Monday, February 08, 2010 

The same old new politics.

At times during the expenses furore, which continues to flicker, further fuelled by David Cameron's denunciations of Gordon Brown today, I sometimes felt like the only person in the country not enraged by the graft and misappropriation of public money. That was what, when you reduced the entire fiasco down to its very bare bones, it was all about. It wasn't, as the Tory MP notoriously complained, that people were envious or jealous of his "very large house", but he was in the right area. It was instead that these already generally well off individuals were feather-bedded to the extent that they didn't even have to pay for their food or to furnish their houses. If you want to be pretentious about it, it was a microcosm of what our society itself has become: a turbo-economy where those, whether either rich or extremely poor, are to a certain extent protected against the effects which the rest are beholden to, with the result being a sometimes justifiable sense of grievance against them. Where wealth is everything, don't be surprised if the bitten occasionally bite back.

The mood was, and still is, profoundly anti-politics. It isn't anger directed at one political party, but at politics itself, which is why Cameron's attempt to try to associate Gordon Brown directly with those MPs who have been charged with false accounting is unlikely to succeed. It also overlooks that even though no Conservative or Liberal Democrat MP was charged with a criminal offence, of those who had to pay back the most, 5 of the top 6 were Conservatives, including Liam Fox, Cameron's defence spokesman. As also previously argued, the attempt, mainly by politicians themselves as well as the ex-broadsheet media excluding the Telegraph to turn the anger into a case for constitutional and parliamentary reform also seemed to miss the point of the rage: those who wanted the equivalent of heads on pikes or an immediate general election weren't interested in slow and steady changes to fix how parliament works; they just wanted the MPs who had abused their expenses out. That also hasn't changed over time, and while Cameron is to be commended for keeping up the pressure for change, it's hardly likely that many votes for the Tories are going to be picked up on the back of reforming the current lobbying system.

It's difficult not to think that Cameron personally attacking Brown might have something to do with Brown's mentioning of he who must not be named: Lord Ashcroft. Ashcroft is also the spectre hanging over Cameron's entire speech: he wants anyone sitting in parliament to be a full UK taxpayer in the United Kingdom, yet he can't even confirm that the deputy chairman of his party is just that. He wants to "shine the light of transparency on lobbying in our country", yet if you donate £50,000 a year to the party you can join "The Leader's Group" and gain personal access to "David Cameron and other senior figures from the Conservative Party at dinners, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions, election result events and important campaign launches".

The entire speech is one that just screams of either never coming close to being implemented or coming back to haunt them. At four separate occasions he claims that "we are a new generation at ease with openness and trust". Really? Would this be the same Conservative party that seems to be imposing top-down control on MPs and prospective MPs use of blogs and social-networking sites? This is a party that even as it denounces Labour's past use of various spin doctors employs the likes of Andy Coulson and Steve Hilton, the former accused at an employment tribunal of leading the bullying of a journalist who suffered from depression. It's an easy allusion to make, but it really is all so reminiscent of Tony Blair: the repetition, the claims of being entirely clean, a new break, yet even while it sounds good, it's next to impossible to believe almost any of it. In that sense, it's Blair at his very worst: trying desperately to convince of his good intentions whilst failing to do just that. Even Blair at his worst though wouldn't have made such stonking great errors as talking up parliament as formerly being an unimpeachable institution once famous for "radical legislation, elevated debate and forensic scrutiny of laws"; has it really been anything like that since the 60s? Nor would he have made the mistake of claiming that a monologue exists where parliament talks and the country listens; parliament may well talk but the country either doesn't listen, or as the Heresiarch suggests, it jeers.

The only part that rings true is also the funniest and most puzzling. At the end he desperately appeals to the media to change its attitude as well, a part worth quoting in full:

But this change also needs something else. It requires a change in the attitude not just of politicians, but of the media too. I want to see a whole new culture of responsibility from those who report the news. You are the lens through which people view the actions of this Parliament. That gives you a great duty to our democracy.

I want to see a proper distinction between honest mistakes made by good, decent people whose intentions were honourable and those who set out to deliberately mislead, swindle and deceive.

Most people who pursue a career in politics do so because they want to serve and because they want to do good. That should be recognised. Parliament does important and effective work, yet it is barely reported.

