Thursday, January 29, 2009 

Lording it over us all.

The old cliché regarding political scandals was that Conservatives gave in to temptation over sex, the Profumo affair probably the most notorious, although Cecil Parkinson and David Mellor, not to mention Alan Clark, down the years gave it a run for its money, while Labour MPs sold their souls for money. Perhaps it could be put down to the narrowing of difference between the Tories and Labour that Robin Cook, Ron Davies and David Blunkett all became known for their own sexual dalliances, but few will now forget the loans for peerages affair.

With that in mind, it's no real surprise that the Lords themselves have at long last come under scrutiny. They are the last real target for scandal-mongering: we've had the expenses probes, the immigration and foreign criminal affairs, the hysteria over paedophiles in schools and the already mentioned cash for coronets. Like with the expenses fiddles and the nods and winks in exchange for donations or otherwise leading to peerages and honours, this has also been going on for years. For the most part we've been concerned with the gravy train whereby ministers who find themselves out in the cold suddenly discover that the companies which had an interest in their policy area are prepared to pay for their advice: most notably David Blunkett, having began the ID card process, has been advising the companies bidding for the contract, while at the same time writing newspaper articles and letters without bothering to inform his readers of his own interests; Patricia Hewitt, who did such a wonderful job as health secretary, soon joined Boots and Cinven, involved with BUPA, while also finding time to work for BT, having additionally formerly been a trade minister; then there was Alan Milburn, another former health secretary, who became an advisor to... Pepsico. There are dozens of other examples.

Part of the reason why anyone could have seen this eventually coming is that this government has been more dependent on unelected ministers than any other in the past. The Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform has only three elected ministers; the rest are all Lords, including the prince of darkness himself. Combined with the removal of hereditaries, who often had their own (inherited) fortunes, and the fact that the Lords has now been stuffed even further with first Blair's and now Brown's cronies, as well as those who have retired from their constituency so that young blood can take over their seat in exchange for a seat in the Lords, it's small wonder that the entrapment practised by the Sunday Times hadn't been tried before.

Less easy to propose is just how the Lords should be reformed to reduce the chances of this happening to a minimum. Of course, that the Lords should be elected is apparent, and that the second chamber is still appointed with all that entails is a continuing black mark on our democracy. The saddest thing is that by in effect abolishing the Lords as it currently exists, the end result will almost certainly mean that the second chamber will become just as party political as the Commons is, and with it will go the resistance to which much of Labour's worst legalisation has quite rightly come under. The solution, in turn to that, would be proportional representation, ensuring that no party could ever have as large a majority as Labour had between 97 and 05, and unable to rail-road through so many bad laws as they managed, but Westminster is resistant at the best of times to such sharp, shocking democratic reform, and to do two things at once would almost certainly be an affront too far.

Even with an elected second chamber, we would still have the problem of whether or not the new Lords would be paid, which they would almost certainly have to be to reduce the conflict of interests which are now becoming ever more apparent. Already there is massive resistance to paying politicians anything extra at all, which even when taking into account the generous expenses, MPs are certainly not overpaid for what is a job with long hours (if additionally long holidays) and a heavy workload for little public gratitude in return; paying the Lords, who do far less even if it's still an essential role, would be asking for trouble.

We could just write this off as an anomaly, a case of grasping peers who have already long got fat off the public trough by whoring themselves out to the private one, as Lord Taylor and Lord Truscott are the epitome of. While undoubtedly it still remains the case that we are one of the least corrupt democracies in the world, at the least there has to a mechanism by which peers can be expelled, just as they can currently be denied from taking on the ermine. When Labour tried to introduce something along these lines so that Archer could be prevented from taking to the red benches after his prison sentence, the Conservatives moved to block it, resulting in its dropping. Perhaps Blair already at that time had an inkling of what else was yet to be uncovered and so was happy to oblige; perhaps Labour was just, as usual, moving between cowardice and ruthlessness.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

1/29/2009 10:33:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 02, 2008 

Blair today, gone tomorrow.

Almost perversely, I take no pleasure whatsoever in the resignation of Ian Blair. Perhaps because it has come so suddenly and without warning, when if he had had any dignity it would have been when it was revealed that he hadn't known that an innocent man had been shot dead by his officers until morning after it had happened, when even his secretary had apparently known.

That stubborn obstinacy to admit to his failings however was something that completely dominated his tenure as the Metropolitan police's chief commissioner. While the execution of a Brazilian man on a tube train the day after an attempted round of suicide attacks was ultimately what brought him down, with its slow but inexorable casting of a shadow over him, this was a policeman who thought that he was a politician first and a cop second. He never ceased to inform the country of just how dark the sky was due to the potential threat of exploding brown people, even while his officers proved themselves almost as adept at causing fear as the terrorists' attempts were amateurish. He campaigned for up to 90 days detention without charge, thought that identity cards were a brilliant idea, and generally put himself about as much as he possibly could.

