British Politics

Taking the long view

2007-07-24T09:25:00.001Z

It is quite something that waiting a month before trying to reach an assessment of our new government feels laggardly.

So quickly does politics move now, that already the phrase "The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown" elicits no shock. The opinion polls that suggested a ten point tory lead when camparing Cameron to Brown have been shown to be as pointless as the intelligent always said they were. Jacqui Smith seems to be taking the country by storm, despite that embarrassing photo of her playing a rather dull drinking game.

As an aside. I feel sorry for the first generation of Facebook politicians. Every single photo of you looking stupid, drunk out of your mind, snogging some poor unfortunate, all uploaded, tagged, saved and secure for posterity, and by your friends too. Still, at least we'll get used to it quickly enough.

So a month in and where are we?

David Cameron is having a minor leadership crisis. How strange that seems. A mere season ago, he was expected to crush all beneath him. Commentators curled up at his feet. Office appeared to be merely a matter of time.

Today Cameron is on the edge of becoming a figure of fun. He's the husky loving, floppy haired, baby hugging, sikh guru embracing toff who made the fatal mistake of believing that the vital task that faced the Tories was to make themselves look nice.

I shall say it one more time. It was not "nastiness" that cost the Tory party power, it was screwing with peoples lives. So, don't go off to Rwanda, no matter how decent or worthy your intentions are. Explain to people why you'd make their lives better in the here and now.

I believe Cameron is more Gaitskill than Kinnock. He's facing the right direction and is personally popuar, but has a narrow base of support in his own party so cannot confront the huge issues that make his party vrtually unelectable. Add to that a huge whole in his policies for spending and taxation (No cuts in the NHS ever and lower taxation? Shurely shome mishtake...) and I think Cameron's destined to fail.

For the Government, It seems fated to suffer terrorist attacks and natural disasters, and to handle them reasonably well. I do find it strange that it's more acceptable to criticise the Government for allowing storms to flood rivers than failing to prevent terrorist attacks. (It strikes me that only one of these two is withing the power of human intervention).

The new cabinet is being quiet, methodical and slightly dull. It's all rather mature. Denham, Balls, Darling, Hutton, Straw. It's a government of the quietly competent lieutenants. The governmet, drained of the bitterness of the last few years seems focussed on getting on with the job, suddenly feeling that if they just do what they're supposed to, The election will be theirs.

On the negative side, I worry that the Government is a little quiet on the issue of crime and anti-social behaviour. We easily forget how big an issue this is for people, and it's an issue that will not go away.

This is a government of serious, policy minded people, which means they might be a little too attentive to their statistics that tell them crime is falling, rather than to the marketeers and focus group merchants who tell them the public are concerned. Cameron's best moment in the last fortnight came on prisoner release. He'll be tempted back onto this agenda soon.

So one month in.

Things going pretty well.

A long way still to go.

Carry on, Gordon, carry on.

I'm not blogging about the new PM or the reshuffle..

2007-06-28T09:21:00.000Z

...because I'm sick of reading and listening to endless breathless reports about what might or might not happen, generally produced by people who know only a fraction more than their audience about what is happening.

Once it's done, and we know the shape of the Government there will be a lot to talk about, but until then, it's all so much froth and blether.

I think the content of the entire political coverage yesterday could be summed up as "New PM takes over. Old PM leaves, details to follow".

Until then I'm content to wish the Prime Minister well, and to say thank you to Tony Blair.

Quentin Davies

2007-06-26T16:17:00.000Z

Devastating stuff.

...Under your leadership the Conservative Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything.It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda...

...The trouble with trying to face both ways is that you are likely to lose everybody's confidence. Aside from the rather significant issues of principle involved, you have of course paid a practical price for your easy promises...

...It is fair to say that you have so far made a shambles of your foreign policy, and that would be a great handicap to you - and, more seriously, to the country - if you ever came to power...

...One day in January, I think a Wednesday or Thursday, you and George Osborne discovered that Gordon Brown was to make a speech on the environment the following Monday. You wished to pre-empt him. So without any consultation with anyone - experts, think tanks, the industry, even the Shadow Cabinet - you announced an airline or flight tax which as you have subsequently heard from me in a long paper (which has never been refuted) and I am sure from many others, is certainly defective and contradictory - and in my view complete nonsense...

...Equally it seems that your hasty rejection of nuclear energy as a 'last resort' was also driven by your PR imperatives rather than by other considerations. Many colleagues hope that that will be the subject of your next u-turn...

...Of course I could go on - up to three weeks ago when you were prepared to stoop to putting forward a resolution on Iraq (demanding an inquiry while our military involvement continues) which it was admitted at a Party meeting the following Monday (by George Osborne in your presence) was motivated by party political considerations. That was a particularly bad moment...

...Although you have many positive qualities you have three, superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions, which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative Party to achieve...

...I do not intend to leave public life. On the contrary I am looking forward to joining another party with which I have found increasingly I am naturally in agreement and which has just acquired a leader I have always greatly admired, who I believe is entirely straightforward, and who has a towering record, and a clear vision for the future of our country which I fully share.

A wonderful day...

2007-06-25T12:09:00.001Z

We have a new leader who has the intellect, drive and passion to be a great Prime Minister.

We're ahead in the polls.

The agenda of housing, social justice and a focus on playing by the rules Gordon set out yesterday, is exactly where we should be.

I'm delighted by the thought Gordon's clearly put into revitalising the policy process, especially the suggestion of a final voice for the membership in policy decisions.

So I'm very, very happy.

It's cheesy but true.

Having got that fawning out of my system, On to the Deputy leadership election.

I'd rather Alan had won, but clearly Harriet fought a strong campaign, which is a good sign that she will be good at her job.

Obviously, I disagreed with Harriet's policy direction during the campaign, but she's an intelligent, capable politician who will give real focus on the issue of social justice while being very loyal to the leader.

Her victory in the members section of the ballot shows she's in real touch with the membership of the party.

She deserves the support of every Labour activist, and I wish her all the best.

After all, those of us on the right of the party are known for demanding loyalty to the leadership. That works both ways.

I did put her 5th though.

A few quick points..

2007-06-21T21:28:00.000Z

it's been a busy, long day in the boring world of real work... so just a few quick points may expand upon on the morrow, though I might get dristracted by Big Brother, kittens, or watching iPhone adverts repeatedly (I waaaant one. I waaaaaaaaant it now).

1. It seems obvious that this was a real serious offer. I don't thinkk any Prime Minister has casually offered a cabinet job to a member of an opposition party. So here ends the Brown the control freak machine politician theme. This guy is serious about reaching out.

2. I fail to see what is dirty and underhand about offering a cabinet job to a member of an opposition party. I really don't. Briefing the press that your leader is an alcoholic is dirty politics, but offering some lords ministerial jobs? I mean, this all happened on Monday, and it took the Liberals until todday to get utterly horrified? Pleeeease.

This is obviously fake outrage, designed to save Ming Campbell from a mauling by rampaging herd (collective noun time- a Bore? a Beard? an Opik?) of Lib dem MPs - so treat it with scepticism. If it took Ming Campbells sources until now to be outraged by the offers, he aint that outraged.

3. What exactly do the Lib Dems want? Yes, yes, More votes and more seats. But for the exponents of consensus politics they seem to get pretty bolshy whenever anyone actually offers them a Consensus.

In the last three months alone they have, for reasons of high principle, turned down coalitions or jobs offers with the following parties: SNP, Labour, Conservative and Plaid Cymru. That is, you may have noticed, also a list of every other mainland party represented in the House of Commons.

Will the Liberal Democrats enlighten us to the nature of the party with whom they are prepared to have a consensus with? Would they agree to enter into government with the DUP, perhaps?

4. Where's the Labour outrage? I could imagine a time when the thought of a Labour Prime Minister, A Labour prime minister, scuttling around westminster in a Government car handing out job offers right left and centre would have summoned forth a lusty bellow of rage from the swamp primeval of the Labour heartlands. Today, apart from the mildest of criticisms from John McDonnell, we heard nothing.

I'm sure that some Labour activists are horrified, but the party has shown incredibly impressive discipline so far. Maybe, just maybe we're a party that really wants to stay in power. If so, that will make me happier than anything I can imagine. Apart from the aforementioned Iphone, obviously.

Fantasy cabinet!

2007-06-20T15:39:00.000Z

I know, people, it's hard hacking away when you don't know quite who to suck up to.

So why not play fantasy cabinet, a cute little game created by a lobbying company called four communications..

It's nicely done, although it's missing Caroline Flint, Jim Murphy, Dawn Primarolo and Bob Ainsworth. I don't think each of these are very likely, but they're just as likely as some of the names that are on the list....

I am a sage and a visionary.

2007-06-20T10:07:00.000Z

They laughed at me, they did. Well OK, they mostly ignored me, but I was right, oh yes, oh yes.

Oh, hello. Didn't see you there.

Today, I am talking to myself about Labour and the Libdems getting together and having a big party around the cabinet table, which is the subject of todays front page splash in the Guardian and a nice piece of catchupwork by the BBCs Nick Robinson.

Well it just goes to show that you should pay attention to me, because guess what I said, (to a storm of indifference) six months ago.

"political reality is more important than my hatred of the Liberal Democrats, and
reality says it might soon be time to reach a deal with them....
"...So why shouldn’t Labour offer left of centre Lib Dems a deal ahead of the next general election?
"We could offer either a coalition, or a deal with 30 or so Liberal Democrats interested in forming a Social Democrat caucus after the next General election...
"...If the offer were made from a position of strength, it would mean an unprecedented openness- shooting for good the idea that Gordon Brown would lead a Gormenghast administration.
"The Liberal Democrats would win by ensuring a secure place in Government, by securing a more European foreign policy and wining major policy debates on multilateralism, the environment, civil liberties and yes, Electoral Reform. "

Honestly, I don't think we're close to a coalition offer, or even a couple of cabinet places. The internal politics of both parties would make that very difficult. Yet the beginnings of a rapprochemont could well be good politics for both leaders.

Gordon Brown needs to spike tory claims he's a tribal, sour faced, grumpy man who wants to steal childrens sweeties. Ming Campbell needs to be able to offer the prospect of real power to his troops. After all, they're now in opposition in Scotland and Wales and the polls don't look stunning.

So, a senior LibDem playing a key role in Government? Well, there's the example of Lord Carlile. Paddy Ashdown is still very popular. Some kind of joint policy work? Perhaps opening debates on the constitution and civil liberties that Lib Dems care passionately about?

Whatever it is, this news indicates that Gordon Brown is very much thinking of the politics of the UK in the long term, and knows that building a progresive consensus is the key to victory. He also seems to understand the importance of dealing from strength.

Although I codially loathe and despise Liberal Democrats and am delighted they feel the same, I'm glad that Gordon Brown is able to see the bigger picture. I hope the same can be said for the rest of both parties.

Cameron 2 - The soundbite strikes back

2007-06-18T15:16:00.001Z

Are David Cameron's speechwriters trying to turn him into a parody of himself or a parody of Tony Blair at his most blethersome?

What a speech. What a crock. Cameron badly needs a new speechwriter.

First up, He keeps on with some horribly mixed metaphor.

"then, brick by brick, you build your house. That is the plan I laid out when I became leader of this Party and that is exactly the plan we’ve been following.

We started by preparing the ground. We stopped fooling ourselves that we’d get a different result with the same old tunes."

What is he talking about here? The barn raising scene in Seven brides for seven brothers?

Then neart the end there's this: "we can be clear about the shape of the house we’re building. It’s designed to deliver collective security, as the platform for individual opportunity." It's a safe house, with a platform for individuals to jump off? Will the platform be on the balcony?

Second, stop this horrible meaningless soundbite overload.

"this amazing country, in this amazing century"
on this amazing planet, in this amazing galaxy.

"Our Society. Your Life."
Our House. Your Wife.
Our Money. Your Life.
Our Pistol. Your Knife.

"what a life it can be if we enable people to make the most of the modern world."
Also, I believe that children are the future. Treat them well and let them lead the way.

"Your life is just that – yours, not mine."
So we can't swap?

"Stand Up, Speak Up."
If you're going to quote Marley, It's "get up, stand up". Or is Cameron copying Nike's anti racism Campaign?

Also, please stop it with the weirdly sweeping statements.

Did you know that "There are technologies that will give us the energy to power the world without wrecking the planet"?
Where can we get these then? I have literally no idea what technology this is. Cold fusion? Windmills? Nuclear power? Giant Cows producing Methane?

I also didn't know that "We have communications which overcome every obstacle not just of distance but of culture – making one world." We do? Really? So If I want to talk to a Korean but I can't speak Korean, we can chat away merrily?

Next, please don't critique your opponents for one thing, then do that self same thing a few moments later.

Here Cameron critiques Labour for policymaking in response to bad headlines:
"We’ve had ten years of short-term initiatives announced to get headlines in the papers. People have had enough of Labour’s fast-food politics: they want something more serious and more substantial. "

Yes! Enough of policy making on the fly. Get a policy right and stick with it. Whatever you do, don't make up a new policy in response to bad headlines. Like on Grammar schools. Stick with the tough policies.

What's the latest line on that by the way, Dave? We're not going to redo our policies to get a headline are we?

"More setting and streaming, with a ‘grammar stream’ in every subject in every school." .

Oh, right.

Even worse, he then does it again- within two sentences.

"Not copying New Labour, but learning from its mistakes."

Yeah! No copying New Labour!

"Not abandoning Conservative principles, but applying them in new ways to new challenges."

Yeah! Copying New Labour's "traditional values in a Modern setting"!

This speech is just blether. If this is his renewal, he's in worse trouble than I thought.

The Cocktail party

2007-06-15T09:41:00.000Z

Last night I decided not to watch the Labour deputy leadership husting on television and toddled off to drink cocktails instead. I felt suave and sophisticated and elegant, even when I fell off my chair.

Yet I felt a little guilty for my alcoholic exploits. The bitter taste of angst intruded into each chilled glass. Instead of sipping expensively mixed drinks, should I have been supping the ales of the people? If Harriet Harman disapproves of expensive handbags would she also frown at the cost of a well put together cosmoplitan?

Whisper it, but the Left is not quite comfortable with spirit based debauchery, preferring more proletarian methods of intoxication.

A social democrat can drink eight pints and be the toast of his fellows, but let him ask for a Dry Manhattan and eyebrows are raised. Looks become quizical. Inferences are made.

Sadly, we are a beer party. Up with this I will not put. I declare firmly that it's good to be a Prosecco progressive or a margarita marxist. Let us proclaim loudly that under socialism, it'll be Cosmopolitans all round.

I am biassed in this argument, because I am an apalling beer drinker. I can't stomach the stuff. I don't mind the taste, it's just that after the second pint I begin to feel queasy. If for some dreadful experiment I am forced to drink three, I need to go and have a nice lie down while gurgling incoherently. In other words, I become a big brother contestant.

The stronger the drink, the more I can sup. Wine is tolerable, while spirits slide down nicely. The problem is that raw sprits taste foul. (I'm looking at you, Whisky connisseurs), So I end up drinking cocktails.

Cocktails have an air of dissolution and decadence to them. This is exactly what is needed in an alcoholic drink. Clean tasting, fast acting and a measure of elegance as you careen headlong towards intoxication.

Now, this is not to support conspicuous consumption. I abjure the loutish type who waste good drink on a treasure chest. That's not just bad taste, it's a bad cocktail, which is unforgiveable.

Still despites the foolishness of the crass and tasteless, we must stand up for cocktails for the left.

After all, if we let the right be the people with the good drinks, all we'd have left with is real ale, leaflet rounds and worthiness. It'd be like being a liberal democrat. If that doesn't make the case for a lunchtime bloody mary, nothing will.

Round and round the parcel goes..

2007-06-13T10:55:00.000Z

So, another twist in the never ending saga of the Welsh Assembly Government. Apparently, now Labour and Plaid are talking.

I'm no expert in welsh politics but electorally speaking I can't see how Labour can lose from the various prospects ahead of them in Wales. (Of course, Wales could lose from bad policy, bad leadership and bad ideas, but that's the realm of the serious policy people and I am a mere hack)

Scenario one- Rainbow alliance. Labour would be by far the largest party but in opposition, which would fire up our vote and our activists, while a disunited coalition tries to implement a populist political programme. The price might be PR in local elections, but the prize would be the ability to peel off almost all anti-Tory LD and Plaid seats at the next election.

Scenario two- Labour and Plaid govern together. Politically this damages Plaid much more than Labour for the simple reason that they will have to bear the burden of Government unpopularity. I'd expect to see a much stronger Welsh Conservative party as a result. That would give labour the chance to pick up floating Liberal and plaid voters who wanted to keep the Tories out in the next General Election.

Of course, the big prize for Plaid is to be in government and that's more important than any narrow electoral consideration. However, they're in a very different place to the SNP, who have taken ofice on the back of a narrow victory and can therefore claim a mandate of sorts and can govern alone and confidently.

Plaid don't have that option. For them all roads ahead involve messy compromise and responsibility for failings that are not of their own making. Indeed, they'd probably be better off in opposition for another 4 years with the objective of making a serious and sustained assault on Labours status as largest party.

You might say that the SNP seem to be popular in office, so why not Plaid? Well, its easy to be popular as a new government three months after an election. It's harder 4 years down the line.

The SNP have a tough road ahead keeping their support together, and they're in a far stronger position than Plaid. There are already Labour MPs who feel happier not having to defend the Scottish Executive each day. By the time of the Next General election Labour might even be able to run an opposition style camapign in Scotland (as long as we don't fall into the trap of letting the SNP portray us as the big "No").

Another self absorbed look at the media and the internet (part 1)

2007-06-12T14:41:00.000Z

The departing, outgoing, soon to be former, retiring, stepping down, Prime Minister made a speech today about the relationship between the media and politics.

The speech is important because Tony Blair is probably the most masterful media operator in contemporary politics, and hearing him question the system he’s won repeated victories by exploiting is pretty important.

It’s like hearing that Pete Sampras wrapped up his final Wimbledon championship with the confession that the reign of the power server had been bad for Tennis.

Blair argues that a combination of fragmented news sources, intense competition and a sharper understanding amongst editors about what readers want to hear fuels a race to the bottom amongst the mass market, and at the same time changes in media structures forces an intensity of coverage amongst the news market competitors that ensures everything is covered in great intensity but little depth.

This combination of disinterest and hyperactivity puts incredible pressures on politicians and journalists alike- leading to ever more cynicism about both politicians and the media.

Thirty years ago, political coverage was decided at a national level by four TV news programmes that everyone watched, a few review programmes with audiences in the 5 million range and about fifty lobby correspondents who wrote the national political stories that everybody read.

Today, there are two 24 hour news channels with tiny audiences. The actual BARB data is here, with Sky News’s top programme last week getting 94,000 viewers. Audience figures like that put it up there with the Broadcasting juggernaut that is UKTV style (+1).

Each of the News channels has three or four political correspondents. I’ve worked on political campaigns, and you would not believe how much time is spent dealing with the 24 hour news channels, despite their statistically insignificant audiences.

You work to their needs because they’ve got the resources to cover everything, and because you know that’s what people are watching in campaign HQ and in newsrooms.

You also work to their needs because their coverage is the access point to the Big TV News shows, the Six and the Ten. These have much bigger audience- between three and 5 million on a daily basis. Then there are about 10 different political shows of varying levels of intellectual self regard, all with audiences in the 1 million and below camp.

These are profoundly irritating programmes, because with the exception of Newsnight and the Sunday morning shows, they’re not big enough to make news but they must be supplied with fodder.

All of these shows audiences have been falling steadily over time. People used to watch the news because they had to. Now they don’t have to.

So what do editors do to try and recover audiences? They find out what audiences want and give it to them. Horrid, isn’t it?

They discover that gossip is interesting, scandal is shocking, disgust is compelling and tragedy makes great viewing. Combine this with the need to keep coverage easy to assimilate because attention spans are low and the need for reporters to convey that they are sharing secrets worth knowing and you have the recipe for the most confrontational and yet oddly empty coverage possible.

This process is not a foolish or an idiotic one, it’s the same reason why Guido Fawkes and his blog of scurrilous tat gets many thousands more readers than any number of worthy emo-blogs like mine.

At the same time as the “national” news agenda becomes ever more ephemeral, the new technologies allow incredibly intensive coverage. We’ve already got 24 hour news. Soon, there will be twenty-four hour politics coverage as bloggers will make their living covering politics. They won’t be traditional journalists, they’ll be people like Iain Dale or Alex Hilton, Mike Smithson or Philip Cowley.

They’ll be insiders, “experts”, people focussed on very particular points of interest- moving easily between covering politics and working in politics. They’ll be totally focussed on inside politics and utterly boring for everyone else

They’ll be desperate for information, will cover inside politics obsessively and will have tiny, tiny audiences- but will break real, important stories that will occasionally go meta.

How do politicians respond to this? When politicians began to be torn apart for gaffes they responded by building a strong public image and stuck to that image. Every appearance had to be controlled, every word measured, every appearnce delivering the message because they knew that mistakes and misteps would be ripped apart by a media interested in scandal and division as much as substance.

Tony Blair was and is the greatest politician in these terms. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him make a gaffe, lose his composure or misjudge the media coverage. Name the great Blair gaffes? The only one I can think of is Yo Blair- and that was because Bush had left his microphone on.

