Love and Liberty

A question to ask Mr Cameron today:

“How is your plan to cut 50 MPs but add 40 Lords a/ democratic or b/ money-saving?”

Four years ago, Liberal Democrats, Labour and Conservatives all promised to make the House of Lords elected – but Labour and Tories teamed up to stop the changes. That’s why voters still can’t hold peers to account or throw them out. Today, the news breaks that the Prime Minister wants to stuff the Lords with forty new cronies at the same time as slashing the number of MPs (for whom we get to vote) by fifty.

The House of Lords already has hundreds more members than the House of Commons – and all Lords have seats for as long as they want them, usually for life. Personally, I’d give more power to the regions and only then cut MPs’ numbers once there’s less work for them to do, but anyone who thinks democracy matters at all can see Mr Cameron’s plan is the wrong way round.

There should be no cuts to the Commons until the Lords is cut to the same size, and no more unelected peers appointed at all if the Parliamentarians we can at least theoretically vote to get rid of are being removed.

The Tories claim they want to “cut the cost of politics,” but this isn’t about reducing the numbers of politicians – just swapping out fifty MPs for nearly as many new Lords instead. The difference is, even after the Tories do their best to choose which voters are put into which constituency boundaries to try and get as many Tories elected as they possibly can, they’re still scared to death that voters can still choose not to vote Tory after all. So now they plot to just stop us pesky voters from getting in their way. That’s why Mr Cameron plans to swap MPs who voters have power over for Tory crony nodding dogs in the Lords – who no voter has ever had a say on.

One to file under ‘You couldn’t make it up’ (but now the Tories have absolute power on a third of the vote they think they can get away with anything).


Sourced from today’s The Times Red Box bulletin:

“In for a peerage

“Yesterday we had news of David Cameron's plan to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600 to help to ‘cut the cost of politics’.

“Today comes an extraordinary story in The Times [paywall] about how Downing Street is preparing to create up to 40 new peers after the EU referendum.

“Sam Coates reports that it means the PM will be able to reward supporters of the Remain campaign, while trying to prevent embarrassing defeats in the upper chamber.

“Legally all such stories must include this fact: The Lords is already the second biggest legislature in the world, after the Chinese politburo.

“And there was me thinking Cameron wanted to take back powers from an unelected, unaccountable elite who threaten the supremacy of British democracy.”

Labels: Conservatives, Lords, Newspapers

Did you guess whodunnit in Broadchurch? Having saved it up, Richard and I binged on the whole series over the weekend, and I have a few thoughts on its themes and surprising quality below (with implicit spoilers if you’re good at clues). Or what about other murder mysteries? Have you ever wondered how to spot the murderer in a TV detective series? Or specifically whoprobablydunnit in Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Father Brown, Inspector Morse and more? I reveal Richard and my (almost) infallible Rules of Suspicion: what’s the number one biggest giveaway of the TV murderer attempting to divert suspicion?

Richard started this long ago when he told me the three general and specific rules for spotting whodunnit in Agatha Christie. He’s right about them, too. Though I did correctly predict Broadchurch’s in Episode Two (albeit after wrongly being convinced Mark and the Rev Paul were shagging, particularly when the former stormed into the latter’s church as if in personal betrayal), I’m usually not a patch on Richard for spotting the murderers. What I am pretty good at is spotting themes in particular authors’ writing. Between us, we’ve come up with three rules that catch bang to rights an awful lot of whodunnits’ off-the-shelf attempts at misdirection, and several more specific ones after watching too much of particular detectives…

Richard and Alex’s Rules of Suspicion

One

Whoever throws around the most vicious accusations is probably the murderer. Any child will be able to tell you the rhyme that warns of this.

Two

Whoever is too nice is probably the murderer. But you don’t come to a murder mystery to stoke your faith in human nature, do you?

Three

Whoever is the victim of a murder attempt but manages to survive when all around them fall is almost certainly faking it to divert suspicion.
If anyone manages to survive an ‘attempt on their life’ while the detective is there as a witness, the chance of their being innocent approaches zero.

Richard and Alex’s Detective-Specific Suspicions

Sherlock Holmes

• The villain will never be the beautiful young woman*, though there is a fifty-fifty chance of her marrying Watson by the end of the story.