While you cannot directly blame Blair personally for the smear campaigns against Jean Charles de Menezes and secondly the Kalam family, he was ultimately responsible for the actions of his officers. What he can be directly linked to was the decision to plead not guilty to the charges brought under the health and safety act, especially when so many other senior officers pleaded with him to take the hit and get over it. Again, even this wouldn't have been so bad if he had instructed his lawyers not to be aggresive and instead defend the Met purely from the operational point of view, that it had been a dreadful mistake in an incredibly hectic and uncertain time, but they didn't; they went straight for the jugular. Jean Charles de Menezes was according to Ronald Thwaites QC more or less asking for it: despite never being challenged by the police, Thwaites claimed that he had failed to comply with them; that he looked like the suspect, when his skin tone was completely different; that he was aggressive and threatening when he acted just like every other commuter that morning, as the CCTV showed; and that he might have acted in such a way because he may have thought he had cocaine in his pocket, even though he hadn't.

No one with absolutely any feeling for the de Menezes family would have argued such a case, but Ian Blair somehow imagined it was appropriate. Just like other things he thought were appropriate, such as recording a call he made to the attorney general without permission, as well as ones to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The IPCC in fact undoubtedly delivered the most telling criticism of him: that if he hadn't, as soon as he knew a man had been shot dead by police on 22/07/05, wrote to the prime minister asking that the IPCC be stopped from launching their investigation into the death of someone at the hands of the police, as they are legally required to do, then many of the things that subsequently happened that resulted in the prosecution against the Met may not have occurred. There was never any evidence that Blair was trying to cover anything up, as after all, he was completely out of the loop. It was just a typically ignorant, short-sighted move, delaying something that would have had to be done at some point as a matter of course. That delay effectively left him a dead man walking.

I take no pleasure, not even schadenfreude, not just because it sets a precedent where the London Mayor can effectively veto the choice of the home secretary, not to mention the MPA, further politicising the role, but because as bad as Blair was in so many ways, there's hardly a whole bundle of talent waiting to take over from him. And as much as he was potentially corrupt, constantly scaremongering, interfering in political discussions and out of his depth, he also was probably the most liberal, at least on general policing and on encouraging ethnic minorities to join the force, commanding officer the Met has ever had and is now likely to have for quite some time. Despite his apparent personality clashes with both Ali Dizaei and Tarique Ghuffar, he started the move towards a more representative Met, and no one I think can begin to suggest that was anything but a good thing. When you consider that the other most senior police officers, or at least publicly recognisable ones of late have been Lord Stevens, Andy Hayman and Peter Clarke, all of them as either convinced of the sky falling as Blair was or in the case of Hayman, just as guilty as Blair over de Menezes whilst also accused of siphoning off money, then it doesn't exactly fill you with hope that the replacement will be any better. Celebrate the demise of Blair if we must, but perhaps as with what we got after the other Blair, we might come to rue what we wished for.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

10/02/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, September 22, 2008 

Dawn of the Dead comes to Manchester.

According to Nick Clegg in his conference speech last week, we have a zombie government. That probably isn't entirely accurate; more appropriate is that we have a zombie Labour party. We aren't here talking about the sort of zombies depicted in certain films that acquire super-human strength despite being dead, being able to rip apart the living with their bare hands to feast on the gooey treats within, but rather the sort of undead creature that is to all intents and purposes dead but refuses to give up the ghost, like Norman Tebbit or the Queen Mother in her final years. To stretch the analogy even further and refer to undoubtedly the greatest zombie film of all time, Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the conference attendees are even reflecting the behaviour of their fictional cousins by taking over a fortified building, somewhere that reminds them of what they used to do. The difference is that this time there's going to be no Roger, Peter, Fran and Stephen to evict the zombies before themselves being forced to leave by looters on motorbikes.

There is little doubt that the stench of death pervades the Manchester Central conference centre. This is a party, truly, desperately going through the motions, pretending to the outside world that everything is going swimmingly, that the economic crisis has given them an opportunity they perhaps didn't have a week ago, that it can still be turned around, and that in the words of David Miliband, the party should "prove the fatalists wrong". It's probably not worth going by remarks which can be misconstrued by those overhearing them, but Miliband's apparent suggestion to an aide that he had toned down his speech because he wanted to avoid a "Heseltine moment" speaks volumes. Ostensibly, the entire event is building up to Gordon Brown's speech tomorrow afternoon, which supposedly is meant to help determine how much longer he might have in office. The reality is that the conference has became so stage managed that reading anything into the immediate reaction is almost as pointless as the entire sojourn itself. Long ago was anything that might really trouble the leadership stripped out; now delegates just vote for policies that will go before the party's national executive committee, where they'll be sharply rejected.