And remember when you’re putting good people down, you could be putting good people off from entering politics. I’m not telling you how to do your job. I’m just saying that if you want to change politics as much as I do, this is something we’ve got to do together. We have a shared responsibility.


The idea of certain parts of the media treating any politician other than the very few it decides it likes in such a way is hilarious. This though is someone who has been treated up till now by the vast majority of it in a completely timorous, even sycophantic fashion, in difference to how those outside it have routinely ridiculed him. He surely doesn't believe that this will change anything, and in any event he uses them just as much as they use him; why then make the appeal at all? Is it for public consumption, although again few are likely to read or have seen his speech in full? Just as you don't believe for a second that Cameron has any real truck with what he calls "social responsibility", the idea that the media think they have any wider responsibility other than to their shareholders or owners is ludicrous.

It is instructive though that the one real reform that would truly redistribute power to the people is the one that the Conservatives refuse to trust the electorate with: Brown's sudden conversion to the alternative vote may be cynical or have ulterior motives, and it may not be proportional, but it would give voters something approaching a real choice over who governs us. A new politics sounds good, but it will remain the same old politics unless you genuinely feel you can make a difference. Starting with the electoral system itself would make the most sense, and would still fit in with the actual anti-politics mood, enabling you to vote the equivalent of none of the above and still make a point. Anything else is likely to fail to make an impact.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Wednesday, February 03, 2010 

Piecemeal reform will still result in contempt.

There are two questions you should always immediately ask when an otherwise completely unexpected political proposal comes along, in this instance Gordon Brown's sudden apparent conversion to an ever so slightly fairer system of voting. Firstly, why now? Second, who benefits?

Well, all right, that's what every cynic will consider. To be fair to Brown, he did ascend to the Labour leadership on the promise of carrying out constitutional reform, which has mostly been either forgotten, watered down to the point of near worthlessness, or handed to Jack Straw to think as shallowly as possible on those much vaunted rights 'n' responsibilities. As everyone knows, Labour has been promising a referendum on proportional representation since 1997, back when Blair was flirting with Paddy Ashdown as he feared not winning an outright majority. We all know what happened next, and despite still setting up the Jenkins commission, which recommended the alternative vote system with an additional top-up element to make it somewhat proportional, there has been no movement until now.

Why then now? Despite there being some voices at the height of the expenses scandal last year calling for a referendum on PR to be held on the same day as the general election, like most of the proposals for reform floated at the time it had come to nothing. While it would be lovely if Brown had suddenly had a epiphany in which he decided that the innate unfairness of the first past the post system means that many votes are all but wasted, and that it's an insult to democracy itself that a party can be elected with a workable majority when it received the support of only 22% of the electorate as a whole, a far more compelling explanation is that it's another last ditch attempt at shoring up the Grauniad-reading core vote whilst also appealing to erstwhile Liberal Democrat supporters. It's also impossible to rule out that it's not a throwback to the thinking of Blair in 97: despite everything, a hung parliament at the moment is a real possibility, and a far more plausible outcome than it was back then. The Liberal Democrats, otherwise regarded by the main two parties as a joke suddenly become incredibly popular, and while it's difficult to imagine them making a deal with the Conservatives, one of their demands in exchange for entering into a coalition would almost certainly be voting reform: by holding out the promise now of a referendum on AV, which they could negotiate into a vote on PR-proper, there's already a basis on which the two parties could work together.

This has the added bonus, and this also falls into the who benefits category, of showing the Conservatives up as opponents of progressive (yes, that word I loathe) reform, a trap which they're more happy to fall straight into, as Eric Pickles' bone-headed performance on Newsnight yesterday showed. According to him, the Alternative Vote system was "unfair"; unfair perhaps if you win the largest share of the vote on the initial count but fail to win an overall majority from all those entitled to, which as the Graun's leader points out not a single one of the current members of parliament has, and then lose after the votes have been re-assigned, but an improvement over FPTP it certainly is, even if only a slight one. There's no doubt whatsoever that self-interest informs both Brown's manoeuvring and the Tories' opposition to any form of PR, but even if Labour's motives are hardly pure, the Conservative position is not down to anything as principled as a belief that PR makes for weak governments, but because of their certainty in getting a large enough majority in which to dominate parliament in a similar way to Labour has for the past 13 years, even if its backbenchers have rebelled against the party whip on an unprecendented number of occasions. The "elective dictatorship" which some have railed against is suddenly no longer a problem when you're inside the tent pissing out rather than the one getting wet.