*Except in terrible adaptations that turn Irene Adler into ‘a villain’ because the terrible writers are threatened by an intelligent and independent woman, so she has to be evil.


Agatha Christie

• Miss Marple – she’s a gimlet-eyed, gossiping spinster; the murderer is likely to be a younger, sexier woman who’s no better than she ought to be.

• Hercule Poirot – he’s a rather prim retired police officer; the murderer is likely to be an ambitious young man.

• Or in any Agatha Christie, it’ll be the one person with such a supernaturally perfect alibi they couldn’t possibly have done it.

Father Brown

• GK Chesterton version and faithful adaptations – the Catholic Church is always right, and anyone who stirs any of Mr Chesterton’s prejudices (particularly if they’re an atheist or, worse, of the wrong Christian denomination [that is, says Father Brown sonorously, not a Christian]) will be proven evil.

• New BBC version – the Catholic Church was surprisingly liberal in the 1950s, so anyone who stirs any of our own prejudices about prejudice (particularly if they’re a sexist man in a position of power) will be proven evil.

Baldi

• A priest with a wandering sense of his vocation and a police officer friend too close and too pretty for the Monsignor’s comfort? God, in the person of the omnipresent author, keeps dropping subtle hints about celibacy by making all the murders love gone wrong.

Inspector Morse

• Richard’s a big fan, but he still suggests the old man usually waits until nearly everyone’s dead and then arrests the survivor.

• It’s also worth looking at the woman he fancies and acts unprofessionally with in each episode: she’ll either be dead or in the nick by the end of it. I wonder if that’s why Endeavour’s admirer decided not to push her luck with a second go the other night.

SS Sturmbannführer Kessler

• Depending on your point of view, either hedunnit or he’s unlikely to get his suspects, but eats out well while puzzling over them. Surprisingly good at getting away when it’s his turn.

Midsomer Murders

• I resisted getting into detective dramas for so many years, but this is so insidious in its quirkiness, bitchy lead detectives and warped country ways that I’ve fallen for it over many classier productions. And yet it’s the odd one out: it has so many writers and so many tones (the weirder and funnier and more AvengerLand the better, for me) that I don’t have a rule for it. But see particularly Rule One above.

• Mind you, if you’re stuck for spotting the killer, in this inbred county where the actors all look like they’ve been in it before (and have), incest is always worth a punt.

Broadchurch

Implicit spoiler warning: in case you’re just skimming across this article and might pick up something vital at a glance, I’m not going to mention names of suspects when I say something that implicitly implicates or clears a particular person, though you can probably work out who they are if you’re reading more closely.


I have to admit that I came to Broadchurch with some wariness. It was an ambitious drama series with many good actors in it, so I wanted to give it a go; but on the other hand, police procedurals aren’t really my thing (particularly horrible depressing Daily Mail-ish paedo-scare misery-porn), most ITV drama I’ve seen over the past few years has been deeply unimpressive, and Chris Chibnall as a writer has often been much worse than that. I have in the past been so critical of Chris Chibnall’s writing (Torchwood Series One being its nadir) that I came to Broadchurch fearing the worst, though with a little hope from his two Doctor Who episodes last year which while no triumphs for me felt conspicuously like he’d been trying harder and, despite having serious problems with the end of each, I’d quite enjoyed until the last five minutes. In Broadchurch, remarkably, his writing seems to have grown up, even down to a dramatically and morally satisfying conclusion.


The obvious part of the series’ success lies in telling two overlapping stories well: a whodunnit police investigation; more importantly, the harrowing emotional effect that has on a community. And it achieves the latter with generally very effective writing and in letting the various characters in that community breathe, as well as giving most of the recognisable suspects their own moments of suspicion and plenty of what on the surface seem like red herrings. The two leads were, of course, strong performances, with David Tennant seeming like he’d not slept since giving up Doctor Who and Olivia Colman moving from Hot Fuzz to everywoman in much darker places, but none of the actors and few of their actions struck false. The emotional realism reinforced the well-plotted mystery, with almost all the clues feeding back into the eventual pay-off from the in-your-face damaged characters to the intriguingly off-key early question of the deleted messages. For me it made the right choice, too, in the ending being all about the effects on the people, rather than just catching the murderer (something achieved through a combination of chance and, at the last, choice, rather than brilliant policework). It meant the writing was both straightforward in terms of how we understood and empathised, and shot through with ambiguity in no character being plain good or bad – that is, going some way to capture the complexity of life, even if that occasionally led to mixed messages (hugging is fine and natural and you should be ashamed for being suspicious of it / but also a danger sign of suppressed evil, for example).