All that's left therefore is for ministers to announce the odd new policy, if they can be called that, in otherwise soporific speeches which nonetheless bloggers and commentators rate because they simply have to write something. Accordingly, David Clark asks whether Miliband is "the English Obama", hopefully rhetorically. Likewise, Lance Price, an ex-spin doctor, asks whether James Purnell is "Labour's Theo Walcott". No reason here to not respond bluntly; no, he's a right-wing Blairite that chose the wrong party to join, and if he's another leadership candidate, then Labour is not just undead, it really has passed on. Jacqui Smith additionally emerged yesterday and revealed the plans for "reform" on prostitution. While these are not quite as bad as they might have been, Labour still intends to try to make kerb-crawling illegal, enhance powers to both police and local councils to close down brothels if prostitutes are being run by a pimp or are trafficked, which in other words will most likely mean anyone who fancies ridding their neighbourhood of the moral scourge will more easily succeed, whilst men who pay for sex with women "who are exploited", i.e. controlled for another person's gain, which again means either run by a pimp or trafficked, will be able to be prosecuted. This should at least lead to some interesting conversations in brothels up and down the land, where the punter questions the worker before handing over the money and dropping his/her trousers about their working conditions. If anything proves that New Labour is still just as illiberal, idiotic and distant from the realities of the real world as it's always been, then this must be it.

The award for the most chutzpah though must go to both Alastair Darling and Brown himself for their various utterances over the weekend and today. Only now that the proverbial horse has firmly bolted do they dare to mention the inequity of the City bonus culture or suggest firmer regulation of the City, but even now such a simple little word as "greed", one even used by John McCain in the United States, is too obscene to pass their lips. Simon Hoggart has already referred to Brown's vision of the reform needed to correct his own reforms which got us into this mess as the Theseus defence: thanks to his magic thread, we'll all be OK, which is reassuring. Even these slight sops to the left though are in keeping with the pretence being kept up by the party of doing something whilst actually doing nothing, as we all know that they don't mean a word of it, nor is there much in the way of legislating which can be done to stop CEOs and board members from awarding themselves such pay deals. Instead we must be thankful that the government stepped in last week and allowed Lloyds TSB to take over HBOS and create an behemoth of a bank, a merger that would have otherwise have been rejected by the competition commission as likely to become a monopoly. Doubtless we will be just as thankful in a few years' time when the bonuses are again being ramped up whilst the difference and diversity on the high street will be even further restricted and diluted.

Does it really seem five years ago that Brown made his barnstorming, defining speech whilst chancellor about being "best when we are Labour", which made some of us hope, probably beyond any reason, that a Brown premiership would be different, bolder, better than Blair's? There won't of course be any repetition of that tomorrow, nor should there be. He needs to get the balance right between introspection, admitting he was wrong over the 10p rate, that he has made other mistakes over the past year and that he needs to improve, and setting out something approaching a vision of how he intends to lead both the party and the country from now on. He could do worse than go along the lines of suggesting that the economic crisis is a paradigm shift or an epoch making moment, even if it isn't, suggesting that the time when the party leadership would ask how high when the CBI said jump is over, and build from there. Moreover, he ought to confront the "elephant in the room": the challenge to himself. Directly ask the party what they will replace him with, and just how much difference there really is between what he is offering, both to the party and the country, with the so-called contenders. It won't stop them from overthrowing him if it's what they've already decided upon, but it might strike a chord with some in the nation itself. If you're going to go down, you might as well do it with both some glory and some dignity, and when neither of those qualities have been present in Manchester at all, that really might make some sit up and take notice.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

9/22/2008 11:02:00 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.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

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

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 

What happened to the vision we had?

Hands up everyone who prior to today had heard of David Cairns, not including those that have the privilege of him being their constituency MP. Exactly. Whether you agree or not with the proposition that the 2006 September rebellion against Blair was Brown inspired, most will agree that at least that uprising had a few recognisable names involved. If you want to be even more disparaging, it's not completely ridiculous to argue that this rebellion appears to amount to Siobhan McDonagh and her relatives and friends. Cairns used to be one of McDonagh's researchers; more amusingly, and possibly completely inaccurately, according to the Grauniad Diary, David Evans, who was defending McDonagh at the World at One on Monday, has two cats, which are apparently called Siobhan and Margaret, after McDonagh and her sister, the former Blairite general secretary of the party.