If that answers why now, then while it's assumed that Labour will benefit under AV or a proportional system, it's not necessarily as clear cut, as while in 2005 most Lab/Lib supporters would have voted tactically to keep the Tories out, the opposite might now be the case, with voters determined to get Labour out of office. There is one thing we haven't considered though: what if this isn't in fact a grand ruse to damage AV and PR with Brown's reverse Midas touch? Key is that any referendum would only be held in the event of a Labour victory, and that's if it manages to rush the legislation through parliament in time, itself difficult with Tory opposition and with less than 2 months before an election will have to be called if the vote is indeed to be on May the 6th. Doing this now only encourages the cynical view Brown will do anything to stay in power, even if it doesn't affect the actual vote this time round. It also distracts attention from that other unresolved constitutional issue increasingly affecting parliament: the West Lothian question, where this time round it could be Scottish Labour MPs which stop the Conservatives from gaining an absolute majority.

More fundamentally, the real reason why a referendum on just AV isn't good enough is that it doesn't allow the electorate to make the decision for themselves on just which electoral system this country should have. Why shouldn't we be allowed to choose a fully proportional system, even if it involves the scrapping of the current constituency system? What's the point of AV when the single transferable vote is very similar but actually proportional? Why not lay all the options out, or aren't we considered intelligent or interested enough to be able to make an educated and informed choice? All Brown is offering is the illusion of change, knowing that he almost certainly won't still be around to implement it. The lesson that should have been learned from the expenses fiasco is that the public both demands the right to know and to be able to act; until parties offer that they are likely to continue to be held in contempt, piecemeal electoral reform or not.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

Friday, June 19, 2009 

Hardly the end of the affair.

When it comes to shooting yourself in the foot, the parliamentary authorities have done the equivalent of blowing the entire appendage off with a sawn-off shotgun. The expenses scandal was finally begin to simmer down, the Telegraph having already deciphered and disseminated all the most outrageous claims, with the full release of the documents in full threatening to be a damp squib, only of interest for those who really wish to know exactly what their MP's favourite taxpayer-funded meal is. By censoring almost the entirety of some of the claims, all they've succeeded in doing is bringing the bile back to the very front of the throat of every phone-in ranter in the country.

At times since the Telegraph first splashed on their ill-gotten gained CD/DVD, I've felt like the only person in the country not to be demanding that MPs be summarily executed with their heads then displayed atop spikes on London Bridge. Of course, that MPs have turned out to be such humongous hypocrites, evading tax, whether it was "allowed" under the rules or not, claiming that they live with their sister and spending our money on duck houses and cleaning moats is certainly disreputable, but I find it hard to summon any great fury mainly because except in a very few tiny cases, there seems to have been no actual rules broken, let alone fraud. As much as some claim to be whiter than whiter, most of us will probably admit to trying it on at times; at worst, what most have done is simply stretched the rules as they existed, while some went further and did so to absolute breaking point, such as Gerald Kaufman with his attempt to charge the taxpayer for an £8,000 Bang and Olfsen TV. That I find for some reason far more enraging than some of the more notorious claims. Equally, the opprobrium hasn't fallen on those most deserving of it: those that have other highly rewarding interests that still didn't think that claiming for "seagrass", mugs from Tate Modern and "Elephant lamps", as Michael Gove did could possibly be objectionable. Then there's just bitter, wormwood-esque irony, like George Osborne claiming a staggering £47 for 2 DVDs featuring a speech of his on "value for taxpayers' money".

Mostly though, as I've mentioned before, there just seems little reason to get angry when there are so many more important things to be livid about. We are talking at most, of millions of pounds being improperly spent or claimed; at the moment we're currently paying around £30bn simply on the interest from our current debt. There's the millions, if not billions being spent on management consultants; the billions being wasted because of the government obsession with the private finance initative; and the countless billions being poured into the toilet which is this government's repeated, incessant, hapless IT schemes. These though are mindboggling sums, which cannot be directly linked to any one individual, hence there's no one to blame. Whether it's bankers, where Fred Goodwin rapidly became the biggest hate figure in the country, or Margaret Moran or Hazel Blears, we can instead put a face to the fury. It's the same with benefit fraud, where the newspapers always have a field day. It doesn't seem though that anything other than money could have caused such a scandal, or at least one which has inspired such rage and gone on for so long. It isn't the case, as Anthony Steen put it, that people were envious of his big house; it is however those whom have failed to benefit from the boom years who are now falling even further behind are fuming at how MPs could kit out their houses and pay their food bills without even a thought for how their own constituents are having to live.