And yet there were other, slightly postmodern touches for people wanting more layers: references such as naming Wessex Police’s DI “Alec” “Hardy” for Wessex’s Thomas Hardy and one of his best-known characters, Doctor Who quotes in the dialogue (to match the large cast of Doctor Who actors) and the faintest whiff of Twin Peaks that ITV would let you get away with; genre-aware – up to a point – DS Miller hanging a lampshade on her superior’s stereotypical broody detective schtick; the recognition about the viewer that we will recognise certain actors and say ‘Ooh, it’s them – they must be significant’, which the first episode foregrounded by giving us opening minutes of the soon-to-be-bereaved dad’s happy tour of all the famous faces in the village, then closing with a montage of those same faces in the dark, alone, troubled and suspicious, all but slapping on subtitles ‘FAMOUS SUSPECT #1…’


For me, though, the most interesting – and the most successful – extra layer was the thought that had gone into giving it a moral outlook that underpinned the drama without being overpowering.

Broadchurch – The Underlying Themes

What most impressed me about the series was that it dealt with a horrible, tabloid-friendly, always-reported-black-and-white sort of story as a much more thoughtful narrative. Even as the show drew me in, I was sceptical that it was trading on a fictional form of rubbernecking misery porn even as it had its cake and ate it with ‘…But of course journalists are evil reptiles’ to show false piety. But by the end, Broadchurch had shown itself to be something much deeper than that, and perhaps even with a touch of genuine piety.


Rather than just take the easy road of saying how shocking Daily Mail Daily Herald hacks are but subscribing to their worldview, it offered two more unusual turns. Though of course the Daily Mail Daily Herald journo was indeed a repellently cynical parasite, it not only gave her a redeeming feature – in days when even some of the media are strapped for cash, wanting to put the work in rather than just regurgitating or twisting words from press releases (though I scoffed at her apparent shock that her story was sexed up for the front page). More strikingly and more bravely, it implicitly (but no less strongly for that) critiqued not just the form of the Daily Mail Daily Herald but its values. The ‘paedo scare’ was shown as an irresponsible witch hunt that claims an undeserved life; and the ambiguity of the eventual repressed killer leaves further questions hanging, even the possibility that the climate of fear contributed to the killing. And, going back to the main body of the series, it showed throughout how tomorrow’s careless chip paper can harm many people along the way. We’re spared most of the feeding frenzy at the end, but we already know how horrible it will be.



There was a deeper morality to the series than media ethics, however. Broadchurch was at the same time a very modern story and very old-fashioned in its underlying themes, to such an extent that I wonder if the writer has a Christian faith informing his work. Part of it might be the name of show, in plain sight. Part of it was that the vicar for once seemed more or less credible as a vicar – at least in his two sermons, after a piss-poor attempt at the Problem of Evil (perhaps he just bottled giving the line on that to a grieving mother, which you might take as extra motivation to find courage to do the right thing in the penultimate episode even when faced with the worst threat someone can make today). But it was also that as every character’s secrets peeled away, all of those ‘red herrings’ echoed and reinforced each other until at the end it wasn’t just the grammar of whodunnits that made the killer’s identity clear, but the morality of the series that led inevitably to it. Over and over, we were told how destructive adultery was (even in the heart) and that betrayal by your partner was the series’ original sin. It was a murder mystery where you don’t work it out from the clues, but from the themes, asking the viewer by the end: how can you not have known? While the characters themselves weren’t black and white, it’s hard not to see the overwhelming near-universal guilt and the way that almost anything a character vindictively slags off rebounds to be found unwittingly in their own lives as a stern morality from the omnipotent author.