As alluded to on Friday, this putsch might have more weight behind it if the protagonists themselves were offering something approaching an alternative, but they aren't. They're not even near to deciding who should replace Brown if their attempt at pushing for a leadership contest is successful. Presuming that Brown himself will be fighting to keep his job, just who exactly will square up against him? Will someone who seriously fancies their chances of leading the party whenever Brown's tenure ends step up to the plate, to use that horrible American phrase? Or will we instead have a stalking horse candidate, with Charles Clarke or perhaps John Reid standing for the unreconstructed Blairite continuation project?

If anyone was hoping that Fiona Mactaggart, one of the very few "big" names that has signed up to the idea of a leadership contest would perhaps articulate what she thinks Labour should be doing outside of taking on the Tories and the most vague declarations of finding a new "narrative", then her addition to the current trend of writing 600 words which are so aimless and indistinct that you forget within 5 minutes what they amounted to proves otherwise. In fact, you can dispense with the entire thing except for the closing paragraph:

The leadership problem that Labour must address is the opposite: we offer means without a bold and inspiring set of ends. Labour MPs can't just hope something might turn up - that would let down the people who need us most.

Ah, so that's it! Labour's got the means; all it needs are the ends! In other words, this is the narrative nonsense all over again. The sudden espousal of this idea of a narrative would suggest that previously New Labour had one. At best, what New Labour has done over the last 11 years is string together a succession of plot devices, based around increased spending on the public services, a strong economy and reacting as quickly and efficiently as possible to whatever it is which is on today's Daily Mail/Sun front page, all tied together by the presence of Teflon Tony himself. While the Conservatives were weak, which is more or less up until 2006, this could still be construed as a defining agenda; it was left to the more pretentious in the commentariat to complain loudly that there was an exceptional vacuum at the heart of New Labour. Now though, with Brown made to look like an idiot every time the news bulletins replay those endless successions of him foolishly claiming to have abolished boom and bust, the country moving towards outright umbrage at the level of tax, and especially the taxes which are funding the busybodies which are now apparently fining people for farting out of turn, and an team in 10 Downing Street which seems to be fighting itself more than reacting to events outside, the claims that Labour is even offering anything approaching means, let alone ends, ring ever more hollow.

Both sides are still of course pointing each other and shouting either "Blairite!" or "Brownite!" at them, and indeed, I have been more than prone to doing so myself. If ever there was a time when this could not be more irrelevant, it's now. Back during the deputy leadership contest, the achingly Blairite Hazel Blears tried to argue, pathetically, that there was no longer any Blairites or Brownites, there was just Labour. It wasn't true at the time, but a year and a few months on it's suddenly applicable when you realise something: neither the Blairites nor the Brownites any longer have any differences over policy; the disagreement is instead between those that think Brown is doomed and needs replacing and those that think it would do nothing whatsoever to restore Labour's standing in the polls. Indeed, if anything all the squabbling is likely to do is further show the party to be divided at a time when most would expecting that clunking fist to be making itself present.

Like with Cruddas and Rutherford last week, the only part of the party that still appears to be both thinking and operating is the left, with John McDonnell making the exact above point. Even he though is resigned to the idea that Labour has lost the next election: he's instead concentrating on how the Labour left as a whole can stay afloat, even if the rest of the party is wiped out by the Cameron advance, sketching out the beginnings of a plan on how to do so.

The moment of truth might well be if one of the bigger names mentioned by Paul Linford in a similarly downbeat post also resigns. Other comparisons have been made to the demise of Thatcher in 1990, but that analogy doesn't really seem to fit either. In 1990 the cabinet were split on Europe and there was fundamental disagreement also over the poll tax. No one can claim at the moment that Brown's cabinet or the wider parliamentary party is split over such defining matters; instead, it's all about Brown himself, his failure to weave the narrative and the Conservative resurgence. The fact of the matter is instead that Labour itself has failed. It has grown too puffed up, too complacent, and like all parties of government eventually do, became the establishment. It still believes that all it needs to do is fight the Tories better and it can still win. Instead, what's apparent is that even if it could fight the Tories better, it would still lose because it has lost the veneer of cover that the economic "boom", built upon unsustainable debt provided. All that's left is for those still in an seat come 2010 to fight it out for the bare bones of a party destroyed not by Brown, although he has certainly contributed to it, but the overweening arrogance of Blairism and its attempt to wield total political control.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

9/16/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, September 11, 2008 

Those new Tories.