To do this day in day out is almost impossible. It requires an iron discipline. If even Tony Blair feels it can’t be maintained, I don’t think anyone can do it.

So what now?

My feeling is that the impact of new media and narrowly focussed media coverage meeting the needs of tiny audiences will be to give us a flowering of gossip in the first instance, as we suddenly get to learn all the embarrassing things we never wanted to know about politicians- which ones are shagging their cousins, which ones enjoy the odd sherbert. Which ones are crossdressers. All that stuff.

Then that ease of access to politicians will make them seem less unapproachable.

Politicians will learn that people don’t care about their private lives. They only care if they seem to be hypocrites.

At the same time that’s happening whole communities will grow up focussed on important policy areas. There will be a move back to policy and content driven by the fact politicians will be able to communicate to 10,000 people who really care about Bank charges, the 5,000 who are concerned by school facilities. The 2,000 who are obsessed by technology issues.

The politicians that are able to string these tiny fragmented coalitions together, not by promising everything, but by actually engaging and gaing credit for understanding, will be the ones who win. They’ll be able to use the insights they gain from in depth understanding to connect with what will be the holy grail of politics, the mass audience.

So meet the next generation of politician.

The one who’s relaxed about their sex life being gossiped about because they know no-one cares really.

The one who builds their career through building in depth relationships with narrowband audiences and who never stops communicating directly with them, who realises that authenticity is the key to trust. (Oh, and who has the resources to spend time building relationships- let's not forget that this means legions of communications staff)

The one who is canny enough to use their knowledge of real issues to connect with what remains of the mass audience.

The one who is able to keep utterly focussed on the concerns of the coalition of voters behind them and knows that by communicating directly to them they can regards the daily ebb and flow of the no longer mass media with rather greater detachment- and therefore is less obsessed by the teeming multitudes in the lobby.

The one who doesn’t try to set up a plastic outer shell to protect their real selves from the media.

Funnily enough, against this standard it’s the media obsessed, soundbite focussed, image manipulating, mass media, political editor courting David Cameron who’s the analogue politician in a digital age.

This is just a test

2007-06-11T13:26:00.001Z

So why is Peter Hain kicking off?

2007-06-11T09:28:00.000Z

Reports indicate Peter Hain is beginning to swing wild and free at various targets.

Why now? Well, Peter knows his deputy leadership campaign is in trouble. Cruddas from the left and Bann and Johnson from the right are squeezing him to death, while Harman is busy stealing his "radical insider" posture.

On top of that, He's not got a historically strong relationship with Gordon Brown (suggesting taxes should be raised when it's not government policy tends to annoy Chancellors), so without a strong showing in the Deputy Leadership election he could well be toast.

So he's realised he's got nothing left to lose. As Kris Kristofferson correctly noted, that's synonymous with freedom.

Only problem is, it's about six months too late. Cruddas has been saying the same things for six months, and because he's a nobody (surely you mean "unfettered by office" - Ed) hasn't caused a row in doing so.

My prediction? Hain to come next to last and to be joining John Reid on the backbenches, where Hain will be able to rediscover his radicalism in time for another leadership job bid if we lose the next election (which we won't).

Stop it Hertz.

2007-06-08T14:11:00.000Z

Last night I watched a soft left intellectual travel round Premiership football training grounds asking wealthy young men to give up a days pay to help “the nurses who are having such a hard time”.

I should have been delighted, I suppose.

Instead my reaction was one of inchoate rage. I frothed. I fumed. I found myself in the sort of mood that leads retired colonels to write letters to the Daily Telegraph.

The set up of the programme was “the Nurses” were having a tough time, with low pay and not enough jobs, and needed more funding. The way to get this extra funding was for Dr Noreena Hertz to get the readies for the nurses from premiership footballers.

In the end, she got various clubs and players, attracted by the possibility of good publicity (and perhaps fearing bad) to donate £750,000 toward a hardship fund.

More importantly, she also got a primetime slot on channel 4, tens of guest appearances on other tv shows and lots of newspaper articles about the process.

Let’s pause for a moment and focus on the prime time TV programme. If Channel 4 had sold the hour of airtime taken up by Dr Hertz’s programme for advertising, she’d have made more money than she did from the footballers.

So let’s not pretend that the money was the point of the exercise.

The money was the hook to get the media coverage. To be fair to Dr Hertz, she seemed to understand that and not try to hide it, being happy to use the footballers as pawns in getting attention for her campaign.

My problem with the programme and with Dr Hertz was not the campaign, but the total refusal of the show to engage with the issues she was campaigning on.

The annual NHS budget in the UK over a hundred thousand million pounds (up over thirty thousand million pounds under Labour, but that’s a different story).

So the money Dr Hertz was trying to raise would be equivalent to one hundred thousandth or 0.00001% of the total yearly NHS budget.

Even the last Nurses pay deal, the one that was so paltry that nurses are threatening to strike over it, and which led Dr Hertz to launch her crusade, is costing the Government £750 million.

Let’s assume that at a minimum, Dr Hertz wants a 6% pay increase for Nurses this year.

That wouldn’t even come close to funding the pay gap closure she wants, but it’s a start. That would requite an additional investment of somewhere in the region of £1.5 billion.

On top of that, Dr Hertz wants to guarantee every Nurse who trains in the UK a job. OK. Let’s say there are 20,000 more nurses training each year than are offered jobs and the average cost of employing them is £25,000. That’s an extra £500 million a year.

Just to start getting close to progress two out Dr Hertz’s five demands would cost two thousand million a year.

So these are huge numbers and this is a big issue.

That’s fine.

It could be the right thing to do. Nurses are important.

The Government has increased investment in the NHS by thirty thousand million over the last ten years, and maybe it’s right that more of that – (say two thousand million?) should go direct to Nurses.

It’s certainly legitimate to use a stunt like raising a million pounds from footballers to highlight some of the big issues around healthcare funding. But they key word is highlight. There are real questions that need to be answered.

For example, given there are more nurses training than we can employ at the moment. Is increasing nurses pay a bigger priority than buying more MRI scanners, or funding local Accident or emergencies? Or should we do all three and increase taxes to pay for it? Or is the overall Tax burden too high?

But Dr Hertz didn’t do that last night.

Instead she allowed herself to be portrayed as an Angel’s angel, the saviour of nurses and gave the impression that the issue of underpaying nurses could be solved easily and without any real cost to anyone, other than footballers and later, “the government”.

That’s not just wrong, it’s delusional. It removes the possibility of intelligent debate because who can say “Stop raising money for the Nurses?”.

It replaces policy debate with crude emotional blackmail. It paints politicians who wrestle with these issues every day in a less positive light than a cartoon thug like Mohammed Al-fayed. (who will avoid all the tax he can, but can’t resist a photo opportunity).

Above all it leaves the boring task of actually persuading people into making a right choice on policy matters far behind, replacing it with the far more attractive prospect of solving problems by emoting on TV.

Is this idiocy new Labour’s fault? Alistair Campbell’s fatherly presence seemed to indicate so. He certainly knows how to get the attention of the media. Yet I can’t quite but feel that New Labour’s fabled mews management has merely been an attempt to catch up with this trend towards the facile and emotive.

Perhaps I’m wrong and it is all our fault, but I don’t think so. In any case I think it’s time politicians stood up to the culture of the easy answer. Al Gore wrote a book about the kind of shoddy political discourse exemplified by Dr Hertz’s programme.

It’s called the assault on reason.

I hope she reads it before launching her next campaign. After all, it just doesn’t do for an intellectual to play a major part in dumbing down political discourse.

I'm Back (again)

2007-06-08T14:02:00.000Z

Yeah, peripatetic doesn't even cover it.

Stand by for long, boring screed.

A thousand impossible things on the Breakfast news.

2007-03-08T12:50:00.000Z

The reporting on Cash for Honours has been coming thick and fast that it's hard to keep up. So I thought I’d helpfully sum up the stories that have appeared in the national news media so informed observers can see all the reports together, and thus understand the truth.

So here's what our media have been telling us over the last few days. I’ve excluded blogs, because blogs are hysterical, poorly sourced and too quick to write up gossip as fact.

First, Ruth Turner sent an e-mail to Jonathan Powell about cash for honours. Except she didn't send it and it wasn't an e-mail.

The e-mail was leaked either by the Police or by Downing Street or by both. On the other hand, the e-mail wasn't leaked at all as journalists were just told about a spoken summary.

Then the Government got an injunction to stop this being published to protect Lord Levy*, while the Police asked for the injunction in order to protect their investigation.

At the same time the police don't leak and so they have told journalists the direction of their enquiry, which isn't the Turner document at all, but a series of meetings. Or some other documents. Or Levy bullying Turner.

Oh, and the Government have abandoned Lord Levy and are trying to pin the blame on him and so they are publicly backing him.

Still at least the enquiry is almost complete and a breakthrough is imminent or will continue into April, although it will also last well until May.

So that’s all sorted out then.

*No links for this one, but it was the thrust of the initial broadcast media speculation, before the Police made clear they’d asked for the injunction.

Lord Levy, An apology

2007-03-06T18:52:00.000Z

Over the last year, we, like other blogs, journalists and ~~online witchhunters~~ citizen journalists have run articles with headlines like "SLEAZY LEVY", "THE LORD OF SLEAZEY SLEAZINESS" "COPS SAY LEVY IS BENT" "COPS TO CART OFF LEVY IN CUFFS", "LETS DO THE PERP WALK AGAIN" and "SLEAZY, SLEAZO LEVY IS SLEAZOID SLEAZE"

These headlines may have given readers the mistaken impression that sources close to the police were informing us that Lord Levy was as guilty as hell and an untrustworthy little shit to boot.

This impression may have been strengthened by ourt constant references to "Police sources", "Sources close to the prosecution", "Top Cops", "Yates of the Yard" and "Scotland yard tecs"

Since Lord Levy has protested that his treatment in the media is defaming him, it has now become clear to us that our sources were in fact Lord Levy, dressed up as a policeman, in a cunning ruse to wreck any prosecution by ruinging any possibility of his prosecution.

He took us in by wearing a police uniform and sayng "Ello, Ello, Ello" a lot.

This only goes to show that Lord Levy is a sleazy little shit, who shouldn't be trusted.

(Oh, I should say since I used to work for the labour party, that, No, I've never met Lord Levy, but I have been in the same room as him. Which means his sleaziness may have infected me, virulent as it is)

I find your suggestions intriguing, Mr Campbell

2007-03-05T13:10:00.000Z

Yesterday Ming Campbell opened a door into the thinking in the Lib Dems in his speech to the Lib Dems spring forum and revealed a seething mass of contradictions, bitter infighting and personal rivalry.

Breifings were given, contradicted, withdrawn, re-emphasised. IT all seemed to revolve on whether or not the Liberals still cared about PR.

However, despite the post-speech chaos, what Campbell actually said was pretty interesting.

At one level, Campbell's "five tests" for Gordon Brown were a simple restatement of liberal Policy. End ID cards, Focus on Climate change, Focus on Pensions and Child Poverty, End Council Tax and have a pop at George Bush..

Yet textually there's more to it than that.

Campbell roundly attacks Blair and Cameron, but only questions Brown.

He has one attack on Brown, which is:

"This Chancellor of the Exchequer has had more control over the direction of government policy than any Chancellor in living memory.

This man, who has written the cheques since 1997, has had unparalleled influence within Whitehall.

Why on earth should we believe that Britain will be better governed if he moves from No 11 Downing Street to No. 10?"

but only a few paragraphs before, 3when looking at the New Labour record, he said:

"To be fair, first, on the plus side. Much-needed economic stability brought by independence for the Bank of England – a Liberal Democrat proposal.

"At last, the necessary investment in our public services – a Liberal Democrat priority."

Which answered his own question.

It's impossible not to read Campbell's questions, challenges, tests for Brown and his repeated emphasis on his interest in Governing as an opening for Gordon Brown to respond to, an opening noticeably not left open to David Cameron.

I doubt he'll want to respond just yet, but this debate is only just beginning...

News presenters solve problems of obese child

2007-02-27T11:38:00.000Z

24 hour News channel reporters today solved the problems of an obese eight year old, according to reports.

The 14 stone child, who was being mocked at school and was suffering acute psychological problems that drove his compulsive eating has benefitted from havintg his bizarre condition repeatedly discussed by attractive journalists and news presenters.

Presenters as varied as Natasha Kaplinsky, Kay Burley, Anna Jones, Charlotte Hawkins and Jane Hill have made the poor, fat child a national celebrity.

Expert media correspondent Phil Miegob said "If there's one thing this severely emotionally damaged child needs, it's repeated exposure on National and International TV for his freakish and unnatural obesity. "

Hill, Kaplinsky, Burley, Hawkins, Jones and the obese kid they've helped

"I'm particularly glad he'll benefit from the fact that everyone he ever meets will have the image of his enormous quivering boyflesh seared into their retinas. Whoever asked the greasy tub of lard to take off his shirt for an interview so everyone could see exactly how gross he was made an inspired decision that can have nothing but positive consequences.

"Furthermore, the fact that attractive, educated presenters with no medical expertise have speculated on the hour every hour about the causes for his obesity has enlightened parents across the nation, and turned what could have been a simple freakshow into an informed debate on why lardy fat kids are so lardy and fat.

"We now all know that the causes for the freaky fat child's grossly overblown stomach could include eating too much, having crap parents, being a greedy little sod or being a bit mental. That's information we all need to know."

Charlotte Hawkins enjoys sport, in particular skiing and horse-riding. Kay Burley was voted What Satellite TV’s Most Desirable Woman on TV for three consecutive years. Jane Hill is a keen supporter of the arts, particularly theatre, and enjoys food, wine - and going to the gym. Anna Jones is a well known business journalist. Natasha Kaplinsky is a well known dancer and journalist.

Why Labour aren't panicking 2

2007-02-23T13:55:00.000Z

Who's afraid of Davey C?

Not the Labour party. Yes, people murmur. He's not done badly. He looks like a normal human being. They've done well on that environment thing. He has a good eye for a soundbite. Good photo-ops too. Wons some people back I shouldn't wonder.

But there's contempt in the analysis too. He's not changed their policies. He's shallow. His message doesn't play in Oglethorpe. The rest of the tory team are crap. "Sharing the procceds of growth" will still mean cuts, while the Tories are busy making spending commitments hand over fist. In the end, these chickens will come home to roost.

By the time of the General election people will have to make a big choice and "not being as bad as Iain Duncan Smith" won't cut it as a reason to vote. People will look at the conservatives and wonder- "and what would you do instead?" The answer to that, so satisfyingly blank today, will be one of the defining features of the next election. Labour think the Tories won't have a good enough answer.

Complancency? i don't think so. Labour know we're in a fight this time. We just think it's a fight we can win.

Guido misses the real story...

2007-02-22T17:41:00.000Z

Guido Fawkes exposes the terrible secret cabal at the heart of the Labour party today, in a piece will have the Brownite cult in disarray.

As a former staffer, I can reveal that the truth about the Brownite "party withing a party" is worse than even Guido knows.

Guido seems to think that the Labour party is split down the middle between Brownites and Blairites, with nothing but suspicious glances, vicious counter briefing and whatever between the two.

This is absolutely true, but it is not the whole story.

It's time the truth was told, so today I can exclusively reveal that there's a Brownite secret ceremony too.

To become a fully fledged Brownite you first enter a darkened room, led by the keeper of the Holy Whelan and are blindfolded with a tablecloth from Granita. Before an image of the all-seeing eye of Gordon you swear to abjure the evil lord Lynton and all his works.

If you repeat the oath of eternal loyalty without a flaw, the secret words of power are whispered into your ears. As the cult repeat "Neo-endogenous macro-Economic Growth" again and again in an ever rising pitch, the high priest intones that you are a now a Brownite, and shall take thy orders from the king over the water, and none other.

You are then given a code name. Mine is fiscal framework. Then, eyes blinking, you are expelled into the bright light of day, sworn never to repeat the secrets you have learnt that day. You are told nothing else but to await the day when you will be needed.

At least, that's what I've heard. From my sources.

Oddly, the only people who have ever asked me if I'm a "blairite" or a "brownite" are either journalists or people not involved in the Labour party.

Of course, a few junior people (like me), fall in love with our own self importance and give the impression that we know all the secrets of the labour party, and other people fall for it. There's nothing more fun than nodding knowingly as someone asks you to confirm some piece of gossip. "Ah," you might say "Well, It would be terribly indiscreet of me to comment".

Of course, at a senior level there will be tensions, rivalries and debates, but honestly, some people shouldn't believe everything they read. The boring truth is that Labour party people come in all shapes and sizes. The vast majority of Labour people respect Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, disagree with one, theother or both on certain issues.

You'll be shocked and amazed to learn that people who are close to Gordon Brown are also friendly with people who aren't that close. You'll be horrified to learn that these people drink together, go to meetings and seminars and conferences together. You'll be disgusted to learn that they want to win the next election. Worst of all, you'll find that they agree about most things, and are on the same side. that of progressive politics and social democracy.

Funnily enough, I have this feeling that it's these latter two things that most irritate Guido and his "sources".

Meacher memories...

2007-02-22T11:03:00.000Z

Well, Michael Meacher will stand for leader of the Labour party.

I think we should welcome the entry of a man who thinks that both 9/11 and Pearl Harbour were deliberate acts of the US government to allow attacks on their on own people.

"It is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war."

And let's look back fondly to the days when a Labour minister could be quoted approvingly in militant for the following statement:

"We are at the end of the capitalist road... The economy has moved from one crisis to another. We have tried different remedies... we now have the lowest strike record in Europe, still no solution... we have the lowest unit costs in Europe, still no solution. It’s reckoned with even three million unemployed that there will no solution of the economic problems. It’s not the fault of the working class, it’s the fault of the system.

Talk about campaigning on the Governments record there, Michael (It was the 1974-79 government andMeacher was a trade minister).

Five Reasons why Labour aren't panicking.. Number 1:

2007-02-21T17:05:00.000Z

My posts have been getting longer and longer. So here's an attempt to break an argument down into handy bite size pieces.

Labour's polls are poor. Journalist headlines scream disaster. Yet labour MPs seem set on continuing with the same stategy they've had in place for the last five years- replace Blair with Brown and keep with New Labour. Wilful head burrowing? Perhaps, but here are the first of of five reasons why Labour people are keeping their heads about losing their seats.

Number One: It's the economy, stupid.

Why have British Governments lost power? Economic failure. 97 (Black Wednesday and recession), 79 (Winter of Discontent), 74 (Strikes, decline and the three day week), 70 (devaluation), and 1951 (loads of things) all followed economic storms.

Only in 1964 has a government gone into an election claiming that the Economy had done tolerably well and still lost, and even then, there was the unpopular 1961 wage freeze and an increase in unemployment in 1963 which led the government to go for a reflation led boom through 1964- a boom which nearly won them the election but led to a balance of payments crisis after the election.

Compared to that, Labour's economic record has been stunning. ten years of economic growth, low interest rates, low inflation and high employment. Labour's next Prime Minister is the Chancellor that delivered all that. Surely, Labour people calculate, a general election will focus minds on what really matters- their jobs, their mortgages and their lifestyle. Who will they trust with that economy- the leader 0f the first British government since the war to never suffer a recession, or a shiny faced PR man?

Cameron and the politics of the semi-intelligensia

2007-02-19T16:13:00.000Z

A few days ago I wrote that David Cameron's problem was not that he had smoked cannabis as a teenager but his privileged upbringing, and that this priviege and comfort led to a fundamental weakness at the core of the "new Conservative" project: an obsession with the wrong issues and the wrong people.

The new Tory analysis seems to be this: At the end of the Major years it became socially unacceptable in "nice" circles to admit to being a Conservative. A combination of grasping materialism, economic incompetence, political maladroitness, unfasionable and unpleasant socially conservative morality and a seeming monomania on Europe all combined to contaminate the Tory brand. A swathe of prosperous, degree-educated, home-owning, share-owning people deserted the Conservatives and never returned. The purpose of New Conservatism is to bring those people back.

So let's look at what Cameron's focus has been on, and what it reveals about what he believes are the main concerns of the people.

First, Cameron has avaided any significant statements on the big issues. The Economy, Healthcare, Education policy have all been consigned a a box marked "We agree with the Government where it's doing the right thing but reserve the right to criticise it". This leads to a degree of creative ambiguity.

The new Tories know that they should be for fiscal stability, but at the same time they should be for freeing the taxpayer from the burden of Tax. So they support doing both at the same time.

On Housing the New Tories are for more liberal planning laws while being against more housing. They are for spending more money on social housing and at the same time in favour of opening private social housing to right to buy.

On The NHS, they know they should support the NHS, but they want to critique it's ineffiency. So they say the NHS is broken _and_ they say they won't change anything.
So Cameron attacks the government for wasting money and demands that hospitals stay open, then he says he won't carry out any more reforms and that local surgical decisions must be respected. He decries targets, then says he'll impose his own.

This is the famed _and_ theory of conservatism. So why is it so irrational?

These incoherent policies are not evidence of stupidity, but rather represent a party trying to work its way toward a new definition of acceptable conservatism in order to appeal to what they see as a crucial group of voters. The incoherence is an acceptable price to pay for gettign their support.

I believe the Conservatives have decided they need the support of people who pay lip service to caring about the big political issues, but _actually_ care about other issues.

They need the support of people who _say_ they care about tax and the NHS and Schools, but since they have a decent income, kids at good schools and either good healthcare or private medical insurance, _actually_ care about their own tax burden, the quality of their food, the sexualistion of their children, the price of petrol, the cost of paying for their child's deposit.

So the Tories pay lip service to policy development on the traditional policy agenda, but the real emphasis in policy and political strategy lies elsewhere.

Let's take a few examples of the policies that David Cameron has staked a firm position on, where he want's the political agenda to be.

He's staked a firm position on unhealthy food for children. He's made sure eveyone knows he's against chocolate oranges,

He's made it clear he is for windmills, cycling, "the environment" and against global warming.

He's set out a strong position on slow food, organic farming and against air miles.

He's worried by big business but not if they show good social responsibility.

He's made it clear against revealing clothing for children and in favour of tax relief for married couples. He's made it clear he's in favour of civil unions, for the family unit and supportive of parental authority.

He's made it clear he's no Neo-Conservative. He's used the word liberal approvingly.

All these positions say something interesting about David Cameron, but say nothing meaningful in terms of political action. They fulfil one crucial function, which is to put David Cameron firmly on the right side of the sort of issues that are discussed at dinner parties up and down the nation. They address the concerns of educated, professional homeowners.

I call this group the semi-intelligensia. You know the type. Univesity educated. Working in a professional job. Weekends that feature a quality newspaper. Home owners. Possible hoping to inherit half of their parent's house, which will help them pay off their enormous mortgage. Two holidays a year. They have broadband and they don't use it to watch porn.

It's no suprise therefore that this strategy has got a good press - after all the UK media is made up almsot exclusively by members of this group. They earn good money, have a reasonable lifestyle and tend to be even more well off because they are disproportionately dual income households. Those in the media who have not warmed to cameron tend to be those who don't come from this background, and therein lies the problem.

The trouble is that this narrow audience is precisely the wrong target audience for the Conservatives. The people who are secure, well fed, well-educated, content with their economic status and therefore primarily concerned with lifestyle issues as their primary political focus are far fewer than you might think, coming from a background of univerwsity educated, professional comfort (you are reading blogs, I feel confident in my bet).

To put it another wayy there simply aren't that many "people like us". There are far more people who are striving for economic security, concerned about schooling, worried about the NHS, and desperate to materially improve their lives. These people are not happy, or content and they are not interested in lifestyle politics. The conservatives simply aren't talking to these people in the way Wilson or Thatcher or
Major or Blair did.

It is perhaps fitting that the Conservative party has been fooled by ten years of Labour prosperity and comfort into believing that everyone is prosperous, educated and comfortable. They aren't, and a political stragy based on a fundamentally incorrect assumption like that, will sooner or later hit a very large bump.

(this post is a work in progress- it may well be edited for sense, argument and flow)

Hello Beeb people...

2007-02-19T13:47:00.000Z

I've just checked my sitemeter numbers and intrigued to see that almost a quarter of my reads come from BBC addresses.

So, BBC types, please say hello, and do let me know how you found this site, whether you like it and what's crap about it.

(More substantial post to follow later, by the way.)

Guido and Iain versus the world...

2007-02-16T12:48:00.000Z

So I've just been reading the "Blogwars" stuff.

I suppose that being paid attention to is what appeals about blogging for most of us. Personally, I like typing away, putting ideas down in writing and having the freedom to think things through.

I've no great illusions of power, or of writing talent or so forth, but I do like it when people read what I have to say, or make compliments, or correct mistakes. I'd like to be really important in the world of commentary and opinion, but I'm not going to make any effort to make people pay attention to me. if I build it, they'll come, if it's not shit.

One thing I've noticed is that the authors of the massive political blogs that have sprung up recently are determined to use their blogs to make their names as media titans. (With the noticeable exception of Mike Smithson, though I'd rather have him and Andrea as pundits than most I can think of)

In Iain and Guido's blogs in particular there's a desperation to impose themselves on the world, to be paid attention to particularly, that is rather.. pathetic. Look at me, they constantly cry. See how I make the mighty media quail. See my own TV station. See my powers to set the news agenda. "Look on my blog, ye Polly, and despair", they cry from their two vast blogs.

Nothing wrong with that, just in the end it makes you a bit monotonous, (My blog on the other hand, is witty, intelligent and not at all longwinded and self absorbed. or badly punctuated). It's that fundamental dullness, which is my real stylistic compliant about Guido and Iain.

Iain's blog seems mostly to be about the greatness of Iain Dale and how exciting his latest book.TV.article.audience stats are, and Guido's targets are so boringly predictable (Labour MPs, people who are close to Labour MPs. Journalists who don't love Guido or know who he is) that it's not worth paying much attention to.

So I don't.

It's like Matt Drudge, during the Clinton scandal, I read matt Drudge every day. Now? I've got other sources of news I prefer. The same will happen here, eventually.

By 2009, I suspect Guido et al will seem so passe, darling. So I'm not going to get too excited by them. I'm glad others are helping with the process of making them passe, however.

Oh, and just to mention it...

If person A wrote a letter to a fascist organisation talking about shared direct action and then later decided to become a rumourmonger and gossip maven, that person would have to be a brain dead idiot not to realise threatening legal action against anyone who linked to those allegations would kill their credibility as a fun loving gossip king stone dead and put them in firmly in the "why did anyone ever listen to that dickhead" category. It might even make them passe.

Sad, really.

The spirit of contrariness...

2007-02-15T12:08:00.000Z

While expressing disbelief over the Nuclear decision made by a judge today (since when is it the role of judges to pontificate over what kind of consultation is good enough?) I expressed my long held belief that the problem with the British democracy was its ridiculous belief in the neutrality and good judgement of a band of mostly privately educated, self serving Judges, Civil Servants and so on, a belief that involves never questioning the competence or wisdom of a band of unelected, unaccountable besuited generalists whose aims in life involve knighthoods, chauffeur driven cars and total independence from any form of punishment for errors.

These undemocratic institutions have been the mainstay of Britain's century of decline yet remain entirely untouched or reformed. Power without responsibilty indeed.

"These people have been holding Britain back for a century" I expounded.

"We laugh at the French elite Ecoles for producing an out of touch governing class, and then we grovel at the feet of our own self selected masters"

I ranted.

"Oh for the honest rapaciousness and democratic instincts of America where civil servants are chosen politically and judges are elected or appointed in a nakedly partisan process. No more of this hypocrisy of neutrality, this sham independence, this fake studious disinterest. Accountability for the men in wigs and bowlers. Let Labour appoint Labour, let Tory appoint Tory, and let us have an end to the cherished lie of non-partisan loftiness!"

"Oh, you're just being contrary" said a friend, and indeed I was.

So today, I celebrate my contrariness. Here are some unpopular and unfashionable things I love, and you probably don't. You should though, you lemming-like fools.

1. Country Music.

The real blue eyed soul. I'm talking about proper country as well as alt.country too, I'm no "it all started with Gram follower of last years fashion". No, whatever country is about it's songs about love and loss and longing and not feeling right by people who mean it. From Hank Williams to Todd Snider, Bob Wills to Lucinda Williams, the Carter family to the Dixie chick, Country music is music that makes life better. OK, I don't like Garth Brooks or line dancing much, but You think liking the Beatles means you have to like Huey Lewis and the News or Disco? Course not, idiot. If you don't like country you're a fool and a numbskull.

2. Having dinner with a smoker

So it kills you, eventually. Right. fair enough. but look at the benefits, you get to have dinner with someone who looks like this, which is worth putting up with any amount of glares from neighbouring diners.

Ah, well. I'll just have to live without this minor pleasure.

(Picture sourced from the disturbingly comprehensive "Female smoking celebrities" website. Despite my support for public smoking, this site felt very wrong indeed.)

3. Violent computer games.

I think I've killed several thousand aliens, zombies, and just ordinary humans in my time. At the moment I'm playing the infamous "Bully" (which is actually about not being a bully, boo).

I love to kill, shoot and chainsaw helpless people. Funnily enough, this makes me no more violent than playing pacman or tetris, in fact less so, because I'm crap and tetris and those close to me might be hit by a flying gameboy.

To close this chapter of Cantrary passions, I will say that Violent computer games are today's "Louie Louie", a phenomenom where the people get excited for no good reason and assign blame in all the wrong places as the aforemention Todd Snider tells us in the fantastic "Ballad of the Kingsmen":

"The Kingsmen came together in a garage,
They could hardly even play
But they practiced night and day pretty soon
They got to where they could really play that song Louie, Louie
So they saved up all the money from the shows
Went in to one of them studios and gave their version of the song a try

Now, I don't know the words to that song Louie, Louie
And I'm pretty sure the singer for the Kingsmen didn't know them either,
If he did know them he didn't get them right on the record
Cause on the record they sound jumbled in his jaw
It says, "Me think of me girl oh so constantly
Ahmayaaah makaaaah aahh ooohoooh aaaaah"

Well, that last part scared everybody from the PTA to the FBI
You see, the kids had been going kinda crazy lately
And it seemed like nobody could figure out why
So they decided to form a coalition,
Launch an investigation, you know for the children, they at least had to try
To figure out the words to Louie, Louie"

Sometimes...

2007-02-14T12:38:00.000Z

I'm just watching News 24, and seeing the astonishingly generous, human, forgiving and wise interview that the parents of Ruth Okechukwu, Ben and Pauline are giving.

To bear such horrific and pointless loss with such dignity and with such compassion requires almost unimanginable humanity and decency.

It’s the privilege, stupid.

2007-02-12T12:36:00.000Z

First things first. Full disclosure. I’ve smoked dope. I would have been tempted to try acid, but no-one ever offered me any. Friends have offered me coke, but the drug made them so annoying I really didn’t want to join them in talking that much crap.

So I’m not that bothered whether David Cameron smoked dope or not. It seems to me that the worst thing for the Tories about this scandal is the repeated emphasis on David Cameron’s ultra-privileged lifestyle.

One of Team Cameron’s best tricks has been to present the Eton educated millionaire son of a millionaire as just a regular guy. Call it the Prince William effect. If attention focuses on Cameron at Eton, Cameron at Oxford, Cameron at CCO, he might seem more gilded youth than average joe. If I were a Cameron adviser I wouldn’t be bothered by drugs, I’d be worried about the Bullingdon.

Secondly, this coverage of Cameron made me realise how much I personally dislike him. His plump, shiny self satisfaction annoys. His accent grates with its posh smarmy smoothness. I know I’m chippy (a word the privileged use about the unwashed), but I really believe my gut reaction highlights a significant issue for Cameron.

In the Westminster, Whitehall and media world we’re all so used to dealing with self assured, privately educated graduates who’ve gone straight into a high flying career we forget how alien that experience is to almost everyone in the country. A plethora of Rees Moggs? Normal. Talking about your days at Marlborough? Totally expected. School at Westminster, then Oxford, the FT, then straight to parliament, and the back of a ministerial limo at 30? Part of everyday life.

Only in politics. OK, so elittes are well, elite. It's annoying, but it's to be expected. I'm not complaining (too much) about that.

No, my point is that the most successful political leaders can be as privileged as their elites compatriots, but they also have an instinctive understanding of the gap between the values and expectations of those wrapped up in high politics and those of everyday life and that understanding it shows in their policies.

Another way of putting this is that we need to recognise that the judgements of the media and political elites are not politically neutral. The things that are approved of by this small, privileged group reflect a whole set of shared assumptions about the world which are not always shared by the voters. The best politicians are able to break through these assumption and spot political opportunites the general politicall culture doesn't see.

One of Margaret Thatcher’s enduring political strengths (Which Labour entirely failed to understand) was the sense of striving, of an emphasis on hard work, on trying to make it, on respectability. This emphasis was clear in her battles to put home owning, share ownership and the end of the Trade Union dominance at the heart of the political agenda. These were battles she thought as much within the Conservative party as outside it.

Tony Blair, though almost as personally privileged as Cameron, added to this middle class sensibility with a public moral code of religion, respect, education and discipline, most visible in the Respect agenda, ASBO’s and on specialist schools. Again, a battle fought as much within the Labour party as outside it.

By contrast it’s instructive that David Cameron’s successes have been based on assuaging the sensibilities of the educated elites (The environment. Food miles. Chocolate oranges and revealing teenage clothes) while his political mis-steps have come when trying to engage with the sensibility of the aspiring middle and working classes. Hug-a-hoodie, Drugs legalisation.

The problem for Cameron isn’t that he was a teenage pot smoker, it’s that his political agenda is based on addressing the concerns of the privileged few who recently found conservatism unacceptable, not the aspiring many who found New Labour attractive.

Stories I don't expect to see...

2007-02-09T14:44:00.000Z

TORIES SAVED FROM BANKRUPTCY BY LABOUR's SURGING ECONOMY

Imagine if they'd sold in 1994. Or if the property crash that Tory economy spokesmen have predicted each year for the last ten years had actually happened.

No need to thank us.

MINISTER STATES OBVIOUS; JOURNALISTS WILFULLY MISINTERPRET

It's so fucking obvious what Miliband was saying that I can barely bother to explain it. HE WAS SAYING THAT PRIME MINISTERS GET UNPOPULAR, AND THAT PEOPLE LIKE WHAT THEY CAN'T HAVE. Furthermore, I am willing to bet that it will be less than four weeks after the take over of Gordon Brown that a major newspaper runs a story on how rubbish Gordon Brown is compared to Tony Blair. This is not because Gordon Brown is crap, but because the Media are like small, spoilt children, easily bored, never satisfied and demanding continual attention. They're also in need of a good spanking, but enough about the foibles of certain Tory columnists.

The Art of the Column... and the Guardian today.

2007-02-07T10:52:00.000Z

As I said yesterday, I have a lot of sympathy with Polly Toynbee's recent speech on the art of the column.

To reduce it down, her argument is that writing a good political newspaper column requires some journalistic skill and a mental sympathy with the aims of politicians. It also requires introducing new information, facts that are new to the reader and a central thesis that is in some way mind opening and thoughtful.

Secondly, she argues that the approach of many writers, specifically in the right wing press, is just to engage in an angry rant, which merely confirms the prejudices of the reader.

Finally, she argues that the internet commentators are driving this rush to the extreme. She says:

"There is a skill in crafting a column with a beginning, a middle and an end, a coherent argument and at least three facts readers don't know, preferably information gleaned from talking to the leading players in the case.

"There is a risk that the style of the blogosphere is dragging us all along to shout louder. It may be that the short burst of opinion is all anyone can absorb and the longer column becomes too much of a time-investment.

"A number of us columnists are anxious about it because it is a different style. It's not crafted, you haven't had the time to ring someone up, they want it now. There's a danger that it becomes more opinionated."

I agree.

The trouble is that the biggest outbursts of outraged ranting and ill researched nonsense tends not to come from the small audience lunatics like me, but from blinkered idealogues given space in the Guardian and the biggest source of ill informed gossip and speculation as central fact are the TV news channels.

Whether it's Andrew Murray, the always reliably barmy A L Kennedy, or today's effort from Geooffrey Wheatcroft, the Guardian has done more to promote ranting than any number of blogs. And whether it's Natasha Kaplinsky, Andrew Neill or Kay Burley, the TV news channels have done more to promote superficiality and scandal as the currency of news than any number of spittle flecked bloggers like Guido Fawkes.

For example, let's tke today's Geoffrey Wheatcroft article. The thesis appears to be: Blair is unspeakable, Brown is worse and less charismatic and Peter Hain. In it he gets the following wrong.

a) He claims the quote about "a second rate intellect, but a first rate temprament" was uttered by Roy Jenkins about Tony Blair, when it was said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Oliver Wendell Holmes (and borrowed by Jenkins).

b) Claims George Osborne called Gordon Brown Autistic, which he didn't.

c) Claimed Alistair Campbell called Gordon Brown psychologically flawed, which he didn't.

He then uses these non-facts to build a case that Brown is inept, and goes on to berate him for supporting the Iraq war.

However, Wheatcroft needs for his thesis to say that Brown is even worse than Blair. So he claims with not a single, solitary shred of evidence, that Brown didn't _really_ support the war, but only supported it out of a flawed politcal calculus and that therefore his support is worse than Blair's who at least was a true believer. Does he provide any evidence for this claim? No, because he can't. He just asserts it as fact.

So the whole article is made up of factually wrong assertions designed to support a thesis which has no evidence to support it.

This is not an article, it is pap, doing nothing but stroking the outrage of those who share the prejudices of the writer.

Polly, please direct your ire to your own editor.

Polly Toynbee and sympathy for the devils...

2007-02-06T11:10:00.000Z

Polly Toynbee made an interesting speech about newspaper columns, blogging and journalism the other day. The speech (which doesn't seem to be online), is rather perceptive and interesting, and I'll have more to say about it later today.

You can read a reasonable summary of it here.

"People say: ‘What's the difference between a blog and column anyway? Isn't MySpace just as good as the Guardian comment pages?' I think not. There is a skill in crafting a column with a beginning, a middle and an end, a coherent argument and at least three facts readers don't know, preferably information gleaned from talking to the leading players in the case.

"There is a risk that the style of the blogosphere is dragging us all along to shout louder. It may be that the short burst of opinion is all anyone can absorb and the longer column becomes too much of a time-investment.

"A number of us columnists are anxious about it because it is a different style. It's not crafted, you haven't had the time to ring someone up, they want it now. There's a danger that it becomes more opinionated."

Also, you might not check your facts, on a blog, which would make you look like a right tool,. not that I'd ever do such a thing oh no. *cough, cough*.

Jon Cruddas is NOT going to screw up today. (and I am a moron)

2007-02-06T09:57:00.000Z

Ignore the post below, I'm an idiot and the _Sunday_ times is a very inaccurate newspaper.

See the comments for details. Goes to show what happens if you don't read the Sunday papers!

According to the Times, Jon Cruddas will call for the PM to step down today during an appearance on the Daily Politics. I hope it isn't true or that he rethinks by noon.

"Jon Cruddas, a contender for the Labour deputy leadership, in his appearance today on BBC1’s The Politics Show, will call on Blair to step down."

If that report is true, I'll lose much of the remaining respect I (and I suspect many others) had for him. This is a totally boneheaded move. Why?

1. It plays straight into the Tories hands. Cameron calls for the PM to go, nothing happens for a week, he looks stupid, then Bloody Jon Cruddas backs him up. Thanks. A lot.

2. It comes on a day when Labour's poll ratings improved.

3. It re-inforces the impression that the Cruddas campaign has gone into full leftie bandwagon mode. Trident, Iraq withdrawal, dep leadership candidates should all resign, and now this. It'll get him some support in the activist base, but at what cost to his reputation as a responsible politician?

4. People inside the party don't want the PM to go for very good tactical reasons, (May elections, dealing with a number of short term issues, and to give the Chancellor a lift across June/July/August and to be fresh in time for Party conferences.)

5. Just from his own personal perspective, it gives a number of the other deputy leadership candidates a handy stick to beat him with- disloyalty. The other centre-left deputy leadership candidates have been hamstrung in attacking Cruddas on most issues, but they can do this.

So, if he does this, Cruddas moves to the very bottom of my preference ranking for the Deputy leadership, for all four of my leadership votes (Party, Union and two Afiliated associatons.)

A miserable failure...

2007-02-05T19:06:00.000Z

Yesterday I tried to live a life without the news media. I refused to read newspapers (except for a sports section I found on the tube). I made a conscious effort to turn over the TV if the news was coming up.

In other words, I spent my Sunday as millions of people in Britain do. I read books, played computer games on my enormous new TV and had an excellent confit belly of pork. As a result of the latter i have to go to the gym now.

It was interesting to see how much news you pick up inadvertently. Whether it's other peoples papers on the tube, the guy in front of you on the bus reading the Observer or walking into a shop for a bottle of coke. You find out quite a lot about the world without making any particular effort to do so.

Of course, I cracked. At about 11pm I logged onto the BBC news website, "just in case I'd missed something really important". I hadn't, obviously, but I'd have hated to turn up to work today and discovered that the PM had resigned without me noticing.

I enjoyed it, and will be embracing no-news Sundays more frequently in future.

GET YER NEW LINKS HERE

2007-02-02T15:20:00.000Z

After the shameful realisation that my links are well out of date (I'm a blogging veteran don'chaknow), I have finally updated some of my link.

Read them, they're free. Also, good.

Labour
Hamer Shawcross, King of the BBF
All Labour Bloggers, in one fun size packet
Not all that delectable, but still.
Idiots for Labour. Exposing pea brained Labour hacks. The mean buggers.

Tory
The high priest of self regard
Britain's favourite sewer.. err Blogger.

Other
The home of Andrea (and Mike S.)
Phil knows votes
Because Peter Young doesn't blog..

Notes on a Scandal.

2007-02-02T14:20:00.000Z

Well, here we are again.

Blair must go, screaming headlines, allegations of a cover up, the whiff of scandal, sleaze and corruption. Prime minister weakened, Blah blah, blah de fucking blah.

I haven’t written much on the cash for honours scandal, because, in common with the vast majority of those writing on the subject, I haven’t got the foggiest what the case is.

To sum up the current state of play: No-one knows if there will be any charges, and if so for what. No one knows how far along the investigation is. No one knows what direction the investigation is taking (lots of people are claiming to know, but their reports are confusing and contradictory and often wrong).

We do know someone is giving information to the media that is bad for No 10. They might be at the crux of the enquiry, or they might not, or the briefings might be intended to get various actors in the drama to react to the briefings themselves. (This, by the way, would be a perfectly fair police tactic).

We also know that four people have been arrested and released. They’ve been questioned on various charges.

We know that if Ruth Turner and/or Lord Levy were charged it would be very difficult for the Prime Minister to continue.

We know that the vast majority of the PLP, including the entire cabinet, are anxious to ensure that the transition to a new leader happens smoothly. So we’re unlikely to see ministerial resignations and ministers calling on the PM to go.

We know that the Labour party constitution makes it impossible to remove a sitting leader until after party conference, by which point the PM will already have gone.

So we can reasonably deduce from this that unless someone is charged, the PM will not quit (and those of us who like him will add, and why should he?).

Everything else in the media is huff and puff.

However, there is a second point. One of the recurrent journalistic motifs in recent “SCANDAL” reporting is usually delivered by a reporter at the end of their package, cataloguing the woes of whatever minister is under pressure or by a comment writer setting out the loathsomeness of the said minister. It goes like this

“Of course, No-one knows if these allegations are true, or if Minister X knew anything about Scandalgate, or if there was any wrong doing at all. But while this political storm breaks over the minister, respected voices are now asking if they can hang on and if they understand the damage they are causing to the party”
This really pisses me off. The insidious notion here is that merely being the subject of controversy is bad. It doesn’t matter if you’re not found to have done anything wrong, or if your actions were correct, or even if the whole thing has nothing to do with you, If somehow you find yourself at the centre of a media firestorm you must immediately be considered a liability and the speculation must begin.

Now, New Labour’s media management was partly responsible for the rise of the notion that the whiff of scandal = resignation, but this is one area where Alistair Campbell was wrong to encourage the PM to sack ministers being run ragged, probably because as a newspaper man he over estimated the importance of the media.

The truth is things are suspected of being wrong all the time but only facts count. I might suspect my deputy is skiving when he says he has a Friday afternoon meeting and won’t be back in the office today, but I’ll only sack him if I actually discover he’s snorting coke off a Tory researcher’s nipple in work hours (Just like in Party Animals).

So please, whenever you hear a reporter or journalist using the “Suspicion of Scandal = pressure to resign”, just regard it as what it is, meaningless filler. The only reason someone quits under those circumstances is if they can’t take it any more or the PM gets rid of them. This PM has made the mistake of giving the media scalps for running these campaigns before, and doesn’t want to give them any more; especially when the prime scalp is his own.

Journalism in the Dark.

2007-02-01T11:42:00.000Z

If you don't know what lies behind a story, why not just report what you think it might be, and then speculate on haw damaging it would be if the thing you've just speculated about was true? It's far sexier than jst saying you don't really know what's happening.

A question for journalists. Why is it that the worst sin in journalism is admitting you've got no idea what's happening?

Party Dodgers.

2007-01-31T17:46:00.000Z

So, Party Animals starts tonight.

The Hamers over at BBF have been chipping away at this for some time and are frothing at the mouth with excitement at the prospect.

After their superb 30 yard effort in tearing the premise of the series apart, it feels wrong to try and toe-poke the Ball into the net and try and claim credit for the piss take. Still, since the ultra innovative viral marketing people have created a site that pupports to be a gossip site for young, fit politicos (It's like Recess Monkey, but less absolutely fucking abysmally shit*) and have seen fit to link to me, I thought I'd try and give impressionable visitors an idea of what life is really like in the glamorous world of politics.

INT. DAY. HOUSE OF COMMONS OFFICE .
It is 9.31am.

BEN, 25, enters the office. He is wearing a cheap Marks and Spencers suit with an ink stain on his left cuff, a shirt that remains resolutely unbuttoned, not due to political fashion but because he's put on two stone since he stated going to the terrace cafeteria for lunch. He carries the Guardian. He is, clearly, a Labour researcher. Lib Dems don't wear suits.

Ben sits at his desk and reads the paper discontentedly.

BEN: Jesus Christ. Fucking morons. (PAUSE) Honestly.

SFX:FIRE ALARM.

DISEMBODIED VOICE: A fire alarm is being investigated in your area. Please await further announcements.

THE FIRE ALARM MESSAGE REPEATS THROUGHOUT THE SCENE.

SFX: PHONE RINGS

BEN: Hello. Yeah, hi Alison. Sorry, fault on the Northen Line. Yeah. How is it in Oldtown?

(PAUSE)

So when's the meeting? Friday? Hmmm. Well,. I'll get him to call her. Well, he's got an adjournment tomorrow. and there's the Crossrail Bill for three hours today.

(PAUSE)

yes, again.

(PAUSE)

Well,he annoyed the whips. No, I'm not expecting him till two. Some union meeting. OK, See you.

CUT TO CLOCK SHOWING 11AM.

BEN is at his desk. He appears to be working, but he could just be looking at crap blogs on the internet.

CANDY, Ben's american intern. enters. She is possibly the least attractive American in the universe, but is extremely expensively dressed. She is clearly hung over. Ben loathes her.

CANDY: Hi Ben.

Ben: Hi Candy. You OK?

CANDY: Yeah- we went to Sketch last night. Soo cool. I've never had Vodka Redbull before.

BEN: Riiight. Want anything from the Terrace?

CANDY: Oooh- can you get me a coawfee? four Sugars.

BEN (flinching): Right

CUT TO ENTRANCE TO TERRACE CAFETERIA

BEN is walking into the large cafe.

He gets there just behind a dozen contractors ordering full english breakfasts.

Obviously he has nothing in common with the representatives of the actual existing proletariat, but wishes to show solidarity with them. So he keeps a small distance and tries not to look annoyed that although they only have blue passes they are in the cafe during a grey pass only period. He's a true socialist like that.

Immediately after BEN enters there follows what appears to be an outing of the British Young Estate Agents association, but turns out to be a gaggle of Tory researchers. The men are all in oxford cotton shirts with thick footballer ties, while the women are in top shop skirts and business like blouses and pearl necklaces.

(Yes, pearl necklaces. You can only hope it's ironic.)

TORY MAN: So, Camilla, lot of totty at the Dinner last night? I wished I could have made it- prime pulling ground!

TORY GIRL: Oh, Miles, they wouldn't have been interested in you, they were all crowding round Steve and George. No-one would have cared about some oik from Kettering.

TORY MAN: Osborne was there? Shit I should have gone..

TORY GIRL: No, not Osborne, Eustace. The one who did sex parties, I think.

BEN, caught between his loathing of the Tories and his fear of the builders, shuffles slowly towards the till, forlornly grapsing his croissant. As he reaches the till, he looks up, and his eyes lock with that of the actually rather attractive Tory Girl.

They smile at each other.

BEN decides to go for it.

BEN: That's a nice Pearl Necklace. I wish I'd given you one.

PAUSE.

TORY GIRL turns on her high heels and walks away.

*Actually it's got better since the one who isn't Recess Monkey does most of the posts now.

CRISIS!

2007-01-30T13:44:00.000Z

As a former, junior, bottom feeding, no name “spin doctor” (though in my case I was more of a spin hospital porter) I feel like I’ve moved into some bizarre alternate reality.

I’ve just stopped caring about the media.

First, I’m suffering from crisis fatigue.

I’ve stopped believing that the latest media crisis is a crisis, or even vaguely worrisome. I just don’t pay too much attention to it.

The sound of Kay Burley, Jon Snow or that smug one from ITN news hectoring a minister over some scandal or other fills me not with fear or delight but ennui.

I don’t respect the judgement of their editors, I don’t respect the research that lies behind their questions and I don’t respect (in most cases) the grasp of the issues of the day's presenter.

I don’t think most news editors know what a crisis actually is. There are more prisoners in jail than ever before. Why? Because we’ve been what every voter in the country wants us to be: Tough on Crime. We've imposed longer sentences. So we need to build more prisons. At the same time Crime is falling.

Right, so we need to build some prison places. Fair enough. But CRISIS OH MY GOD PEOPLE WHO WOULDN’T EVEN HAVE BEEN IN PRISON A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO MIGHT BE RELEASED!!!!

Or is it that the Home Office itself is in crisis. Perhaps it’s unmanageable. Can’t do the job. FILES HAVE BEEN LOST!! CRIMINALS HAVE GOT INTO THE COUNTRY!!

Did I mention that crime is falling?

Right, so where exactly is the huge crisis that is going to engulf us all? It’s not that these aren’t issues, or significant, or need to be managed, but the sense of permanent crisis is so ludicrous that it's impossible to take seriously.

Then there’s the po-faced hypocrisy.

Today it’s gambling. A presenter from Sky News shouts at a MP because he won’t accept that Government should stop people from gambling. I turn over to watch high stakes Texas Hold Em. On Sky.

It’s all so boringly predictable. Find a crisis. Take the moral high ground. Use it to promote whatever political agenda your news organisation supports.

On TV this tends to be a general sense of frustrated outrage that these things can’t all be sorted out, immediately.

On the Newspaper side, I can’t remember the last time a daily newspaper surprised me with their response to a particular issue.

The take of a newspaper is so boringly predictable. Whether it’s the Mail’s righteous anger (paedophiles on the loose – thanks to our lax society), the Independents morally grating sanctimony (Want paedophiles in prison? then free these nice middle class people) or the Sun’s mixture of escapism and vindictiveness (Suzy, 23, thinks John Reid’s lost his marbles…).

I don’t hate them. I don’t care about their approval. I don’t want to froth and rave like I used to. I just don’t care any more.

Truth is, most of them don’t really know what they’re talking about. So why pay any attention to what they say?

Shurely Shome Mishtake?

2007-01-30T11:30:00.000Z

"Instructing Muslim parents to spy on their children. Offending our war heroes with the proposal of a new 'Veteran's Day' when we already have Remembrance Sunday. Suggesting that we put flags on the lawn. These and similar clunking attempts to address the complexities of community cohesion show a serious misunderstanding of the scale of the challenge, and the shape of the solution."

David Cameron in the Observer, Sunday Jan 28th

"THE Queen’s Birthday will become a national holiday under Tory plans to create a sense of “True Britishness”, David Cameron tells The Sun today. The Tory leader wants everyone to have a day off to celebrate Her Majesty’s official birthday in June — and mark what it means to be British.

"The civil service already gets that day off, and Mr Cameron would give the nation a break as well. He says: “The suggestion of a national day is a very good one. It should be held for everyone. It’s above politics and it unites people around the Royal Family.”

David Cameron in The Sun, Monday, Jan 29th

Cowley Streets Ahead

2007-01-30T10:40:00.000Z

No, not the Lib Dems, but rather the good and great Philip Cowley, who has written a marvellous submsission to the Commons Modernisation Select Committee about reforming the role of the backbencher that includes the following example of.. err.. "heavy handed" whipping.

"The MP was said to be thinking of rebelling, and so Cocks explained the party’s position to him. The MP – who happened to represent the constituency of Blackburn – replied that he didn’t find it a particularly convincing argument. ‘At this point, Michael Cocks seized Jack by the genitals, held on to them tight while Jack turned white in the face and finally released him with the comment, ‘Are you convinced now?’"

The Committee on Modernisation is Chaired by the Rt Hon Jack Straw MP, the honourable member for Blackburn (squeezed).

SUCKERED!

2007-01-29T10:28:00.000Z

In an amazing co-incidence, David Cameron's argument on Multi-culturalism has been backed up today by a report by the charity/Think Tank Policy Exchange.

The BBC and Sky described the Think Tank as an "independent Think Tank", which is how they promote themselves. It is, of course, total bollocks.

Read their events page, and count the number of times the word "Conservative" is used. Check their recent list of speakers, and see that the last three were Gove, Hague and Osborne. The endorsement on their front page? From Letwin.

Their staff desriptions include two Tory Councillors, a ex-CCO staffer, an adviser to a Tory peer and David Willett's old researcher. Oh, and a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph.

The BBC and Sky just got played by a Conservative front group. Suckers.

A modest proposal.

2007-01-26T17:03:00.000Z

Could it be time to complete the New Labour project- by merging the centre left?

This could be the most controversial thing I've ever written. I have always had a cordial hatred for the Liberal Democrats. I dislike their policies and most of their MPs. I loathe their hypocrisy, self righteousness and political cowardice. I don’t want PR. I supported (and still support) our mission in Iraq. I'll be enthusiastically campaigning against the Lib dems every chance i get between now and the next election.

I’ve been involved in anti-Lib Dem campaigns and been proud to use with every means at my disposal: fair, and not so fair. I've always disliked the metropolitian, elitist wing of New labour who liked to discuss coalition at dinner parties and think tank cocktail reception. I'm far more Tom Watson and Fraser Kemp New Labour than Patrick Diamond and Andrew Adonis New Labour.

My anti Lib Dem credentials are impeccable. So I'm not entirely comfortable with what I'm about to say myself. However, political reality is more important than my hatred of the Liberal Democrats, and reality says it might soon be time to reach a deal with them.

The idea of reaching a deal with the Lib Dems isn’t new. One of the most controversial ideas of New Labour was the suggestion that it’s founding fathers would be willing to work with Paddy Ashdown.

Indeed, there’s every sign that if Labour had won a small majority in 1997 Tony Blair would have reached out to the Lib Dems. In the event, an enormous majority and the strong institutional hatred for the Liberals at the very top levels of the party killed the idea at the birth of the new Government. Later still, the personal and political antipathy between Blair and Kennedy and the bigger divide of the Iraq war stopped all thoughts of co-operation.

Today, relations between Labour and the Liberal Democrats are about as bad as they’ve ever been. Labour’s attacks on the Lib Dems as soft on crime, woolly, muesli eating liberals with no courage on issues like crime, public service reform and taxation have hurt, while the Lib Dems critique of Labour as centralising, anti-civil liberties and reckless on foreign policy have been more pointed and more coherent than that of the official opposition.

So it seems a bad time to say that leading figures in both parties need to be considering changing the terms of British politics by planning a rapprochement.

But let’s look at the future.

At the next election Labour’s majority will likely fall or there will be a hung parliament. If the majority is less than 40, a small group of disaffected ex-ministers and the hard left will be able to hold the Government to ransom. The prospect of this is pretty unnerving. There's been no sign that this group have moderated their stance with a majority of 60, so why should we believe they'd do so with a majority of 20? In that situation, if the hard left didn't moderate their positions they could destroy the Government.

For the Liberals, the possibility of a hung parliament means that they need to decide who they side with- and for many, many Liberal democrats that will be a painful, unhappy choice. At the same time, many Liberals worry that their party’s domestic policy is unpopular where it is thoughtful and right, and popular where it is unreformed and wrong.

So why shouldn’t Labour offer left of centre Lib Dems a deal ahead of the next general election? We could offer either a coalition, or a deal with 30 or so Liberal Democrats interested in forming a Social Democrat caucus after the next General election.

The Heads of Agreement could be along the following lines:-

1. Agreement to joint Government throughout the Parliament.
2. A Liberal/Social Democrat Foreign Secretary given authority to lead a new approach to Europe and re-enforce multi-lateralism, in a context of British withdrawal from Iraq.
3. Commitment to continue public service reform, low taxation and tough on crime policies.
4. Commitment to increase environmental taxes.
5. A referendum on Electoral reform, which would not be whipped (a la EEC entry).
6. A written constitution and/or Bill of Rights.
7. Agreement on Identity cards but combined with new civil liberties laws.

Labour would win by being able to co-opt the Liberal Democrats to economic redistribution and public service reform policy and on crime issues, and by no longer having to rely on the campaign group.

If the offer were made from a position of strength, it would mean an unprecedented openness- shooting for good the idea that Gordon Brown would lead a Gormenghast administration.

The Liberal Democrats would win by ensuring a secure place in Government, by securing a more European foreign policy and wining major policy debates on multilateralism, the environment, civil liberties and yes, Electoral Reform.

There are negatives too. For Labour, this would mean accommodation with a hated enemy. It would mean effectively accepting that some cherished policies are unpopular and in need of revising- and it would mean accepting that we would prefer an accommodation with centre left Liberal Democrats than a reliance on the far left- whomay not have been loyal in parliament, but have been loyal activists in parties up and down the country.

For people like me, it would mean swallowing our dislike of PR and Bill of Rights style liberalism. It would mean accepting a diminution of power. It would mean being nice to the bastards at the next council meeting.

For the Liberals it would mean an end to easy opposition. It would mean Liberal MPs having to take responsibility for Government policy and having to accept the discipline of Government- something they’ve not been good at in Scotland.

It also might mean accepting that the Liberal Democrats are an incoherent party as currently constituted. Half of the party are left of centre social and civil democrats, believing in redistribution, environmentalism and the social market. Another faction - less numerous at the activist level but more powerful in the parliamentary party – is more economically liberal and more friendly to approaches from the Conservatives. Could an offer like this destroy the Liberals?

On the other hand, If we ever had PR, we would probably see a re-alignment of political parties, with a “Socialist party”, Labour, a Social Democrat party, “Free democrats”, Conservatives and “Britain Firsters”. Why not start that process ahead of time, and at the same time, show that coalition government doesn’t always mean weak Government?

After all, the prize is very big- A much stronger overall social democrat grouping- and a decent shot at a political system that would give social democrats a good chance of being the natural coalition government. That’s a spoonful of sugar that might make this most unpleasant medicine go down pretty well.

Dead Tree media isn't dead yet.

2007-01-22T15:54:00.000Z

You know traditional media isn't dead when you can open up your New York Times to read about the impact of High Definition TV on the media industry and find this:

"The biggest problem is razor burn," said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

" Jesse Jane, one of the industry’s biggest stars, plans to go under the knife next month to deal with one side effect of high-definition. The images are so clear that Ms. Jane’s breast implants, from an operation six years ago, can be seen bulging oddly on screen.

"I’m having my breasts redone because of HD," she said.

"You can see things you cannot see with the naked eye. You see skin blemishes; you see cottage cheese," said Robbie D. "But some cellulite is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s kind of sexy."

Just as importantly, I'm now betting HD-DVD will beat Blu-Ray in the next gen DVD market. Why?

"Pornographers’ progress with HD may also be somewhat slowed by Sony, one of the main backers of the Blu-ray high-definition disc format. Sony said last week that, in keeping with a longstanding policy, it would not mass-produce pornographic videos on behalf of the movie makers.

The decision has forced pornographers to use the competing HD-DVD format or, in some cases, to find companies other than Sony that can manufacture copies of Blu-ray movies"

Like it or loathe it, porn has helped drive the take up of virtually every new media technolgy of the last twenty years. HD will be no different.

So when you visit your single male friends in a years time and ask him why his new DVD player is HD not Blu-ray, you'll know why he looks a bit shifty.

Well, who'd have thought it...

2007-01-19T14:53:00.000Z

So Ruth Turner has been arrested (but not charged), in relation to the "Cash for Honours" investigation. It's not good news for the Government, or for the PM and will make very uncomfortable reading tomorrow.

I'm still of the opinion that there's little likelihood of any charges at the end of this investigation. The investigation must be close to wrapping up and I think this is part of the last steps before a file being sent to the CPS (After what, six months? I wish they'd cared this much when I was burgled. The guy stole about ten kilos of coppers. Surely that's traceable!).

However, I know nothing and have no sources, just gut feel.

Are we nearly there yet?

2007-01-18T13:44:00.000Z

God, politics is boring at the moment.

On the one side we have a government that has delivered most of it's legislative agenda, and is confident of winning it's major parliamentary battles (Trident, Anti-Social Behaviour legislation, Pensions, Child Support and Welfare reform) while trying to ride out growing public and media discomfort over the huge issues of Health, Crime and the Economy.

Incidentally, these newly tough areas are all cases where the government's record is perfectly respectable, but where a dearth of real crisis has lead to an overheated series of headlines that a few weeks later are then recycled into lower poll ratings. It's against this background that the Home Office "scandals" of recent weeks should be judged. Not to underestimate the importance of them, but how big an issue can something really be when it is wiped of the face of political discourse by a racism row on Celebrity Big Brother?

Yet really, all of this is mere political washing up. We've got six months until we have a new Prime Minister, and a lot of decent work can be done in that time. But it will be the politics of the small step forward, as big changes will have to wait. So we wait too.

On the other side, we have what appears to be a vacuous announcement-a-day strategy from the Conservatives. Today's Spectator seems to suggest that a Conservative Government will ask Mcdonalds to put the price of Hamburgers up.

This appears to be yet another initiative where the Tories boldly set out a political stance they have no intention of doing anything about; just like their stances on Chocolate Oranges, food miles and hugging hoodies.

Cameron's political aim appears merely to be to take the state out of the nanny state, leaving us with a nanny PM telling us what to eat, how to be happy and that we should be nice to the oiks. Quite appropriate for a shadow cabinet of public schoolboys, but ultimately useless.