So Broadchurch Wasn’t Perfect…

There was one suspect who, though a decent performance, I found so improbable in concept and their red herring so unconnected to the themes of the rest that their only proper dramatic function appeared to be to illustrate DI Hardy’s gradual collapse. Conversely, we didn’t see enough of Tracey Childs’ rather fabulous police boss with her cool pedeconferencing sporting shades and ice cream, but she was saddled right up front with one of the minor mysteries so awkward that I wondered throughout if it would ever have a payoff (a practical rather than a thematic one): why didn’t Ellie get the job? The series starts with DS Miller returning from three weeks of holiday, scattering presents among the jolly coppers, before being abruptly called away by the Chief Superintendent to be told that she’s not been promoted. Despite being told before she left that they needed a female DI, that she was local and that she was a shoo-in, in her absence the situation had changed and someone else had already been appointed a week ago. A male DI with an apparently conspicuously awful record about which no-one would speak. For a minute, I thought that the explanation had to be that the murder had taken place a week ago, they’d had to get someone in fast, and so Ellie would be the viewer’s point of view in a town suddenly gone horribly wrong – but, no, it was all still to come and there was no motivation at all for dumping on her. That made Hardy’s appointment such a bizarre turnaround that it suggested psychic powers not for Will Mellor but for Tracey Childs, with her able to see into the future of the case or indeed into the minds of TV bosses who might have said, ‘I know we promised the lead to a woman character actor but really we need a big name male star’.


DI Hardy belatedly explaining the missing link (and pendant) in the infamous Sanbrook Case was in many ways necessary – for the drama, for the viewers, giving his motivation, showing he’s a good copper really (or was: seeking redemption through doing another job he’s literally not fit for suggests he no longer is), and to put in place the last major piece of thematic reinforcement for the series’ underlying original sin. But, as he’d been silently taking the blame until now to protect two other people, and as even without naming the guilty party the press are going to find it bleedin’ obvious, why come clean now and ask only for a couple of days’ delay from the local rag? This was so clearly a deathbed confession that, the viewers having heard what we needed to, there was no dramatic need for it to be published as well: you expected his caveat to be not ‘give me a couple of days’ but ‘after I’m dead [in a couple of days]’. Was he scripted to keel over at the moment of triumph, as many earlier scenes had hinted, but then the producers realised they might have a hit on their hands and asked for a rewrite to preserve the unlikely but now promised sequel?


All in all, though, Broadchurch was a surprisingly impressive and thoughtful series, and once again proves the old Sherlock Holmes adage that I’m glad I don’t live in the countryside.




[Oh, joy, Blogger’s doing its thing where it either prints all my text in one splat or gives random massive gaps if I force in breaks again]

Labels: Agatha Christie, Broadchurch, David Tennant, Newspapers, Religion, Reviews, Richard, Sherlock Holmes, Top Tips, Tracey Childs

In short…

Five Lessons From Eastleigh:

1  Partial winners: the Liberal Democrats, UKIP
2  Total losers: the Conservatives, the Labour Party, the entire British media
3  Voters trust or like none of the above
4  Hard work and authenticity can still win
5  All politics is local. Thank fuck.

Two Questions After Eastleigh:

1 With a neo-fascist party on the rise, will British politics get nastier and more illiberal?
2 Will the entire UK media change their narrative about the Lib Dems now? Or will they just hold up two fingers to the voters?

…It’s the two fingers, isn’t it?


Just the other day, I put yesterday’s by-election in the context of the previous one in 1994. So how did the comparison go? Last time, the incumbents (Conservative) was pushed into third place, while the main challengers (Lib Dems) won – now Lib Dem and Tory starting points are reversed, the Lib Dem incumbents were punished by staying in first place and the Tory main challengers soared from second to third. Again.

Last time, Labour began the process of Tony Blair’s coronation by leaping from third place to second and gaining 28% of the vote, showing they were on their way to government. Ed Miliband’s Labour Party leapt from third place to fourth and less than 10%, showing he’s on his way down the toilet.

And after the most sustained, hysterical venom from the entire British media against any party in the by-election history, they showed that they still don’t quite have the power they thought they have, but that hysterical venom does help the rise of neo-fascist parties.

The Biggest Loser: The Media

One thing that, surprise, none of the headlines tell you this morning is that the entire British media establishment believed, wanted and actively did all their power to ensure that the Liberal Democrats were dead, and they all failed. Instead, the only mention is an outraged ‘How can they still have won?’

I’ve been an active and detailed watcher of UK Parliamentary by-elections ever since the Lib Dems were formed in 1988. The sheer, destructive hailstorm of hate in the last week – was it five screaming front-page attacks on the Lib Dems in a row from the Daily Hate Mail alone? – is literally unprecedented. There are no Lib Dem-supporting media outlets, and even the BBC (terrified after its own failings into becoming identikit hatemongers) lost all sense of proportion.

And it didn’t work.

Out of hate for Liberalism, out of fear of Leveson, out of outrage that so many voters had the temerity not to listen to them last time – in their hunger to pervert the course of this by-election, the establishment was utterly determined that the Lib Dems must be destroyed and the voters put back in their box.

The sane reaction would be for the media narrative about the Lib Dems to have to change.

The almost certain actual reaction is that, now confronted with the fact of their impotence even when at their most brutal and determined, throwing everything at us with a following wind behind them – the media will hate and fear both the Liberal Democrats and the voters even more.

So expect ever-greater hysteria and evil authoritarianism.

Paddy Ashdown, as ever, has wise words: “Don’t panic, Lib Dems. All this manure just makes us grow stronger” goes into the pain, the problems and the press’ ravenous feeding frenzy. Millennium Dome, Elephant puts things in perspective, too.

The Main Winner: The Liberal Democrats

Congratulations to Mike Thornton – reassuringly calm, local, knowing his stuff and answering questions honestly, unspun and without a hint of shrill hysteria… Yet, against the two most virulently far-right challengers in by-election memory, sticking quietly to Liberal guns on issues like equal marriage. He was exactly what the Lib Dems in Eastleigh, and the voters, needed for what Jonathan Wallace has termed this morning “The Lib Dems’ Battle of Stalingrad”. And congratulations to all the valiant volunteers carrying out that street by street battle.

Without Mike and all the troops, the hurricane of hate would surely have consumed us. With them, it showed that even a “perfect storm” isn’t perfect. While the Tories and UKIP competed to see who could make Britain the littlest by excluding the most people from it – gays, ethnic minorities, Europe, poor people, people who go to state schools, immigrants – and Labour struggled and fell short of being the One-Tenth-of-a-Nation party, at least the Liberal Democrats felt authentically British: complaining about the storm, but still going out in all weathers and not letting it stop them.

All this shows that the Liberal Democrats can’t be assumed to be a write-off at the next election, holding a by-election in the depths of mid-term blues and with the full fury of the establishment bent on annihilating us, aided by terrible real news stories. Even the Daily Telegraph – shellshocked and angry that their attempt to bludgeon the voters into obedience failed – this morning admits, calling UKIP the hammer of the Tories and us the anvil (I wonder if the Torygraph’s Deputy Political Editor actually knows what happens, respectively, to the anvil and hammer?):

“It’s the ‘sheer bloody resilience’, as one Tory put it earlier this week. ‘They just won’t lie down and die.’
“Eastleigh is yet more proof of an old adage: in the event of a nuclear holocaust, all that will remain of life on earth will be cockroaches, and Lib Dem activists handing out Focus leaflets attacking the cockroaches for not being local.”

When you’ve been in the wilderness for ninety years, still not being all that popular but actually being in government and getting something done is hardly going to make Liberal Democrats give up. There’s a massive relief to be had that, even under the worst possible conditions, the fall in the Lib Dem vote was limited and hard work held the seat. In future seats, we can hope for similar hard work, now given a morale boost by a slogging victory, and that neither real news stories nor the screaming hate of the establishment can repeat such force. There’s hope based on reason that this is the worst they can do to us, and we’ve withstood it. But that’s not enough. We still took a battering, though we stood up to it. There’s a strong likelihood that our anti-establishment vote is gone, leaving us competing for the much more crowded ground of dull, respectable governing parties. The good news is that this win can’t be called a protest vote, but a successful defence by Lib Dems as a governing party. The bad news is that that’s what you say when you’ve lost a shedload of what were very useful protest votes.

The last few weeks have seen the first concerted use – allied to all the local depth – of the new Liberal Democrat message:

“Only the Lib Dems can be trusted to build a stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.”

Nick Clegg used the line when campaigning and in victory. We saw “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” on posters – something I heartily approve of, as it’s about time national messages were consistently and succinctly integrated with local campaigning. It gives the lie to those who say we won only on local issues. And it clearly reflects the party leadership’s desire to compete as a dull, respectable governing party: it’s a new – and sharper, more priority-driven – version of the Alliance’s ’80s ‘Head and the Heart’ message, saying we can split the difference between Tories and Labour and give you only the nice bits of each.

Is this message right?
If it is, is it our priority?
Is it sufficient?
Will it help to enthuse – or even win back – any of the idealists we need to do all that hard work?

I’ll return with the answers to such questions (not all of which are “No”, not all of which are “Yes”; I can split the difference, too) and more answers on what the Lib Dems’ core message should be next week.

Update: So, from the following week, What the Lib Dems Stand For Part 1 and What the Lib Dems Stand For Part 2 – 2013.

The Loser That Looks Like A Winner Because the Media Can’t Bear To Give Credit To Lib Dems: UKIP

There’s no doubt about what UKIP, the party with the clearest messaging, stands for. Three things, two the obvious vileness of neo-fascists, one less specific and more tempting. Between them, they show UKIP’s appeal particularly to some former Tory and some former Lib Dem voters.

UKIP’s explicit priorities: The Double Racism. No to Europe! No to immigrants!

Yes, we know what you mean.

UKIP’s handy new market opportunity: the anti-politics, ‘none of the above’ protest.

It’s clear that the Twenty-First Century has created one opportunity, with angry old privileged people feeling left behind now that everyone else is getting uppity and equal (hence other policy priorities of kicking the gays back down, Mr Farage’s incredible misogynistic sneering, and so on). Even Andrew Neil – so utterly shit as a host of the BBC By-election Special that he made you pine for a pompous but competent Dimbleby – managed to expose UKIP’s man last night by asking “Why run so hard on immigration with so few immigrants in Eastleigh?” and leaving him floundering for any answer than wasn’t the obvious ‘Because we’re racists’. It’s unfortunately clear that, though in most respects the Lib Dems are UKIP’s polar opposite, for the visceral anti-establishment voter the Lib Dems’ transformation into a dull, respectable governing party has opened the other flank – though I doubt very much if UKIP would have succeeded in peeling votes equally from Tories and Lib Dems yesterday were it not for the hailstorm of hate. But then, hate breeds hatemongers.

The media establishment will love to talk up UKIP, and have been doing nothing but all day. They’re the establishment’s wet dream of an ‘anti-establishment’ party: viciously prejudiced, nearly all white, male defenders of privilege. It’s like a party of newspaper editors. The Labour Party has already shown its usual commitment to principle by rushing to the far, far right of the Coalition, again, with John Denham now promising Labour will shameless pander to racism on immigration to compete with UKIP as a trailer for his Leader’s next cynical courting of the crumbling BNP vote in the hope that those ex-Labour voters won’t go to the middle-class purples.

All this mixture of gloating viciousness and craven pandering will, too, unfortunately move British politics in a more nasty and authoritarian direction, but UKIP really isn’t worth it. I’d assumed before the last election that if Mr Cameron won, UKIP would do very well. With the LiberaTory Coalition handing him a brilliant opportunity to get the anti-politics vote as well as the disgruntled Right, I expected UKIP to be regularly scoring 20+% in the polls – as Lib Dems always did against a Tory Government in dire straits – and to take several seats from the Conservatives in by-elections. To look at their adoring press coverage and the craven panic of both Labour and Tories, you’d think that was where they are. Instead, they’ve been underperforming to an amazing degree – something that shows the voters aren’t as stupid or as nasty as the whole media establishment likes to think they are.

Can you believe that UKIP’s greatest ‘success’ so far is to still be on just 20+% in their best ever by-election, and still never to have won one? Even George Galloway’s taken more people in than that. Can you believe that, with all the massively orchestrated press hyperbole, UKIP still struggles to break double figures in the opinion polls? If they’re supposed to be the ‘replacement’ for the Lib Dems as the party that makes the sort of protests the establishment likes to hear, just imagine if in the ’80s, ’90s or ’00s the best the Lib Dems ever managed was squeaking a second place but never winning, squeaking to 10% but never staying there, not having a single MP, not having more than forty-three elected local councillors in the entire UK – rather than four thousand? Imagine what the media would have said about that as a bandwagon, and you’ll see how much, much further down UKIP would be without the heavy support given by the media establishment’s bias to neo-fascism.