All this week the Guardian has been treating us to a series of articles on the "new Tories". It's very tempting to dismiss the entire idea immediately out of hand, as has been New Labour's execrable policy, and to go by the briefing from such socialist luminaries as James Purnell, this is still the emphasis which the party is going to continue with. It's true that by no means has the Conservative party had anything approaching the reflective soul-searching which resulted in the New Labour project, nor has there been such a decisive if shallow message that the party has changed akin to the abandoning of Clause 4.

Such gestures however have not been necessary because of Labour's incompetence and failure to learn from its mistakes. When considering the new Conservatives, what has to be remembered first of all is that it was a very old Conservative policy, the promise to abolish tax on inheritance for all but the very richest estates which catapulted the Conservatives back into the opinion poll lead, bringing Gordon Brown's short-lived honeymoon to an abrupt end. Ever since it has been one disaster and fiasco following another, combined with the economic downturn which has made Labour so incredibly unpopular. While many now see David Cameron as the best man to lead the country, what has not been shown is that same country is in any sense agreeing with the party's solutions - rather, they have become fed up to the back-teeth with a Labour party that has become socially authoritarian, economically illiterate and which has abandoned any attempts at deciding what it stands for or, more pertinently, who it stands for.

The tension, disengagement and pessimism which this has cast on whom should be the party's natural supporters was evident at this week's TUC conference. The unions are now according to some reports funding the party by up to 90% - accordingly, you would imagine that such influence would be causing the party to shift leftwards. Instead, if anything, the party is more craven and broken when it comes to addressing big business than it has ever been. While I personally do not believe that the case for a windfall tax on the energy companies' gross profits has been made, you would have expected that the party could have wrung far more concessions from them than they actually did. Instead what Brown has delivered has been little more feeble than the supposed attempt to get the housing market restarted. While that was a futile exercise, no one can possibly describe reducing the bills of the poorest and elderly this winter in such a way. Really sticking in the claw though is that there is both mass public and media support for taking on the energy companies - whilst the Daily Mail might not have supported a windfall tax, it has been just as angry if not angrier than papers on the left as what it sees as the obscene profiteering and greed in the City, and would have been livid if the companies had attempted to pass the costs back onto the consumer. With Brown's proposals, any chance of there being a simply response if they do exactly that is unlikely to say the least.

There was though another incident at the TUC conference that did show that the Conservative attempt to sell itself as new is only worth so much, and that was Harriet Harman's announcement of yet another quango to investigate social mobility. It wasn't that though but rather than an article went round beforehand which used the "c" word which so exercised Theresa May. You can expect the Torygraph to start screeching about class war, but for Theresa May to do so in almost the exact same language when her own party is currently trying to sell the idea that it believes in greater equality and is the real "progressive" party was pure chutzpah. The real issue is that Labour has long since abandoned calling a spade a spade; whilst the Mail, as Dave Osler points out shouts from the roof-tops about the middle class and the Torygraph invents the "coping classes" to laughably describe its readers, mention or allude to the working class and suddenly we're back to the class war. This is partly because all the main political parties have liked to pretend for some time that we are all bourgeois now, or come up with euphemisms or other identifying features to target voters, but it's also because few of them even seem to want the working class vote, or if they do, to say that they do. Class, above gender, race, sexual orientation or anything else is the main signifier of how you will get on in life and where you will get in it. Labour has demonstratively failed to improve social mobility, but for May then to suggest that Harman also hasn't done anything to tackle gender inequality when she only recently announced plans for positive discrimination, even if you don't agree with it, is plainly churlish.

This is where the idea of the new Tories so falls down. It's not that Cameron and his supporters don't mean what they say - they plainly do, and it's not that he's a shallow salesman, which he is, but then so was Blair. It's that their ideas are contradictory, flawed and less likely to work than Labour's. Jonathan Rutherford and Jon Cruddas have effortlessly identified this in their "Is the future Conservative?" essay from the pamphlet of the same name (PDF). First Cameron repudiated Thatcher by saying there is such a thing as society - it's just not the same thing as the state, then they moved on past questioning the economic position of society, which was not in the position it is now, to instead challenge the breakdown in society, or as they call it, the broken society. In fact, the Conservatives have hardly anything approaching an economic policy, with their only real commitment to "share the proceeds of growth". When Northern Rock failed, the Conservatives didn't have any idea how to respond, except to oppose nationalisation and attempt to paint Labour's delayed decision to as another throwback to Old Labour. Along with this has been their supposed commitment to "making education an adventure, giving children ‘the chance to take risks, push boundaries and test themselves outside their comfort zone’", whilst supporting the academy project which in most areas is doing the exact opposite of this with their almost regimental emphasis on discipline, curriculum, uniform and conformity. Just read the horrifying description of the Evelyn Grace academy in Brixton in today's Grauniad, which sounds almost Orwellian with its slogans of "excellence, endeavour and self-discipline" on posters on the walls. Their decision to recognise marriage in the tax system, with up to £20 a week being the mooted break being given, is both cynical and an incredibly simple non-solution to what is an incredibly complex problem. They have also increasingly moved from so-called compassionate conservatism or Cameron's own description of himself as a liberal Conservative to the old hectoring against the feckless and overweight, whether from Cameron himself or even less subtly from Andrew Lansley. And finally, whilst trying to suggest that they are the new progressives, the new intake of Conservative candidates for parliament are profoundly socially conservative, with their solutions to the "broken society" also being even more punitive than Labour's criminal justice policies.

