Love and Liberty

I heard at 7am the news that Charles Kennedy had died. It feels so terribly unfair. He had so many gifts and should have had so much more to give with them. And just as Liberal Democrats are starting to recover from the grief of the election, and find something to celebrate in such unlooked-for growth in our numbers (from 45,000 members to 60,000 since polling day), our family is plunged into the most appalling shared grief of all. My heart goes out to Charles’ immediate family too. I knew Charles as Leader, much less since, but I’ll miss him.

Like many Lib Dems, I started the day by pouring out some of my grief on Twitter and a comment on Lib Dem Voice – then a short piece on my Tumblr, which is where, essentially, I write and publish things quickly, before there’s time for insecurity to stop me writing. But I’ve decided that Charles deserves a proper thank you and memorial from me, too, which in my typical way means much the same I said earlier, but at significantly greater length.

A Great Communicator (but not in every way)

You’ll have read a great many tributes and obituaries. Like all Leaders, he had his good and his bad points – perhaps more of both than most. Charles’ greatest strength was that he came across as genuine, and decent, and more like an ordinary bloke than other politicians: today British politics has to make do with Nigel Farage, his anti-matter duplicate. Getting to know Charles over half a dozen years or so, as I’ll come to, he always struck me as the same in private as he was in public, and in private, too, he rarely let people see his bad days.

The one thing I’ll say that contradicts most of the pieces I’ve seen about Charles today is that I don’t think he was a great orator. He was a great communicator – probably the best the Liberal Democrats have had, though I reckon we’ve been blessed with three. But his greatest gift was in speaking directly, conversationally, not reading lines from a platform. I don’t mean he couldn’t deliver a speech – he could, and I saw many of them. Some stuck in my head for his principles as a call to action; some inspired me by turning those principles into a brave challenge. But platform oratory wasn’t his best platform, and if you want to read a review of one of his speeches with a favourable view of the content and a not entirely complimentary look at some of his vocal tics, I wrote one quite some years ago and still think I was right. That doesn’t matter.

I think it may well have been on introducing Charles for the first of the three speeches I mentioned above that a Lib Dem MP said something rather indiscreet that stuck in my head as much as the speech itself. Charles was relatively new in the job of Leader, and there was a wide assumption (not necessarily a fact) that he’d been more the choice of the armchair members than the activists – but also, by this stage, a widespread feeling of pleasant surprise that he’d made himself both a more explicitly Liberal leader and more distanced from the Labour Party than anyone had expected before his election (I remember one of his initial backers telling me sourly that I was probably more pleased with his victorious candidate than he was, and happily agreeing). So when Charles was introduced for his own Leader’s Speech with “I didn’t vote for him – but I’m ever so glad he won!” there was both a huge laugh and a sense from many, myself included, that we would have said the same if we’d been daring enough.

My Memories of Charles (and the Reverse Aesop)

I got to know Charles mainly on the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee. I was an elected member throughout his Leadership, and for four years I was a Vice-Chair to Charles as Chair. He was the same in private party meetings as he was on the telly: a big change from Paddy Ashdown’s fight to the death on every issue – bringing people together, but passionate on the issues he really cared about. The converse was also true; the chance of my taking over the Chair for an hour when Charles suddenly discovered he had another urgent Commons appointment rose in direct proportion to the time FPC members spent droning on multiplied by the lack of interest he had in the subject. His slipping out rarely helped meetings to finish on time, as he was far more skilled in finding kindly ways to shut people up when they were blathering on than I ever was.

I used to joke at the time that in choosing Charles to succeed Paddy the party had done a reverse Aesop – calling for King Log after King Stork. That was a little unfair (to Charles, at least). He may not have wanted pitched battles on every line of policy, but I remember him usually making two different sorts of crucial contribution across the board. One was in spotting when policy was getting either too impenetrable or too up itself (not that he’d use those terms). In particular, he had a keen eye for the Lib Dem habit of setting up National Institutes for Well-Meaning Interference. Nobody else on the FPC was ever so good at puncturing pompous proposals, rolling his eyes at yet another new bureaucracy: “No more capital letters, please!” Part of that was what you might call Charles ‘remembering common sense’. But there was another element in there. Whether it was being a Highlander, an outsider, his temperament or his chosen ideology, he quietly disliked people pushing other people around.

Growing Into a Liberal Leader

I didn’t know Charles well enough to be able to say whether it was out of that instinct, or his political judgement as Leader, or it simply seeming the obvious thing to do, but his other ‘big picture’ contribution was more blatantly ideological – under Charles, the Liberal Democrats started using the words “Liberal” and “Liberalism” in the headlines, not just in the small print. The Liberal Democrats never lost our Liberalism; when during the election I was searching for inspiring Liberal quotes, short and long, for my Liberal Democrats Believe Tumblr (which, like so many things, I must get back to), one of the most inspiring speeches and probably the one I quoted at greatest length was one of Paddy’s Leader’s speeches, which is as brilliant an exploration of philosophical Liberalism as you could hope to find. But you’d rarely find the word on its own on a policy paper front page or in a shorthand description of the party.

I suspect that a lot of this comes down to simple history: Paddy had been a Liberal MP, and as the Liberal Democrats’ Leader for our first decade, he was careful not to ‘unpick the merger’. And so was everyone else who’d gone through that shambles of a time. Under Charles, the party was more at ease with itself, with the passage of time and the passage of members. Quietly, we had a Leader who would say of us, “We’re a Liberal party,” without anyone being under the impression he was expelling former Social Democrats; policy papers on what we stood for started proclaiming “It’s About Freedom” or “Freedom in a Liberal Society”, rather than the party’s early years of “Our Different Vision”, which I remember reading cover to cover and still being unable to say quite what it was.

I joined the new party immediately after the merger in 1988, because I’d been a teenage supporter but didn’t see why there were two separate parties and waited until it was official to sign up. For me and my generation of Lib Dem Youth and Students, it was natural to be Liberal Democrats, happy with a party born out of a merger, not wanting to go back to the structures and strifes of a party we’d never been members of, but of course we were ideologically Liberals too. Older members found it more difficult to separate the history and the philosophy, so it was something a lot of Lib Dems were very quiet about during the ’90s. It was obvious to me that Bob Maclennan – a former Leader of the SDP – was by far our most Liberal Home Affairs Spokesperson of the time, and similarly, when Bob was Party President in the mid-’90s he was the most senior figure to speak of our Liberalism, unabashed, one of many reasons I became an unlikely fan and friend. No-one could accuse him of digging up old rivalries or a Liberal Party takeover, and the same was true when Charles, another former Social Democrat, was elected Leader. He was able to talk about what we all stood for without it being divisive. Under Charles’ Leadership, the Lib Dems started to grow our own distinct philosophical rivalries, today spoken of more along Social Liberal and Economic Liberal lines, though neither (with a few exceptions!) as sharp as between our two predecessor parties. Most Lib Dems are both Social and Economic Liberals, and those who come down much more heavily on one side than the other are just as likely to have come from the old SDP as the old Liberal Party – but, like the vast majority of Liberal Democrat members, are most likely not to have been a member of either party that voted to merge into the Lib Dems nearly three decades ago.

So every time a ‘political correspondent’ talks about the ‘fault lines in the Lib Dems’ being based on the Liberal Party vs the SDP, they are almost without exception talking bollocks – just as it would have been absurd to characterise every internal debate of the pre-1988 Liberal Party in terms of Whigs, Radicals and Peelites who merged to create the Liberals in their turn. We are not our parents, and neither are parties. Charles, in his calm and consensual but crucial way, helped the Liberal Democrats to grow up.

Charles’ Principles and Passions

The much less quiet decision that Charles took, after much internal debate and soul-searching, and which came to define his Leadership, was to oppose the Iraq War. It’s often falsely remembered as a populist move. It was nothing of the kind. It was a terrifying plunge into doing the right thing when nobody else would, and we were vilified for it. In the run-up to the War, there were mass marches in opposition, but not largely by natural Lib Dems, and the massed fire of the media was all against us. When the invasion began, our opinion poll support took a dive. It was only much later, when it became clear to people not that the principle of invading another country against international law was wrong – people knew that, and were gung-ho anyway – but that the Labour Party and the Republican Party had created such an appalling, bloody mess, that support swung back our way. Remember that the Labour Party and their Tory and press cheerleaders called Charles and the Lib Dems “Traitors” and much worse for not going along with their illegal war of aggression.

If Iraq was Charles Kennedy’s defining issue by circumstance and brave decision in a hard place, perhaps his greatest passion was Europe. A committed and persuasive European, internationalist, democrat and reformer, while Liberal Democrats and many others who simply liked and agreed with him will miss Charles for too many reasons to count, over the next couple of years our loss will be a huge loss in the coming referendum. As well as the personal loss for his family and our wider Lib Dem family, both bereaved, it’s tragic to lose his voice when he’s so needed.

“I am a Highlander, a Scot, proudly British, and European. I’m proud of all four of these things, and I don’t see why I should have to choose between them or delete any of them.”

You may well have seen today a letter from Charles replying to a voter with his judgement that, even though he’s blue, Gonzo’s a nice guy and his favourite Muppet. I can reveal that he rather liked Doctor Who, too, and that his favourite Doctor was always Patrick Troughton, so I’ve had the Mighty Trout’s most Liberal story on this afternoon. If you really want to celebrate one of Charles’ passions, though, put on some David Bowie to remember him by. There, he was a real fan.

Labels: Charles Kennedy, FPC, Iraq, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Obituary, Paddy Ashdown, Personal, Speeches, The Golden Dozen

The argument over Syria is depressing. After decades of an appalling regime and months of appalling civil war, poison gas has pushed many people simply to say – enough. And, morally, they’re right. Who can’t understand the urge to say, these are terrible things, and they must be fought? But real life doesn’t let us be the Sheriff, all guns blazing. The last decade above all has taught us about playing at cowboy ‘peacemaking’. So much as I empathise with Nick Clegg, it’s time to tell him to be a grown-up.

Syria up-ends all the usual certainties of UK politics. Nick Clegg talks about hard choices trumping idealism, and being practical, and concentrating on what can be done, not what we want to do in an ideal world… Not today. Today Nick says, this is what I believe in, it’s simply right, never mind the cost or the consequences, we can work those out later. And it’s the Liberal Democrats who are having to lecture their Leader, slow down, think about it, we don’t have unlimited money, we need to get people to agree, we’re living in the real world and you can’t just commit to everything you want out of idealism.

Political leaders make all the decisions, and their parties grumble and follow… Not today. To the credit of British democracy, all three leaders have blatantly had kicks in the nadgers from their much less gung-ho MPs. Ed Miliband’s constant u-turns after agreeing military action with the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are only the most obvious signs – and the press treating this as ‘Miliband changing his mind, and again’ only the most obvious sign that the media simply do not understand that parties are not always monolithic and that leaders are sometimes told where to go by their troops.

It’s a harsh lesson to learn, though the use of chemical weapons is a terrible crime, and weakens us all, and we want to do something about it… Sometimes even the most powerful of us can’t get everything they want.

First and Second Principles

First principle: yes. It was wrong. It was horrible. It was in defiance of international law.

Second principle: so call in the international police.

…Oh.

And that’s where it all falls apart.

There were brief times when the UK, or the US, or even NATO, had both the military and moral authority to do pretty much what they liked. In the ’90s, intervening to save lives in Kosovo, it looked like the world would agree to such action, even if the Security Council didn’t. It wasn’t quite legal, but by what looked like wide consent it was the right thing.

It takes naivety past the point of stupidity not to realise that the world has changed, and that the US and the UK changed it for the worse.

We need a system of international law and enforcement to do what Liberals have always done – stand up to bullies. But none of us have any idea how to get there, and our leaders closing their eyes and wishing because they understandably can’t bear that they have so much power but so much impotence at the same time will not make it real.

We need to face up to the unpalatable fact that, after George Bush and the Labour Party’s invasion of Iraq, the US and the UK cannot be the international police. In principle, you can’t uphold international law by breaking it. In practice, too much of the world would see us yet again not as neutral law-enforcers but only the bigger bullies.

Deputy Prime Minister, I know you, and I know you’re sincere, and I know you feel that something must be done. Be mature enough to realise that sometimes you can’t do something, and that trying might make things far worse.

The Practical Problems

Nick Clegg has written “Five reasons why this is not Iraq”. They’re well-considered reasons. They come from the head and the heart. They’re mostly right. But they’re largely irrelevant. No, it’s not Iraq, but it’s absurdly delusional to ignore the fact that everyone on Earth will see it through that prism. Yes, the Coalition is getting a lot right that Labour’s warmongering lie factory got wrong: waiting for weapons inspectors; letting Parliament decide; publishing the legal advice; committing to something far short of an invasion. Before Iraq, that might have been enough. Today, it simply isn’t.

The practical problem of who you’re taking action on behalf of looks like the most insurmountable one. I’ve written before that international law is the gravest of the three big issues on which Liberals lack an instinctive compass – because it’s impossible for all those concerned to give informed consent. I’ve written before that without that, who appoints you a policeman? Who holds you accountable? If you’re wrong, what defence are you left with other than ‘might is right’? And the fact is that the limited framework of international law we have is ‘enforceable’ by a far more limited and flawed body of international decision-making in which many countries with interests against the letter of international law must give their consent, and in which Russia and China in particular can stop any idealist interventionism from having the fig-leaf of legality. There is no ‘citizen’s arrest’ in international law. There is law – or there isn’t. Breaking the law ‘to do good’, again, means no-one will trust you to keep it, or trust your motives. You might or might not be able to improve things in Syria: the likelihood is that no-one will agree on the balance afterwards. The certainty is that international law will be broken, that making it a reality will be put back, and that countries and people who already distrust the US and the UK for the previous governments’ disgusting actions will be further poisoned against us and say whatever government’s in power, they’re all the same.

The practical problem of what happens next is one you clearly haven’t thought out. Say that you manage a precise, proportionate missile attack – whatever that means. Say that somehow the Syrian regime neglects to smear all the world’s TV screens with images of bloody horror that you perpetrated, as any side now can in any war. Say that things have gone ‘according to plan’. But say that Assad doesn’t back down. Does he ever? So what would you do? More missiles? More planes? Tanks? Troops? Or would you back down, and lose face, and do even more damage to the international prohibition of chemical weapons than that which you fear now – with every future perpetrator knowing that you will go only so far, then crumble? You couldn’t answer that question in your Radio 4 interview this morning. If this isn’t going to be another Iraq, we have to ask, too… What next?

The practical problem of the “war crime” is that today we must demand proof. It would be unforgivably irresponsible not to. Even those of us against the Iraq War ‘knew’ about their weapons of mass destruction, because for Labour to sell us monstrous lies on that scale seemed inconceivable. Now we know that they spun and lied their way to war on sexed-up nothing, we can’t take the word of any government and we can’t just take our instincts as proof. It looks very like there was a gas attack: but the weapons inspectors need to investigate. It seems very like it was Assad’s regime: but evidence has to prove it. We need compelling evidence not just of what but of who. We all know of cases where the police said ‘We know he did it, so let’s just get him’. And we’re not even the police. For too many, we’re seen as the gangsters. The consequences of getting this wrong are incalculably higher than just any old-fashioned copper fit-up scandal.

The practical problem for the Liberal Democrats, at last coming to selfish party interests, is that we just can’t afford yet more ‘betrayal’. It isn’t only pacifists who are weary of war. The UK has been fighting for more than ten years – apparently for nothing. The vast majority have just had enough. And for the Lib Dems, it’s worse. One of the few bits of moral high ground we still have that lets our supporters sleep at night (and still vote for us) is that unlike the Labour Party, at least we didn’t invade another country and soak ourselves in blood in defiance of international law. No, this isn’t Iraq, but just as you’re going on your feelings, a hell of a lot of other people are going on theirs that it feels the same. Not least when bloodsoaked liars Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell are already cheerleaders for their next Iraq.

Look at the opinion polls if you don’t trust my instinctive analysis. This is an adventure on which the political leaders and the voters are absolutely split apart, and no more so than Lib Dem voters: the widest gulf between any party leader’s position and that of his voters is for you. Listen to your voters. Listen to your party. If you can’t even get their consent, how much harder will it be to persuade all the countries that are not already minded to trust you? If there’s any issue likely to make both your supporters and your members vote with their feet and leave you with no power at all, or even rise up and break the Coalition, this is the one.

Nick, I know you long to do something, but this is real life and you are not Batman. It’s a hard choice for you, but the most practical thing you can do is – say no.


For further reading, choose by the hundred, but I particularly recommend Caron Lindsay’s round-up “Syria: what do Liberal Democrats want?”, Mark Pack’s “Syria – I know what’s wrong; working out what’s right is rather harder” and Millennium Dome, Elephant’s “Syrians versus Badgers”, in which he hopes that one day, “people will stop thinking that the solution to a problem is to throw ordinance at it”.

Labels: American Politics, British Politics, International Politics, Iraq, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Stupid Ideas

The Labour Government eagerly joined President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. An illegal war.

The main ‘justification’ for invading Iraq was a series of lies to Parliament sexed up by the Labour Government. The Labour Party has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands. Ten years ago in March, Labour joined President Bush in invading. Ten years ago today, President Bush announced it was “Mission accomplished”. That was another lie. The Labour Party stayed the main cheerleader for the hundreds of thousands of deaths and tortures that followed.

So much for Labour’s “ethical foreign policy”. Twenty years ago, the Labour Party abandoned socialism and the Red Flag. Ten years ago, the Labour Party chose to stain the Union Flag in the blood of hundreds of thousands instead.

Who Are the “Traitors” and “Collaborators”?

The Labour Party demonised anyone who opposed the war as “traitors” and “collaborators”. The Liberal Democrats were proud to stand up for international law and do the right thing – even though at the time opposing the war hit us badly in the opinion polls.

The Labour Party still call the Liberal Democrats “traitors” and “collaborators”. Now it’s because we’re in coalition with another British political party who isn’t the Labour Party. They howl and shriek daily that trying to fix the economy after the Labour Government spent all the money and much more they didn’t have – in part by spending so many billions on an illegal war – is exactly the same as being Nazis.

The Labour Party say this because they remember what they did. And the only way they can cope with their guilt for all that death is to accuse someone else instead. But I remember what the Labour Party did, too.

• Remember – who was it who joined the coalition with President George W. Bush?
  

• Remember – who was it who led Britain into an illegal war?
  

• Remember – who was it who involved Britain in illegal torture and rendition?
  

• Remember – who was it who lied and lied and sexed up fake intelligence that weapons of mass destruction which didn’t exist could be launched in forty-five minutes?

Remember what the Labour Government actually did.

The Liberal Democrats Did the Unpopular Thing Because It Was Right

And remember what the Liberal Democrats did – we were the only party to oppose the war back when it seemed political suicide to do so.

Ming Campbell writes how Britain lost its moral authority. I remember how he was desperately ill and came out of hospital to vote against – so that every single Liberal Democrat MP voted against the war.

Andy Strange remembers the Liberal Democrats marching against the Iraq War (I remember bringing bags of sweets and feeding them to Shirley Williams and other leading Lib Dems on the front line of the long march to keep them going on a bitter day).

Caron Lindsay reports Scottish Lib Dem Leader Willie Rennie’s speech about the Iraq War.

Nick Clegg writes on the lessons of Iraq.

Labour Leaders Past and Present – Blood-stained Bullies, Cowards, Hypocrites

Brave, brave John Prescott, the Labour Party Deputy Prime Minister who screamed “traitors” and “collaborators” then and still screams “traitors” and “collaborators” now admits ten years later that the invasion of Iraq “cannot be justified”.

Lord Prescott is the authentic voice of the Labour Party. A bully. A coward. A hypocrite. A moral vacuum who stayed in power at any cost. A man who went along with President Bush in an illegal invasion, lied to support it, attacked those who were against it.

And ten years later, ten years too late, Lord Prescott admits it was all wrong. So vote Labour!

While brave, brave Ed Miliband worked for the Labour Government as a leading advisor through every second of that time and slimed his way to being a Labour MP on the back of it.

To reap the rewards of insider power and become a Labour MP, Ed Miliband supported the war to the hilt.

To become Labour Leader, Ed Miliband said seven years too late that he “considered” resigning.

Brave, brave Ed Miliband.

Things To Remember

So when the Labour Party pretend to be sweetness and light, just remember what they did with thirteen years of absolute power. Remember that war-mongering, evidence-sexing, amnesia-promising, freedom-crushing, LGBT-hypocrisising, rich-brownnosing, poor-taxing, crony-bribe-swallowing shameless Labour Government.


And remember that when the USA asked the UK’s help in arming up for a potential war on another Middle Eastern country, this part-Liberal Democrat Government said no.

The Labour Party had a choice. The Liberal Democrats had a choice. So do you.

Labels: American Politics, British Politics, Iraq, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Things To Remember About Labour

If you saw Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero on BBC2 last night, you’ll suddenly know quite a bit about Victorian naturalist and natural selection theorist Alfred Russel Wallace. You may not know that he was a prominent Liberal, contributing to Andrew Reid’s 1885 Why I Am A Liberal. I’ve just re-read Duncan Brack’s 1996 follow-up collection Why I Am A Liberal Democrat, which includes extracts from the earlier book. So, followed by my reaction to that edition, here’s Mr Wallace’s Liberal creed – with ideals familiar to modern Lib Dems, even down to complaining the party doesn’t live up to them…

“Although very slow to act upon its convictions, the Liberal Party recognises fundamental principles as a basis of reform, and aims at unbought justice and equal freedom for all as the ultimate goal of political progress.”

I’ve always loved the Why I Am A Liberal Democrat selection, and, Duncan, if you’re reading – or Mark Pack, perhaps – isn’t it about time there was a new edition? Regular readers will know that I’ve been asking a related question of today’s Liberal Democrats, and will I hope soon be publishing more of them: both the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century versions of the book carried a lot of crossover between the personal testaments and the statements of what the party stands for.

Although Alfred Russel Wallace’s line is probably just an excerpt, as I don’t have Mr Reid’s book and Duncan’s is clearly selective in his reprints of earlier contributors and their contributions, I was inspired by the coincidence of having come across him on the page mere hours before the documentary about him on the telly (the second half next Sunday). So this may be the first in a series of Liberal quotations… Or it may not, as I’ve been worse than usual recently, horribly ill and knocked out and not written anything at all for three weeks.

Andrew Reid’s Why I Am A Liberal Vs Duncan Brack’s Why I Am A Liberal Democrat

I won’t review Why I Am A Liberal Democrat – there are 155 entries, and I’d feel like commenting on all of them – but, though it and the Victorian original are long out of print, it’s worth searching for and, again, could really do with a new edition. I did notice a few interesting things about each, though.

Both books had several Liberal ideas in common for many of those writing, over a century apart – an emphasis on freedom, first, on equality, and on not being in the pay of classes or other groups. Both were internationalist, though it was the 1885 version that was strikingly more in tune with the passionate anti-aggression of Liberal Democrats from just a few years after 1996, in the wake of Labour’s illegal invasion of Iraq. But there were differences, too.

Andrew Reid’s Why I Am A Liberal is rather grandly subtitled Being Definitions and Personal Confessions of Faith by the Best Minds in the Liberal Party, and from that you can deduce that it has a far higher religious content than that from more secular Britain a century later, with many of the writers seeing their faith as the wellspring of their politics. As I’ve said, for the Imperial power of the time there was great scepticism of using that power in military adventures, and – rooted in the history of the time – a clear opposition both to Tories (I have to admit to a double-take on seeing an entry from the MP George Osborne… [next line] …Morgan) and to revolutions. The plain Why I Am A Liberal Democrat saw a much greater passion for Europe and proportional representation, each of which I suspect might be lower down in the mix were a new edition to be gathered today. But for me the most interesting difference was in the favourite ideological line of the time; quite a few contributors saw the purpose of politics as:

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

By contrast, the most-quoted line of 1996 Liberal Democrats was my own favourite (with Duncan’s afterword, like my What the Lib Dems Stand For, written largely around the three words):

“No-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.”

In this change of repeated rallying-cry, you can see a change of generations of favoured Liberal philosophers. In part literally, from James Mill’s utilitarianism to his son John Stuart Mill’s Liberalism. I have to admit I have my own problems with the superficially attractive summary of utilitarianism: its implicit ‘the ends justify the means’ puts a chill up my spine. To me attempts to quantify happiness to ‘give’ to a majority sound at best more like New Labour – targets for what can be measured rather than what actually matters to people, and dumping people who don’t fit – than Liberal. It’s clear that the party has gone through a similar evolution to that of John Stuart Mill, who while not openly abandoning the word and his dad kept trying to make it mean something very different. When he stopped listening to Jeremy Bentham (not that one) and started writing with Harriet Taylor, modern Liberalism was born. From Mill and Taylor we get freedom rooted in knocking down conformity; rather more from the New Liberals of the early Twentieth Century we get the cry against poverty; and from both, opposition to ignorance. Between them, that universal appeal to freedom is social Liberalism, and it’s no surprise that still, today, it’s at the heart of the Liberal Democrats.

Labels: Alfred Russel Wallace, Books, Harriet Taylor, History, Iraq, John Stuart Mill, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, The Golden Dozen, Utilitarianism, What the Lib Dems Stand For

I’ve offered four largely positive reasons to vote YES! to the Alternative Vote on Thursday… But sometimes I’m a grumpy sod, so now I’ve got down to number 5 I’ll admit there are also some very negative reasons to vote YES! Is there a party you hate the most? Or has one politician in your area really pissed you off? Then imagine the satisfaction in putting them all the way at the bottom of your ballot. If the “No” campaign is right that Lib Dems are unpopular, then AV is the system that lets you give us the biggest kicking.

Can I confess that in internal Lib Dem elections I often take some pleasure in putting the people I like most at the top of the ballot, then filling in people I particularly dislike (surely not!) at the bottom…? Which is much more fun. And only then thinking about the order of those I don’t mind in the middle. You don’t have to use more than your top preference, of course – in fact, you can abstain altogether – but knowing you’ve made it more difficult for the person you like least to get elected can be very satisfying.

The Alternative Vote magnifies people’s views, and lets voters gang up on unpopular parties. That means it’s far easier to kick out an unpopular government – if people think a party’s good, or at least ‘OK, I suppose,’ they get a bonus; if they’ve totally fucked up, AV hammers them, because they don’t get many preferences.

Remember the 2005 General Election? Remember the fury at Tony Blair and the Labour Party for their illegal invasion of Iraq and lies about weapons of mass destruction? The Labour Government got just 35.2% of the vote. Nearly two thirds of the country voted against them, giving Labour the smallest share of the vote that a “winning” government has ever had – but they still “won” 355 seat. A comfortable majority.

Vote “YES!” to make unpopular governments a whole lot less comfortable.

Fairer votes might have let all those of us who thought Labour’s warmongering authoritarian smugness needed taking down a peg gang up on them. Instead, as the ‘biggest loser’ under our current system, they were rewarded with absolute power even when two thirds of the country voted them down. They had absolutely no mandate, but still – again – absolute power.

And if you hate the Liberal Democrats as much as I hated Labour, AV lets you give us a thrashing, too. The “No” campaign tell a lot of lies, but one of the stupidest is that the Lib Dems are incredibly unpopular – and that AV would give us more power (it never has to a third party in Australia, where it’s actually used). It is simply not possible for both of these to be true. If the Lib Dems are now widely hated, AV would hammer us.

I believe in fairer votes for the sake of democracy, not just one party, so I’m willing to take that risk. That the “No” campaign tells such lies to scare you just shows their narrow partisan agenda has nothing to do with democracy.

No To All Those Lies (Part IV)

All the No Campaign can do is keep heaping on more lies because they can’t come up with a positive case for the current broken system. But as in this post I’ve almost matched “No” for being negative, why not read some of the reasons why their lies about AV don’t stand up by my friend Andrew Hickey, who’s a big, positive fan of the strengths of the Alternative Vote?


Update: with tonight’s two polls bizarrely showing either “No” just 1% ahead and all to play for – “YES!” voters take note: it’s close as can be, and your vote counts! – or with the biggest lead yet – “No” voters take note: you’re safe, you can sit at home and not bother ;-) – Andrew is very forceful: get out the YES! vote!


Not completely convinced yet to vote #Yes2AV? Try 1 of my other YES! reasons. Or 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 or 8…!

Labels: British Politics, Iraq, Liberal Democrats, Referendum

With excruciating timing, just as the bloated zombie of the “New” Labour Government is (hopefully) due at last to lumber into its grave, one of the main reasons to bury it at a crossroads with a stake through its heart returns from the dead. Long-term readers may remember that I was never fond of the pure poison to the body politic that was for too long Prime Minister, so Mr Blair’s resurrection today in a body that (like Lord Voldemort’s) is no longer quite human started me thinking of the terrible lessons to learn from the fable of New Labour…

Wasn’t it astounding to see Gordon Brown, surely one of the few people on Earth who loathes Tony Blair more than I do, calling him back after all the hate everyone knows they’ve spat at each other to give one last lie for the gitter?

Wasn’t it astounding to see Labourites on Twitter pretending they’re pleased to see him again, with the celebratory hasbeentag #BlairsBack (still with #BrownsKnives?) fighting for attention with the competing #TheMummyReturns, #SendHimToTheHague and #MoneyTalks?

And wasn’t it astounding to see a man who’s not standing for election – who can’t be held to account – fly in on a tide of money and order us all what to do, as if he still had absolutely power? Wasn’t it just like old times for the Labservatives to assume that we must all do what they say, as long as they’re rich and arrogant enough, and no need for them to be elected? And wasn’t it absolutely bloody typical of the man who lied our country into an illegal war at the behest of God and George Bush – and with the full support of the Labservative Parties – to make his grand declamation, tell us all what to do… Then refuse to answer a single question, ordering out anyone who tried to hold him to account?

As you may have gathered, Mr Blair descending to Earth to lay his holy hand on us miserable sinners is reminding me just how much I loathe him. I disliked him very much even before he became Labour Leader; he fulfilled all my grim expectations as Prime Minister; and then as war criminal and George Bush cheerleader he became someone who I could no longer look at without feeling muscles clenching and teeth grinding.

It’s one of the paradoxes of politics that, although I dislike Mr Cameron far more than I do Mr Brown, I suspect that Dave (in his vacuous nebulosity) would be easier to deal with. Gordon Brown is a bullying, egomaniacal control freak and not up to the job, but I can’t help thinking that he means some of what he says – unlike Mr Blair, bar his warmongering. If there’s one good thing to say about the (looks at watch) still current Prime Minister, it’s that while he always wanted to have Mr Blair’s job, he never wanted to be Mr Blair. One reason I detest Cameron more of today’s two Labservative Leaders is that he desperately wants to be Mr Blair, only without the talent (which means, grudgingly, that he probably has less capacity for evil, though not for want of trying).

Blairytales of New Labour

None of this is to deny Tony Blair’s abilities. He was a phenomenal talent, leaving his two Labservative successors standing. But having talent isn’t enough – it’s what you do with it. And he used his flair and his power to preach at the powerless and suck up to the powerful. He was a poisonous, hypocritical, sanctimonious liar. Mr Blair reminds me of the joke told by Denis Healey about David Owen, in the style of Sleeping Beauty:

When Tony was born, fairies gathered round his crib to shower every possible gift on him. He would be successful, intelligent, lucky, handsome, charismatic…

But, unfortunately, the bad fairy also turned up. And she said, ‘He will have all those gifts, and more. But he will also be… A shit.’

The moral of this story, as always, is that it’s not what you have that counts – it’s what you do with it.

The other cautionary tale to take from New Labour is simply this. The moment they were elected, they started tugging their hardest at all the levers of power, only to find they weren’t connected to anything. Their solution?

Build more levers! More levers! Always more levers*!


Still, after all that, if you’re a better person than Tony Blair – and that’s not hard – you might find it in your heart to pity him. Just a little. Have you seen pictures of him speaking today? The poor** man. Wearing those burning pants so long has finally barbecued him all the way up to his face.


Count Packula, Prince of Markness – yes, the Lib Dems have our own undead forces – has applied his razor-sharp teeth and discovered that, in endorsing Gordon Brown, Tony Blair has been careful to leave his own ‘plausible deniability’ in place. You think that’s an exaggeration? Seriously.


Update: having been unable to bear actually watching Mr Blair’s speech, I sat down to read some of it. It was worse than I expected.

He still has chutzpah; he attacks Mr Cameron’s message of “change” as “the most vacuous in politics”. It’s bizarre to hear the truth from Tony Blair, and yet a truth that can only ever reflect on his opponents, and not himself:

“Is there a core…? Think of all the phrases you associate with their leadership and the phrase ‘you know where you are with them’ is about the last description you would think of.”

Is that just out-and-out hypocrisy from the man who “changed” the Labour Party by turning into a vacuum, precisely as Mr Cameron attempted to do with his own half of the Labservatives? Or is it the disdain of a convert who finally found something to believe in – conquering the world with George Bush – and so embodying a very particular cautionary tale, that if you elect someone who’s ditched everything they ever believed in, you never know what hideous monstrosity is going to crawl into the vacuum left behind?

But the line that really turned my stomach – the one that the Liberal Democrats should shout from the rooftops, because it should make everyone still considering voting for the Labour Party ashamed – is when he finally came out and revealed what he really believes, deep in his shrivelled soul.

For all Labour’s attempt to be all things to all people, for all their attempt to chat up Lib Dems in 1997 and, again, now that they fear they need our votes, their record is of a savagely authoritarian party that has turned back the clock at almost every point to state power against individual choice, that has tried again and again to destroy the Rule of Law. One that has been, incredibly, far worse and more repressive than the Conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s. But who could have guessed that even Mr Blair would choose so revealing a selling-point as to shout that we must choose Mr Brown over Mr Cameron – because the Conservatives are TOO LIBERAL.

“On law and order, they've gone liberal when actually they should have stuck with a traditional Conservative position.”

Like yours, Mr Blair? And yet he hacked apart our liberties in ways even traditional Conservatives wouldn’t have dreamt of – and now, at last, he boasts about it, like the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. A monstrously illiberal Prime Minister, finally turned from dissembling to proclaiming his monstrosity with sneering pride. The man who believes he is always right has finally made a statement of such appalling hubris that it deserves to be repeated over and over until every Labour voter knows exactly what foulness they’re supporting.


*The Labour Party has created more than 4,300 new laws since it came to office, at a rate greater than any government in the history of Britain.

**Tony Blair’s definition of poor does not exclude wealth beyond the dreams of githood.

Labels: British Politics, Iraq, Labour, Labservative

The BBC today denied accusations that filling Question Time with five authoritarian egomaniacs displayed any lack of political balance. ‘Last week we had three Tories – today, three Labour people,’ a spokesperson said. ‘How much more balanced could we be? It’s not as if the Liberal Democrats have anything distinctive to contribute about tonight’s topics of Iraq and electoral reform. I’m sorry, what?

‘With Lord Falconer, Theresa May, Clare Short, George Galloway and Melanie Phillips on tonight’s panel [see our EXCLUSIVE advance photograph], the audience can be assured a full range of political colours.


‘We reject accusations that two embittered, self-aggrandising ex-Labour MPs with minuscule public support are in some way likely to agree. Everyone knows they consider each other “splitters”.

‘In fact, Clare Short will tonight join Theresa May in representing the Conservative Party, as a cheerleader for the war who voted it through and then, when it all went pear-shaped afterwards, angrily said that it wasn’t her fault, she’d been deceived, and how could she possibly have been expected to exercise any individual judgment (something that’s a lot easier to say in the absence of any awkward Liberal Democrats).’


DISCLAIMER: The Daleks wish it to be known that they dissociate themselves from the far-right authoritarianism of Melanie Phillips and the support for genocidal maniacs offered by George Galloway.


Update: and again…

Labels: BBC, British Politics, Conservatives, Daleks, Iraq, Labour, Pictures, Questionable Time, Stupid Ideas

Continuing my series on what the Liberal Democrats stand for, today’s instalment is perhaps the most problematic part of Love and Liberty, a 1999 booklet exploring my own Liberalism – struggling to set out a Liberal approach to international problems, not getting as far as I’d have liked… And before Iraq. Still, if you’re searching for my answer, there’s another one I prepared later. In the meantime, I paraphrase David Lloyd George (not usually my favourite Leader), suggest the biggest difference between Liberals and nationalists, and come up with a good line knocking the Tories. That’s always fun, isn’t it?

Love: Liberal Internationalism

I once read a line from David Lloyd George, where he exclaimed that he hated fences and wanted to kick down any he came across. He may well have been thinking of Welsh landowners, but that quotation always pops into my head as part of that instinctive Liberal internationalism. Liberals don’t like neat little boxes and borders that individuals can’t cross. I want to kick down fences, too, and I don’t see how the concerns of Liberalism can be confined to one country. We've always been the most internationalist of creeds, and also the most individualist. That flows perfectly logically from the borderless connections individuals make in their own ‘living circles’, though perhaps, with my dual nationality, it was never going to seem like a contradiction to me. That's another difference between nationalists and us: we include everyone, rejecting the idea that we shouldn't bother with rights for people beyond the border - our principles don't stop on the shoreline. As the Preamble to the Liberal Democrat Constitution puts it,

“our responsibility for justice and liberty cannot be confined by national boundaries; we are committed to fight poverty, oppression, hunger, ignorance, disease and aggression wherever they occur.”

There are many pragmatic reasons for internationalism, too; Paddy Ashdown outlined the two main Liberal opportunities at the turn of the millennium as the globalisation of power and information, and the growth of individual autonomy and choice. Standing up against multinationals is no longer possible for many countries in isolation, recessions cross-national boundaries, and one country can’t save the world’s environment on its own. Common peace and security, economies and the Internet are all parts of the movement into internationalism which should hold no terror for Liberals, whose outlook was never confined to the short-term interests of one country.

Other parties have more difficulty; even Labour’s hopeless dithering is preferable to the Conservatives’ approach to Europe. In government, the Tories were like a drunk at a party – not listening to anyone else, standing propped up in a corner, ranting away at the other guests, making our friends move away in embarrassment and those who didn’t want us invited in the first place say ‘See! We told you they couldn’t behave!’ Now they just want to sit at home and complain about the noise next door.

Nationalism, of course, contains a greater danger than mere isolationism. While there is a difference between those for whom nationalism is the end and those for who self-determination is the means, the nationalist assertion that ‘we’re good’ easily leads to ‘they’re bad,’ which too easily becomes ‘we hate them’ and unleashes racism or fascism, particularly to distract attention from failure – for some people, it’s so much easier to put up with if you can blame ‘them’. If you can’t live with differences in people, you start by stopping people living their own lives, and finish by stopping them living. Those who believe Liberalism’s values (rather than some of its methods) have changed so much in the last century should compare Mr Gladstone’s concentration on Bulgaria with Mr Ashdown’s on Bosnia.

Liberal Intervention?

A Liberal response to issues in other countries is a key area where Liberal values clash – often setting diversity and democracy against duty. Liberal internationalism is a tradition that’s long been kept alive in Liberal hearts, but we try not to talk about the movements also once active in the old Liberal Party for pacifist isolationism or imperialism. If we recognise no borders to our love of humanity, what about freedom for ‘a people’? What about self-determination? What happens to persons, when it has to apply on levels other than the personal? Liberalism’s search for ‘truth’ means Liberals should accept practical, pragmatic experience solutions, but not believe in any ‘perfection for all time’.

One lesson of the 20th Century is the growth of cultural and colonial independence – but another is that ‘muscular’ Liberalism must sometimes intervene to prevent hideous crimes, even at the expense of pluralism. If we regard individuals as different from societies, then causing harm to ‘our own’ is still ‘harm’. A majority can’t consent to harm a minority, but it can be a difficult circle to square with not forcing your own idea of ‘best’ on others – particularly if ethnic cleansing starts in a ‘democratic’ country. Where is the balance to be found between protecting cultural diversity by not stomping over a country from outside, against protecting cultural diversity by stopping the leaders of a country eliminating internal pluralism? While I’ve always tended towards pacifism towards attacks on me, I’ve always favoured weighing in to defend someone else, and I have a similar view about intervening to protect the oppressed in other countries. Even so, who appoints you a policeman? Who holds you accountable? What if you’re wrong; if reason fails, can you only say that might happens to be right, so it’s OK? As with ‘internal’ guarantees of liberty, Liberals believe the long-term answer will be to set rules, and look at each case on its own merits. Instinctively keen to look beyond national boundaries and pool sovereignty, Liberals’ solution is a framework of ‘international law’ and agreements, not merely to rely on US unilateral action. It is difficult to reconcile the appalling actions of the Taliban towards women, for example, with the still-revolutionary Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Problems on a global scale or made plain through global communications, whether war crimes or multinational company power, are problems for consenting international institutions.

Tempting as it is to re-write the whole of Love and Liberty, I’ve only been polishing the odd particularly clumsy line here and there, or just changing it to my ‘house style’ (double quote marks for direct quotations, single for anything paraphrased, unattributable or just made up for a laugh, and so on). I frowned on re-reading today’s piece, though; the earlier part of it has several lines which I – can I be charitable to myself? – which I’m sure I borrowed, but the second part just isn’t really up to scratch.

I still agree with myself as far as I went (and haven’t changed a word of that part), but I knew what I wrote about Liberal intervention was a bit threadbare at the time, and it looks much more so post-Iraq. It’s partly because there’s a definite clash of different Liberal values here, and I don’t have an easy answer to it. It certainly needs more work from me.