More depressing is how the momentum which was behind the moves towards reform, which went hand in hand with the revelations in the Telegraph for some time, has suddenly dropped off. Partially it fell away as attention turned to whether Gordon Brown was going to survive as prime minister or not, but it also seems to have failed because MPs were only ever paying lip service to it, and as the race to be the next speaker has shown, as attention has turned away so has the belief that there has to be change. The House of Commons is a notoriously conservative institution, overturning even Robin Cook's minor reforms to the working hours because some MPs felt it had ruined the "atmosphere", and as the everlasting cliche goes, turkeys are unlikely to vote for Christmas given the choice, but you would have thought that even they would have realised that something has to be done. It does remain whether or not the public themselves ever were really behind such wide-ranging reform, but it is still quite clearly what is needed to re-energise politics. The exchanges of the last week, with the nonsense on stilts which has been the portraying of Cameron as "Mr 10%" and the general refusal to even be slightly straight with the public on the cuts which are going to have to come have only reinforced that. The European election results were both a warning and an opportunity: they showed politics at its worst and best, with the BNP victories because Labour voters stayed at home, and the successes of other minor parties showing the breadth of political dissent and debate which is stifled in the three party consensus which is Westminster. Only those that are prepared to end that monopoly deserve to be supported at the next election, and whatever our thoughts on the expenses furore, we will have them to thank if it does eventually lead to the change which is so desperately needed.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 

From expenses to going soft in the head.

After taking an age to respond, with Labour still yet to make anything like the stand which the Conservatives have, you have to wonder whether what began as a crisis in politicians rather than necessarily in parliament itself has started to get out of hand. Not because the proposals for more general reform, especially those set out today by David Cameron, are too radical, but instead because they don't seem to be actually targeting what enraged the public in the first place: personal enrichment rather than general democratic failings.

One of the things that few commentators seem to have attempted to adequately answer is why the expenses debacle, rather than other recent general failures, whether you include the Iraq war, the previous loans for coronets scandal, or more recently the banking collapse and with it the breakdown of what had been a consensus of how the country could be run, has been the straw that broke the camel's back. The former and the latter have cost and will cost sums that dwarf the money which MPs have claimed for second houses, duck houses or duck a l'orange, while our involvement in Iraq has directly cost the lives of thousands, and indirectly hundreds of thousands, and from which it will take our reputation decades to recover.

Certainly, part of it is just a logical progression from the rage that was briefly directed at bankers, although again their greed puts MPs' second home allowances and other perks into stark contrast, albeit bankers were then not using public money for their bonuses. Recessions often are cathartic, and the anger and bitterness that come with the sudden change in circumstances has to be directed somewhere, but at MPs as a whole rather than just at a set of individuals within a party or at one party in particular is something new. Admittedly, this has been building for some time, as more and more, again admittedly with some justice, have started decrying politicians as all the same. Still though this alone doesn't quite explain why the loathing has reached such a crescendo. We seem to want our MPs both to be above the kind of temptations which befall many of us mere mortals, while also being as normal as politicians can be. When it turns out that MPs are, unsurprisingly, just as liable to bend the rules as far as they can go as the rest of us are, for which they should nontheless be condemned, it still seems completely disproportionate for them to come in for the savaging which has been raining down on their heads now for close to 3 weeks.

From this has spawned the obvious look for quick fixes to a system which has been broken for quite some time. The real demand though seems to be far more simple: everyone out, and everyone out now. This is something that the current politicians are hardly likely to accede to, and so there has to be an alternative found. Those who have long sought reform for principles both pure and personal have also found a perfect opportunity to perhaps finally get their way, echoing the Rahm Emanuel quote that you should not let a good crisis go to waste. All this though seems to be ignoring what the public themselves want: they mostly don't seem to care about the inner workings of parliamentary committees or what votes are whipped and which aren't; they just want the rotten out and a new lot in and to let them work it out.

All of us are however making numerous assumptions here. Fact is, we simply don't know how this is going to pan out; it might yet peter out as the Telegraph's revelations eventually do, or it might keep going until an election has to sort it out. This is why the most attractive proposal of all so far has been Alan Johnson's, for a referendum on proportional representation to be held at the same time as that election. That will fundamentally answer the question on whether the thirst for reform is long lasting and thoughtful or short and ugly.

It's also instructive that proportional representation is one of the few things that David Cameron has actively ruled out, in what has been variously described as either the most radical thing ever, "the spirit of Glasnost", as Cameron's Guardian article rather pompously puts it, or more plausiably, as politics having gone soft in the head. Instructive in that it's one of the few things that genuinely would change the way politics is run, while Cameron's other lauded promises, or not even that, potential aspirations are tinkering at the edge. Some of his proposals are simply laughable, such as the idea that the person who currently employs Andy Coulson as his chief spin doctor is going to be the one that puts an end to sofa government, promised by Brown and also broken. He wants to end the quangocracy without naming a single one which he actually plans to abolish, as so do many others who rant against them. He wants to tackle the power grabs by the EU and judges, without leaving Europe and without withdrawing presumably from the ECHR, making the ripping up of the Human Rights Act and its replacement with a British bill of rights an utter waste of time. Then there is just the madness of ultra-Blairism still writ large within the Cameroons: ending the "state monopoly" in education, which is in actual fact local authority control, giving parents the power to set up their own schools, as if they have the time or will to do so. The similar powers on housing seem to be a recipe for banana-ism: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything, while on policing seem destined to result in the futility of "bobbies on the beat" while politicising the organisation. He meanwhile has nothing whatsoever to say on Lords reform, the monarchy or on the anachronisms of Westminster itself which seem to be kept only so that tourists can experience the quaint old-worldiness of the mother of all parliaments.

Cynicism is easy, but it's difficult not to be when you reflect of how many in opposition have promised reform along these lines only for it not to materialise once power has been grabbed and when such changes are no longer so attractive. You can't help but think all we might eventually get from Cameron's changes are the schools and parliamentary debate on YouTube; that again though, might all be the public themselves want. It's difficult not to reflect that the old adage we get the politicians and politics we deserve still rings as true as ever.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Wednesday, July 02, 2008 

The undemocratic task force.

In a way, it's almost verging on chutzpah for Kenneth Clarke, former member of the Conservative government which foisted so many unpopular and regressive policies on Scotland first as an experiment to now be offering solutions to a problem which he had a hand in cultivating in the first place. One of the main reasons why Scotland finally achieved devolution and a parliament was undoubtedly the poll tax, levered first on the nation which had steadfastly refused to become a part of the Thatcherite revolution and therefore deserved the contempt with which it was treated, but we should perhaps let bygones be bygones. On the whole, Clarke and his "Democracy Task Force's" paper (PDF) on the West Lothian question is worthy of praise, praise of which more in the final paragraph. It's just that it comes to such a simpering compromise in its conclusion that's unlikely to be accepted, and that will do very little to staunch the sense of grievance which some feel about where the power now lies in the UK.

First though the conundrum itself. Devolution in Scotland has left the unhelpful constitutional problem of Scottish MPs being able to vote on legalisation that affects only England and/or Wales, the Welsh assembly not currently having the same powers which have been devolved to Scotland. This problem wouldn't be so bad if the MPs in Scotland were spread more equally across all parties, but the Labour party has overwhelmingly had Scotland as its personal fiefdom for quite some time. This is gradually starting to be broken, with both the Scottish Nationalists themselves and the Liberal Democrats making gains, and could be much extended at the next election with Labour's collapse in popularity and with the SNP in power in Edinburgh, but at the last election Labour had 29 Scottish MPs, the LDs 12, the SNP 6 and the Tories a very lonely 1. Added into the problem is that most of the Scottish Labour MPs are either one of two things: mostly completely loyal and therefore unlikely to rebel against the Labour whip; or either ministers or former ministers, not to mention the prime minister himself. This has led to bills affecting only England, such as the votes on tutition fees and foundation hospitals being carried only by Scottish Labour MP votes. With the Tories likely to sweep the board in England at the next election, but with certain victory still in doubt, it's feasibly possible that Labour could still cling on to a majority but only through their Scottish seats, with the Tories the defacto party in power in England.

One of the other factors which the Clarke report doesn't touch on much is that the Conservatives already have won the popular vote in England, as they did at the last election, yet because of first-past-the-post still received 100 fewer seats than Labour. This will undoubtedly be even more pronounced at the next election, with the Tories likely to wipe out Labour almost completely south of a decent chunk of the Midlands (London is a different matter), yet the Conservatives continue to oppose proportional representation because they realise that even though the system works against them, they'll still be able to get a decent majority if they win well, let alone if they win big. This was more defendable when the vast majority voted for either Labour or Conservative, but that is no longer the case when the Liberal Democrats won over 22% of the vote last time round, not to mention the votes the other minor parties received despite there being next to no chance that any of the candidates would actually win any seats. The report however meekly dismisses proportional representation out of hand, with the simple response that "[W]e do not favour either practice [PR or US-style separation of powers] in the UK as British political culture would take a very long time to adapt to either practice." This simply isn't good enough.

The Clarke solution is instead of pure "English votes for English laws" a poor substitution for it that would make very little overall difference. Rather than simply barring Scottish MPs from voting on legislation which doesn't concern their own constituencies, the task force proposes that Scottish MPs would be barred from taking part in the committee stages and report stages of a relevant bill, while being allowed to vote on both on the second and third readings. This would still however leave non-English MPs with the ability to vote down a bill at the crucial third stage. Clarke is rather pleased that this would still leave the UK government with an effective veto if it felt that the bill damaged UK interests as a whole by urging its members to vote down the amendments made to it in committee stages at the third reading.

If this sounds complicated, then it is. If you're reading this in the first place then you're likely to have some sort of remedial interest in politics, but for those out there that don't this is about as confusing as it gets, like attempting to explain what colour something is to a blind person. It also falls down because it ignores the simplest solution, if we're also going to reject PR: that English votes for English laws makes the most sense and would be easy to institute. The other argument made by some is for an English parliament, or full English devolution, but this isn't a solution or option which I've ever been tempted by: what's the point of establishing yet another devolved instutition when we have a perfectly acceptable one already in use, if only it can be acceptably modified to make it work both more fairly and better than it currently does? The break-up of the union this also might herald is also a red herring; Scotland still seems unlikely to go independent any time soon, however much some both north and south of the border might like it to, and any changes on the constitutional level over the West Lothian question are hardly likely going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

It is of course Labour that is stalling any solution on either front. It didn't shoot down Clarke's "solution" for the exact reason that it keeps their strangehold on Scotland and also potentially England in tact. It's the best of all worlds in short-term polticial terms: the West Lothian question has been answered, but things carry on as before. That this trickery won't trick English voters themselves doesn't seem to enter into the equation. It's strange however why the Conservatives are still so mealy-mouthed with their policy. They could have proposed something that would have made everyone except the Labour party immensly happy, yet they've done the opposite. You can understand why they reject PR, as they fear that it could keep Labour and the Lib Dems in a coalition for potentially all-time, especially when they can still win big as long as they're slightly more popular than Labour under FPTP, yet on this they have potentially everything to lose. The best thing that can in fact be said for Clarke's task force's report is that it's short and to the point, unlike so many other policy documents. That it took four years to produce rather dampens down even that accolade.


Related posts:
OurKingdom - The Madness of Ken Clarke
OurKingdom - Cameron wanted English nationalism, not the West Lothian question, answered
Paul Kingsnorth - A radical answer to the West Lothian question

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Tuesday, March 04, 2008 

Pranked over Cameron's likeness to Obama, while Cameron himself sings from the same old hymn sheet.

It seems then that both I and the rest of the readers of Iain Dale's CiF post yesterday were pranked. Posting on his blog, he writes that the article was first intended for the Torygraph, but that he was then asked to write about Andrew Lansley instead, so he sent his original over to the Grauniad as to not waste it, with the intention of winding up "the Obama supporting fanatics".

Strange then that even after having posted the above on his site, he felt the need to defend his piece in the comments of my own dissection of it. Presumably if it was meant as a wind-up, he wouldn't really have needed to respond to criticisms of it at all. I seem to have got off rather lightly though compared to those on CiF who were rather more stinging in their dismissals:

Good evening and thank you for all your kind words. I especially liked the reference to me being in the Bullingdon Club. Strangely that didn't exist during my time at the University of East Anglia or even Saffron Walden County High School.

Can we really not get over this class ridden language.

And as for Tim Ireland. It will be a cold day in hell. I'm surprised they even let you comment on this site. Mind you, you're in good company among your own kind. Even fewer braincells than the LibDem front bench. And that's saying something.

[prepares self for more torrents of abuse from the self appointed guardian of the blogosphere who must be obeyed or you suffer the consequences]


Which seems like an excellent way of engaging with those not inclined to instantly agree with everything you say.

Speaking as we are of daft posts on Comment is Free, the site is today blessed with a post from the man compared to Obama himself, a certain Mr David Cameron. His main thesis is that politics is broken, and that there are deeper forces at work that underlie how it has come to be smashed to pieces. Both of these forces involve in the internet, the first being blogs and self-publishing, the second being that despite common conception, the youth of today are becoming involved in politics, just not in the "old" ways, but rather through campaigns using social networking.

If this already seems rather dated and close to passe, it might be because Cameron himself made these exact same arguments on the exact same site back in late 2006. Then Cameron was also launching another venture, like he was today. That was the sort-it.co.uk site, which complete with a fake-tanned bloke in a garish suit was aimed at dealing with "yoof" issues and making them think about their "own social responsbilities". The joke was that the suited guy was "the inner tosser", someone who rather than thinking about saving instead urged you to splash the cash. This campaign was such a roaring success that the sort-it.co.uk is still going str.... oh, wait. Sort-it.co.uk now instead links to conservatives.com.

The exact same response to Cameron's arguments then is still mostly valid now. Of the hundreds of millions of blogs Cameron talks about, only a minuscule number are about politics, or updated daily, which ought to be the yardstick by which they should be measured. Of the 20,000 videos uploaded to YouTube every day, the vast majority are either television clips, music videos or the most inane shit that you've ever watched and will afterwards pray that you could get those wasted minutes of your life back. If someone really wanted to do a study, they could sort those videos into respective categories and go from there. My bet would be less than 5%, if that, would be related to politics.

I am however willing to give Cameron the slight benefit of the doubt on the social networking point now. Facebook was then still only open to college students, or if it had opened up to all and sundry it had only just done so. Facebook undoubtedly is a site where protests movements are increasingly being organised and coordinated from, although whether any of those that started off there have made any major impact as yet is certainly open to question. Again though, Facebook is mostly just a slightly more grown-up version of MySpace and Bebo, with those over 18 mostly using it, and the vast majority are the same self-absorbed individuals interested only in what their friends are doing every second of the waking day. The backlash against the site has also accelerated recently.

The Conservatives then, desperate to look hip and trendy under their somewhat youthful leader, are trying their very best as they were over a year ago to get down with the kids, this time by advertising on Facebook. That most of the web-savvy individuals on there will most likely be running Firefox with Adblock+ or some other combination of browser and blocker and therefore never see the ads seems to have passed them by entirely, but never mind. Of course, that most of those they're trying to target were growing up during the age when the Tories were at their lowest ebb, a collective laughing stock and viewed as the worst possible waste of a vote, not to mention achingly uncool, with nothing having happened since then to change that also seems to have flashed by them without it being acknowledged. The other Conservative wheeze, launching a ludicrous campaign for "friends" to donate to them in an attempt to become presidential candidates in the US, like Obama this time round and Howard Dean before him, who were funded through many small pledges via the web, is also laughable. That the Conservatives are hardly strapped for cash, being donated £2.9m alone by Lord Laidlaw, who just happens to be a tax exile who lives in Monaco, with the grand total donated last year clocking up at £26.4m shows that this is nothing more a PR stunt, with them having no intentions of weaning themselves off of their current sponsors, all while demanding that Labour's donations from the trade unions be capped. Their biggest howls would be reserved for constituency donations being capped, as that's how Lord Ashcroft pumps his cash into the party.

If Cameron really wanted to mend politics, he'd support the one thing that would re-engage the public and ensure that their vote was worth something: proportional representation. Instead, the Tories, unlike Labour back in 1997 who toyed with the idea of PR until they got a whopping majority that meant they didn't need the support of the Lib Dems, think that they can win big enough as to not need it. That is the true face of not just the Conservatives but of Labour too; only when they are not certain of power will they pretend that the public need a proper voice. At the current rate of developing cynicism and disengagement, a whole generation will have lost faith in Westminster before anyone actually acts.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Tuesday, March 06, 2007 

What's the point of the Liberal Democrats?

Honest, it is.