Cameron has succeeded because he has adopted the language of empathy, of insecurity and of change. He has abandoned the "Continuity IDS" faction while still managing to take them along with him, much like Blair took the wider left along with him in their desire for power. The comparison is apt because rather than being genuinely new Tories, Cameron's Conservatives are instead the unapologetic new Blairites, able to do what only Blair and the even more Blair than Blair Blairites dreamed of doing. The only point on which I disagree with Rutherford and Cruddas is that they suggest the future is for the left to lose. On the contrary, the left has already lost. The Labour party has shifted so far to the right, and indeed, is controlled by those on the centre-right that it is simply impossible to believe that it could ever readjust to the policies which Cruddas and Rutherford propose in response to the new Conservatives. The sooner that the left realises that the Labour party is dead the sooner it will be able to challenge the new consensus which exists between the old new Labour and the new Blairite Conservatives.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

9/11/2008 11:06:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 

The clunking fist.

When Gordon Brown finally ascended to the job he had so coveted just over twelve months ago, I suspect that most of us, or at least those of us who had regarded Tony Blair for his last few years in office with the same sort of respect as we do a dead skunk, didn't possibly think that things could get worse, or indeed, that the odds were good that such forgotten little things as honesty and accountability would improve, with there was also likely to be less pompous and sanctimonious grandstanding.

For the first couple of months, over Brown's so-called honeymoon period, this actually seemed to be happening. Announcements were being made to the Commons rather than to the press; the cabinet was meeting regularly and debate within it was actually encouraged; and even if a little underwhelming, with some finding it rather sad, Brown's pledge to "do his utmost" as he stood in Downing Street surrounded by cameras felt authentic, compared to all the flannel that we had been used to from Blair.

All of this evaporated in one ill-fated, ignorant decision: not to call off the election after Brown had Grand Old Duke of York style marched his troops to the top of the hill, but to instead go and visit the actual troops in Basra during the Tory party conference, and also to pledge that some of them would be shortly returning home. This understandably on the part of the Conservatives caused widespread anger; not just to be upstaging them, which could be forgiven, but to be playing politics with the armed forces and their loved ones back home for short-term possible gain. Ever since then Brown has floundered.

If this had happened to Blair it would have been forgotten swiftly. Blair could do almost anything, whether it be his overall responsibility for the death of Dr David Kelly because his spin doctor, knowing that the BBC potentially had information which could critically damage both him and his boss, went completely over-the-top in his quest to prove the allegations of sexing up were untrue, or being interviewed by the police over the loans for peerages scandal on the same day on which his press and ministerial team were doing their best to bury it, as his ever loyal attorney general walked over to the House of Lords and announced that the SFO were abandoning the corruption inquiry to the Al-Yamanah weapons deal between BAE and the Saudis, and despite being covered in the proverbial, he still emerged smelling of roses. I suspect that Blair would never have inspired such visceral loathing if he had ever betrayed signs of vulnerability, admitted that he had got something wrong or even if anyone ever laid a real glove on him in a political sense; but they didn't.

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, as others have mentioned, seems to have at the moment the reverse Midas touch. Everything he goes near doesn't turn into gold; it turns into excrement. Take yesterday, in the Commons on the last day of the parliamentary year, where you'd expect both he and the opposition to be de-mob happy. What's more, he had some sort of good news to report. Having just visited Basra again, this time, thanks mainly to the continuing ceasefire of Sadr's Mahdi army after a brief uprising earlier in the year, the city's security has vastly improved, meaning that even though the remaining British troops there are on "overwatch", training the Iraqi army, all troops might now be out, or all but a very minor force, by 2010, with the majority out early next year. We can quibble that we should have never gone in in the first place, that they ought to have been out long ago, and that all Brown is doing is in reality waiting until we find out who the next US president is going to be and what his plans are, but it's possibly the beginning of the end rather than the end of the beginning.

Cameron though, understandably, stands up and raises the point that Brown's posturing last autumn wasn't really fit behaviour from a prime minister. Mark Lancaster, who's served with the TA, went so far as to ask for an apology. Brown's response? He accused the Conservatives of playing politics with the armed forces.