The Other Big Loser: The Conservative Party

What can you say? It’s as bad as it could possibly be for them. If they couldn’t win yesterday, then when? As the Daily Mash puts it:

“Tories beaten by perfect storm’ of Huhne, Rennard and nutjobs”

The Conservatives chose a candidate to give their Leader the finger, a far-right ideologue who disagreed with Mr Cameron on every single issue. That, in itself, was arrogant stupidity when they needed to appeal to Lib Dem voters. And then the candidate made the implicit message that they took the seat for granted explicit with her spectacular arrogance, incompetence and snobbery, from slagging off every state school to turning her nose up at the prospect of any voter talking to her and hiding from most of the hustings. She surely was the worst mainstream party by-election candidate for at least a decade.

And then, despite being identical to a UKIP candidate in all her views, she lost even to them when UKIP managed to find a candidate who seemed more competent. Yes – UKIP seemed more competent and less insanely illiberal than the Tory.

And despite the Tory being so far from Mr Cameron’s position that it’s hard to believe they’re in the same party, the wet dream candidate of the Tory Right who believe that all the electorate needs is shrill attacks on gays, ethnic minorities, Europe, immigrants, poor people, state schools and so on to come to the Tories in droves but which actually drives them away, all of which reason suggests Mr Cameron’s attempts to detoxify his party are right and the Right are wrong… Despite all of that, all the narrative is that poor Mr Cameron is in trouble and the Tories, totally rejected with their most extreme candidate in recent by-election memory, were beaten only because they weren’t extreme enough.

This proves how stupid Mr Cameron was to pander to his extremists on Europe and other issues – feeding them only makes them hungrier. Making the Tories sound like UKIP only makes UKIP seem a respectable choice – and choosing a Tory less competent than UKIP’s choice suicidal. And, of course, it proves again that the media establishment love to talk up neo-fascism and hate not just Liberalism but reality.

The Other Other Big Loser: The Labour Party

Oh dear. Poor Ed. Again. Eastleigh is only the latest result to put the Mili into humiliation.

Only a few weeks ago, Labour were talking of Eastleigh as a test for Mr Miliband’s “One Nation” idea. Failed. When Tony Blair was headed into government he went from third to second here – now Labour goes from third to fourth, just scraping a third of Blair’s vote share (but not scraping into even double figures).

But then, everyone always knew John O’Farrell would have a Weak Ending. It’s only by being awarded points for turning up that he rises above the level of the Tory hustings-dodger as a terrible, incompetent, foot-in-mouth candidate.

Labour had two messages last night:

• They will try to be as racist as UKIP, because being as shockingly anti-immigrant as Gordon Brown’s disastrous campaign wasn’t far-right enough
  

• They talked to tens of thousands of people in Eastleigh, which shows they’re making contact! Though, er, it also shows that the more people hear from Labour, the less they vote for them.
  

• And, er, that’s it.

I’d say more about Labour, but there’s not much I can fit in less than 10% of the space and, on the results, why bother?

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, By-elections, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Newspapers, The Golden Dozen, UKIP

Some days change your life. Some people do. Twenty years ago today I was a teenage activist at my first ever Liberal Democrat Federal Conference, and I was told off by Paddy Ashdown. But not in the way you think. And given that, though I’ve not missed an Autumn Conference since, I may well not be at next week’s Conference because I’ve still yet to hear if the police – the police – will deign to permit me to take part in our democracy, Paddy’s moral is very resonant today. So what was it that our then Party Leader said?

“You’re not causing enough trouble.”

The day before, I remember I’d met Paddy Ashdown for the first time, and had the first of what were to be a great many arguments with him. A set-piece Conference debate had called no cards against, despite quite a number being submitted; I remember that mine was one (another year before I got to make my first Conference speech, when I went into such a spectacular rant that I managed to talk over time. And cause our then Leader in the House of Lords to walk off the stage behind me), and that another was from someone who’s now a leading MEP. I strode up to Paddy afterwards and asked him if he thought that was right. He said he didn’t, and that I should challenge it – then blasted the arguments I would have used had I been called to pieces. Across the next decade, I had more rows with Paddy than I’ve had with any other Leader, but it’s those rows, and that first one, that earned him my undying loyalty, even when I thought he was absolutely wrong. When I was a mouthy young activist who no-one had ever heard of, there were plenty of party bigwigs I wanted to take to task, and more than a few refused to engage with someone as unimportant as me. Even when Leader, Paddy never looked down on ordinary members, and if you wanted to argue with him, he’d argue. And quite rightly, he never patronised you, either: if you were talking bollocks, he took no prisoners.