Confusion still reins over Menzies Campbell's less than impressive speech to the spring conference, with its talk of "five tests" which Gordon Brown has to meet in order for him to have risen to the challenge of believing in "liberal democracy".

The real debate has been over whether the initial briefings, which appeared to suggest that in the event of a hung parliament the Lib Dems would not insist on a form of proportional representation being introduced in return for them forming a coalition with Labour reflected the party's true priorities or not. For the last God knows how long, the two Lib Dem policies which almost anyone could name and knew about were a 50p top rate of tax on those earning more than £100,000 a year, and the electoral system being reformed from the first past the post system to one in which every vote counts. In the past year, the former has been abandoned in favour of "green taxes" and now PR itself has quite possibly been rejected in favour of power for power's sake.


While there were questions over how the 50p top rate would affect key workers, Labour raising the point of nurses in particular, and over whether it would further encourage the rich to squirrel away their earnings in tax havens, it was one of those key redistributive measures which genuinely made the Liberal Democrats different to both Labour and the Tories. Likewise PR, especially when
you consider only 22% of the electorate voted for Labour at the last election, yet it still managed to win a majority of over 60 seats. Something is quite clearly rotten, and the electoral system is part of the problem. First past the post is at least one of the reasons why the oxymoron of "radical centrism" is preached by Clarke and Milburn: a voting system which meant there was no such thing as a "wasted vote" or a need to vote tactically would radically alter the political landscape, meaning the parties would no longer have to pander only to the wants of the "aspirational" voters who make up the difference in the "ultra-marginals" which the Blairites have been crowing of. This might be frightening to how both Labour and the Tories have become comfortable in listening only to those who care about no else apart from their self, but it would be liberating for the rest of us.

It's true that
Ed Davey, Menzies' chief of staff, stated that PR remained "critically important" to the party, but the woeful lack of any mention of the policy in Ming's speech may well have spoke volumes. When you have a decent, noble and urgently needed policy, you shouldn't be afraid either of mentioning it or preaching about it. If the Lib Dems wanted to gain the support of a substantial part of the population, they'd make perfectly clear that in the event of a hung parliament, they would join a Labour government, but only if PR was introduced in return. While this would be open to the criticism of propping up a Labour government that had run out of steam, it would at least mean that the next election would be fought under completely different conditions, with a new set of policies likely from each party as a result. It would be a significant boon for democracy, and one which the Lib Dems may well be remembered for long after all our brains have turned to mush.

Instead, Campbell's speech to the conference was disheartening at best and woeful at worst. The Liberal Democrats are meant to be the party which comes up with the fairly radical policies which are then pinched without thanks by the Tories and Labour. Ming's five tests, by comparison, weren't potentially bad assessments of how Brown intends to govern, but they were far from being individual to the party itself. The Tories pledge to scrap ID cards, have moved opportunistically but reasonably credibly towards taking on climate change, and have made clear they would advocate a more distant foreign policy from that of Washington, three of the tests which Campbell set out. It's true that the Tories are about as likely to act on poverty, the third test, as Labour is to neuter Murdoch, and we've yet to learn properly about Cameron's views on where the Tories stand on devolving power, but it's not exactly a clean break either, is it?

The whole thing smacks of the Lib Dems drifting rather than leading.
Opinion polls have showed there's a large amount of support for scrapping Trident, and while there's at least something prudent about waiting a few more years before making a decision, the decision to do just that instead of setting out now the reasonably compelling arguments for disarmament, in the face of a Labour and Tory axis which means that Blair's replacement plans are going to be passed whatever the Lib Dem policy suggests that Ming may well not be up to making the difficult but important policy stands. We already knew about his hesitation over Charles Kennedy's decision to go on the anti-war march back in 2003, fearing that he/they might be painted as anti-American, but it was instead one of the party's finest hours.

The question for Campbell, with the Tories surging, is just how he justifies the party's continued existence. The country is crying out for a decent centre-left alternative to Labour, and there's plenty out there who'll either never vote for the Tories again after Thatcher/Major or because they don't trust "spliffy" Cameron's Blair impression. At the moment, instead of pushing ahead and challenging the Tories to make clear how far their newly re-found social libertarianism goes, Campbell seems content with coasting. His leadership ethos isn't being discussed yet, but if the current situation continues for a few more months, it certainly will be.

Labels: , , ,

Share |

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates