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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Wednesday, June 27, 2007 

One gone, another moving in?

Rejoice? That ought to have been the primary emotion now that Blair's long goodbye is finally over, only for the fact that it's gone on for such an interminable period that the only one I feel is a weariness, with regret that the bastard's leaving with his head held high, going into a job where he's meant to be bringing peace to a region where he has only delivered war and empty promises.

Should we rejoice however now that Brown is finally in the job that he has coveted for so long, a real Labour prime minister after ten years of a phony one? Last night's Newsnight did a good job of showing just how open Brown really has been to the public and to questioning during his tour of the country - shut out at every opportunity by press officers modeled on Alastair Campbell and by security men and police influenced by the same behaviour meted out to Walter Wolfgang. If that's the changes which Brown's promising, then we're getting out of the fat and heading into the fire.

It's probably worth a slight cheer that the dross is getting cleaned out, although we won't have the full details of Brown's new cabinet until tomorrow. Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Beckett, united in being completely out of their depth in their respective jobs, are at least finally put out of their misery. John "not a single shot" Reid has already announced his departure, as has Lord Goldsmith and another Blairite apparatchik, Hilary Armstrong. If Hazel Blears, Tessa Jowell, Lord Falconer, Lord Drayson and Liam Byrne follow suit then Brown might just mean a certain amount of what he says.

He should be similarly judged on just how far his familiar talk of a new politics is. It needs to involve a full, independent inquiry into the Iraq war - involving both how the intelligence was presented by the government in the build up to war, how apparently the planning for after the invasion was either ripped up and ignored or how there was none in the first place, and as Lord Goldsmith has already suggested, how the mistreatment and torture of detainees came to be both accepted and even encouraged, with predictable results. A similar inquiry into the 7/7 attacks wouldn't go amiss either.

Next Brown needs to set out just how soon the troops in Iraq are to be brought back - they are, as General Dannatt said, simply making the security situation in the south worse. Enough blood has been spilt, both Iraqi and British. Handover in the other provinces formerly controlled by the British has already taken place with only minor problems. The majority of troops could be back home within 3 months, with a complete withdrawal within a year easily being achievable.

Reid and Brown have already hinted at a new attempt at reaching cross-party consensus over anti-terror legislation. The introduction of intercept evidence, rejected so far, needs to be reconsidered, despite the concerns of the security services. The disappearance of those being held under control orders has only proved what the critics said they would be: both illiberal and ineffective. Rather than derogating from the article 5 of the ECHR, those being held under them should be either prosecuted or set free, it's that simple. Brown is meant to support up to 90 days detention without trial: he could signal a new approach to civil liberties by deciding that 28 days is in fact more than enough, especially combined with offences not yet used that make it illegal to withhold encryption keys. Putting into action the leak at the weekend of the possibility of the lifting of the protest ban within a mile of parliament should also be one of his first acts in office. Scrapping ID cards and reexamining the need for both the children's database and "the Spine" medical records database, indeed the whole National Programme for IT would also be more than welcome.

Columnists have talked of Brown wanting to make considerable constitutional changes, even as potentially radical as either a bill of rights or an actual constitution. If we're to have either, then the bollocks about "rights and responsibilities" has to be dropped. We have rights: we don't need to be reminded of our responsibilities while exercising them, especially in any document, which is the way the ludicrous debate has been going. Potential electoral reform, also hinted at, would also be welcome. Almost every other election going is now under a form of proportional representation, whether it be for the European parliament or the Scottish/Welsh votes, so let's at the very least have the alternative vote system at Westminster, if not full PR.

This is without even going into the NHS or further education reform, on which Brown's ideas/plans have also not looked particularly promising. If he means what he says, then full consultation, rather than top-down enforced for the sake of it change must be the order of the day. There's next to no chance that he'll reconsider the huge wastefulness of his pet PFI projects, especially considering how they've helped keep him from breaking his so-called "golden rule" by keeping the costs off the public balance sheet, but it's a scandal waiting to happen, and he ought to act first.

There's much much more, on criminal justice, immigration and the environment which could be discussed, but this ought to be a more than adequate basis on which his promises to be different should be eventually considered. An election sooner rather than later would also be a welcome step, if he's to firmly cement his mandate which not even Labour party members were called on to confirm. A year should be more than enough time to consider whether he's been true to his word. If so, rejoicing then might be in order. I'm not holding my breath.

Related post:
Chicken Yoghurt - Bye then

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