit)

(Confused faces, swanee whistle, curtain)

FPTP makes coalitions more fragile

One of the main things the Lib Dems have to do during the current coalition government is to prove that coalitions can work. The reason they need to do this is because one of their main long term reform policies is to change the electoral system to a more proportional one. This would likely result in more coalitions in the future. Ergo the Lib Dems have to prove that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

The problem is that they have to do this whilst still under our old friend First Past the Post.

The Lib Dems got 23% of the vote at the last election and got 57 MPs. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that 57 is only about 8% of MPs. We all know that is not proportional of course but let's take that as a given.

So 57 MPs from 23%. Since being in government the Lib Dems have had to take a lot of "tough decisions". That's political speak for "things that are really going to piss some people off". When you add those to the number of former Lib Dem voters who were really only in it for the protest and are not happy that the party is now in government we see the sort of vertiginous falls in the polls we have seen recently with the Lib Dems down to as low as 8%.

Now in reality as we get closer to the next general election I expect that number will pick up. Although I am pretty damn sure the party will not poll anything like as much as 23%. But let's go with that 8% figure for a minute.

According to projections by UK Polling Report 8% would see the Lib Dems with 7 seats. But hang on a minute, they had 57 seats on 23%. Now they're only getting 7 seats on 8%!?

I'll illustrate the reason for this using this graph I produced (on the old/current boundaries*) which uses the UK Polling Report swing calculator to show how as the percentage of Lib Dem votes tick down by 1% point at a time, we see the number of seats reduce by more than that as we progress. I went as far down as the 8% indicated by the worst poll so far. The red line shows what would happen if the seats decreased linearly with the vote (roughly what you'd expect in a proportional system).

Iniquity: Now in graph form

It's not just that FPTP is disproportional that is the problem for the Lib Dems. It's that it gets even more disproportional the lower the vote goes.

This means that as the party takes the "tough decisions" the hit that they take is much much harder than that of their coalition partner. Not only are the Tories not seeing their vote drop as much as the Lib Dems (their core voters are happier with them as the austerity measures are more in line with what they want to see) but even when it does drop, the punishment they receive in terms of proportional loss of seats is much less. On the UKPR projection, a loss of 15 percentage points reduces the Lib Dem seats by a factor of more than 800%! The worst projections we see for the Conservatives at the moment on a reduction of around 5% or 6% see only a reduction of maybe 25% of their seats. Still enough to see them out of power but nowhere near as bad as the sort of pummeling the Lib Dems could be facing.

Given all of this it is no wonder that Nick Clegg is pushing the "differentiation" line so much harder nowadays. I understand that some Conservative activists and MPs are aggrieved about this. But they should try to put themselves in the place of a Lib Dem activist or MP for a few minutes.

If they did they might see that there is a huge difference between being out of power for a few years with a solid base to rebuild from and an existential threat that could see their party all but disappearing.

It is indeed ironic that in order to prove a more proportional system could work, the Lib Dems may have to face the worst excesses of a totally disproportionate system.

We may find in the end that the party simply cannot take that sort of pressure and it ends up leaving the coalition in an attempt to ward off the electoral Armageddon scenario.

But that wouldn't necessarily prove that coalitions cannot work. It would however prove something all Lib Dems already know.

First Past the Post sucks.



*The slight disparity between the 7 seats figure and that seen in the graph is due to UKPR's use of the new expected boundaries in their projection

Adam Smith should be prosecuted

Yesterday evening, the more I mulled over the events of the previous 24 hours, the more I started to think that what Jeremy Hunt's adviser is alleged to have done could have broken the law.

If we are to believe the Secretary of State, his adviser went completely rogue. On his own initiative he is alleged to have leaked privileged information to one of the potential bidders in a deal worth billions of pounds. From the published e-mails between him and Frédéric Michel (Murdoch's point man on the deal) it would also appear that he leaked details of speeches Hunt was due to make and also apparently offered advice from his office on how to counter arguments from the OFT.

Surely amongst all of this there are grounds for a prosecution? We know that in the end the deal did not go through because News Corp withdrew their bid in the light of the hacking scandal. But it is worth bearing in mind that had that scandal not erupted Hunt was poised to give the nod for the deal. So all the information that was apparently passed on by Smith could have made the difference.

It would appear that we are in a legal grey area on this one. But the City watchdog is considering a prosecution stating that the scandal "potentially falls into market abuse territory".

I suggest that this is an important enough case that if there is a chance laws have been broken it should go to trial and we can test this complex area of law in court. That way, all relevant correspondence can be subpoenaed and we can hopefully get to the bottom of this. That would seem to me to be very much in the public interest.

I certainly don't think that a hasty resignation from a SpAd followed by an "he made unintentional mistakes" eulogy from his boss in parliament is anywhere near enough to close this scandal out.

And although Smith might be willing to sacrifice his career to act as a "firewall" for Hunt I suspect it might be a whole different ballgame if we start to talk about potential prison time.

Lib Dems should not fear a Lords reform referendum

We got battered last year.

So it would only be natural if we were to be a little wary of plunging headlong into another referendum for changing our political system so soon after the public rejected our proposal for AV for the Commons by such a wide margin.

There are now rumblings from Conservative MPs and also the Labour leadership that any change to the Lords should be subject to a referendum. Nick Clegg has strongly argued that this is not necessary as all three main parties were committed to reform in their manifestos and it is also in the coalition agreement.

I'm with Nick on this one. I do not think a referendum is needed. However I am also a political realist. And if enough Tory MPs and the Labour party are determined to force a referendum on the issue then we may have no choice but to allow one to go ahead.

If that were to happen though I think there are plenty of grounds for thinking that it need not go the same way as AV did.

I am sure a putative No campaign is already forming and war-gaming their strategy. I can't predict everything they will try and throw at us (Soldiers without bullet proof vests? Sick babies?) but straight away I can see that one of the main planks of the Yes campaign will be that reform is democratic and those arguing for the status quo are trying to keep an unelected and unaccountable chamber in place. That goes completely against all the democratic reforms of the past 15 years (Scotland, Wales, NI, London and other local devolution). The No campaign will be on the back foot trying to defend this.

Another thing that will come in handy is that there are still 92 hereditary peers in the Lords. This is utterly indefensible. Politicians of all sides regularly talk about how birth should not be destiny. The idea that someone can legislate in our parliament because of who their parents and grandparents were is completely anachronistic. I expect the No side will concede that the hereditaries should go but that the Yes campaign wants "the wrong sort of reform". But they have had 15 years to get rid of them and still they cling on. A No vote would surely give the hereditaries a reprieve as reform went back to the drawing board yet again.

I'm sure cost will rear its head. The No2AV campaign lied about the cost of a change to AV (David Blunkett, one of the main supporters of the No campaign admitted as much at the time) and there is no reason to suppose the No campaign this time will be any different. But what price democracy? The devolved institutions all cost money to run and the Lords is not exactly free at the moment with around 800 members all with generous allowances and subsidised food, drink etc. I don't think this argument will gain very much ground if countered properly. Also, the arguments about the costs of the referendum itself will be the other way round this time as Clegg has already pointed out it will be for those against reform to justify why the cost of a referendum is needed given the mandate is already there.

Like many from the Yes2AV side I still bear the scars of last year's bruising campaign. But it needn't be like last year this time. We have a strong argument to make. We are in favour of democracy and our opponents are essentially trying to prevent that.

We have a good chance of winning and should not fear the opportunity to make our case to the British people.


Oh, and one last thing. For every picture of Nick Clegg the No campaign uses we can use ten of Jeffrey Archer.


This post was first published on Lib Dem Voice.

The public did *not* reject proportional representation last year

Over the weekend I have seen comments from a couple of Conservative MPs who in the context of the potential change to the Lords to a (partially) elected and proportional system are stating that the public rejected a form of proportional representation in the referendum last year.

Here is Elainor Laing, MP for Epping Forest quoted in The Independent on Saturday:

“What Conservative MPs are angry about is that Nick Clegg’s Bill [will] create in effect a new House of Commons to be elected by proportional representation. Less than a year ago, the British people rejected PR in a referendum.”

And here is old stalwart of the right John Redwood writing on his own blog yesterday:

"...There is concern that the Bill may include electing the Lords by a system of proportional voting, so soon after the public decisively rejected such a voting system for the Commons.  What part of “No” did they not understand?"

There is not really a delicate way to put this. Laing and Redwood are lying. What the public rejected was the Alternative Vote. AV is not a proportional system. In fact it can be less proportional than First Past the Post.

But don't take my word for it. The fact that AV is not proportional was one of the main planks of the No2AV campaign itself! Laing and Redwood along with virtually all Tory MPs were strong supporters of the the No side. You'd think they would at least remember what their campaign said. Here's a little reminder taken from the official No2AV website:

"There are strong principled arguments for and against PR, and it's a debate worth having. The Alternative Vote, however, is a step backward rather than a step forward.
AV combines the weaknesses of both systems; it isn't proportional – three out of the last four elections would have been more disproportional under AV"

I expect other Tory (and those small c conservative Labour) MPs and their media cheerleaders will be promulgating this nonsense in the coming days and weeks as the Lords reform debate intensifies.

We need to squash this mendacity before it takes hold.

The public have never been asked about a proportional system in a referendum. It is simply untrue to say otherwise.

Guido shows why "tax transparency" won't work

Guido (actually I think it was "Neo Guido" AKA Harry Cole) published a blog post earlier this week which "exposed" Lib Dem London Mayoral candidate Brian Paddick's failure to declare income for the tax year 2007/2008. This is in the light of the various shenanigans in the Mayoral contest whereby the main contenders have agreed to publish details of their earnings and tax paid for the last few years in the interests of transparency.

To be fair to Guido/NG it was some good research that led to them deducing that Paddick received a tax free lump sum of close to £390,000 in that tax year. It was not included as part of the disclosure. Paddick claims that it does not count as it is not within the last 4 years which is what the candidates agreed to disclose information about.

So, blimey. A massive tax free lump sum! Paddick must have been very crafty with his affairs to have been able to avoid tax on that scale surely?

Actually no. The lump sum (as the blog post does make clear) was part of his pension. Everyone who has a private pension is entitled to take a tax free lump sum upon retirement. The exact amounts will of course vary but given that Paddick was a senior officer with the Met until his retirement the amount reflects his seniority and time in service.

So the actual story here is "man takes pension he is fully entitled to". There is not even a hint of tax evasion let alone avoidance. He just did what millions of people with pensions are fully entitled to do.

Of course the amount he gets and whether it is fair for police to get pensions like that is another question and another debate for another day.

The breaking of this story though by Guido amply demonstrates why all these calls for "transparency" on tax affairs cannot really work. The tax system is very complex. There are all sorts of perfectly reasonable ways in which income and payments people receive can be exempt from tax or be subject to reliefs of various kinds. Just taking the headline income figures for a certain period and then working out the percentage of tax paid tells us very little. We need to look behind those figures in quite a lot of detail to understand what they mean. Accountants earn so much money because this is not easy to do.

The idea that the media will be capable of applying the level of nuance necessary to properly understand what earnings and tax figures for individuals actually mean is pretty laughable. Even if it is published, the context will get lost in the headline figures. We live in an age of soundbites and if something takes longer than 10 or 15 seconds to explain you can forget trying to win the argument. The headlines will crucify you before you've even opened your mouth.

In this context it is no wonder that Paddick did not disclose that tax year. It would likely have made his proportional tax paid across the 5 years lower than any of the other candidates even though all he did was take his pension.

I fear similar injustices will be perpetrated on those running for office in the future if the current political fetish for tax transparency continues.

I, for one, welcome our new UKIP overlords

I am genuinely pleased to see UKIP doing well in recent polls, polling at as much as 9%. That might seem like an odd thing for a Lib Dem to say given that ideologically I am quite far away from their views and also they are currently close to potentially pushing my party into fourth place.

Allow me to explain.

As I have bored people to tears with on here for years, one of my major preoccupations is with electoral reform. We lost the AV referendum last year and the consensus at the moment is that any further talk of reform is off the table for the forseeable future. The Tories are dead set against it. Labour are ambivalent but a majority of its voters seem against it. End of story. Or so you'd think.

The Lib Dems do not get a fair crack of the whip under FPTP. At the last election we got around 8% of the seats on 23% of the vote. But at least we got some seats. UKIP got 3.1% of the vote and got no seats at all. Not even close. Even their current leader, the high profile Nigel Farage came third in his attempt to unseat Speaker of the House John Bercow.

But even if UKIP got 9% of the vote they would still be unlikely to get any seats. They are a national party trying to appeal across the country. This is a big weakness for a party under FPTP. As the Fields Medal winning mathematician Tim Gowers wrote a couple of years back in a tour de force of a blogpost:

...under FPTP, if you want to maximize the number of seats you will get for a given share of the vote, then there are two things you must avoid. Most importantly, you don’t want to spread your vote about too evenly: if you get 28% of the vote in every single seat, you probably won’t win a single seat. So FPTP penalizes parties that have a uniform appeal throughout the country. This suggests that what you want is for your support to be geographically concentrated...

That sounds almost exactly like the problem with UKIP. I reckon even if they were polling well above 9% they'd struggle to win a single seat.

The same poll that put UKIP on 9% has the Lib Dems on 8% so nominally fourth. But even the worst projections suggest the party would still get 7 seats. In reality I suspect the Lib Dems would get more than that because of the incumbency factor in some seats and the fact that their support is more geographically concentrated than UKIP in places like the South West. I wouldn't be at all surprised if even on a national vote of 8% the Lib Dems got 15 or 20 seats.

But even if I'm wrong and it would be 7 seats for the Lib Dems, how on earth would that be fair? One party gets 9% and gets no seats. Another gets 8% and gets several seats (or more).

That same poll put Labour on 43% and the Conservatives on 32%. What we would actually see on those numbers as well is a Labour landslide. The UK Polling Report calculator suggests we would get:

Labour: 384
Conservative: 223
Lib Dem: 19
Others: 24 (including 18 seats in NI)

If this happened at a general election I think we would see two effects:

1) Massive cognitive dissonance from eurosceptic and small c conservative newspapers like the Daily Mail and The Sun. They would be outraged that UKIP got no seats on such an improved vote but they are generally against electoral reform. Their editorial line would struggle to reconcile these contradictions but I suspect when the dust settled they would find themselves having to support some sort of change to the electoral system.

2) A big rethink from the Conservatives on this whole subject. It is largely forgotten now but back in the 1970s after Heath lost the first 1974 election despite getting more of the popular vote than Harold Wilson there were numerous leading conservatives and their fourth estate cheerleaders who were strong advocates of proportional representation. Moggism-Levenism as it became known had a fair bit of right-wing support which (strangely ;)) faded once Margaret Thatcher was able to leverage huge majorities during the 1980s partly due to the split on the left. Well if we end up with an insurgent UKIP causing a split on the right and a subdued Lib Dem party allowing Labour to get well over 40% leading to repeated landslides I fully expect the same thing to happen again. And the Tories can repent at leisure their visceral opposition to any change at all last year. AV of course would have allowed the majority of those UKIP voters to put Conservative as their second choice.

So thinking about this long term, it will be much better for the Lib Dems if we can get a fairer electoral system. A surging UKIP for various reasons makes that more likely. Ergo I'm intensely relaxed about the surge. Even if in the short term it pushes our party into fourth place in national polls and even elections.

Clegg has already told us we should not trust this government on civil liberties

We can't say he didn't warn us. In 2010, Nick Clegg said in an interview:

"I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good."

And now that it looks like the government is going to try to extend RIPA to essentially allow snooping on internet communication and the Lib Dem party machine has issued a briefing paper defending this that has already been picked apart by Privacy International, now is the time for us all to man the civil liberties barricades.

In a parallel universe where the Tories got 30 more seats in 2010, Clegg and the party's other leading spokespeople would all be railing against these proposed changes now.

So I agree with Nick.

We should not trust this government on civil liberties and should do everything we can to stop these illiberal measures from being enacted.