More seriously, all this stuff is a straight lift from the Republican's position on "faith-based initiatives" in the run up to the 2000 election. In both cases, what is being rhetorically proposed is the insertion of the volutary, religious and community sector into areas where the problems are difficult and intractable, in the hope that without spending more money you will get better results.

It's a lovely idea, if it works. You get better services, for the same money, from people who _really care_. It's why George Bush talked a lot about unleashing the armies of compassion, and then what happened when he got into office?

Lets go to the tape, or this case the first White House Director of the Office of Faith-Based inititives. John DiIulio

"Even more revealing than what happened during the first 180 days is what did not, especially on the compassion agenda beyond the faith bill and focusing on children.

"Remember "No child left behind"? That was a Bush campaign slogan. I believe it was his heart, too.
"But translating good impulses into good policy proposals requires more than whatever somebody thinks up in the eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered, or whatever symbolic politics plan—"communities of character" and such—gets generated by the communications, political strategy, and other political shops.
"During the campaign, for instance, the president had mentioned Medicaid explicitly as one program on which Washington might well do more. I co-edited a whole (boring!) Brookings volume on Medicaid; some people inside thought that universal health care for children might be worth exploring, especially since, truth be told, the existing laws take us right up to that
policy border.
"They could easily have gotten in behind some proposals to implement existing Medicaid provisions that benefit low-income children. They could have fashioned policies for the working poor.
"The list is long. Long, and fairly complicated, especially when—as they stipulated from the start—you want to spend little or no new public money on social welfare, and you have no real process for doing meaningful domestic policy analysis and deliberation."

Fast forward to 2007. We have a good hearted but policy light opposition leader talking about the importance of society, but giving no sign of thinking about how any of this will work. Take the pledge to free charities from red tape. Sounds goodn no? Unfortunately, the red tape like are things like the Criminal Records bureau checks which, according to Cameron's Chamberlain lecture, help strangle creativity in the voluntary sector. So to put it another way, Charities will be better able to deliver services becuase they won't have to bother with tedious paperwork like whether they're employing criminals. I'm sure the Home Office cut cut it's costs and save itself a whole lot of bother by applying the same approach.

The point of this is not to say that Cameron's insticts are wrong, or he's a bad, bad, person. I don't believe either are particulaerly true. It's simply to say that Tory policy on this is so superficial that to take it seriously is to trap yourself in a morass of contradictory urges, un-thought-through policy pledges and vague aspirations. There is no sense of what would actually happen to make these mythical changes. Which means of course that none of it will happen, and we'll instead end up with the old mantras of contracting out, increasing effiency and cutting down on the public jobs bonanza.

As I said, boring. Important, but utterly boring. The trouble is that although Cameron is spouting total guff, revealing it to be guff is so dull that no-one cares.

Thank god for Lembit and the Cheeky Girl.

THE WORST PIECE OF WRITING IN TODAYS PAPERS

2007-01-02T13:07:00.000Z

It's a New Year, a new start and time to start with the resolutions.

Mine is that I'm no longer going to merely turn the page when confront by some garbled, over-written tosh churned out by broadsheet writers with a negative talent to column space ratio.

So today begins the first "The Worst Piece of Writing in Today's papers" competition. Where I find an offender, I'll post it. Then it's up to you to top it. If, Mirable Dictu, I fail to find some tosh, I'll open a thread and you can document the atrocities.

The rules are.

1. The bad writing can't be in a red top. It never is anyway.
2. Preference will be given to columnists, but leaders, diary stories and features will be considered, as will straight news, but I expect to see few instances of this.
3. Grammar matters, but mixed metaphors, incoherence, over-writing, silly extrapolation from personal experience and other tell tale signs of phoning it in will be valued.

To begin as we mean to go on.

I nominate Zoe William's dreadful opinings on the new edition of This Life in today's Guardian as TWPOWITP. Some poor deluded sould at Guardian online has chosen it as pick of the day. So have I.

It begins "This Life was a TV series which managed to capture the time and atmosphere so totally that, 10 years on, its comeback tonight is event television. Who even knew event television still existed? The show, which lasted for two series in 1996 and 1997, was never particularly funny..." and somehow manages to get worse from there.

Well done Ms Williams, you have won the first ever TWPOWITP prize- unless that is, Eagle eyed readers can beat your effort.

David Cameron: The to do list

2006-12-22T12:27:00.000Z

It's been a pretty successful year for the leader of the Conservative party.

He's put the Conservatives into a consistent, if small, poll lead. he's rebrabded the party, changed it's public policy focus and been the subject of several hundred media profiles. His focus on women and minorities means that across the country, metropolitan, media savvy candidates, many of whom don't look like traditional tories, are being selected.

yet with that achieved there are some political headaches that Cameron has to address this year. With no apologies at all for focussing on the tough questions, here's my To Do list for david Cameron in 2007.

1. Gordon Brown.

The Cameron stategy has been to applaud Blair and undercut Brown on policy, with the more personal attacks coming from Osborne. The strategy has helped paint the Chancellor in starket colours, a process helped along by the Seven Days in September "coup attempt".

However it's less than six months before Chancellor Brown becomes Prime Minister Brown, and the cure and certain knowledge that Prime Minister Brown will unleash a new world of policy initiatives on the Country will pose tough challenges for the Conservatives.

Does Cameron set out his stall now, then face having to applaud his political opponent if he implements the idea? Does he accuse Brown of being negative and then look on as he acts positively?

I believe he has to go for the former, looking like he's setting the agenda. The only issue is, what should he actually propose?

2. Policy.

Those policy commissions are going to be a head ache. many of them are going to propose policies that go against the thrust of Camerons leadership. What was Cameron thinking putting John Redwood in charge of competition policy, for example?

This cuts to the heart of the vacuum at the heart of Cameron's leadership. What is it for, other than the return of the Conservatives back in power. The Policy commission seem to have the sniff of pleasing all wings of the party at the same time, giving Cameron the space he needs to rebrand the party without having to fight it out on the tough ground.

That strategy works as long as Camron can show his party success. If you're leading by 5-10 points in the polls, you can claim that you need to drive change further. The issue is that if Labour catch up with a new leader, those policy battles become more important.

Ideally Cameron needs to have the key policy decisions taken before Brown becomes PM.

By the spring, he needs to be clearer on tax, on overall economic strategy, on spending in key areas, on what the impact of the "proceeds of growth rule" will be, what green taxes he's considering, what "devolving power" actually means in the NHS and Education, on Europe, on social justice (which Brown is certain to try and make his own) and on immigration, nationality and crime.

At the moment, the Conservative leader is in danger of being seen as a pale imitation of Tony Blair, with no real policy differentiation. That's fine in establishing moderation, but at some point the country has to look at an opposition leader and think- wha

3. Scotland and Wales.

The headache for the Conservatives is that while they seem to be doing well in southern england, they seem to be no-where in large sections on the North, and more specifically across almost all of Scotland and Wales.

While it's certain the Tories will make gains in the English local elections, how on earth can Cameron, a man whose contribution to the Scottish politcal debate has been to suggest that Scots should be disenfranchised at Westminster, make the party credible there?

What indeed is Conservatism in Scotland and Wales? Where is it relevant? What does it have to say to anybody about anything? This is a major challenge, and if cameron wakes up after the Welsh and Scottish elections with a party flatlining in the Parliament and the Assembly, he's in real trouble (even though the headlines will focus on Labour).

So Cameron needs to think what his agenda is here. Could he realistically let the Tories go for a low tax approach in Scotland while rejecting it in the UK. What is his position on the barnett formula? how does he sell his position on English votes to the scottish political establishment- or does he effectively cut off the party, accepting it's place as a minority player and focus on building a bigger lead in England? the same questions are faced with Wales, with the slight difference that the party seems to be in better fundamental shape.

4. London

The search for a Tory candidate for London mayor has been an embarassing failure.

The Tories cannot afford a bad london Mayoral campaign in 2008. They need to find an attractive, moderate, credible candidate prepared to give up about a year of their life to challenge Ken. That candidate has to do better than Steve Norris last time round. Where on earth is this creature?

5. Image

Given that this has been the great success of Camerons first year it might seem odd to put this on the list. Yet cameron's image isn't stunning. His satisfaction ratings are on a par with good months for Howard or IDS and his dissatisfaction ratings are rising. There's also a limit as to how far he can go on sounbite policies. The Toriwes have notably dialled down the chocolate orange approach to policy, but what do they have to replace it with? They've doon decent work on terroriasm, but the Whitehall institutions around the Home office are not going to be the batteground on which the next electio is fought.

Secondly, While Camerons likeability ratings are good, he does much less well in test that measure whether he's seen as Prime Ministerial.

If I were a Tory strategist, I'd be worried if I was seen as only just as credible a PM as a man who isn't even leader of his party yet, and who, whatever personality ratings he might have wuill have the power of Number Ten to establish himself as a political leader.

To put it brutally the challenge here is to reposition cameorn from being "Pleasant, Nice, Fluffy, Vacuous, media friendly, vague" to being "Leader, strong, decisive, nice, pleasant". Yet if he's refusing to commit himself n policy issues in any substantial way, how is that process to happen?

So that's the challenges for Cameron.. next up... Ming;s merciless warriors!

Oh and another thing....

2006-12-21T12:51:00.000Z

Simone Clarke is a hypocritical moron. A member of the BNP living with a half-chinese man? For fuck's sake.

It's not the racism so much as the fucking idiocy that annoys me.

(Full disclosure- I'm mixed race. Neither one thing or t'other. I often think I should be offered partial repatriation. More importantly, I'm conflicted about whether fuck's sake should have an apostrophe. After all it is the fuck's sake, but can a fuck posesse a sake? I'm not sure. the grammar of swearing is hard)

Friday Funnies. Woo hoo.

2006-12-21T12:38:00.000Z

Serious proper political post coming this afternoon, but in the meantime, this "advice to Axl Rose from his editor" is the funniest thing I've read in weeks. The excerpt doesn't do it justice. Read the whole thing. Enjoy. Never listen to Axl in the same way again.

She's got a smile that, it seems to me—Why equivocate? You weaken your point by framing this as a mere personal observation instead of a fact.

Reminds me of childhood memories—Redundant. You either have a memory or you're reminded of something. You're not reminded of a memory. Heavy-metal fans won't stand for such writing, my friend.

Where everything was as fresh as a bright blue sky—I asked around the office and no one is sure a blue sky is "fresh." You could have ablue sky at the end of a long, sweaty day and there would be nothing fresh aboutit. And she reminds you of a time when things were fresh? Fond reminiscences offreshness are no foundation for love. Fix.

Now and then when I see her face it takes me away to that special place—Again, you're weakening your own argument. Why does the sight of her face transport you only periodically? And is it just her smile or her entire face that does this to you? Because you've already said both. Consistency, Axl!

Exclusive Photo- Meacher campaign launch!

2006-12-20T16:29:00.000Z

All together now.. Splitters!

Ahhh. Aren't the left sweet. The battle for the leadership of the left is like the intertoto cup. Starts early, takes ages, and even if you win it, no-one cares. All that happens is you get beaten by a big club.

Newcastle fans: I will apologise for comparing you to Meacher and McDonnell if you win the UEFA cup. Still the UEFA's turning into the European Simod Cup anyway, so don't get too excited.

And a very Merry Christmas to you...

2006-12-20T11:28:00.000Z

Well, the political year is winding down. Here at British Politics, we've wound down already, as you can tell from posting frequency.

All the lovely MPs have dispersed to harrass their constituencies, the hacks are phoning it in (You can just hear the wheels grinding as particular journalists try to think of a way to write a cash for honours story when nothing much seems to be happening) and in any case, the public aren't listening what with enjoying the real life episode of Cracker that is entrancing our major News channels in the run up to Christmas, and bemoaning the horrors of English cricket. Oh and cramming themselves into horrendously packed shopping streets to buy loved ones a mountain or two of utter tat.

Still, there was a poll today, which contained some Christmas Cheer for everyone. The Tories can be happy that they're in the lead by a big margin for the first time in more than a decade, Labour can be happy that support seems to be fairly solid at around the 32/33% mark (and frankly, when you've had the media coverage we've had for the last six months, you have to figure that there's no-where to go but up).

Even the Liberal Democrats can be cheered by the news that the Cheeky girls have been given leave to remain in the UK. Cheeky Bottoms up Lembit!

So, to maintain your political focus over the next few days, I'll be writing a piece on the challenges of each of the major parties over the next year, starting with the Conservatives.

Now that's a proper Christmas present.

Lembit Opik

2006-12-18T11:40:00.000Z

It's just hard to know hwere to start sometimes.

Odds on an appearance in IMCGMOO? Getting lower every day.

Can you spot a trot?

2006-12-14T18:03:00.000Z

Today Jack Straw told the lobby that

"Since I was I teenager I've had the ability to spot a trot at fifty yards."

Does he really? Does anyone else share this amazing ability.

In order to find out, we present our first ever.... Trotty report.

See how well you know your trots. If you see Jack, print it out and see how well he does.

...and no, they're not all Trots, though they've all come close in one way or another.

(and by the way, the fact that when you google Janine Booth, you get this link as the first result nearly made me drop my cup of tea. Oh, the irony, the horrible, horrible irony.)

Jolly Good Post, this.

2006-12-14T17:52:00.000Z

by the Hamers, some of whom are apparently of the female persuasion and look just like the Pussycat Dolls. That's what they meant, right? I was just thinking of the gyrating Hamers with a contented smile.

Go read, and never darken your MPs doors with a postcard campaign again. Just write a green ink job about aliens taking over your brain. At least that will give the poor ducks some pleasure.

Small interview, Not many hurt.

2006-12-14T14:08:00.000Z

I've resisted blogging too often about the "cash for honours" enquiry, mostly because while I love my own opinions about most things, my own opinions about this is coloured by nothing more than near total ignorance.

That ignorance still remains, so I won't comment on the substance of the PM's questioning at all. I don't know what he was asked about, how serious the various lines of enquiry are, and if his questioning differed from that of Michael Howard.

Still, I can't help but feel a slight sense of pleasure that the frothing at the mouth brigade have been denied their orgasmic spasm.

What ever will Guido's commenters post about now?

The murder of prostitutes.

2006-12-12T11:37:00.000Z

Watching the news yesterday and today, I reflected on the difference between the political debate of the day on family breakdown and the news of the day the three murders of prostitutes in Ipswich.

A few years back, I read Nick Davies' book "Dark Heart". Published in 1998, it begins with a description of the author being approached for sex by a boy of ten or eleven, in my home town.

This chance encounter led Nick Davies to try and discover what had happened to this boy, his friends, and from there he went from inner city to inner city, from youths who burnt out pubs to families trying desperately to hold their area together.

Dark Heart is not a party political book. It is about individuals, families, communities trying to hang on on the face of overwhelming odds.

One of the things that caused me to read the book with a desperate haste was how much it reminded me of my childhood.

I grew up in a red light district, and my street was mentioned twice in the opening pages.
I remember looking out of my bedroom window and seeing the street walkers opposite.

I remember seeing the most prefectly executed mugging. A woman stood on a street corner, a car drew up. She went over to the passenger side and as she did so a couple of men ran to join her, relieving the John of his money. Chances of the crime being reported? Pretty small.

I can't help but think he deserved it. Those women were so broken, so used that even now I can't think how any man would think they were happy to please them, that they had any choice in their presence on the streets.

Ever since those days, I've had an abiding, even irrational, dislike of men who use prostitutes.
To me, it speaks of a blindness to the moral consequences of your own actions. A hollowness of the soul that warrants more condemnation that anything done by the woman themselves. I even argue that while prostitution should be legal, buying sex should be illegal under all circumstances.

So, here we are, ten years later, and three prosititutes are killed. Wealthy journalists head to East Anglia and interview prostitutes still on the streets, who tell them that they are working because of their heroin addiction. I wonder whether any customers are buying since there seem to be more television cameras than prostitutes.

So what helps those women? What protects them or stops them from falling into those lives? Yes, "falling" with all the moral and social connotations of that word.

The ingredients of these lives are so familiar. Low levels of education, alcohol abuse, a lack of stability.

The history is long too. This is no new phenomenon, no product of a lack of Victorian morals.

To remember Victorian values, read Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.

"if, indeed, it needed a special creation and example to teach the best and strongest of us the law of right, how bitterly must the children of the street-folk require tuition, training, and advice, when from their very cradles (if, indeed, they ever knew such luxuries) they are doomed to witness in their parents, whom they naturally believe to be their superiors, habits of life in which passion is the sole rule of action, and where every appetite of ouranimal nature is indulged in without the least restraint.
"I say thus much because I am anxious to make others feel, as I do myself, that we are the culpable parties in these matters.
"That they poor things should do as they do is but human nature -- but that we should allow them to remain thus destitute of every blessing vouchsafed to ourselves -- that we should willingly share what we enjoy with our brethren at the Antipodes, and yet leave those who are nearer and who, therefore, should be dearer to us, to want even the commonest moral necessaries is a paradox that gives to the zeal of our Christianity a strong savour of the chicanery of Cant."

The strong savour of the chicanery of cant.

We all have to be aware of that when we are tempted to pontificate about family breakdown.

The sad truth is there is no simple, easy answer. There will always be drug addicts. There will always be prostitutes, alcoholics, the mentally ill, the criminal. There is no utopia and the attempt to create one inevitably leads to worse sufferings.

All politicians can do is develop public policy to gradually reduce poverty, to reduce the numbers that fall into these traps. To give a little extra strength to the weakest, the poorest, the most vulnerable.

All politicians can do is try to provide mothers (and fathers, where thay are around) with as much help as they can as early as they can.

All MPs can do is try to make sure that people have the chance of a steady stable job and that if they get sick they won't lose their livelihoods. If they do, try and help them find something else. Then, if they can't or won't or are too addicted or lost to work, all a government, or an activist or a campaigner can do is try to help them work, try to help them get clean or sober.

All a council can do is try to help young children with nurseries, with parenting centres, with better schools and decent food. Try to give them help with child care. If they abandon their children try and intervene. Give people jobs to teach hygiene and good food and how to read, and put up with it when it's called "the nanny state".

All Ministers can do is try and give people decent homes and make sure there are no slums or sink estates or no go areas and try to put police, or CCTV, or community support or social workers or the much mocked "sex worker outreach officers" on the streets to help protect people.

Then, after you've done all this, your job is to explain to the hard pressed familiy paying their taxes for all this, that it is worth it. That doing, trying and failing to protect those who fall is of benefit to everyone in society. That you're not just wasting their money on the criminal, the feckless, the feral.

All the time, whatever politician, or MP, or councillor, or minister or simple activist or campaigner you are, know that all this won't be enough, that as a part of what you're doing, because of the compromises you make, you will be failing some.

That perhaps more could have been done, or done differently. That you will never succeed completely.

So cross your fingers and hope that evil will not take the weakest in the night.

It's Deja Vu all over again.

2006-12-11T16:57:00.000Z

When did the destruction of marriage under this government begin? Listening to the Tories today, you'd think that the Labour government had unleashed all hell's armies against the institution of marriage.

Yet hold on, there's been no major increase in the divorce rate, and the marriage rate has been pretty stable too (do you need to see the graph again?). So what's really going on?

So to explain what all this talk of marriage is really about, it's time to go BAAAAAACK IIIIIIN TIIIIIIME to the salad days of 1999, when a young, thrusting Iain Duncan Smith, newly elevated to the front bench, is lambasting the government for tearing apart the foundation stones of marriage in a debate on the Budget. Sounds familiar, eh?

What had this dastardly government done that destroyed marriage and led to the pretty pass we find ourselves in now?

Why they'd abolished the Married Couples tax allowance and replaced it with a tax credit that went to low income parents of children. YOICKS!

In effect what the Labour government had done was to take money from wealthy married people and give it to working families on low incomes, whether married or not. THE SWINES!

"Arguably as important, if not more so in the long term,
is the position that the Government have taken on marriage.
On the married couple's allowance, the Conservativeparty disagrees with the thrust of the Government's policy--that is nosurprise, given the Secretary of State, his predecessors and his colleagues in Cabinet.Their contempt for marriage is now clear--[Hon. Members: "Oh!"]
"…I have said that the Conservative party is pledged, on returning to office, to reinstate the special position of marriage in the tax and benefit system…
"…The Government's real reason for the change is that they oppose the structure of marriage...
"…Those who suffer from the change to the married couple's allowance will see just how wrong-headed this policy is. It is nonsense to chase the children with the money without any sense of structure.
"…If the Chancellor was so certain that he had the money and wanted achange, why did he give the money to children at the expense of marriage? Ido not understand that unless there is a clear message…
"...It is at the expense of marriage. The right hon. Gentleman need only look at the Red Book to see how the figures flow. The Chancellor saved some
money, but transferred the bulk to the children's tax credit
"…The Secretary of State says that nobody gets married because of the married couple's allowance, but he knows that the greater the pressure piled on, the more difficult it is for married couples to stay together and the less likely it is that unmarried couples will get married--all the figures for the past 30 years show that.
"The Government are barking mad if they really believe that that is an argument for getting rid of the married couple'sallowance."

What this whole debate is about, and has always been about is replacing tax credits for the poorest working families with a tax break for wealthy families.

It's the only solution the Tories are really interested in. Trouble is, We had that in the eighties and it did nothing to stop familiy breakdown. Still, who need worrisome facts? Not today's Tories.

That Conservative “Tax cuts for the married” policy in full

2006-12-11T12:04:00.000Z

1. Marriages are good. Tasty, wholesome and good for you.

2. If you don’t get married, your children will become yobs and we will have to hug them. Nobody wants that.

3. So if you do get married, we’ll give you a tax cut. Doesn’t matter how rich you are already, you deserve free cash for getting wed. How does Two grand sound? Who’ll pay for the tax cuts? We’ll tell you some other time, but don’t worry, it won’t be you. Probably thaose pesky Tax Credits, which only give money to the feckless poor, whether married or not.

4. We think that a tax cut for every married couple will solve the problems of people with mental illness, people from unstable non-working chaotic families, people with a record of criminality in their family and people who are barely literate.

5. This strategy worked brilliantly in the Eighties, when we had the married couples tax allowance. No married couples broke up then, and there was no rise in crime and everyone had a pony.

Why are you saying that isn't true?

Look, just because divorce rates rocketed in the eighties when there was a huge fiscal encouragement to marry, doesn't mean we shouldn't try giving wealthy people free money again. Let Sunshine win the day, y'hear?

6. Look, don’t ask difficult questions. We know what’s best for the paupers, and that’s tax cuts for the wealthy.

What's on your Veternari list?

2006-12-08T17:52:00.000Z

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (Yes, I am a nerd), the pre-eminent political leader is Havelock Vetinari. Portrayed as a mixture of Lyndon Johnson, Machiavelli, Richard III and Bismarck, Vetenari is the ultimate in cynical, rational, cold blooded political realism.

Except for his loathing of mimes. The man hates mimes and throws them into pits for nothing more than practising their harmless art.

When I am Supreme Dictator of All Britain, things will be similarly rational and well ordered. Aside from the minor issue over my headquarters (The National Gallery or Somerset House? I cna never decide) every major decision will be considered coolly, rationally and without emotion.

There will however be a few exceptions. They follow below. Consider yourself warned- and feel free to supply additions.

1. Under the "Freedom of the Airwaves Act 2007," Janet Street Porter will be banned from any Television, Radio and Newpaper work. Penalty for allowing her image to grace our screens? To be placed in a room alone with her for four years.

2. Under the "That was just mean Act 2008" the parents of BBC Business reporter Julia Caesar will be publicly flogged. Honestly, Julia Caesar?

3. Under the "Misrepresentation of the people Act 2009" Vox Pops will be banned. Random streetwalkers do not a reflection of Britain make.

4. Under the "Prevention of cliche Act 2010" All Travel articles that contain the words "Land of Contrasts" will be burnt.

5. Under the "Brilliant and Incisive Act 2011" Any book reviewer who does not disclose personal, familial, marital or financial links to either the author, the publisher or a competitor to the above will be banned from publishing anything, ever.

6. Under the "Prevention of Neoptism Act 2012" The son or daughter of a famous person shall be forced to change their name and no comment shall be made about thair parents. No son or daughter of a senior media executive, author, actor or comedian will be allowed to work in the media until the age of 28.

. Oooh. Get me.

2006-12-08T13:29:00.000Z

Things I find really irritating. If you use them, I will automatically assume you are a cretin.

Bliar: See, if you change the letters round… Brilliant. You are a comedy genius.

Nulab, ZanuLab and variants: I don’t even understand why Nu is bad. Now, if is were GnuLab, I’d laugh.

LibDumb, LibDim and variants: Yes, yes, well done.

Oddly, I haven't seen many moronic, childish epithets for the Tories. Why not? Do Labour supporters just have a more finely honed sense of humour, or have I just missed the tidal wave of Konservative, Camer-wrong and other idiocies?

Vote for Someone Else!

2006-12-06T15:52:00.000Z

Your humble correspondent is a hack. I've stood in more elections than you've had hot dinners sunshine. I've won by landslides, been beaten by less than a fifth of a vote, stood on a stage looking delighted and smug and been the devious hack saying I'll nominate a friend for an election and then standing against them. I won, too.

So when I realised that this Blog had been nominated for the "Best Labour Blogger" award by the fine people at Bloggers4Labour, it was all I could do not to grab the nearest battlebus and head off to the nearest marginal seat.

Yet, I confess I am not worthy. How can I campaign for such an award, when I can't even update my links? how can I win if I care not for the typo or the grammatical error?

No dear friends, This is an award I cannot in all conscience campaign for.

*takes out onion*

Vote here, if you desire, but feel no pressure from your correspondent, who cares not for such trinkets and baubles and only wishes to add his little all to the great struggle for social justice that is the Labour movement. After all, are we not stronger together than we are seperately?

All of the Blogs listed are naturally excellent, so i thought that since i was not asking for support I should give you a bit of information about my fellow contestants. My comments are of, course, intended to help my rivals.

Best Blog
Snowflake 5:
Reasonable, softy lefty and commenter in the bearpit of CiF. Read him, even if he did vote Lib Dem, the swine. THE EVIL LIB DEM SWIIIINE.

http://nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com/
Thoughtful, intelligent, nuanced. Currently running a campaign about standards for bloggers and against malicious gossip. This is because the author sleeps with small furry animals, sex-wise.

http://thedaily.wordpress.com/
Half Blog, three-quarters Cruddas for deputy fansite. Currently stalking Peter Hain, as I was informed by special branch. If you go there your movement will be tracked by MI5. Definitely.

http://letsbesensible.blogspot.com/.
Again with the thoughtfulness and intelligence. YAWNARAMA OR WHAT? Recently apologised for slavery. Because he had seven slaves until 1997. Now pays them minimum wage, thanks to Labour.

Oh, all right, they're all very good. The Bustards.

Oh, and do vote for Hamer Shawcross as best new blogger. Just to encourage the mustachioed reprobates. I was excluded from the best new blogger vote, despite being nominated, which is a sign of the repression implicit in the social fascist state. Fight the power. Tom, Kerron and Bob Piper get enough traffic already, the greedy gets.

...and back Fair Deal Phil for best elected representative. He's our man in Deeping St James. It's like being our man in Moscow, except flatter.

My Pre Pre-Budget Report report.

2006-12-06T11:10:00.000Z

So Gordon gets a chance to set out his stall today. I think he'll want to be forward-looking.

I don't know economics, but I do know politics. So here's my pre-budget predictions:

Gordon Brown will do the following:

1. Let's look at the record. Stability. Growth. compared to years of boom and bust.
2. Big Picture is good, but challenges of future. Focus on facts and details - drawing the contrast with Cameron and Osborne.
3. Climate change, Skills, Globalisation, Education. Business growth. Big challenges need real, worked through responses.
4. I have rejected submissions to cut spending on Schools'n'hospitals which would..... How mean that would be.
5. You want to be green? This is where you start paying. In Cash. You said you wanted it.
6. The Economy is growing faster than predicted. Again. Remember when you said it was going to crash? losers.
7. My brilliance means I can.. spend more on schools!
8. So I'm going to spend more. but that still leaves some space in economy.
9. Shock Tax cut - maybe.... OK. This is just me hoping and he'll probably wait till March for that.

Osborne will:

1. Keep his voice as low as humanly possible, but forget about halfway though.
2. Try to be serious but work in at least one reference to a big clunking fist.
3. Try to take credit for any green moves.
4. China'ndia. Big global challenges, productivity, red tape. Holding back economic growth.
5. The economy is stagnating. Oh yes.
6. Where has all the money gone?
7. (Takes out onion) Life is getting harder for hardworking families, unemployment rising, Inflation, It's all you fault.
8. So we need tax cuts. Err. We need balanced tax cuts. ummm.
9. You're rubbish and you smell.

Your Correspondent will:

1. Try to supress my deep and abiding loathing of George Osborne, the smug, shrill, piping, arrogant wind up merchant. As you can tell it's going well.

2. Throw things at the television when the more ignorant and self satisfied of our press corps burble on. I mean you, Langdale, and you strangely forgettable woman next to Andrew Neil and the entire ITN political team. Not Sky then, the sky people tend to be relatively good if they're the politics team and not ignorant, superficial Kay Burley.

3. Edit this post after the event, so there is no evidence of my idiocy.

Political Book Corner

2006-12-05T12:51:00.001Z

Iiiiiiits Christmas, quoth little Noddy Holder before all of the miserable sods around Parliament kick his head in.

So for your purchasing joy, here are the first of occassional political recomendations for the hack in your life.

1. The Powerbroker, Robert A Caro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,. Everyone's heard of Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography. But kids, talkin' bout Lyndon is so 2002. We've all been there done that and told the story about getting the aides to take notes in the toilet. And the one about the pig-loving.

So this book is where you show you really know political biography. This is the Book Caro wrote before he started on his LBJ marathon. This is a Deep Cut, the early work that made his rep on an indie label before signing for a major. This is the Sex Pistols on A&M.

It's about Robert Moses. Moses, baby! It's seven hundred pages about a New York builder who made one run for elected office and lost.

You know you want it.

Buying this book for your loved one is like getting some rare Miles Davis bootleg for a jazz fan. It shows you understand. it shows you care.

Buy For: Gordon Brown, William Hague.

2. The Washingtonienne

OK, So you're a bag carrier. It's not so bad but could be so much better.

You could be a minx of an American Bag carrier working for a US Senator. You get free drinks and powerful middle aged men trying to put their pork where it really shouldn't go.

I meant lobbyists trying to insert appropriations into a tax cutting bill.
Honestly, people.

Anyway, it's a book about researchers and sex, which is good for novelty value at least.

Buy for: Louise Bagshawe, Recess Monkey, the writers of Party Animals

Why this blog is anonymous..

2006-12-04T13:37:00.000Z

Because I need to tell you that my first reaction on hearing the news that former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in a sushi bar was to think...

Mmmmm... Sushi.

I am a bad and evil person and my identity must never be revealed.

Could this Story get any more James Bond? The castlist..

Possible villian, Mario Scaramella,
Intriguing Russian... Alex Goldfarb,
English Scientist.. John Henry (snigger).

But where, you might ask, is Xenia Onatopp?

I nominate Maria Gaidar, daughter of possibly poisoned former Russian PM Yegor, as our putative real life thigh-crusher. She's already got into practise by abseiling down Moscow bridges. Mmmmm.

Xenia and her alter ego Maria

So what happened last week?

2006-12-04T10:19:00.000Z

John Cruddas decided he wants the mantle of the left more than he wants to be deputy leader. Can you imagine Gordon wanting a deputy leader who opposed Trident?

Will Hutton sketched out the shape of things to come. Idea of a split up Treasury is quite interesting.

Senior Tories decides that the way to attack cameron is to attack his surrogates. Without Steve, you're nothing, they think. This reminds me of the way people would brief against Kinnock by attacking Mandelson and Charles Clarke. In code it means "we don't really think you're up to it.".

I Wonder who the sources are... Iain Dale would know, but he's not telling.

So how is Cameron really doing?

2006-12-01T13:25:00.000Z

For the last 25 years, only one leader of the opposition has become Prime Minister. Historically, this is an unusual statistic, but it does underline how dificult a job being Leader of the Opposition really is.

Foot, Kinnock, Hague and Howard all lost and resigned. John Smith, sadly died and Ian Duncan Smith wasn't allowed to run with the scissors of leadership. So how is Cameron doing in comparison to his predecessors on the opposition benches?

To find out, It's time for Graphs! Woo hoo!

Mori have asked how satisfied voters are with each of the opposition leaders. The questions and the polling techniques have been consistent for more than 25 years, so are internally consistent. You can find the raw data here. What I've done is take the data for each of their first 10 surveys and put them side by side.

First up, here is the percentage of voters satisfied with the performance of each leader. David Cameron is the thicker blue line. As you can see, after a good start, where the numbers satisfied with him was in the Kinnock(83)/Smith/Blair territory, his numbers have flatlined, or even slightly declined, and he is now firmly in Foot/IDS/Howard/Hague territory. It's a dramatic contrast to Blair, who started well, then improved. It's closer to the performance of Neil Kinnock in '83- a good initial performance followed by a sag in support.

It's not all that bad for Cameron. Here are the numbers dissatisfied with each leaders performance. Here, a low, declining chart is good. Again, Cameron is the thick blue line.

Here we can see that the British people are patient people who will wait before deciding they hate you!

All the leaders started out with low dissatisfaction ratings, and saw them rise over their first year. Foot, Howard, Hague and Kinnock saw the greatest increase, while Blair saw only a minimal increase.

Cameron does quite well in this area, coming second only to Blair in not annoying people. Third was IDS- which goes to show that not terrifying people in your first year isn't enough for political success.

One can argue whether this good score for Cameron is a result of policy lightness, or brand repositioning (or both) but it is real.

We then combine the satisfied and the dissatisfied, to get the Net satisfaction rating for each leader after one year. This is the figure you tend to see in the papers.

Clearly Blair performed incredibly in his first year, with Smith coming a distant second and Cameron third, putting him ahead of the people who were defeated by landslides, but declining over time.

Worringly for the Tories, we've seen that Cameron's strength compared to Foot, IDS, Hague and Howard is driven by the fact not very many people are disatissfied with him, rather than by any great enthusiasm for him. His satisfaction ratings are low.

That's dangerous, as for all the leaders dissatisfaction inexorably rose over time, while satisfaction ratings rarely broke out of the settled range people established early on. Cameron hasn't scared many people off, but he has generated only the same enthusiasm as the big losers in British politics.

Conclusion? Cameron's not doing that well. His support is soft.

Al Gore is Stiff

2006-11-30T15:57:00.000Z

I know, you can't wait for another party funding post- and there will be more, I promise.

But in the mean time, I wanted to draw your attention to possibly the most explicit quote I've ever heard from a US politician. It's from an interview in US GQ.

Q. What kind of freedom do you feel now that you didn’t feel when you were running (for president)?

A. You know my all time favorite Onion headline—you read The Onion?—sometime in the summer of 2001, the lead story on the front page had a picture of Tipper and me, and the headline was, “Gores Enjoying Best Sex of Their Lives.” And she said, “How did they know?”

See. When they said Al Gore was stiff, they were just telling the truth.

Big Bad Ben

2006-11-29T10:22:00.000Z

Yesterday we asked how a company that was registered as "non trading" at Companies house managed to lend the Conservative party £2.6million.

Today, thanks to an eagle eyed friend, we can go a little further.

Above, we see the latest Directors report for Big Ben films, covering up to December 2004. As you might be able to see, it says "Principal Activities: The Company is dormant and has not
traded for the year". As the report was filed in October 2005, I think we can assume that there wasn't a surge of activity immediately after that.

But it gets better.

The day before Big Ben films lent the Conservative party £2.6million, it filed another report with Companies house.

This did two things. First, it confirmed that the company was non-trading- the day before it scraped together the cash to lend the Conservative party £2.6million.

You can see the relevant parts of the report, and the dated signature of Johan Eliasch below.

Secondly, itnotified Companies house of the transfer of the entire shareholding (both shares) of Big Ben Films from a company called Boldergate, based in the attractive sounding "Sea Meadow House, Blackbourne Highway, Tortola" to Johan Eliasch personally.

Now, your humble correspondent isn't well travelled, and hasn't heard of Tortola.

It turns out to be.. the largest island in the British Virgin islands, and the address is the home to many lovely offshore tax avoidance companies, including those provided by the charming AMS group of Sea Meadow House, Blackbourne Highway, who offer "business that can be carried out in a tax free envirionment".

But Tortola it did ring a bell. Hmm. Where can I have seen Tortola recently? Ah yes. It's mentioned in.... The Conservative parties register of Loans! What a coincidence. Lanners Serices Limited is registered as lending the Conservatives £3.6million in January 2006. It's Michael Ashcroft's creature, apparently.

So what do we think is happening here?

First of all, you need to remember that in late 2005 and early 2006 the Conservative Party was coming under increased pressure to name a number of people who had loaned it money. The electoral commission was threatening to take it to court if they didn't reveal their funding sources. Some of these people very much did not want to be named, so before revealing the names of the sources of their loans, the Tories repaid a number of loans. We don't know how much, because of course, they didn't declare the loans they'd repaid, but £5million seems reasonable.

However, to repay that money they needed funding, which is where the loan from Big Ben films comes in. The day the Conservative party paid off its "secret" loans they didn't want to tell anyone about, they got a £2.6million loan from Big Ben, which enabled them to balance the books.

The problem is of course, is that since Big Ben is a non trading company, dormant for at least two years, it's a bit of a mystery where it managed to find £2.6 million. It's not the sort of money that you'd forget you had in a little known corner of your corporate empire, is it? It's a real shame their latest accounts are late.

It's a mystery why a Swedish millionaire would need to use a dormant, non-trading company to make an emergency unsecured loan of £2.6million to the Conservatives. It's even more of a mystery why just before making the loan the ownership of the company moved from an obscure offshore company to him personally.

So perhaps someone should be asking Mr Eliasch how his dormant, non-trading company managed to have £2.6million to lend at such an opportune moment?

Who are Big Ben films?

2006-11-28T13:43:00.000Z

Big Ben films lent the Conservative party £2.6million last year. Not bad for a company that is described as being "non trading" at Companies house.

But who are Big Ben films? Basically they're a UK based dormant front, (I mean non trading company) for Swedish tycoon Johann Eliasch.

How do I know this? Google "Big Ben films" and you get various references

1. An Indian film being produced in Kerala by "UK based Big Ben films international"

2. Porn. (NSFW, obviously). I don't think these are the same people, but what do I know? I thought you might like the link. Perverts.

3. References to an off-shoot to Alex Korda's "London films". The current London films is based at the same address as Bib Ben films registered address and seems to own various old TV programmes and films.

I phoned the contact number for London films up and the nice man at the end of the phone told me Big Ben Films was "dormant" and both it and London Films were owned by Johann Eliasch, the Tory lender who lent Michael Howard his private plane and who appears to be a mate of Belinda Carlisle.

Anyone who wants to see how active Big Ben films actually is can download their accounts here for a pound. I'd do it myself, except, perhaps unsurprisingly, they're overdue.

Now, the Tories released information about a loan from Johann Eliasch earlier this year.. but it is intriguing that Mr Eliasch routed his loan through a dormant British company.

After all, Mr Eliasch isn't a British citizen, so if the Tories were unable to repay the loan, he couldn't make a donation, but the company could.

Of course, if that were to happen, and Big Ben films really was a non trading business, any donation from Big Ben films would merely be a disguised donation from a foreign citizen, and therefore illegal.

I'm sure this is one loan that would never be converted into a donation.

Obviously.

Memo to TV news editors:

2006-11-28T11:19:00.000Z

People who do not work for television broadcasters care very little about the managment structures of television broadcasters.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Cameron is almost as popular as Iain Duncan Smith - Fact.

2006-11-27T17:44:00.000Z

Over the last few months various commentators have given the impression that David Cameron is quite.... Popular. Refreshing. Exciting.

So perhaps today, as the man himself puts the meat on that radical, exciting policy agenda by errr.. Cancelling his speech at the CBI, is a good time to reflect on exactly how popular David Cameron is.

According to the latest Mori poll*, After a year as leader, David Cameron is...

1. Less popular and just as disliked as Michael Howard was 6 months into his term as Tory leader
(Sat/Dissat 25/31 compared to 30/31)

2. Less popular and more disliked as Tory Leader than Iain Duncan Smith after 8 months.
(Sat/Dissat 25/31 compared to 26/27)

3. Less popular but marginally less disliked than William Hague after 10 months into the job (and to be fair, the Tories really were unpopular in 1998).
(Sat/Dissat 25/31 compared to 27/27)

4. All of the above.

If you chose, option 4, you won our special prize, a laudatory op-ed piece saying how you are striking a chord with voters across the country by taking part of lots of funky photo opportunities.

(Oh, and If you're wondering why someone doing that badly is ahead in the polls, the answer lies in the PMs satisfaction ratings, which are bad. For perspective, they're slightly worse than they were on October 2003, two years before he won his third term and better than Margaret Thatcher's were in 1981, two years before.. well you know).

Gordon Brown? He's not a party leader, so the questions not asked in the same way- but his satisfaction rating was in the high 40s the last time they asked.

THANKS TO PREGETHWR IN COMMENTS FOR THE TIP

* if you're one of those who's been trained into discounting MORI by the good folks over a political betting, remember - this is about historical comparison between polls caried out in the same way by the same company, so the comparisons are valid.

Letwin? Seriously?

2006-11-27T10:54:00.000Z

Oliver Letwin is the Tories policy chief.

Tory. Policy. It's hard not to laugh. Letwin is one of those people who, despite utter incompetence in every field of political activity has somehow managed to gain a reputation as a deep and thoughtful thinker. This is mostly because he's generally regarded to be quite pleasant, and has good books on his shelves.

Let's recap his career.

He became a Tory education adviser- despite never having visited a state school.

He moved to No 10 under Thatcher, where he recommended the Poll Tax.

After becoming an MP, he became Shadow Chief Secretary and managed to single handedly detstroy the Tories election campaign by absentmindedly sketching out to the FT how many billions the Tories would cut from public spending.

He had a brief stint as Shadow Home Secretary, when he decided to be a liberal at the single moment when the British people were moving towards tough measures on immigration, crime and policing.

He also managed to get into the Newspapers by saying (remember, he is an old Etonion) that he would rather sleep in the Steets than send his children to the local state schools.

By 2005, he was Shadow Chancellor. He produced economic plans to cut public spending by several billions, whose impacts for public spending were made clear by his Shadow Chief Secretary, a la recherche du temps perdu.

This career is the single greatest example of failing upwards in British politics. It's not just a leftie like me that sees this, the right wing Social affairs unit published an (unsigned) rather perceptive analysis of the man, calling him the "second worst opposition politician of the century".

So, he's in charge of Tory policy now. Is he no longer a tax cutter? Of course he still is, it's just now he doesn't want you to know that he is. Be.. rrilliant.

Today he posts a little squib in the Times, setting out the Tory policy on poverty after he discussion of the last week. The 10 paragraph opus sets out the following piece of startling political thinking - The way to deal with ingrained poverty is to give money to social enterprises that you expect will be wasteful, have a high failure rate and will be unregulated.

Now this is all very nice. After all, we all like to embrace a risk taking culture- but how much moeny is Letwin willing to spend on these difficult intractible problems? Silence. Will this be extra spending- or will it replace Tax credits that help working families? Silence. How will this new munificence for charities be governed, and how will he ensure that the money isn't wasted, stolen or used corruptly? silence.

This isn't a policy, it's an idle wish.

I'm sure Oliver Letwin is a wonderful man. He's clearly a pleasant and cultured one. However, as a politician, he's a walking time bomb. His presence at the Tory top table is immensely re-assuring to me.

My manifesto for the Daily Politics

2006-11-26T13:27:00.000Z

WhenI first started this blog I had some expectations of glamour, success and massive importance. I fondly imagined that I would be approached by journalist, editors and cogniscenti to give my views on the issues of the day.

Surprisingly, it did actually happen, although I had to say no to the opportunities that came up.

I remember getting complimentary e-mails from both Melanie Phillips and Nick Cohen in the same week (surely a record of some sort?) and I still regret the fact that as I was firmly anonymous I couldn't accept Danny Finkelstein's offer to write an article for the Times.

The message here to bloggers is- keep at it. If someone as crap and typo-freindly as me can attract real proper journalists, so can you.

Yet, throughout this whirlwind of acclamation and general brilliance * cough * I never got the call I really wanted- the call from the team at the Daily Politics asking, nay, begging me to take over. It went something like this:

Daily Politics: Hello is that British Spin- sorry, what can I call you?

Brit: You can call me Sir, minion.

Daily Politics: Righty ho, sir. We just wanted you to know that we've finally realised that Andrew Neil is a total spunkwad, a repulsive reptilian creature from David Ickes most fervid fantasies, an oily, creepy, sycophant and a terrible, terrible human being, and that giving him an attractive young co-presenter just leaves the viewer with a queasy, unsettling vision of his wrinkled, drooping visage leering over...

Brit: Enough. I get the picture. I don't want this fantasy conversation to get libellous. Cut to the chase.

Daily Politics: Well, sir, we'd like you to take over. After all you are the most attractive and charismatic anonymous left of centre political blogger – apart from Hamer Shawcross, of course.

Brit: That bastard. The ladies love the moustache. It's fake.

Daily Politics: Will you do the show?

Brit: Can I present from my bedroom?

But sadly, the call never came. I can't think why.

So I've decided to get proactive. Here are my five simple rules for making the Daily Politics bearable.

1. Sack Andrew Neil.
He's biased, weird and tries to take over the show. Replace him with a decent political journalist who isn't simply a pretty face -and who is more interested in the story than the process. So no effing James Langdale. You could have your pick of hungry, smart lobby hacks, all of whom would know the political scene a zillion times better than Neil.

2. Equality of lunacy.
Please BBC, for the love of god stop the practice of pairing a total lunatic (of course I mean, provocative maverick) with a party line loyalist. You might think Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Vaizey make good TV but all it means is that the loyalist gets to parrot the party line without being challenged, while the maverick agrees that the leader of their party is indeed an evil, unprincipled swine. If you're going to have loonies on the show, let them balance each other out. I want to see Tapsell versus Corbyn, Abbot versus Fabricant, Hoey versus Carswell.

3. Get someone who'll challenge Nick Robinson.
Nick is just another journalist. He is not to be deferred to as the fount of all political knowledge. If he's going to be on the show to opiniate, he should be treated with the same scepticism as any other interviewee, not allowed to simply make unexplained assertions. Sometimes he's right, but the show would benefit from someone explaining why Nick had got it utterly wrong. This can't be the political guests, but someone who has no interest in making Nick look good would make the show better.

4. You're Inside Baseball- So be inside Baseball.
Look, no-ones going to watch the Daily Politics who doesn't have an interest in politics. You don't have to patronise them. So be prepared to go in depth on the politics of an issue. If you're going to do a piece on gambling, say, make it a political story. Why is Labour suddenly becoming free market friendly on this issue? What pressures are taking the Tories to embrace regulation? Is it simply government and opposition, or is there a more profound philosophical shift inside the parties? These are interesting questions that no-one else will ask, so why doesn't the one show that's about politics ask them?

5. Stop it with the Mugs. It's not funny. Never was, never will be.

Now, about my salary...

Will the real Inner Tosser please stand up?

2006-11-24T11:42:00.000Z

The man on the Left is Simon Wolfson, Chief Exec of Next, whose in store Credit Card has a whopping APR of 26.4%*. An APR like that helps young people spend on the never-never then get into a lifetime of debt.

He also chairs the Conservative Competitiveness Commission alongside John Redwood. They've recommended that the Financial Services market should be further deregulated.

The man on the right is an actor hired to the point that Conservatives don't want young peole to buy clothes at high interest rates . The little film thay made (bless) shows a young man getting into debt at his local Next-a-like.

In the film the "inner tosser" tells a young customer thinking about buying some shoes: "Let's get a store card and stick 'em on that". You can see the film here.

So do the Tories think Simon Wolfson is the real inner tosser?

*The nice woman at the Next press office "didn't have the info at hand", so I just phoned their customer service centre, who told me quite happily.

These "Gordon does worse" stories are crap.

2006-11-24T10:43:00.000Z

I looooove Tony Blair. When it comes to the Prime Minister I'm the embarrassing fanboy in the corner with the baseball cap, T-shirt and strangely adoring gaze.

Yet even I recognise that certain other people don't feel quite the same way. Indeed, when you look at the polls he's now.. well, quite unpopular.

So what can one make of Polls that say Gordon does worse than the PM? Is Gordon really less likely to attract votes than the Prime Minister who took us to war in Iraq?

Let's take a look at the poll and data.

ICM asked "If at the next election the Conservatives are led by David Cameron, Gordon Brown leads Labour and Menzies Campbell (Ming Campbell) leads the Liberal Democrats, how would you vote, would you vote Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats or for another party?"

So people are being asked to predict how they would vote under a hypothetical match up. Not how they currently vote but how they think they will vote.

This matters, because it alerts you to the biggest issue with these questions- they ask voters to make a leap of imagination- to transport themselves into the future and decide how they are going to vote.

When one looks at the poll breakouts for this question (page 4) we see:

Of the 205 base Labour support, 170 current Labour supporters think they would vote Labour under Gordon. 9 would go to the Tories and 8 to the Liberal Democrats. In return Gordon would attract 3 Conservatives and 11 Liberal Democrats.

So that's 17 out and 14 in. Not much change really.

However, another 13 go to Don't know/Refused. That's an entirely reasonable response to a hypothetical question, and almost entirely accounts for the difference in Labour's support between TB and GB.

Now, I don't know whether those people would come back to Labour under actually existing Brownism, but I do know that it means there's all to play for.

Intriguingly, the softest support under a Gordon Brown Leadership is for the Liberals- they lose 11 people to Labour, 7 to the Tories and 11 to don't know, getting 10 Labour and Tory supporters in return.

Finaly one word of warning over all this.

Polls are trailing indicators, not predictive ones. Doing popular things makes you popular. Being the Prime Minister gives you the bully pulpit. You can use it well or badly, but it gives you an unparalleled power to change perceptions, so any analysis of polling today could be shifted hugely by one or two actual announcements by a new Prime Minister.

Hug- a- Polly?

2006-11-23T18:36:00.000Z

Greg and Polly, sitting in a tree... K I S S I N G.

The Daily Telegraph said

“It is annoying.. to be regaled with PR froth such as yesterday's vacuous suggestion from one policy adviser that they should look to the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee rather than Winston Churchill for inspiration.”

Boris Johnson said

“She incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain. She is the defender and friend of everyone whose non-job has ever been advertised in the Guardian appointments page, every gay and lesbian outreach worker, every clipboard-toter and pen-pusher and form-filler whose function has been generated by mindless regulation!”

Douglas Carswell MP said:

"If we really are serious about helping hard-working families we should be prepared to reduce the tax burden, get rid of our centralised system of welfare, address our "like or lump it" education system that crushes aspiration, and look seriously at the idea of giving parents control over their chidren's schools.

"We need to be bold and we need to be radical. Polly Toynbee, nice though she may be, is part of the Establishment that advances an orthodox view that's prevailed for the past 20 years and its done precious little to solve these problems."

Shipley MP Philip Davies said:

"If I had wanted to be a member of the liberal establishment I would have joined the Labour party."

Tory Commentator Bruce Anderson said:

“A Tory who would take Polly Toynbee’s advice on social policy is a Tory who would consult the Warsaw Pact on defence policy. During the French Revolution, there was a particularly unpleasant set of females, who would do their knitting by the side of the guillotine, watching gleefully as the aristocrats went to their deaths. They were known as les tricoteuses. Miss Toynbee is a modern British tricoteuse, lacking only a guillotine. No sane Tory should provide her with one.”

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

You know. I've suddenly realised what Labour's secret weapon against cameron should be. it's not policy, not attack, not Tory toff.

It's mockery. The man is absoloute A-grade piss take material. Cycling with a chauffeur... Hug a hoodie... Hug a Polly... Inner Tosser...

It's getting hard to take him seriously about anything.

He's Frit.

2006-11-22T14:06:00.000Z

You're the leader of the opposition and one of the countries leading newspapers is running a story about your ambitious new policy to tackle deep poverty- but none of your actual policies would make a damn difference to the poorest.

Your shadow chancellor has just launched a campaign on reducing personal debt by increasing regulation of store cards- but your economic competitiveness commission wants to deregulate the financial services market and is chaired by the Chief Exec of Next- who won't want his store card business axed.

Your backbenchers are acalling for more spending on their local NHS trusts- but your own policy briefings say you won't match government NHS spending.

You want to talk about climate change- but you know your policy on Nuclear energy, on annual targets and renewables are thinner than recycled bog roll.

So what do you do? You ask six questions about Foriegn affairs.

He's Frit.

I've managed to find gainful employment for today

2006-11-21T16:17:00.000Z

So instead here's a picture from David Cameron's website that caused me to wonder- how much, exactly, does David Cameron love himself?

Is it:

a) A lot

b) More than most

c) He's bigger than Jesus, dude.

or d) It would be better if every picture of David Cameron had a slightly more moody and pensive picture of David Cameron included in the background as a Brucie bonus

...and before you start, shut up with the "this post is pointless".

I wrote a serious intelligent and witty post yesterday (or so mummy says), Did I get linked everywhere and have praise piled upon me? *sniff* Did I 'eck.

A picture from the Web's other side

2006-11-20T13:23:00.000Z

Following Matthew Taylor’s remarks on new media last week, quite a few bloggers, writers and commentators have pondered the question of “why some people don’t get it”, the it in this case being the wonderfully liberating energy and blasphemous rage (take your pick) of the interwebnets.

As far as I can tell it’s not that Taylor doesn’t get it- any less that Osborne does get it in his "the interweb is cool eh, isn't there a lot of stuff happening" speech, or Guido Fawkes gets it, it’s just that the wild freedom of the internet looks a whole lot different when you’re trying to manage government than when you’re trying to get a good story up.

Dear reader, whether you're Conservative of Labour, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a special adviser. You get into the office in the morning at 8am, determined to do your bit to move progressive governance forward a little by carrying your bosses bags. It’s a noble and joyous task. You have a little planner saying what should happen that day and you’ve got a thoughtful speech to write about long term policy challenges.

Within 15 minutes of getting into the office, you get a message that a story is running on News 24 about spending a billion on new design of paperclips.

You listen to it and it sounds all wrong, but you can’t issue a straight denial because you’ve never heard of the figure and the head of the Papercip Department is unavailable.

So you phone the reporter, who’s got the figure from some NAO report that some website has mined for data and reached this conclusion, and you try and get your press office to get the right numbers- which takes three hours, and by that stage the story is running on the World at One and Number Ten are asking why you’re letting another story about government waste get out of hand.

Then you discover that your junior minister has been quoted by a local paper as saying that David Cameron is “worse than Hitler”. You phone him and he says the quote was in fact “Worse than Spitzer” and he meant the new Governor of New York. You rush to get a denial on PA, but the stories off and running.

So far it’s 11am and you have Sky running “Is Cameron worse than Hitler?” polls and the BBC running “The billion pound paperclip?”.

Both of the reports end with the familiar line “The Department of Total incompetence, Craven spin and ridiculous waste were contacted for a response but didn't comment.” read in that tone of “We let the mendacious crooks have their side of the story and they couldn't evn defend their idiocy” so beloved of newsreaders in the post Paxman days.

Your thoughtful speech on "How to make life better?" Not written much of that yet.

When your life feels like this, you can imagine that you welcome a bunch of bloggers whose reporting agenda consists of “that lying scumbag is a lying scumbag and I’m going to prove it.” with the enthusiasm you normally reserve for a bucket of cold sick at the breakfast table. Especially when you suspect that when his lot are in power he'll suddenly go quiet about the scumbaggy nature of the liars in question (When was the last time Matt Drudge ran an anti-Bush story? He sure used to do a lot of anti-Clinton ones).

This isn’t really about blogging, or about the internet- it’s about the management of accurate information in an age when you can find a source to suit your own world view and the number of news organisations seems to stretch to infinity..

If you're trying to promote an agenda, question authority, provoke debate and encourage sceptisim about official responses this freedom is liberating. I feel it myself writing this blog.

Yet if you’re the one desperately trying to answer all the allegations, questions and challenges coming at you, not knowing precisely where the next one will come from or what it will contain, and knowing that if your response contains an error or a bad figure you’ll be called to account, well- you feel hobbled, constantly trying to catch up with an agenda that is cartwheeling freely.

I’ve spoken to a few people in different parties who have been at the centre of this process when it reaches its apotheosis- the moment when the amount of allegations, rumour, story and counter-story floated on a particular issue reaches boiling point, when it becomes no longer possible to contain a story because the number of people producing reports, writing articles and allocating camera crews is so many orders of magnitude greater than the number of people trying to respond to it

At this point it is no longer possible to separate fact from fiction for any of the players- A point you know you've reached when 24 hour news reporters are standing in strange suburban streets waiting for a car to pull in, and saying things like:

“Well, Natasha, the situation is murky here in XXXXX, but one thing is clear – So and So is fighting for their political life as A N Other alleges YYYYY and ZZZZZ reports FFFFFFF. Of course, none of this is proven, and I can’t tell you if it’s accurate, but it all adds to the mounting pressure on a beleagered minister. Back to you in the studio.”

After all, no-one wants to lie and they don't know what the story is exactly, but they're not going to let it pass and be the last ones to know...

The people dealing with this all report the same response- total powerlessness. They can no more know whether all the things being said are accurate than the reporters can. As soon as they deal with one issue another arrives. They are reduced to simply trying to fight their way through a crowd.

The truth is, whether through the internet, through journalists, through 24 hour news- it’s now easier than ever to set a story running, and harder than ever to respond to it. It’s a fact, and we’ll all have to deal with it.

In the end, I suppose the truth does get aggregated, that somehow we discover what is accurate and what is not, and it’s tremendous fun to throw around the suggestions, the allegations and the banter, but from that perspective, it’s not a positive process- it’s a disturbing, frightening and seemingly random one.

Will blogging make things better? It might- I know that I tend to gravitate to trusted sources- like Slugger o’Toole or Mike Smithson or Virtual Stoa – where I can make reasonable assumptions about bias and perspective. Then again it might not- I also want to read sites that fit with my already existing agenda and who give me my daily hate- so when we’re in opposition again, we’ll have the continual invective revolution on our side.

Governments (of all stripes) will have two, possibly contradictory responses. The first will be to try and batten down the hatches. To draw a line and say we will not respond, support or magnify this story any further. To just try and take the oxygen out of a story and rigidly contain it.

The second is to say “let it all hang out” You want to believe your government is made up of deluded psychopaths? Fine, off you go, use this as evidence if you want, we’ll just talk about Healthcare quietly in the corner.

Personally I suspect the second strategy has a greater chance of success- that we will all have to deal with a political environment which is more tempestuous, more crazed, more seemingly irrational in it’s story choices than ever before –and that in the end consumers will sort out which sources and authors they want to listen to.

However, I can understand that in the middle of an election campaign, when you turn on the Today programme and hear the words “Websites are reporting that party Leader X made an offensive hand gesture to the Queen” followed by 17 hours of in depth frame by frame coverage, and a thousand youtube spoofs perhaps it won’t seem such a great strategy after all.

A german bomb plot....

2006-11-20T11:13:00.000Z

Apparently the German police are investigating a bomb plot to blow up an aeroplane.

I will now channel Simon Jenkins, Roy Hattersley, etc, etc, etc.

"Obviously this bomb plot would never even have happened if Germany had not taken part in the horrific and provocative invasion of Iraq, which caused an unstandable, if misguided reaction amongst Muslims.

"It just goes to show that these terrorist actions have been provoked by German policies and if only Germany withdrew their troops from Iraq and criticised Israel more outspokenly then Germany would not be the target for terrorism like this."

Ok, OK. We don't know who the alleged terrorists are, or what their agenda is, so let's not leap to conclusions. Still, if it does turn out that these are Islamic extremists, I do hope the people who have propogated the "It's all about Iraq" argument will at least bear attacks like this (and Bali, and Mombassa, and Mumbai) in mind.

Also, just on the detention point, I do find it slightly odd that you arrest people for conspiring to blow up a passenger plane, then release them, saying the investigation will continue.

I mean, if someone's accused of blowing up a passenger plane, presumably they're a teeny-tiny bit of a flight risk (pun not intended)?. So perhaps this conspiracy was not that advanced, or those arrested are low- level, or there's little to the allegations.

Friday Caption Competiton....

2006-11-17T11:50:00.000Z

A correspondent (and fellow former party hack) sends in this image of a lightweight dancing..

Do your worst.

New Links.. Ideas...

2006-11-16T12:18:00.000Z

OK, so I was away for a while. Bloggers are fickle and give up and move around a lot (Sorry, I meant, the Blogging world is fast paced and never static).

Also, I'm shifting to all-new blogger today (ooh err)

So I need new links. So dear readers, Plug a blog. If it's good, I'll stick in in my links and read it regularly. If it's bad, I'll probably do the same, because I'm a pretty nice sort of guy.

PS. I'm glad to see that the drivelling idiots of the Lobby agreed with me about yesterday. Cameron flopped, the floppy haired fop.

PPS. I think Cameron has lost weight recently. Has he been in training, if so impressive achievement given that he's giving up smoking. Come on CCHQ, we need Cameron's top diet secrets.

At last, a fight about policy.

2006-11-15T16:19:00.000Z

The Queen's speech debate surprised me. Not because of the legislation, which is mostly sensible, intelligent but not world-shattering stuff like pensions reform, anti-terror measures and crime.

No, what was surprising was the way in which Blair and Cameron battled it out. One of the conversations Labour types sometimes have late at night is whether or not the PM is really passionate about taking out cameron, given that he doesn't have to win an election against him. Today settled that question.

Cameron didn't give a bad speech. He was, as is his style, rather witty, with good jokes. He recycled his complaints about poor governance quite effectively and showed the new political tactic of lauding the Prime Minister and blaming the Chancellor. However, he did go on a bit too long, and given only the last paragraph or so of his speech was about Conservative policy proposals (most of which were in the actual Queens speech), it seemed rather thin gruel, certainly not enough material on which to base a claim you were going to bring hope to the country.

The hope line gave Blair his starting point into his speech- contrasting rhetorical hope with real hope provided by economic success, education and opportunity He really tore at Cameron, both patronising him (for example picturing Cameron, sitting with the lights going out, asking his cabinet secretary to "rustle up a nuclear power station") and lambasting his political style- quoting his policy shifts on Climate change and Nuclear power, on terrorism and then finishing up with "and all this from a man who said his politics were all about consistency and sticking to your guns".

Intriguingly, Blair finished on a note which Labour will likely stress again and again- Stature, content and governmental drive campared to shallow political trickery, a lightweight versus a heavywight. This might sound a little strange coming from a man widely regarded to have elevated shallow political trickery to an artform, but I think the argument works. It has the merit of fitting into the media perceptions of Brown and Cameron.

Overall, it was the best performance for Blair in a long while, and one that might have confirmed Cameron's image as a policy lightweight, and go a long way to calming nerves in the PLP, especially the closing veiled endorsement of Brown.

Edited for typos since the Comment is Free link

Are we neeeearly there yet?

2006-11-14T16:06:00.000Z

God I'm bored of reading leadership speculation. Bored, BORED, BORED.

Listen carefully now: this is how it's going to go.

At some point in the next 6 months, most probably immediately after the May elections, if things are going badly, a couple of months before, Tony Blair will announce he's standing down.

Gordon Brown and John McDonell will definitely stand. John Reid, or Milburn, or Byers or whoever pops up next as the "blairite successor" won't except that John Hutton might well stand if he thinks he can get 44 signatures, a task which at the moment is beyond him.

Michael Meacher will almost certainly stand if he thinks he can get 44.

Whatever happens there will be a great call for an election, and if McDonnell or Meacher don't get 44 nominees there will be a move to either allow them through anyway or have a national affirmative ballot.

Brown will win with over 60% of the vote if Hutton and McDonnell both stand and over 75% if there's only a Lefty candidate.

The Deputy Leadership election will come down to a choice between one of Blears, Benn and Johnson and one of Hain and Cruddas. Pick one from column A to find your winner. Brown won't endorse any, but it'll be clear who he won't want.

Now I've told you all what will go down, can we please hear no more about it until the New Year please?

I for one welcome our Rees-Mogg overlords.

2006-11-13T13:58:00.000Z

I give up. I've tried to fight the oversized chip on my shoulder, I really have, but it's to no avail.

Resistence is clearly useless. We are destined to be ruled by generation after generation of Rees-Moggs and Corens and Stothards. Let us bicker no longer, and instead praise this brave new world, and hope perhaps that our children's children will one day have the honour of having parents who were Times columnists.

For today, let us simpy bow down to our masters.

They shall grant us wisdom from every broadsheet newspaper as soon as they reach the age of maturity.

They shall entertain us with their thoughts on pornography, or food, or politics, or student life, allowing us to see the everday anwith the fresh eyes of their wit and genius for observation.

We shall elect them to Parliament in cohorts, invite them to present TV shows and ask them to be the voice of our generation on endlessly recycled "best of" clip shows.

We shall, for no particular reason we can think of, buy their books, find them generally readable if hackneyed or a little try-hard, and then realise that it it is we who are repsonsible henceforth for their presence on the best sellers list, their ubiquity on television and in newspaper columns and even in the highest councils of our nation (well, in the Conservative party).

Clearly, this race of reasonably able, unobjectionably privileged children of writers have inherited an ability to control us through the written word from their fore-fathers.

Let us accept their hegemony, welcome their commands, for then at least they might give us rest from their celebrity.

After all, can there be any facet of our life than cannot be improved by having it explained to us by the privileged?

Johnson for Deputy?

2006-11-10T12:07:00.000Z

Colour me Impreseed. Alan Johnson's team are saying they have 70 MPs pledged to support him and they were prepared to name names until asked not to by No 10. .

That's way above expectations- especially since he's been widely regarded as damaged since conference. I expected there to be less, mostly because MPs don't like to back a candidate when there's not much to gain and a lot to lose by committing early.

It will be fascinating to see the names. The ones I've heard so far are very moderate to Blairite.

A stunning revelation

2006-11-09T10:10:00.000Z

This Mary Ann Sieghart article in the Times today contains barely a shred of evidence supporting its thesis about women voters preferences.

However, if you do find and replace, finding the word "women" and replacing it with the phrase "Mary Ann Sieghart" it suddenly makes perfect sense.

Amazing.

The morning after the night before.

2006-11-08T10:31:00.000Z

God. I'm knackered. Spent the night rather enjoyably hanging out at politicalbetting commenting on the US elections, and rather less enjoyably watching the appallingly bad coverage on Sky (with an honourable exception for Andrew Wilson).

Looks like the Democrats have got a good chance of winning both the House and the Senate. They're ahead in both tight races in Virginia and Montana with recounts looming in one or both.

In the House, looks like the Democrats looking at about 30 gains, giving them a pretty decent margin.

A good day for the Democratic party.

Don't bother with the Lobby pass, Guido.

2006-11-07T16:50:00.000Z

I understand Guido Fawkes has applied to have an orange L stamped on his Commons pass.

He shouldn't bother. If he slips Gallery news a small wedge he can save himself the trouble of blogging the Lobby.

As a sample of the wares on offer.... today's highlight, and I bloody hope it's fair use.

"The Downing Street spokesman was asked if the Prime Minister would donate a day's pay to the Farepak Fund - as proposed by minister Ian McCartney for all MPs - to recompense families who have lost up to £40m from their Christmas Fund.

The spokesman replied, " I think Mr McCartney said it was a matter for individual MPs. I do not think it is my domain. MPs will make their own individual decisions."

What does the spokesman for the individual MP for Sedgefield think that individual MP would do, he was asked.

" I have not had time to ask the individual member for Sedgefield. I could not interrupt the press conference with the Polish Prime Minister. That would not have been a very good idea.

" MPs will make up their own minds in their own good time, " he said.

One correspondent said, " May I make a suggestion - do not make that suggestion to Mrs Blair.

The spokesman said, " Shall I pass that on to Mrs Blair from you personally, " he asked.

"No," said the correspondent.

" What is that worth, " asked the spokesman.

" A day's pay, " said the correspondent's colleague."
Cockpit of the nation.

Party Funding reform- consequences again....

2006-11-07T14:18:00.000Z

Money is like water. It flows around obstacles.

Think back to the last time the Government regulated funding of political parties.

In response to the fact that donations were untraceable, secret and were often obtained from abroad, Labour introduced the Electoral Commission, made all donations above a certain limit public knowledge, said only UK businesses and individuals could donate. In addition, the Government limited national election spend in the year before the election- while allowing candidates to campaign locally before the election was called.

The response?

Political parties of all kinds took out loans from donors and only declared them under duress, the Conservatives funded local campaigns through Richard Ashcroft and a shadowy group called the Midlands Industrial Council while the Liberal Democrats took a donation from a Spanish-based tax exile through what now appears to be a front company used for money laundering.

All of these were unintended consequences of a laudable desire to clean up political funding.

This isn’t an argument against reform. The victory for the reforms was that we know about it, not that the money stopped flowing.

We know a lot more now about political funding than we did a decade ago and this is a good thing. Sure, at the moment my party is getting the stick, but we’re in Government and it’s to be expected. Whatever the short term headlines, it’s a price worth paying for greater openness in the system.

Yet it would be stupid to pretend that the next set of reforms won’t also have unintended consequences.

It’s only by surveying the laws as burglar shops and houses do, to see where one might best break through that you can try and mitigate the unintended consequences.

The Hayden Phillips review on Party funding has set out three possible scenarios, but reading carefully I suspect that the package we might well end up with will look like this:

1. Donation limits for individuals and companies, but an exception for affiliated groups where they represent a collection or routing of low level individual donations (eg a Trade Union political fund).

2. A tax incentive or similar form of public support, weighted to encourage small scale donations.

3. A limit on local spending over a longer period, say a year before a General Election.

4. No real change for outside bodies.

If we get something like this, I’d expect to see the following responses.

1. Minimal or zero membership fees with donations sought instead to qualify for tax relief on donations. Result: A bit of a boost for the Lib dems in funding. Good for Tories too as tax breaks help their wealthier membership base donate more. Labour happy as trade union relationships preserved.

2. Increased emphasis on internet fund-raising.

3. Increased gifts of money to outside organisations for campaigning outside of election periods.

4. As a result of the above, growth of organisations like the Taxpayers
alliance, with emphasis on developing a stronger local campaign presence.

5. Reduced national party spend in election compensated for by increase in spend by outside bodies.

So how would this look during an election campaign? More to come..

US Mid Terms prediction time

2006-11-07T10:39:00.000Z

After taking a punt on John Kerry at 1.35/1 after getting a heads-up on the early exits and losing, I'm not betting this time. I want the Democrats to win too badly to think it through clearly.

That said my predictions are as follows:

1. Dems gain 5 seats in Senate taking it to 50-50 (counting Lieberman and Sanders as Dems).

Rhode Island, Pennsylvannia, Ohio, Missouri and Montana go D

Maryland and New Jersey stay Dem

Virginia, Arizona and Tennessee stay R.

Missouri and Virginia are the races I'm least sure about, but if I rate them boh as toss ups, it looks like the R's are doing better in the South than the west... so let's split it on that basis.

Intriguingly, If Chaffee wins RI, Lieberman win Ct and the Dems win Virginia and Missouri, Chaffee and Lieberman will effectively control the Senate....

2. Lieberman wins in Ct, but by less than polls predict.

Lamont's been pouring money in in the last week and has a good ground game and I think the Ballot paper is bad for Lieberman.

3. Dems gain 22 in the House.

It's a guess. I've taken the 13 "likely Dem" seats and added 9 of the 14 toss up races.

OK you freaks. here's that Barbara Amiel picture you've been searching for.

2006-11-06T18:56:00.000Z

10% of my traffic today came from people searching for Barbara Amiel pictures.

Honestly, what's wrong with you? She's 66 and married, guys.

Still, give your public what they want and all that.

Unintended Consequences.

2006-11-06T14:11:00.000Z

The Lawyers, of whose Art the Basis
Was raising Feuds and splitting Cases,
….. to defend a wicked Cause,
Examin'd and survey'd the Laws;
As Burglars Shops and Houses do;
To find out where they'd best break through.
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees

Party Funding Reform- The problem.

Reading the papers over the weekend, I thought a little about what the political landscape will look like when the current debates on party funding and loans for peerages have played out.

I don’t mean in regard to prosecutions. Personally, I suspect that any putative case is pretty thin, so pressure is being put on publicly in the hope that either someone will say something incriminating or that a decision to act against someone, anyone will result. I confess though, that I know absolutely nothing about the case.

No, I’m thinking about party funding.

More specifically, I’m thinking about a political funding environment that restricts donation levels or loans to political parties. They have a system like that in the US, and it’s led not to a decrease in political campaign funding, but in a re-routing of money from the Party to the outside campaign body.

For example, this ad running in Montana is a straight out attack on the Democratic candidate, John Tester. It’s called BrokeBank Democrats. (Those democrats, both gay and fiscally irresponsible!)

The ad is paid for by an organisation called The Free Enterprise Fund, which is funded by a some of the same people who also funded the infamous “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.”

So what’s that got to do with us? Only the fact that this is probably where we’re going too, so we better think carefully if we want this kind of campaigning.

More to come..

Nice but Dim?

2006-11-03T09:52:00.000Z

The Leader of Her Majesties Loyal Opposition visits a housing estate.

Today, Cameron is making another platitudinous speech filled with meaningless soundbites that annoy the sun.

Cameron's not all that, people.

I read the speech this morning, thinking it would be fun to take apart. Trouble is there's nothing to take apart. Sure, he has an interesting analysis of where Labour has gone wrong, and he says about twenty times that society is good and horrible institutions are bad, but you search in vain for any idea about what he's going to do about it.

Actually, there's one. He'll let private companies run young offenders centres. How revolutionary.

All he says, repeatedly, is the inanely obvious, that society is good, that charities are nice, that the deprived have it pretty tough. Well, yeah, We know this already.

It's like listening to Tim Nice but Dim after a visit to a housing estate.

Succession....

2006-11-02T10:33:00.000Z

Starting today, my in depth 13 part look at the race for Leader of the Labour party....

OK, not really.

However, since this topic might occassionally pop up over the next few months, I think I should say where I'm coming from, so that anyone unlucky or stupid enough to read regularly will be able to calibrate their bias detectors.

I'm a New Labour loyalist who wishes things were a bit different in a few policy areas, but is happy to live with the occassional compromise because I think the party is generally in the right direction.

I'll be supporting Gordon Brown (if the support is even needed) for the leadership not because of any Brownite/Blairite stuff (that has always bored and annoyed me in roughly equal measure) but because Gordon Brown is the towering figure in the Cabinet, has the clearest radical centre/social democratic agenda for the party and will have the best chance of ensuring a Labour government after the next election.

End of.

On the Deputy Leadership, I really haven't made my mind up.

At the moment I expect the battle will be between Hain, Benn and Johnson with Straw, Harman and Cruddas finding it difficult to get the 44 needed to win, and if getting them not able to break through (Straw might well get the 44, but I don't think he is as popular in the wider party).

Of those, I'd be torn between Benn and Johnson, though Hilary Benn doesn't seem to have much partisan bite to him (perhaps that's a factor of being at DFID). If Hazel Blears did run, I think she'd be a serious candidate but would mean all the "centrist candidates" would be scrapping for the same votes, making it more likely that the final two would be Hain and one other.

So that's where I'm coming from.

I promise not to talk about it too much as it's all very dull at the moment and there's serious business to talk about.

Speaking of which, later on I'm going to try and finish off the series on the politics of climate change by looking at the challenges facing my beloved Labour Party. So you know, stay tuned. Cos it'll be bockbuster stuff. ZZZZZZzzzzzz.

Bias? Heaven Forfend.

PMQs Erupts

2006-11-01T14:52:00.000Z

Ooooohhhh. Handbags at dawn between Dangerous Dave Cameron and Mighty Mick Martin.

Everyone should be annoyed by Speakers. I know Labour MPs have been outraged pretty frequently with Speaker Martin. An opinion I've heard a few times is that they think he's been "captured" by the pomposity and grandeur of the Speaker's chair into an attempt to take politics out of the Commons. It's not that they think he's trying to be "too neutral" but that he's tried to stop a good old fashioned political scrap too often (This view is not unrelated to the fact the the Labour MPs I know love a good political scrap).

I see Martin's intervention today as part of this drive. Just as he stopped Blair talking about the Conservative party campaign on the NHS, he stops Cameron talking about the Labour party.

Personally, I think the idea of taking the politics out of parliament is ludicrous, but it's not inconsistent with prevous interventions. It's part of a philosophy ofthe Commons that sees it as essentially non-partisan, and that views party politics as getting in the way of the real job of passing legislation and debating the great issues of the day. I don't like it, but it's Martin's position.

What is new is Cameron's reaction. It's kind of an unwritten rule that you don't attack the Speaker. It's a mark of Cameron's dislike of anything that gets in his way that he virtually had a temper tantrum at the Speaker and afterwards allowed his spokeman to call what Martin did ""bizarre and extraordinary".

He'll win the media war tommorrow, but picking a fight with the speaker is rarely a good idea for any opposition Leader.

It's an little observed facet of Cameron's political persona that he does tend to get rattled when challenged or diverted from making his case. He's very smooth in asking questions, but when he gets rattled, he has a tendency to snap. (See here for another example)

It's a tendency he'd have done better to restrain this time. I'm sure Labour advisers will be wondering how to put Cameron under that kind of stress again and again and again, to see if he'll snap at someone less august than Mr Speaker.

Small rebellion, nobody killed.

2006-11-01T12:57:00.000Z

A quick note on the vote last night.

A message for the politically sophisticated. Lbaour MPs don’t like voting for opposition day motions. The question that worries whips isn't so much whether they'll vote against Alex Salmond (especially if he puts his foot convieniently in mouth*), but if they're around at all for a minor parties day.

Secondly, Philip Cowley is wise. Heed his words.

If he says something is so, it is so. Pay no attention to anyone else, myself included, on the mood of the PLP. Also, buy his book. It’s a must for anyone interested in the Labour Party.

The man should be a special adviser in the Whips office.

Inter alia, Hamer Shawcross is about a trillion times more interesting, perceptive and amusing than all the other Labour researcher bloggers put together, with the possible exception of Barry Beef. If you’re interested in the backwash of life in the Commons, he’s the man.

*Jim Devine's parliamentary intervention is not the firstime youtube has caused questions to be asked in parliament. Labour's Iain Wright got there first, warning Jack Straw of the dangers of provocative and inflammatory videos posted on the sight.

I wonder if he raised the issue with his good friend Tom Watson?

2006-10-31T18:15:00.000Z

Labour's newest adviser...

The news that Al Gore is to be the governments climate change adviser give me an excuse to post this video by Spike Jonze. It's the greatest campaign bio ever, and is porabably why Gore agreed to do inconvienet truth. it was barely shown in 2000, but on watching it today, you can't help be filled by a terrible sense that we're all worse off because of that election. next time let's make sure a "compassionate" conservative with vague policies but warm words doesn't get to beat a policy wonk who gets portrayed as awkward by the sillier people in the media.

The Tories on Climate Change...

2006-10-31T14:14:00.000Z

Woot!

My last post achieved the recognition of being *drumroll* the fifth best thing on the web today according to the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. (thanks for the twelve readers chaps. This blogging thing is huuuuuuge). I’m so proud.

Since the post met with such distinction, I think I ought to carry on examining the challenges climate change poses to the political parties. Today, the Tories.

The Conservative debate and positioning on climate change is emblematic of the Tory party under David Cameron. It’s his signature issue and biggest political passion (well, apart from the NHS, which has been his signature issue and lifelong passion since party Conference.).

I warn you now. This post will be long. Long, and unless you’re interested in the inner workings of Tory policy, and where their pledges actually take you, rather dull.

I beg you to stay with it though, because the idea that people, even people interested in politics, won’t understand the detailed implications of positive sounding policy commitments, is the very cornerstone of Cameron’s conservatism.

I believe Cameron is relying on people not to care about the detail and only to remember the soundbite. He might be right, but even so it’s worth understanding what that would mean in Government. My analysis of what the Tories will do could be wrong, but the correct answer is important.

Cameron has radically repositioned the Conservatives. They’re now perceived to be greener than Labour, he’s recruited environmentalists like Zac Goldsmith to support him, George Monbiot to speak at Tory Conference (Did he stay in the same hotel as

Let’s assume Cameron over-rules Ainsworth and makes the Targets bite. Would they be a good idea?

Sadly, No. If we have a cold winter, emissions will go up. If the global oil price falls, they might also go up. Neither short term factor is within the hands of government. Yet if these are binding targets, presumably the Government would have to act to prevent this carbon consumption? What tools are available to them- higher taxes and rationing. Of course.

So where this takes us is a situation where the Government is changing taxation levels on fuel in response to the most short term of inputs. That’s bad for business, bad for the economy and not really effective in preserving the Environment.

This isn’t about not making carbon expensive, but about how you do it- It would be far better to give businesses certainty to plan with in knowing their costs were going to rise steadily so they can plan their carbon switch, and also to improve and extend the emissions trading scheme. Annual targets do nothing for this. Which is why Ainsworth tries to back away from them.

But perhaps I’m being harsh. I mean, annual or five year targets are fairly small beer.

Let's look at the bigger picture. If we’re to move away from being a high carbon economy we need extra sources of energy. So why is Cameron refusing to support Nuclear power? We don’t have a chance of hitting our carbon targets without it.

I know a lot of Labour people oppose nuclear power too, so let’s be clear about this. We can’t reduce carbon emissions without either massively reduced energy consumption or low to no carbon emitting energy.

Nobody can definitively promise to deliver renewables on the scale we need or energy efficiency at the level we’d need, so we have to go for Nuclear. We might get lucky and make a renewables or efficiency breakthrough, but that’s a prayer, not a policy.

Yet Cameron refers to Nuclear as a last option. Yet what are the other options? Either they exist and they should be used in preference, or they’re not definitive and can’t be relied on.

Oddly, some conservatives think Cameron doesn’t mean what he says about Nuclear. Yesterday for example,
Peter Luff MP said in the Commons

“I have no wish to cause my hon. Friend any embarrassment, but ironically, Conservative party policy for an improved carbon trading mechanism and for a capacity market are more likely to bring forward nuclear power more quickly than the Government's proposals on carbon emissions trading.”

OK, though. Let’s assume that
a) Cameron is serious about binding targets for Carbon emission
b) He will change short term tax policy to hit annual carbon targets and hand over management of this to an independent board
c) He is serious about not embracing Nuclear
d) He won’t commission new Nuclear- or at least there will be no expansion of nuclear.

If he’s serious about using the above policy tools to manage down climate
change. he only has one option, a massive increase in renewables in the very
near term to meet energy demand.

Yet what is he doing about it?

Cameron says he wants a “level playing field” for nuclear and
renewable energy. Sounds good, right? But there isn’t a level playing field
right now, there’s a massively tilted playing field- tilted in favour of
renewables. In 2003 the government put an obligation on energy producers to
produce 3% of their energy from renewables. That rose to 5.5% this year and will
reach 15% by 2015.

Without the renewables obligation- Increasing renewables wouldn’t happen at all.

The Tory policy position, as far as one can make out, is simply to “reform” the renewables obligation. Reform is code for tear apart.

After all, a level playing field is incompatible with forcing energy producers to build renewable wind turbines, and the Tories are trying to reduce the number of wind turbines being built in the countryside. Oh, and Tories say the renewable obligation is “slanted to wind”.

It’s not difficult to join the dots.

So we have- an unworkable or meaningless annual carbon target. A ridiculous nuclear position and a backing away from forcing up the commitment o renewables.

That leaves us with one final policy option.

Just force up the price of energy, with spikes when it’s cold to reduce carbon emissions then.

That would force down emissions.

It might also lead to poor people not heating their homes properly, and a few manufacturing industries finally giving up the ghost, but that’s a price worth paying for being able to sound green without building Nuclear, pushing forward with the renewables obligation or managing carbon emissions over the long term.

Now that’s being Conservative tothe core of your being.