Doubtless, Blair would have done pretty much the same thing in Brown's position. He however would have done it nimbly; Brown's problem is that he has the same sense of subtlety as Jodie Marsh has in the clothes department. Blair called him the clunking fist, and he is, there's no doubt about that. But it's in the truly literal sense, in that you can see him making his move a mile off, and he does in it such a blundering, clumsy manner that it doesn't just offend for a moment before it's forgotten, it sticks in the memory. Tony Blair had chutzpah in spades, but always got away with it. Brown's chutzpah leaves him not looking vulnerable, but looking like both a knave and a fool.

Again, you could perhaps even forgive this if Brown had kept his promises on honesty and accountability, but as the problems have mounted up, this too has been quickly forgotten. You can put a certain amount of blame on the media hysteria over knife crime, but last week's fiasco with Jacqui Smith going round the studios announcing that youths were to be taken into hospitals to see victims, only to deny this was the case a day later when they suddenly realised it wasn't a very good idea and that the presentation in any case was hopeless, was a case in point. That however compared to yesterday's rushing out of 30 end-of-term statements, which can only be described as burying them as even when the newspapers aren't busy they hardly bother to report the happenings at Westminster. Of those rushed out, 10 were prime ministerial statements, a direct breach of the ministerial code, which just incidentally, is enforced by... the prime minister.

Even allowing for the fact that some things are forgotten and may not have genuinely been ready to be announced until yesterday, this is surely cynicism of the highest order. It's not also if this has only occurred this year; last term there were 27 statements on the last day of parliament. The number in Blair's final full year of office? 17.

While this is clearly not on the same level as Blair's attempt to bury his meeting with Inspector Knacker, it was that we had come to expect it from the king of spin. From Brown, some of us naively thought that things would be different. Perhaps again though the biggest failure is that Brown's spin, when he's attempted it, has been dire. Alastair Campbell may have deeply distorted and helped bring politics down to its current level of contempt and cynicism, but at least he was good at it. You would never have seen Blair sitting next to a gun in a helicopter, just to begin with. Brown's real failure is not to have led his party to its lowest ratings in a generation; it's that he's failed to be honest with himself, and in doing so, he's left the door wide open for David Cameron, just as agile as Blair, to skulk in.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

7/23/2008 11:33:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, June 28, 2008 

One year on: the verdict.

Predictably, the week's press has been full of various articles commenting on Gordon Brown's anniversary in power, so there seems little point in writing a long narrative along similar lines (although, as usual, it seems that's what I've ended up doing) when you can go with either of these two instead.

It is however worth looking back, if it isn't too narcissistic, at what I wrote when Gordon ascended and what would hopefully be changed or altered. As you might have guessed, it doesn't make for good reading:
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.

Hazel Blears is now communities minister, and as useless as ever. Tessa Jowell is still Olympics minister, because you may as well keep one complete failure at the post rather than taint someone else with such a poisoned chalice. Lord Falconer has gone, and since taken to criticising Brown over 42 days and the constitutional changes, even though if he were still in government he'd doubtless be defending the same things to the hilt. Lord Drayson resigned to spend more time racing, and Liam Byrne is still at the Home Office. Adding to the dross that Brown has brought in, "Wacky" Jacqui Smith is just as bad a home secretary as we've come to expect from New Labour, Tony McNulty, is still polluting the airwaves with his absolute loyalty to the Supreme Leader and every bad policy which has ever been conjured up, Andy Burnham is now culture secretary, the execrable Blairite James Purnell is at work and pensions, and the supremely talented Digby Jones was last week celebrating the brilliance of the British arms industry as trade minister. With a team like that, how can it be possible that Labour's doing so badly?

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.

Back in March the government argued successfully again that the "time wasn't right" for an inquiry into the war. There is also no chance whatsoever of an independent inquiry into 7/7.

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.

Since then, the withdrawal to Basra airport has taken place and there have been no casualties in Iraq for some time. One of Brown's biggest mistakes was his trip to Basra during the Conservative party conference last October, quickly seized upon as him trying to make political capital out of bringing troops home while deflecting attention from the Tories. The opposition also quickly noticed that Brown's announcement was another New Labour classic strategy of re-announcing something already made public. The troops are still stuck in Iraq, serving absolutely no purpose whatsoever except making things easier for the Republicans in an electoral year. That Brown and Bush were far more chummy when he came to visit two weeks' back than at the initial meeting, where Brown was deliberately stand-offish to give the impression that the special relationship between Blair and Bush was not going to be continued showed where the real power lies.

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.

Starting with the good, Brown is indeed scrapping the ban on protests within a mile of parliament without permission. That he last week claimed this was a freedom that Labour had created when it was one that they had initially taken somewhat blotted the goodwill the gesture originally espoused. As for the rest, I think we all know what happened over 42 days, without needing to go into it yet again. Intercept evidence is still rejected; control orders are still in place; ID cards the same; the children's database and the Spine are still coming; and the National Programme for IT is still the wasteful disaster it was at the time of writing.

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.

Far from the bollocks about "rights and responsibilities" being dropped, it's instead at the very heart of the mostly miserable constitutional changes planned. Electoral reform was briefly alluded to, with the alternative vote mooted, but again it seems to have now been forgotten.

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.

On schools, we've seen the academy system being ever further hyped up, ignoring the inherent problems they have with the sponsors, the more subtle forms of selection, and the throwing of the "troublesome" children onto the other schools. Ed Balls, who despite the brickbats aimed at him by the right is one of the most promising ministers mainly because he stills seems to have an ounce of humanity left in him, recently announced that over 270 schools were for the chop if they didn't improve within 2 years. That a large proportion of these schools aren't failing in the specific sense doesn't seem to matter; we must have permanent revolution in education or we have nothing. On health, while Alan Johnson has mostly been an effective minister, the planned polyclinics are rightly attracting huge amounts of criticism and concern about the patient-GP relationship being broken down. Health is probably the government's biggest success since Brown's takeover: the losses have been turned into surpluses, waiting times are down across the board, but no one really seems to have noticed.

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.


The only really appreciable change over criminal justice policy was that quietly the reliance on ASBOs has been dropped, with Ed Balls again being fingered as the person responsible, with him wanting a return to a more welfare based approach. That is to be welcomed, but when your entire policy revolves around responding to whichever tabloid demands this or that on crime this week, it's constantly being undermined. The reclassification of cannabis to Class B is the prime example - a move that will simply criminalise yet more young people and those who have been smoking for years, distract the police from dealing with more serious crimes, and will have no effect whatsoever on those who'll carry on using the drug regardless, all because of one of the most hysterical and misinformed tabloid campaigns on "skunk" in years. Again, we all know what happened on the election front, and ever since we've been treated to constant, tedious allusions and remarks about "bottler" Brown.

When Brown became prime minister, I suspect many of us on the left hoped that Brown, while never likely or even able in the circumstances to reach the standard we'd like to set, would at least offer something different to Blair. In a way, he has. The spin has calmed down, we haven't had any outrages on the level of that day in December 06 when Blair was questioned by police while everything possible to distract from it was enacted, or the shameful response to the Israel/Hizbullah/Lebanon war. Brown is infinitely more of a real person that the messianic Blair, but yet it seems the public themselves don't want someone more cerebral, less natural in front of a camera, less charismatic. You look across at David Cameron, and it seems that is what a significant majority now seem to want from their leader: folksy, personable, the common touch while not being the slightest bit common. Brown of course doesn't help by the way he responds to the ribbing of Cameron at every prime minister's questions, the prime minister resembling the proverbial bear with a sore head, who roars at every jab while never landing a blow. In that, Vince Cable was wrong: Brown is Stalin, but he's only feared by his own people, in this case the Labour party itself. Everyone outside of it just pokes endless fun at him.

This difference though doesn't make up for the complete lack of change for those of us who are sympathetic, while it's disastrous for him and Labour among those who aren't. The overwhelming reason why Labour is 20 points behind in the polls isn't for any of the above reasons however, but because the economy has finally turned, and the cupboards are bare. The 10p tax debacle just reinforced that even the two things Brown was meant to be for, the end of child poverty and stealthy redistribution to the poorest, were dispensable when an opportunity to get one over on the Tories presented itself. So it was over 42 days.

The most damning verdict on Brown's first year in power has been given most forcibly not by any commentator or blogger, but by the voters in the Henley by-election. Labour was never going to win, but to come fifth behind both the BNP and the Greens and to lose your deposit could not be a bigger indictment. The hilarious solution to this from Hopi Sen is to donate money to the party, which contains the same amount of logic as putting your money on a horse with three legs. Most of all though, Brown has not just betrayed those who hoped for better things, he's betrayed himself. Blair never had any principles to jettison, and it was clear from the beginning he would say or do anything to get into power. The same is apparent with David Cameron. We thought differently with Gordon Brown, but we were wrong. There's no point changing leader, as no one can stop the ship from sinking. All that's left is to count the days until these bastards are finally out of power and the next set of likely worse bastards are voted in.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

6/28/2008 08:51:00 PM | | | links to this post

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates