Friday, March 12, 2010 

The Liberal Democrat dilemma.

If nothing else, the Liberal Democrats can claim at the election that they're the only party to have an "adult" film director standing for them as an MP. It does say something about the Libs though that they're both mature and open-minded enough for Anna "Span" Arrowsmith to be their candidate in Gravesham; you can hardly imagine Labour, let alone the Tories and their so-called "Turnip Taliban" being prepared to face the attention and controversy which such a career is always going to bring. In fact, it's probably down to the fact she is representing the Lib Dems and that she has no chance of actually winning the seat, which was an almost dead heat between Labour and the Tories in 2005, that she's had such a favourable and reasonable response to her candidacy, rather than the country (or perhaps the media) developing a more open attitude towards sexuality. Being female instead of male also probably helps, as the Heresiarch concludes in his usual fine style, but the party also makes an important difference. That Adam Holloway, the Tory MP she's standing against has voted against equal gay rights might also be a debate starter.

As for the Liberal Democrats as a whole, they continue to confuse and perplex rather than inspire confidence in those who are flirting with voting for them. Nick Clegg's latest disastrous decision was to give an interview this week to the Spectator, presumably in a dubious attempt to appeal to those still unsure about the Tories, although you somehow doubt that Speccie readers and subscribers are anything but true blue. Maybe it was a stalking exercise in convincing the Tories that the Libs can be trusted should there be a hung parliament, but even if it was, they must have known that Clegg issuing a paean to Margaret Thatcher over her dismantling of the unions, as well as pledging to cut the deficit wholly through cuts rather than tax rises was hardly going to go down well with committed supporters, nor Labour-leaning floating voters. Perhaps Clegg was thinking that considering the SDP helped split the vote in the crucial 83 election he was on sure ground in praising Thatcher, but the rifts which her reign has left are still with us, and will be for a generation yet.

Clegg himself, and those advising him increasingly seem to the major problem with the party as a whole. He and they don't know what they want to be, and with it what the party is meant to stand for. Even those only slightly interested in politics knew that the main Lib Dem policy of old was a 50% tax rate for those earning over £100,000 a year, and while Labour has introduced something similar as a result of the financial deficit, there's been no similar replacement. The closest the party had was to scrap tuition fees, yet even that is now an "aspiration" rather than a promise.

It's this indecision, reflected in the woeful slogan the party has decided on for for its election campaign, "Change that works for you. Building a fairer Britain", that is more than anything holding the party back. The leadership wants to have it both ways, taking the Tories' crap "vote for change" and combining it with Labour's better but hardly sparkling "A future fair for all". That they couldn't think up anything even slightly original, let alone inspiring is never a good sign for what is yet to come. It already threatens to be a dismal, depressing, underhand and dirty campaign, something which the Lib Dems usually manage to rise above. Not this time it seems.

The conundrum for those of us who've abandoned Labour just as it has abandoned us is that the Liberal Democrats, much as we agree with them on most things, just don't seem to really want to make us truly welcome. In my case it doesn't really make any difference: my constituency is a straight fight between the Tories and Labour, with the Libs a distant third, and the boundary changes seem destined to make it an even safer Tory seat. Whether I vote Lib Dem or Green (although I might be persuaded to waste my vote even further by a far-left grouping, if one stands) isn't going to matter, and increasingly I think I'm going to plump for the latter. Others though will be in a position to make a difference, and beyond a doubt the best possible electoral outcome will be a hung parliament. The leadership and their incompetence are helping to ensure that we have exactly what we don't deserve: either a Labour or Tory outright victory.

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3/12/2010 09:43:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, February 15, 2010 

The hung parliament hypotheticals.

There seems to be a distinctly strange air to politics at the moment. Despite parliament likely rising in around two months for the dreaded general election campaign, it's still as though it's an incredibly long time away, even though business itself is hardly bustling. Only the Tories seem to be keeping themselves visibly busy, and in doing so keep making more and more gaffes. If the David Cameron personal poster campaign was disastrous, or at least it was with the Twitterati (ugh) and the chattering classes, while the policy flip-flops on marriage tax and public spending cuts were more expected but no less damaging, then the almost radio silence from Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the former only seemingly making any noise when the Tories make such execrable (if not deliberate) mistakes as miscalculating 54% for 5.4%, is not doing much to capitalise on it.

On the Lib Dem front, part of this reticence might be due to the strategising going on behind the scenes in the event of a hung parliament. With the polls either predicting one or a slight Tory majority, even if one suspects that come the day the Tories will get a large enough share of the vote to be able to comfortably govern, it is nonetheless the closest the party is likely to come to grabbing some semblance of nationwide power since David Steel infamously told the party to return to their constituencies and prepare for government. Even if similar plans were made prior to 1997, the polls leading up to the election, although narrowing at one point, never suggested anything other than a significant Labour victory.

The apparent insight into the party's thinking that we're given in today's Graun is suitably significant. Rather than seeking a coalition, Nick Clegg is instead mulling over propping up a minority government through supporting a party's program of legislation, as long as certain Liberal Democrat policies are incorporated in it. Just how many will be needed to be implemented is seemingly elastic, with four policies up for immediate discussion, although just two might also be considered. While you could imagine that Labour would be open to debate on any of the four mentioned, the "pupil premium", tax reform, a greener economy and constitutional reform, it's difficult to imagine that the Tories would be malleable on the proposal for capital gains and income tax to be levied at the same rate, or on electoral reform, which they have consistently opposed.

You can see why they're thinking in this way: propping up a defeated Labour party through a coalition is likely to breed only resentment and disdain, even if say, Vince Cable or Clegg became chancellor and the deal involved Gordon Brown stepping down, although another "unelected" prime minister would hardly help matters either. At the same time however it's difficult to see just how much difference there would be in not getting fully into bed with Labour; is the public really going to live with a minority Labour government passing its legislation with Lib Dem support if it's the same old party rejected at the ballot box with a very slight yellow tinge? At the same time you can't see a minority Tory administration being prepared to give way on proportional representation in exchange only for short-term support; why not simply force a second election or, if Labour and the Lib Dems then attempt to from some sort of alliance, simply stand completely against and preach about its illegitimacy and wait for the inevitable breakdown in relations to take full advantage?

The disheartening thing about the likely manoeuvring in the event of an inconclusive election is that this is probably the only way in which the four stated policies on which the Lib Dems would negotiate, all of which are worthy of support, would ever be implemented. Those voting for the third party are always aware that while their vote is all important on a constituency level, it's not going to change much on a national level, even if they would like to see a Lib Dem government. The irony here is that were the hung parliament to become reality, with a Labour-Lib Dem deal, the party itself would almost certainly lose support as a result. While it would be worth it were some form of PR to be introduced as a result, it could also end the possibility of the party holding any rein of power for another generation. While all of this is based upon multiple hypotheticals, there is just as much to be lost from a hung parliament as there is to be gained. We may want a weaker government after 13 years of the opposite, but our system as it stands with the politics we are currently blessed with seems determined to destroy any possibility of it.

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2/15/2010 11:21:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 

The Queen's last gasp.

The obvious response to the Queen's speech would to be to class it as the last gasp gesture of a government on its death bed; the sole remaining embers of a cigarette burnt down to the very end, offering not even the slightest nicotine kick; the last words of the condemned before being dropped through the trapdoor. For once, the obvious response is also the right one, although not necessarily for the reasons detailed by either Cameron or Clegg.

Clegg, in the increasingly hysterical fashion in which he seems to be deciding is the best way to lead his party, declared that the entire speech should have been cancelled so that politics could be "fixed". Cameron too, complained that "the biggest omission" was the cleaning up of expenses. Considering that the proposals from Sir Christopher Kelly in the main do not change anything with any great immediacy, except for the intake at the next election, the only real reason for urgency is to prove who has the hairiest shirt, as it was before. Clegg at least has purer motives in wanting the changing of the way we do politics as a whole, but the emphasis which both are continuing to place on the expenses scandal only encourages the view that nothing has changed, when it simply isn't the case. True, the complete changing of our system which some rather hopefully imagined might happen has not arrived, but then neither Labour and especially not the Tories have it in their interests to implement the likes of electoral reform. We're going to have to make do with what we have for now, and further alienating politics from the majority is not going to have a happy ending.

That said, there's not exactly anything to inspire absolutely anyone in this final dirge of bills. Labour has, unless it's saving the big hitters for the election, finally ran out of any remaining ideas it had. Cameron's ridiculously hyperbolic claim that this was the "most divisive, short-termist and shamelessly self-serving Queen's speech in living memory" was wrong, not because it's divisive, self-serving or short-termist, but because it serves absolutely no one, certainly not Labour themselves. The Tories will obviously claim that the commitment to end child poverty by 2020 is meant to embarrass them once they take over, but it would embarrass whoever's in power. Can anyone seriously believe that child poverty in its entirety will be ended at any point in time, let alone in 11 short years, without corners being cut or pledges being subtlety altered? Capitalism itself ensures that there will always be winners and losers; the poor, as the Bible earnestly predicted, will always be with us. It is, like Nick Clegg said while criticising the fiscal responsibility bill with its equivalent pledge of halving the deficit within 4 years, like legislating the pledge to get up in the morning, an empty gesture.

Empty gestures were however the order of the day, as Jenni Russell ruthlessly exposed in her critique of the "pupil and parent guarantees" in the education bill. Politics by magic wand is though increasingly popular: it's the exact same nonsense as "sending a message", whether it's through foreign policy or on drugs, somehow imagining that by raising cannabis back up to Class B the kids will realise that this isn't a safe drug after all and so reject it in favour of those other legal highs, the ones which the government isn't also attempting to criminalise. There was yet another in the Equality Bill, with the public sector having a duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Will this be done by cutting the ridiculous salaries which some chief executives on councils and other managerial types take home and "redistributing" them to the lower paid in the public sector? I somehow doubt it.

We should perhaps be grateful for small mercies. While there is an umpteenth crime bill, making it even easier for the police to carry stop and searches, which is simply guaranteed to cut crime at a stroke and have no negative consequences whatsoever, there is no new immigration bill. Missing though was the health bill, which was odd enough to prompt Cameron to ask where it was, even while he was lambasting the government for being addicted to "more big government and spending" and also the housing bill, both of which would have been popular with core Labour supporters. Perhaps they're being saved for the manifesto, but it does show that for Cameron's claim that this was all about electioneering (politics, in a Queen's speech, as Martin Kettle notes, how horrible!) Labour still hasn't brought out the really big guns as yet.

It did however make you wonder what the point of the entire exercise was. How many of these bills will actually make it to the statute book is impossible to know. That there are only 33 legislative days in the Lords though between January and when an election is likely to be called suggests that it won't be many, if any. Everyone in essence was going through the motions, gearing up for the real fight, which is still some distance away. Perhaps the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh could have been given the day off and some random individuals pulled off the street, put in fancy dress and lead in to read the interminable goatskin vellum. It would have been a sight more authentic than Cameron and Brown pretending to talk to each other as they walked into the Lords.

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11/18/2009 09:10:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, September 24, 2009 

A very underwhelming conference.

As conferences go, the Liberal Democrats' visit to Bournemouth was not exactly a resounding success. To be sure, as Martin Kettle suggests, anything that brings the party to wider public attention, however fleeting, helps. When 60% don't know who Nick Clegg is, according to a Newsnight poll, a figure which probably suits him down to the ground, you have to hope instead that it's your policies rather than your personality that makes the waves.

It was those policies, naturally, which came just as unstuck as both Clegg and Vince Cable did over the week. It's understandable when we're still either eight or nine months away from the election and when the political theme of the moment is how to get the deficit down with the smallest amount of pain, but surely Clegg and co realised that talking of "savage cuts" to the Guardian wasn't going to go down well? To then increase the pain by taking the sacred cow of abolishing tuition fees and downgrading it to an "aspiration" was surely asking for trouble, or as much trouble as the staid bunch of yellowshirts can manage, which, predictably, was a letter to the self-same Graun.

The standard defence of this rather amicable difference of opinion within the party is that the Liberals are the only remaining of the main three parties which actually decides its policies at conference democratically. This doesn't however explain the bewildering failure of either Clegg or Cable to inform Julia Goldsworthy of the new "mansion tax" policy, despite it firmly being her turf, nor does it then help us to understand why the party didn't know how it was actually meant to work. This wouldn't perhaps be unusual when it comes to either the government or the opposition, responding to a headline with a policy drawn up on the back of the proverbial cigarette packet or dinner napkin, with the details to follow later, but this was the party that usually has it all worked out in advance.

Part of the reason seems to be down to Clegg and Cable thinking that they can run the party as their own fiefdom, buoyed by their overwhelming popularity. You can hardly blame dear old Vince for some of the hype going to his head, but Clegg has hardly done anything to justify such delusions of grandeur. Last year Clegg's closing speech was underwhelming; this year it was completely dismal. To call it a speech might even be awarding it an adjective it doesn't deserve, as Clegg seemed to take the very worst tendencies which overwhelmed the utterances of Tony Blair, such as beginning a new paragraph when he was only starting the next sentence as well as the vacuity of the seemingly endless statements of facts and pseudo-beliefs, and combining it with the personal feel that David Cameron attempts to emulate and dismally fails to. Hence Nick wants to be prime minister, not like the Tories because they believe that they're entitled to it as their time has come again, but because he's on our side, not the side of the "others". When it comes to platitudes made to seem inspiring, wanting to be on the side of the weak rather than the strong is not exactly stirring stuff.

When attacking Labour, especially accusing them of betraying the best hopes of a generation, there was some power in amongst the placidness, but it was few and far between. Easily the worst combination, already being much mocked, was Clegg's espousal of a "progressive austerity". When Cameron and Osborne talk of austerity, it sticks in the craw because you know that not once in their entire lives have they had to experience anything approaching "austerity", yet they delight and seem almost excited at imposing it upon the country. Clegg somehow imagines that by cloaking this austerity in the verbiage of wonky ideology that we won't notice that he in fact seems to be telling us that he was to makes things, err, progressively worse. It's perhaps not the greatest example, but an Alastair Campbell would have seen that nonsense on stilts in the text and sliced it out in a second. Clegg instead just ended up looking like a flatulent prat.

This has less to do with the Liberal Democrats not being a serious alternative, and more to do with the electoral reality which makes them look not a serious alternative. Yet this week should have helped to cement the deal with those flirting with the party, while those paying attention will have likely only been further confused. We used to know what the Lib Dems stood for, just as we used to know what Labour and the Conservatives stand for; no longer. They remain the best, most viable alternative to the apparent foregone conclusion which is a Conservative electoral victory, but they seem to be going out of their way to lose votes rather than win them.

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9/24/2009 10:03:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, September 21, 2009 

The more things change, the more they stay the same, Liberal Democrat style.

It's a theme or cliché I've depended upon in the past, but sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same. A year ago some optimistic sorts thought that the banking crisis might lead to either the downfall of capitalism entirely or at least a softening of its edges; instead we've decided that socialism for the rich is here to stay, while the public sector and poor taking the pain is the order of the day. Likewise, some thought it was a historic opportunity for the left, the long-awaited crash which so many had predicted; instead the right is in the ascendant everywhere, with the exception perhaps of America where "change" came and went rather swiftly. Earlier in the year with the expenses scandal a few talked and hoped of a "new politics"; instead we're entering conference season and even though the theme of across the board cuts might be new, everything else is as tattered and torn always.

Hence I looked back at what I wrote last year about the Liberal Democrat conference. With a few slight edits and changes I could post it back up and I doubt anyone would be the wiser, not least because no one reads this toss anyway. The main difference is that Nick Clegg seems to want to establish his own motif of the times; he thinks, bless him, that this is a "liberal moment", although whether that's liberal with a lowercase or capital is not clear. A look at the polls suggests that this is in fact a begrudging Conservative with a capital C moment, with Cameron and pals now enjoying a 17-point lead over Labour. Last year I wrote that the Lib Dems were flat-lining at under 20% in the polls, and lo and behold, the Lib Dems are still flat-lining at under 20% in the polls a year later.

Politics, probably even more than life itself, isn't fair. If it was, then surely the Liberals would be doing better. Even if this isn't a "liberal moment", Vince Cable still shines as brightly as he did a year ago, and Clegg himself, while still hardly Charlie Kennedy, is making a much better fist as leader than previously. While the other parties bicker about what is to be cut, and don't even begin to broach the even more toxic topic of what taxes are going to have to rise, Cable and Clegg have set out to be both radical and upfront, something you would never accuse either Brown or Cameron of being. That doesn't however necessarily make them right, or even popular within their own party: while Clegg waxes lyrical to the Graun about how "savage" cuts are going to be necessary, the party's base is the one which is most resistant out of the three to those very cuts, instead preferring tax rises.

This not knowing the party's own support, or even directly attempting to alienate it seems puzzling at best. Ask someone with a little politics knowledge what the Lib Dems' three main policies are or were, and they'd probably tell you a 50p in the pound tax on those earning over £100,000 a year, the abolition of tuition fees and opposition to the Iraq war. The first is now long gone, the second is to be "delayed", and the party doesn't seem to know what to do over Afghanistan. Clegg's article with Paddy Ashdown in last week's Graun on the subject was a worthy effort, but "just a little more time and a desperately needed change in strategy" is hardly a vote winner. While locally the Liberal Democrats can trade on being themselves, nationally they are overly dependent, in England at least, on student populations which were more than easy to rally on both fees and Iraq. With the party now unclear on just what it will do on the former and equally opaque on foreign policy, they might have to trade on the fact that they're simply a better prospect than either Labour or the Tories, not the worst reason to vote for them, but not exactly a intellectual position.

The result seems to be that they're trying to please everyone, with the predictable result that everyone is instead slightly annoyed. Why after all should public sector workers have to suffer a pay freeze because of the failures of the private sector (the armed forces will apparently be exempt, interestingly, while they claim that only the pay total will be frozen, meaning that they'll be some redistribution presumably)? Why, just because the private sector is abandoning final salary pension schemes because they're only interested in the short-term, share prices and dividends (while the bosses of course still sit pretty) should the public sector have to follow suit? The idea that everyone should have to share the pain is repugnant. Then there's, much unlike the Liberal Democrats generally, the apparently not thought through at all "mansion tax", which although superficially attractive will undoubtedly breed resentment just as inheritance tax does, and also doubtless further prompt those who can to abandon their pads here and become non-doms rather than pay up. If the Lib Dems have in the past served as a place where policies are first thought up and then stolen by either Labour or the Tories, this one seems destined to be left well alone.

The main criticism which can be levelled against the Lib Dems in general though is that they seem to have no overall view of society as a whole. This seems to be less to do with woolly liberalism and more to do with how the party has concentrated for so long, first on tax and spend and Iraq, to now economics in general, with home affairs and the "spiritual" health of the nation taking a back seat as well as how they've been "embarrassed" in the past about conference debates on reducing the age at which you can buy pornography. For better or worse, we know that the Tories supposedly believe that society is broken, even though their solutions would probably atomise it even further. As far as I can recall the Lib Dems have made little to no response or criticism of this view, even when they are by far the best placed to do so. The Liberator, as noted by John Harris, summarises this beautifully:

"What is missing is a distinctive vision of the good society. This is a prerequisite for any successful political strategy. And it is imperative at an historic turning point such as now."

In fairness, such a vision is notoriously difficult to perfect. Thatcher managed it, even if she didn't create one or believe in it. Blair managed it. Brown has failed to, while Cameron is making an attempt. If Clegg and the Liberal Democrats could start to define one and then proselytise it effectively, they might able to paper over all the over cracks in their facade. They still remain the party which deserves to be given a chance, even as the spectre of a hung parliament begins to fade.

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9/21/2009 10:02:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 

Edifying.

Considering that due to an unfortunate slip of the tongue we'll now be hearing about how Gordon Brown single-handedly saved capitalism for prosperity for the next decade, it's instructive that the Labour benches, obviously in need of a good laugh, found a single mother with small children visiting Nick "Shagger" Clegg so hilarious (14 minutes 40 in). Even when you consider that describing the prime minister's rapid fall from grace as going from "Stalin to Mr Bean" is about the highest form of wit that's emanated from the House of Commons in years, it's still rather surprising that what would embarrass 10-year-olds as being rather unfunny still succeeds in making them roll in the aisles in parliament. All that need have been added was the Speaker to tell those falling about to get their minds out of the sewer and everyone would have been right back in the playground.

(via Justin)

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12/10/2008 11:54:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, September 18, 2008 

The Liberal Democrats: getting better, but not enough.

The Liberal Democrats rarely succeed in getting themselves much attention at the best of times, so their sojourn to Bournemouth, unfortunately occurring at the same time as the implosion in the financial markets has been rather glossed over.

That's doubly unfortunate, as with Labour in dire straits financially, intellectually and electorally the Lib Dems ought to pushing against an open door, trying to communicate with those betrayed and abandoned by New Labour, whether they be the long ignored working class or the clichéd middle-Englanders that turned out in 1997. On the surface, they ought to be doing fantastically well; which other party can boast that it has long predicted the exact conditions which have so overshadowed their yearly show-piece and also the policies to deal with it? Compared to both Labour and the Tories, they're still the only one of the big three that is daring to suggest that actually the prison population should not be inexorably growing, that there is an alternative to the casual authoritarian consensus on criminal justice and that perhaps we shouldn't be wasting billions on renewing Trident.

Instead one poll has them on the depths of just 12%. Considering the poll has the Conservatives on a similarly ridiculous 52% it most likely is and will be written off as a blip. Even so, the party otherwise has been flat-lining just below the 20% mark for quite some time, and the defenestration of Ming Campbell last year has done nothing to alter that. Nick Clegg's performance as leader has hardly been stellar: the most attention he received was his "confession" to Piers Moron that he had slept with around 30 women, and he did himself no favours this week either when he thought that pensioners somehow manage to get by on £30 a week. He's also had to cope with being effectively the second Liberal Democrat that the media turn to, such has been the demand for the dancing demigod Vince Cable, merely because he unlike legions of other politicians can actually answer a question and knows what he's talking about.

Much was in evidence at the actual conference. Clegg's speech, despite some of the reviews of it, especially from the Labour-leaning bloggers, was probably about as good as it was going to get, getting the mixture just right between knockabout, talking of a "zombie" Labour government whilst attacking the Conservative party that doesn't have much left to it once you have taken the unpleasant bits out, and the deadly serious, the economic reforms which are much in order and also the proposed tax cuts for the poorest and middle earners which dominated the week. He might have made the mistake of trying to be too much like Cameron, despite the brickbats, and the wandering about and waving of arms is surely one innovation at political conferences that is not here to last, but it was what you expected: middling, strong in places and weak in others.

All eyes though were again on Cable, and his speech was little short of barnstorming. Delivered in his usual understated fashion, with by far the most wounding criticism against the Tory tax policy of "sharing the proceeds of recession" yet made. This could have quite easily been a speech by someone decidedly old Labour, from a bygone age, attacking tax evasion, demanding that socialism for the rich does not become the new religion, and calling for the poorest to be lifted out of tax altogether, while abandoning the bureaucracy of tax credits. Some bits were needlessly populist, like the idea that everyone earning over £100,000 in the public sector should have to re-apply for their jobs, which will hardly be fighting needless waste in the short-term, but this was the sort of thing on the whole you wished that the party of government should be proposing.

They could of course go further. One of the things not mentioned by Cable was the disastrous public finance initiative, with its around £100bn of debt off the Treasury's balance sheet, which needs to abandoned forthwith. On education the Liberal Democrats are still a much of a muchness, the "pupil premium" being all well and good, but not when they don't oppose the deeply authoritarian nature which much of the erroneously named academies adopt. When some schools resemble something out of 1984 and provide courses of training in working in a call centre, the equivalent of adopting pessimism as the school ethos, something has gone deeply wrong. On foreign policy they ought to dare to be different and potentially be unpopular by calling either for a withdrawal from Afghanistan or for a complete reappraisal of the current ahistorical campaign which cannot possibly either win local hearts and minds or beat the increasing insurgency with the number of troops deployed.

These might help win other a few more supporters, but you also have to be both realistic and fatalistic about their chances at the next election. They face a Conservative party which doesn't just pose a threat to Labour but also to them, especially in the southern seats, which is doubtless where the tax cutting policy has been aimed directly at. It's a risk worth taking, but it's unlikely to pay off. For those of us who have no intention of voting either Conservative or Labour at the next election, which leaves us roughly with a choice of either the Lib Dems or the Greens, the conference won't have done anything to actively turn most people off, but when the election will be fought primarily on Labour's unpopularity and giving them a kicking rather than actual policy, it means that a reversal of 1997 with a huge Conservative majority this time round looms ever closer.

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9/18/2008 10:40:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 

Up all night with Nick Clegg.

Being not the most frequent user of pubs, the closest I get to the bar room bores are their equivalent on public transport. Of the three most annoying things and behaviour which goes on while aboard them, third is the increasing tendency for people to not just listen to their music at a volume that the entire bus can hear on their headphones, but to actually broadcast it to everyone through their mobile phone itself, music which is always the least likely stuff you would ever listen to, let alone share with the rest of the class. Second is those who take it upon themselves to talk as loud as they possibly can about their sex life, in intimate detail, which has previously involved someone's predilection for being fisted. First though is taking it into the physical dimension, when couples just can't leave each other alone for ten seconds and spend their entire time with their faces wrapped around each others, or going further and indulging in heavy petting. That this means you haven't got the slightest idea where to look and that they tend to embarrass everyone around them doesn't seem to matter.

As you can tell, I'm a miserable fucking bastard. I'm sure I'm not alone though in finding just how many different sex partners someone has had as about as interesting and essential as being err, fisted on public transport. Hence why I couldn't be less fascinated in learning that Nick Clegg has apparently had between 20 and 30 different partners. Hey ho, congrats old man. What exactly I'm supposed to do with this information or whether it's more likely to make me vote Liberal Democrat or not I'm not sure, but it was obviously important enough for Clegg to not shrug off the question when asked by Piers Moron in his GQ interview. We could debate exactly why he answered the question instead of telling Moron to mind his own business until the cows come home, but nonetheless he answered it.

The key fact should be is that it doesn't make any difference. Would someone reading this blog think less of me if I'd slept with over 100 or if I hadn't slept with any? I would hope not. It's as irrelevant as what I look like, whether I've done drugs in the past or what colour my skin is. What matters is what they believe, what they think and in Clegg's case, how he intends to lead his party and potentially change their policies. Strangely, as Paul Linford points out, to Clegg it seems his sex life is more easily discussed and a legitimate question than being asked about his previous drug use is, a question to which he said he had the right to having a private past, something I'd readily agree with. The point is though that if politicians had nothing they thought they ought to hide, they'd answer it. Again, it shouldn't matter whether someone's used drugs in the past or not: what matters is their views on it now. This however seems to pale into insignificance when the right-wing especially continues to see drug use as a matter of both morals and mental strength, hence why Cameron never owned up to his own previous drug use, nor has his shadow chancellor, George Osbourne. Having smoked a joint, and even more threatening, having enjoyed it, is still seen as either setting a bad example or even condoning its use now. That no politician that doesn't want to bring the remaining rump of the moral majority down on their head means that any admission of previous use must be condemned as youthful exuberance or as completely different now that said drug is 20,000 times more dangerous.

This can't possibly be expanded to youthful overuse of the loins though, surely? According to Amanda Platell, oh yes it can:

But that's precisely my point. It's all very well for Mr Clegg, by all accounts a devoted and loyal family man, to dismiss his early excesses as the indiscretions of youth.

But that is the same defence used again and again by politicians about drugs. "Yeah I did it, but I got over it."

Alas, many young people in our most broken communities don't "get over it".

For many of them, lacking Mr Clegg's privileged background and supportive family, casual sex becomes a way of life, just as casual cannabis use slides into lifelong drug dependency.

And the dangers for society are only too obvious to behold.


Ah yes, it's all right for Clegg and his highly sexed liberal university chums to bang each other in cyclical, but introduce such behaviour to the lower classes and it all gets out of hand. Before you know it you've moved from casual sex use into the use of harder sex, such as fisting, rampant rabbits and domination, just as casual cannabis use slides into the inevitability of shooting up and err, sucking dick for crack. That this comes from Platell, who in the past has written an extra chapter of Sex in the City, where the continuing joke is that Samantha has an affair with a different man each week, and also wrote the thinly-veiled attack on some of those she encountered in the newsroom in Scandal, which she herself freely admits was a "bonkbuster", satirised at the time by Private Eye as "Scanties" with Platell trying to seduce William Hague, is maybe ever so slightly rich.

The unspoken fact here is that like walking in on your parents having sex, or even hearing the noises through the wall, politicians discussing sex is about the most likely thing to turn everyone else off it that you could possibly imagine. The entire nation reached for its collective sick bag when back in 2005 Blair boasted in the Sun's pages of having Cherie five times a night, and the thought of Brown going at it hammer and tongs is possibly even worse. Jonathan Ross was vehemently attacked when he asked Cameron whether he'd masturbated to the thought of Thatcher, which Cameron refused to answer, but it is hard to imagine exactly what the average red-blooded young male in the 80s did see in the prime minister; perhaps it was that everlasting aphrodisiac, power itself. That power is something that Clegg is highly unlikely to ever yield, yet at the same time he's displayed that quality we supposedly want most from our politicians: honesty, or at least answering a straight question with a straight answer. He should now discuss his past drug use if any, but let's not attack him for his conquests themselves, even if they are as tedious as the Liberal Democrat party itself is.

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4/02/2008 10:17:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, December 18, 2007 

The clunking Clegg.

It's Nick Clegg then. Or, probably more interestingly, it's Jacob Zuma. Perhaps if the Lib Dem leadership contest had been between a man acquitted of rape who had a shower after unprotected sex to ensure he didn't contract HIV and another who believes there is no connection between HIV and AIDS, the turnout might have gone up rather than down on the last contest, itself only conducted last January.

My own failure to raise any enthusiasm for the leadership contest seems to have been the default position even amongst most Liberal Democrats. Presented to them were two white men, one slightly younger and fresher faced than the other, both privately educated at err, the same school, both with much the same ideas as each other. Oh, Huhne tried to flush out Clegg's previous propensity towards more free-market ideology concerning the public services, and there were epithets of Calamity Clegg, but that was as far as it went. Their stupefying performances on both Newsnight and Question Time, apart from being soporific, only reinforced the notion that there was very little to nothing whatsoever to choose between them.

That impression is hardly going to be changed by Clegg's acceptance speech, after winning the vote by only slightly more than 500 votes. It might be that we've gotten use to leadership changes in politics recently, but it all sounded so familiar. Change and ambition! Ambition and change! Renewed ambition for Britain! Change Britain! Ambition to change Britain! Britain to change ambition! Change to Britain ambition! And so forth. Interchangeable to a T, the only real difference to the other leaders of the main political parties was Clegg's similarly tedious repetition of just how liberal both he and Britain is. You don't get that impression reading the Mail and Sun forums, that's for sure.

After all, this ought to be so easy for the Liberal Democrats. Clegg rightly identifies that Labour and the Conservatives are mutating into each other, but he's wrong that left and right have broken down. They're still there, just, it's that Labour and the Conservatives haven't wanted to be constrained by those labels for all the wrong reasons. The sense that Labour is decaying is becoming ever more evident, while David Cameron is so opportunistic that he's claiming to be a progressive with which even the Greens can find common cause. Somehow you can't imagine John Redwood and Caroline Lucas belonging to the same party. Brown has blown his inheritance while the Tories offer absolutely nothing but more of the same but with a slightly nastier face.

Given the choice, you get the feeling that most of the membership would have settled for Vince Cable staying in the job. Few politicians have made such an impact as he has in two months, going from a man with a charisma bypass who didn't look much younger than poor old Ming himself to a clunking fist in record time, or to use his own analogy backwards, from Mr Bean to Stalin. Granted, as Charles Kennedy has pointed out, he's had the benefit of knowing that he hasn't got to do the job permanently and with few of the duties of an actual leader, but from his boycott of the Saudi royal visit to his authority over the Northern Rock debacle, he's both sounded and played the part with panache.

Clegg will pick up the mantle with difficulty. Despite the lack of real difference, I slightly favoured Huhne for the position, more because Clegg seems a Cameron clone, or rather a clone of a clone, considering Cameron's own impersonation of Blair. He has yet to convince on any subject, while Huhne has handled his environment shadow job well. Going by his current performance on Newsnight, where his response to Paxman's question on three things where he would be advancing the Liberal Democrats, he said they would be concentrating more on education, health and crime; in other words, just like the other parties. Things, it seems, can only get worse.

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12/18/2007 10:17:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 15, 2007 

So. Farewell Then. Menzies Campbell.

"Now we really are in the shitter."

Very little overall surprise that Ming Campbell has been unceremoniously forced out as Liberal Democrat leader, jumping before he became the victim of a death of a thousand cuts like Charles Kennedy; more that it has been both so soon and so sudden. There were murmurings at the Liberal Democrat conference, mostly stirred by the media who can think of nothing more boring than a week of actual discussion of new policies when they can challenge an under-performing leader, but it was assumed that there would be something of a more dignified hand-over approaching the changing of the guard in Labour earlier in the year, rather than this brutal and humiliating exit for Ming.

The challenge, more than anything, was two-fold: firstly, Ming simply wasn't Charles Kennedy. The country as a whole would probably have preferred chatshow to stay in the top job regardless of whether he needed to tackle his drinking problem. That he was also seen as being at least partially responsible for Kennedy's demise also didn't help. However hard Ming tried, and he did, with his speech at the conference being decent if rather frightening because most people had never seen Campbell visibly angry and so apparently determined to make the best of it, he simply couldn't be equal to the easy charm and ordinariness that radiated from Kennedy. Secondly, the Lib Dem's three main, easily identifiable, rallying cry policies have all either fallen by the wayside or diminished in value. Iraq is still a disaster, but it's one we're getting out of shortly; student top-up fees have been slightly lightened by the government's reintroduction of grants; and their 50p top-rate of tax on those earning over £100,000 a year has evolved into the more fashionable green taxes.

Add into this mix Cameron's success with the Conservatives, resulting in some floating voters' returning to the Tories, especially, if the polls are to be believed, enthused by the Tories' inheritance tax pledge, and this, rather than Ming's actual leadership are what has left the party in an apparent mess.

Ming's victory back in January last year was itself such a compromise. Simon Hughes had been the victim of an outting by force by the Scum, the Mark Oaten "scandal" had just occurred, while Ming's other main opponents, Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne had neither the recognition factor nor the support within the party to stand in the way of the heir apparent. At best Ming was only going to lead the party into the next election and no further: holding onto the gains made under Kennedy once two-party politics was re-established was to be his real challenge, rather than furthering them, impressive victories in a couple of by-elections or not, and even this strategy was undermined by the changes in the political wind and the Lib Dems' actual policies.

The biggest tragedy is perhaps that Campbell, out of all the current "big three" political leaders was by far the most honest, urbane and principled. He needed some prompting from Charles Kennedy before he was totally sold on opposition to the Iraq war, but he soon became associated as the only person in any position of authority that was asking the pertinent questions needed. The term "flawed prospectus" may not have been most passionate denunciation of an illegal conflict that has led to the deaths of so many, but it was Ming's way of landing a blow without opening himself up to any of the easy smears of either being a defeatist, an apologist or an anti-American. Despite his poor performances at prime minister's questions, where he seemed out of his depth to begin with, he improved, and he was always surest when in actual debate, not the mock Punch and Judy version served up on Wednesday lunchtimes. He shined on a recent Question Time, but doing so there was never going to turn the polls his way.

That was perhaps his downfall: he lacked the killer instinct that those who are really successful require. True, Charles Kennedy didn't have it either, but then he was up against Blair and Hague and Blair and Howard, a choice to make any believer in genuine political choice shudder. Again, that also hasn't changed under Brown and Cameron, but some seem convinced enough that it has to demand a change. The obvious successor is Nick Clegg: solid enough at Home Affairs, but one of the "Orange Book" liberals, and nowhere near as genial as either Ming or Kennedy. The Liberal Democrats might gain in the short term, but politics tonight in this country is the poorer for Campbell's unhappy, isolated resignation. The only bright spot is that his tenure came nowhere near to the disaster that was Iain Duncan Smith's of the Tories, and that is very little comfort.

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10/15/2007 09:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

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