Fortunately, I did do a bit more work on it, so here’s one I prepared later, which does at least weight matters post-Iraq, if far from definitive. In 2006, commenting on the Liberal Democrat policy paper on Britain’s Global Responsibilities: the International Rule of Law I wrote an article for Lib Dem Voice which outlined three areas where Liberals tend to have arguments – as I said yesterday, while all parties have ideologies, they don’t all focus on the same things – and focused in on one in particular. My theory is, you see, that we all generally tend to agree that informed consent is the touchstone for what people should and shouldn’t do, and it’s usually a pretty coherent model. What happens, though, in situations where informed consent can’t apply? I wrote,

“It seems to me there are three big issues on which Liberals lack an instinctive compass, and they’re all situations where it’s impossible for all those concerned to give informed consent: animals, children and international law. I remember coming up with these in discussion during the writing process on the party’s philosophy paper It’s About Freedom. Its chair, Alan Beith, agreed that these were issues on which Liberals might well not have easy answers, and while I thought that was a good reason to raise them, he – perhaps wisely – thought the opposite was true!”

So, if you want to read what I thought further (if still not far enough) on the international rule of law, it’s here in my thoughtful and understated article, “When Liberals Attack!”


You can find the evolving links to the whole of Love and Liberty with an introduction here. Over the following days, I’ll be expanding on the consequences of putting love and then liberty at the heart of my Liberalism – check back to that contents list and watch for those links to spring into life. Oh, and don’t forget to give your opinion on whether #LibDemHeart or #LibDemValues makes the better tag!


Back to III

Forward to V

Labels: Conservatives, European Politics, History, Ideas, Iraq, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Paddy Ashdown, Personal, What the Lib Dems Stand For

You couldn’t get a more stark summing-up of Labour’s moral bankruptcy. For war criminal Tony Blair, the Prime Minister whose illegal invasion was led by George Bush and cheerled by the baying enthusiasm of the Labour and Conservative parties while only the Liberal Democrats stood against it, life after office means pocketing millions of pounds and sparing just one day to help Lord Chilcot with his Inquiry. By contrast, for the rest of us ordinary people, in thirteen years Labour has fabricated over 4,289 new laws so far (nearly one a day) to waste police time and micro-manage our lives.

This is not the trial of Tony Blair, sadly. The Inquiry has no power to lock the bastard up. They don’t even have the power to summon up all the evidence – lots of Mr Blair’s dodgy correspondence promising war in advance has been blocked from view, despite Nick Clegg demanding that the Inquiry must be given all the facts. Still, from the Labour Government that abolished the right to silence, we all know what to infer from that. But I suspect that even Mr Blair’s extraordinary gifts with language will not entirely spare him from wriggling in discomfort under some harder questions than his native chat show sofa puts to him. However deflective or punctured his composure in today’s hearing goes, though, I won’t be the only one to feel a sense of betrayal that, at the end of his testimony, he’ll stroll back to making more extreme wealth from his Premiership rather than be escorted back to the cell he deserves.

Blunkett: Iraq Debates Spoiled My Posh Dinner Parties, So Pity Me

Disgraced former Labour hatchet man, failed Home Secretary, serial waster of police time through making up hundreds of daft new laws and unbelievable media favourite David Blunkett complained on the Today Programme this morning that some newspapers have “never forgiven” Mr Blair for the Iraq War, which is so terribly unfair to a “great” man. Well, fair’s fair: none of you war criminals have ever said sorry or admitted there’s anything to forgive. The flippant answer to such whining pleas usually involves asking Mrs Lincoln how, apart from that, her night at the theatre went, but I just find it difficult to sneer away hundreds of thousands of deaths on Mr Blair’s (and Mr Brown’s, and Mr Straw’s, and Mr Blunkett’s) orders. Or the lies that they used to justify them. Or ignoring all the people who marched and protested, and all the Liberal Democrats’ questions about how it could all go so horribly wrong, and evading responsibility when it all did. Or ignoring all the government lawyers who told them, as the Liberal Democrats did, that their war would be illegal and smash international law into piece – Mr Straw’s response to them, as we heard this week after his leadership-hungry posturing last week as a tortured man of principle, was in fact to boast that he was always being told what he was planning was illegal, and always went ahead and did it anyway. So much for the Rule of Law.

What else did Mr Blunkett plead pity for when he was interviewed this morning? What was his response to being pressed about the repeated outright lie about weapons of mass destruction being ready to launch at Britain within 45 minutes, a three-part claim in which all three parts were untrue and at least two were known to be untrue by the Labour government who sexed them up before misleading the House of Commons and spreading their terrifying lie through their chosen attack-dog newspapers, screaming that everyone who questioned them was a traitor? About the fact that Mr Blair and the rest of the Labour Government claimed that Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were “active, detailed and growing” and “beyond doubt” when the evidence before they sexed it up read instead “sporadic and patchy”?

Mr Blunkett’s response was that he wants to be loved, and it was all very hurtful, and that – you may have to stop reading, gentle viewer, lest you burst into tears – he even had to ask people to stop arguing about Iraq over the table because it was upsetting his dinner parties. Oh, the horror. So never let it be said that Labour ministers didn’t suffer just as wretchedly as the people being bombed to blazes.

An Overdose of New Laws? It’s Enough To Drive You To Drink

Something else you may have heard on this morning’s Today Programme is the Labour Government’s latest example of legislative diarrhoea. Today’s new law – well, one of them – is to prohibit “persistent possession of alcohol in a public place” – well, they’ve not banned alliteration, at least. Richard groaned and exclaimed, “Why not just say, ‘You’re under arrest for hanging about’?” Welcome, then, to the Labour Government’s 4,290th law – or 4,291st, or 4,292nd, or have we passed 4,300 yet? And are they in a headlong rush to top 5,000 pointless prohibitions before they’re forced from office?

Just last week, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne revealed that Labour’s record, while being shamefully poor at achieving anything in the real world, is a sparkling success in the Labour MPs’ imaginations that have cobbled together new legislation in ever-greater torrents. A couple of years ago, Labour had only inflicted 3,000 new laws on an unenthusiastic public; but by last week, Chris revealed, the total had rocketed to 4,289. If only manufacturing industry had grown like the manufacturing of legislation, Britain would be a world leader. If only saying the magic words really made it so, Britain would be a shining fairyland. But, instead, Chris pleaded that, if only Labour would stop, think and start repealing some of their ridiculous 4,289 new laws, the rest of us might find it easier to get on with our lives.

Yes, with 4,289 new laws under New Labour as of last week, and still growing rapidly as we heard this morning, Britain may be an international disgrace for joining George Bush’s illegal war, and Britain may be the last major economy to emerge from recession – and even that by the most Brown-trouseredly microscopic measurement – but Britain is, proudly, a world leader in law-making.

But what’s it for?

Though the Labour Government has produced more new laws than any other government in British history, are we in some way more riotous than ever before? Hardly. Are the police short of powers? Not a bit of it. Can any of us even keep up with this mountain of legislation, and find out exactly what we’re newly outlawed from doing day by day? Not even if it’s our full-time job, I imagine, though if there’s one sort of job that’s been growing as unemployment spirals under Labour, it’s the jobsworth. They ban things that shouldn’t be banned, they poke about in our private lives and micro-manage our public spaces, and all they achieve is labelling ordinary law-abiding people ‘criminals’.

This is a waste of all of our time. It’s waste of the government’s time. It’s even, and in some ways most counter-productively, a criminal waste of police time. What on Earth is the point of getting every police officer in the country to stay in and memorise a new law every day, when the problem is that they’re not getting out and enforcing the laws we’ve already got?

Labour’s Waste of Time; Tories Support Them; Lib Dems Have A Better Answer

Labour’s laws are not for the benefit of the police, or of society – just for the benefit of Labour. These are laws as substitutes for action – laws showered out instead of press releases, to get a winning headline for a day, then someone else can clear up the mess later. Don’t ask the Conservatives to do it, though; you may not realise it from the way they attack Labour in the TV studios, but in Parliament, just as the Tories were even more eager than Labour to wave their pom-poms in support of the Iraq War, the fact is that right now the Conservative “Opposition” are voting in agreement with the Labour Government more times than any “Opposition” since the Second World War. Some change.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Even a lot of people whose knee-jerk response was that if it moves, ban it, can see that this tidal wave of time-wasting actually gets in the way of the practical function it’s supposed to achieve. And for those of us Liberals who don’t like banning things anyway, who’ve been questioning what the point is every step of the way and opposing so many of these crazy new laws on principle, it’s small comfort – to us, to the police officers who don’t have time to do their jobs, and to all the many, many people brought before the courts on stupid little charges that should never have been made up – to say ‘we told you so’.

The centrepiece of the Liberal Democrats’ legislative programme in our General Election Manifesto will be a Freedom Bill, which rather than adding to the pile will start repealing vast swathes of Labour’s bossy, bullying, blatantly unnecessary laws. It can’t come soon enough.

Labour Bans Locally As Well As Nationally (and I have blogging trouble)

This morning’s indignant piece is for the moment rather linkless, as blogging and Twittering have hit something of a hitch at home: on getting in from a rather impressive few Richard’s birthday burgers together at the Gourmet Burger Bar, where I’d recommend the lamb (if slightly smothered) and the wild boar, and the really serious garlic mayo if you really like garlic (the only garlic dressing I’ve ever had in a restaurant as ferocious as my home-made garlic bread), our evening was slightly put out of kilter by finding our Internet connection had gone down. Actually, I probably shouldn’t write “gone down,” as it’ll add fuel to the censor’s fire, of which there’ll be more in a moment. Anyway, I spent quite some time on the phone last night to Waitrose broadband customer support, and rather more this morning, and there’s good news and bad news. Good news: they made a note on our account last night, so I didn’t have to go through every test all over again. Bad news: this morning’s tests and changes didn’t fix the problem either, or even identify it (sample quote – “Oh, that’s strange” / put on hold with ’80s stadium rock). Good news: they’re sending a new router. Bad news: we’re waiting for a new router…

So I’m out at my local library, which has a tight time limit on how long you can use their computers for (as I discovered when our street had its power cut for a day a fortnight ago – not good if you have no gas, your phones need power and the water in your flat runs from electric pumps – and my library e-mails to EDF Energy were abruptly cut off), in a bit of a rush, even with one I prepared earlier on a memory stick.

And just as I was getting into the swing of publishing Love and Liberty posts at noon daily. Bah. I’ve just done today’s, but can’t actually check what it or any of my other posts look like, as the local library’s over-enthusiastic content protection blocks anyone from viewing my blog – bloody Labour council! And that’s despite several times e-mailing them with examples of just which political websites they’ve auto-banned (including most Lib Dem blogs), and how ludicrous it is for a library to be so dead-set against reading. Richard has suggested that, as this is a Labour council, the word “Liberal” has been put on their anti-terror watch list.

Once we’ve got our connection back, I’d better look up some really interesting porn links to post and give them something worthwhile to ban me for, then…

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Food, Iraq, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Personal, The Today Programme

President Bush has given his final press conference – keener to be held to account now he’s suddenly paying some attention to history (much too little, much too late). He claimed that he was “disappointed” not to have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Well, that’s one way of putting it.

He’s earned some unexpected credit over the past couple of months; he was an occasionally good outgoing President. He decided to be, at the last, a unifyer in supporting President-Elect Obama (actively so, rather than in the country uniting in relief that anyone else was to be President). It doesn’t make up, of course, for matching that with all his last-minute shittery in rushing through Presidential edicts to pay off all his big business fundraisers by destroying the US environment, and nothing could make up for the unspeakable butchery of the worst Presidency in American history. Still, it’s reassuring to find something nice to say about even President Bush, as my Mother always used to tell me about everyone (though I suspect she’d be very pushed indeed to find a nice word to say about him – but then, she was born an American, and I have dual nationality, so as well as being as horrified by him as 90% of the world, we feel soiled).

He finished by saying that history would judge him. As with his friend Mr Blair and their Cabinets, I’d rather it was the Hague.

Labels: American Politics, Corruption, History, Iraq, Labour

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead!
Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up, you sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead.
She’s gone where the goblins go,
Below, below, below, yo-ho,
Let’s open up and sing, and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know
The Wicked Witch is dead!

Perhaps I should wait until it’s verified legally, but he is morally, ethically, spiritually, politically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably finished. And he has, of course, been so for years. Technically, even now he’s not gone yet, but after this latest, absurdly stage-managed (and characteristically pre-announced), self-justifying, faux-humble, faux-apologetic pile of cant, even this loathsome lying hypocrite will find it difficult to wiggle out of this announcement. Holding my breath that he doesn’t declare martial law, fulfil his greatest unrealised ambition by arresting Gordon Brown, and call the whole thing off, on the 27th of June the streets will ring to the joyous cheer, “Hail, hail, the Witch is dead.” As always, it emerged first through his spin doctors.

More charitable political obituaries will remember the first few months of Mr Blair’s reign, when he put into practice proposals championed by other leaders and other parties, all of which he was lukewarm over at the time and has bitterly regretted since: freedom of information; Scottish and Welsh devolution; the Human Rights Act. He grits his teeth and struggles to chip away at them to this day. And since then… What? Been more Tory than the Tories? Centralised more power than ever known in peacetime? Demanded government control to micromanage every area of our lives? Swept away centuries of British freedoms, so that reviled kings like John or Richard III who introduced them are certain to look better in the history books than he does? Brought in dozens of criminal justice acts that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on while displaying nothing but contempt for the Rule of Law? Yes, what an incredible achievement it was to win three elections in a row, even with the astounding luck that our supercasino voting system gave him a jackpot of power with barely a third of voters backing him. But isn’t it still more incredible that, having won such immense majorities and all that power, Mr Blair so clearly had absolutely not the faintest idea of what to do with it, except keep it? No wonder he’s hung on so long. What else was he there for, but to be there? Mr Blair is the most public proof ever displayed that it’s not the size that matters, but what you do with it. Look at his record at home, and his protracted period of incompetently Orwellian absolute power has left nothing but the most mean-spirited of marks.

But it isn’t for any of those things that Mr Blair will be remembered. His legacy is one thing, and one only.

Iraq.

Because of Mr Blair’s appalling judgement and because of Mr Blair’s shameless lies, hundreds of thousands of people are dead, terrorists rejoice at the recruits he’s brought to them, and Britain is reviled around the world. Even before he came to power, Mr Blair had made ‘spin’ famous. His relationship with truth was always tenuous. But his lies to take Britain to war with Iraq, his lies to smear the opponents brave enough to stand up to him at the time, and his lies to cover it all up mean that politics has never been regarded with such contempt. And that’s not unfair. Because when the Prime Minister lies about something so serious, we all deserve to be held to account for it.

Tony Blair has had a hideously corrosive effect on British politics. Even when he’s telling the truth, no-one can believe a single word the Prime Minister says. He preaches to the powerless and sucks up to the powerful; he is a loathsome, hypocritical, sanctimonious bully who lied his way into mass murder. I know many Liberal Democrats had a sneaking (or in some cases blatant) regard for Mr Blair when he was first elected. I started off finding him an untrustworthy Tory snake-oil salesman, and that was the high point of my regard for him. I came up with a Watchdog-style consumer questionnaire in 2001 for people who’d voted him into office: ‘Is This the Labour You Voted For in 1997?’ I didn’t come up with a funny list in 2005. ‘Did you expect Labour to pitch us into an aggressive, illegal war that will make us infamous around the world?’ just didn’t have that comic edge to it. Today’s was the first of his speeches for years that I’ve been able to bring myself to watch, and that only in the spirit of someone standing over the coffin with a mirror over the lips. Just to make sure that that irredeemable shit isn’t about to get up again. Even his own party has been desperate to get rid of him for months now, and in many cases years. Such a shame they didn’t stand up to him when it mattered, and just want to duck the blame now.

Members of opposition parties must, I think, be more selfless than members of the Labour Party. In the 1990s, Labour held their noses and wanted him as Labour Leader because, though they hated him and he despised them, he would win elections for them. Today, though he hates us and we despise him, few members of opposing parties will experience anything other than public-spirited relief at his going, though by cold electoral calculation we should want him as Labour Leader because he would win elections for us. While every day that Mr Blair stays means that the biggest focus of bitter resentment against the Labour Party remains in place and that no-one can properly set a future direction that might just get them out of that mess, all of which is hugely damaging to Labour prospects, his staying in office has been even more damaging to the national interest of the nation he closed his speech in synthetic fervour for, this scoundrel picking jingoism as his last refuge. I believe that the second everyone is certain he’s left Downing Street for the last time, there will be a surge in support for Labour through sheer relief, and the Liberal Democrats will be more squeezed than ever. Despite that, it can’t come a moment too soon. He’s pure poison to British politics, and that simply isn’t good for anyone.

For readers expecting one of my usual jolly Doctor Who references, I’ll leave you with this. Two Doctor Who stories were broadcast on this very date in years gone by. One was The War Games, in which sinister autocrats toyed with countless soldiers’ lives as part of their sincerely held conviction in creating a new order. No relation. I watched the other this morning, noting the uncannily prescient phraseology:

“I shall be the people’s liberator.”
“You came very close to being their destroyer!”
“That will be forgotten in my triumph.”

No such luck, Mr Blair. People will forget your ‘triumphs’, but your chosen role as destroyer will stain our history for centuries.

Labels: British Politics, History, Iraq, Labour

Labour has a problem with the law. That’s obvious, you say: they campaign on ‘law and order’ rhetoric, but after several crime bills every year inventing over 3,000 new crimes (that’s one every day for the police to memorise rather than getting out tackling real criminals), but the whole criminal justice system’s still such a failure that today the Home Secretary’s announcing to the House of Commons Sunday Telegraph that, having run out of other people to blame, he wants to split his department in two. But their fundamental problem is that they don’t believe in the Rule of Law.

The whole idea of the Rule of Law is that the same rules apply to everyone. Everyone has to obey the law because it gives everyone equal protection, and will punish everyone equally, without fear or favour. That means the Rule of Law is just as much about controlling rulers as about them controlling those they rule. From John Locke onwards, a key building block of Liberalism has been that power must be bound by rules to guard against bullying in general and arbitrary government in particular. It’s not about subjecting people to the law, but making everyone play by the same rules, strong or weak, majorities or minorities, governments and citizens. Similarly, equality before the law means not concocting rules specifically to penalise a particular group. If the law picks on people unfairly, what reason do they have to obey it? Every individual must be treated on an equal basis as an individual by the law for a Liberal society to win respect for law and society, not compel it. The obvious result of this is that there’s always a tension between governments and the law, because it stops them doing everything they want. How could it be otherwise? That’s what it’s there for.

What makes the current Labour Government different is not that they try to find ways of getting around the Rule of Law or try to tilt bits of it for partisan advantage, but that they’re assaulting it or discarding it across the board. Of course their Conservative predecessors had problems with the Rule of Law too – whether it was crooks like Jonathan Aitken lying in court, others using government to make themselves rich or the government abusing legislation to mount vicious attacks on groups it hated, like travellers or gay people. But undermining the courts, the police, the whole legal process, and a flagrant belief that the law doesn’t apply to them across the whole of government… That’s new.

I say ‘new’, but in some ways it’s almost like a return to medieval notions of absolute power. The ‘divine right of kings’ is a bit of a simplification (the notion was more that anyone in authority was ordained by God, from the king downwards), but several different lines of reasoning seem to have led the Labour Government to develop a similar view. The public think of them as crooks – and, often, so do I – but the key to their criminal pathology is that they don’t. Or, at least, Mr Blair and his true believers do not. They just believe that terrible creed, that the end justifies the means.

There are three main roots to Labour’s belief that, whatever they do, they should remain irreproachable. The first is the old leftist utopianism, that as they were going to create the perfect society, anything would be justified to get there. The belief in the perfect society has disappeared, but the attitude of mind remains – perhaps that’s why those who were the fiercest of old utopians, former Communists like John Reid, who are among the most ruthless in government. The second is their long period in Opposition, when Labour eventually decided that abandoning anything was worth it to get elected – so, in power, it’s only a small step to believing that any action is worth it to stay in power. The third, and in many ways the most disturbing, is that I suspect Mr Blair does have a frighteningly messianic belief in the rightness of his cause – and, if you are absolutely right, any minor wrong in pursuit of the greater good becomes a noble means to an end.

That all serves to explain why, despite all the lies, corruption and contempt for the legal system, there is still a curious integrity to what looks, on the surface, to be a desperately crooked Labour Government. There’s very little evidence of them making money individually: what they do, they do for the cause. Some of them are starry-eyed true believers; some have just convinced themselves. Both sorts will react with outrage if you accuse them of immorality (one lot in defensive funk, the more dangerous sort because they genuinely believe they can do no wrong). As Nixon said, if the President does it, it’s not illegal.

If anything that aids the Labour cause is right, then anything that obstructs it must be wrong. And so follow the deeply felt moral objections to judges, forces of conservatism, impertinent journalists, impertinent police investigations, protesters, liberals and laws. If they are roadblocks to ‘progress’, well then, they are simply wrong. It’s not merely that they believe themselves above the law, but that – as evidenced by the unprecedented way in which they tinker with it – the law itself is just an occasionally inconvenient means to their ends, itself to be denounced when it gets in the way. Churn out new laws as if every day is Day Zero. Sneer at hundreds of years of legal protections. Juries find the wrong way? Do away with jury trials. Judges give sentences that suit the case instead of the headlines? Attack the judges. Don’t have the evidence to bang up people they know are guilty? Do away with evidence and detain people without trial. If the law is too fair and thorough, use mob rule and ASBOs to criminalise people for non-criminal acts, on hearsay instead of evidence, on whim rather than beyond reasonable doubt. Set out to have all citizens, guilty until – well, no-one but Labour is innocent – guilty and so to be DNA-tagged and forced carry cards to be permitted to walk around their own country. If it’ll make the business of controlling everything easier or look better in the headlines (and so keep them in power longer), it’s morally justified and anyone who disagrees with something morally justified is, surely, deliberately evil.

So many of Labour’s problems come straight from this attitude. When Mr Blair said his government would be “purer than pure,” he meant it, and he still does. In the bright light of his ultimate aim – to stay in power – everything else is bleached. If they sold peerages for millions, it wasn’t for an immoral gain, but for money Labour needed, and so a minor transgression becomes a moral duty for the greater good. I don’t know whether the Prime Minister’s Director of Government Relations, Ruth Turner, is innocent or guilty. But in the Prime Minister’s eyes she is entirely innocent either way, because she was doing something for the greater good. Whether she broke the law or not is entirely immaterial. Either way, Mr Blair is not lying – he’s telling a greater truth. When the police arrested someone first thing in the morning, without warning – as they might do with anyone on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, who could reasonably be thought to be disposed to dispose of evidence – the howls of outrage from such figures as bullying Mr Blunkett, happy to attack police, judges or any other thought criminals, were entirely justified in their own minds. If criminals are arrested, it should be with the maximum publicity and without worrying about evidence or prejudicing any trial – Labour must be right, and seen to be right. If Labour people are arrested – well, that’s an evil theatricality, aimed against the forces of good. Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s midday news had an interview with someone from the Police Federation who had a different (so, by definition, wrong) view, attacking the government on behalf of rank and file police officers: “What sort of undue pressure are they trying to bring?” he asked. “Senior figures in the government shouldn’t expect better treatment than ordinary members of the public.” You see, that’s his fatal mistake.

The same comes of Mr Blair still believing he’s right in ordering the legal system to stop investigating the Saudi bribes scandal. The unions give Labour money, which is an absolute good, and they want the investigation stopped; the Saudis give Labour moral support in the war against whatever it’s said to be a war against, which is an absolute good, and they want the investigation stopped. On the opposing side, what are there but a few laws, and what good are laws if they put themselves against the side of good? When the Liberal Democrats criticise that for undermining our moral position in the world, that’s a failure of leadership – failing to see that anything is justified to aid the big picture. When the OECD says the Labour Government is breaking an anti-bribery treaty, it misses the point that the Labour Government has no intention of being corrupt. Oh no. The Attorney General announces with typical doublethink that dropping the investigation “doesn’t mean we are backing off in any way from our commitment to tackling international corruption.” And, as Jeremy Hardy’s version of Mr Blair used to say when believing in Christianity and sacrificing to the Devil by the full moon, I see no contradiction in that. The only reason that Ruth Kelly stands out in wanting different laws so Catholic organisations can be state-sponsored bigots over adoption is that, in a slightly off-message way, she’s not doing it in the interests of the Labour Party but of some other believers who think the law must support them and them alone.

Anyone who disagrees is wrong. Anyone who criticises or exposes is damaging Labour – which is wrong. Anyone who defends or allows any of those things is wrong. And isn’t it wrong to tolerate evil? So, while the rules don’t apply to them, and it’s none of our business to ask why, only they are the arbiters of good and evil. Any other criminals or critics – in the Labour lexicon, the two are interchangeable – must be shown no mercy, due process or not. Labour people cannot do wrong because what they do is in the cause of a greater right; but nobody else can make this decision, and only most glaringly in their infamous disregard for international law. No other consciences are valid, because that would be to permit evil.

There is an alternative point of view.

It is that the state must be bound by the same rules as everyone else. That however powerful they are, however rich they are, whoever their friends are, everyone must be constrained by the Rule of Law, or no-one has cause to obey any of it. All power must be answerable to the people, which needs the people to know what it does in their name, and it to be checked by the same rules that check us all. And the end does not justify the means, or there’s no law at all. You can either believe in the Rule of Law or the Rule of Labour, but when they come into conflict one must take precedence.

In a completely unrelated development, tomorrow the Liberal Democrats launch a new campaign to tackle crime.

Labels: British Politics, Iraq, Labour, Liberalism, Religion