So why did Paddy admonish me and other Student Lib Dems that day in Bournemouth? That afternoon, there was a Conference debate on a policy paper called Science and Survival. I remember it vividly. Various party grandees, particularly those working in the House of Lords and in higher education, had used the paper to decree that the best thing for all young people was that they be required by law to be in education until the age of 18. I and a bunch of other Student Liberal Democrats, though most of us were just past 18 at the time, were quite aware of the party’s commitment to votes at 16, and thought that superannuated worthies commanding what ought to be voting adults what to do – ‘for their own good’ – was the sort of thing Labour did, and that Liberals ought to give a good kicking to. We pushed that clause to a vote; by my reckoning, we won, but that’s not what the chair of that debate thought, and he refused our shouts for a count of the votes.

Paddy’s Lesson

That evening, Paddy held a private meeting – as he used to every year – with all the Student and Young Liberal Democrats (as was) at the Conference. The practice was, he’d turn up (usually turning a chair round and slinging his jacket over his shoulder) and we could ask him whatever he wanted, no topics barred… But no cameras, no recordings, and absolutely no journalists. I still remember my satisfaction on getting sleazy Times hack Alice Thomson thrown out of one a couple of years later when she’d lied her way in; yes, I know, a Murdoch employee listening in on people by deceit? Who’d have thought.

But on that evening in Bournemouth, the first thing Paddy did was not answer a question, but put one to us. He’d been in the debate that afternoon, and he’d disagreed with us – but he thought we’d backed down too easily. We should have forced a proper count of the votes. And he saw that as symptomatic of the (then separate) Student and Youth wings of the party since he’d become Leader, and asked us why that was: “You’re not causing enough trouble.”

Imagine the mortification when your Leader – who knows that the founding principle of Liberalism was to control arbitrary power – is the one who had to tell the rebellious young people that they’re crap at it. But mortification wasn’t my only reaction. I made two resolutions to myself at that very moment: because this hadn’t been a failure of will, but of knowledge, that I’d find out what the correct procedure was for demanding a counted vote, and if necessary challenging the chair of a session [tip for next week: turn to page 63 in your Conference Agenda]; and that Paddy would never have to tell us that twice.

Over the next half-dozen years, the various Liberal Democrat Youth and Student bodies bombarded Conference with motions and amendments that took great care to get the procedures exactly right, and as a result had more of their policies passed by Conference than anyone else but the Federal Policy Committee. And when, in 1994, the Conference debated drugs and the monarchy – despite remarkably heavy pressure from many grandees for us not to – and the party voted (for the first time) to look into decriminalising cannabis, Paddy stomped off the stage and was heard to suggest that when I appeared in The Guardian and on air quoting his instruction to us to prove that it was us, in fact, who were the party loyalists and doing what the Leader told us, he didn’t think it was particularly funny (one BBC radio interviewer did, though; that line made him corpse in mid-broadcast. I can’t imagine why).

Who Needs Teaching A Lesson?

Today, it seems, the Liberal Democrat Federal Conference Committee are avoiding the awkwardness of people standing up in Conference and quoting the standing orders by allowing the police to break the Liberal Democrat Constitution that puts the so-called Conference Committee in authority in the first place and stop ‘troublemakers’ from coming in at all. Even people arbitrarily prevented from exercising their democratic rights in person, of course, should still receive their ballot papers when it comes time to rightly vote out of office every single cowardly illiberal spineless quisling craven renegade gutless undemocratic pathetic unconstitutional pusillanimous police state member of Conference Committee. As the elections are biennial and this is the ‘off’ year (in so many ways), I wonder if an emergency motion of no confidence could be moved in the lot of them*? Just a thought.

I wonder if Paddy would have something to say about that? I know a lot of other people do.


Oh, and – particularly if you’re a member of Liberal Youth – remember those wise words of Party Leaders gone by, never officially rescinded, and make sure that you obey the Leadership and never, ever give Nick Clegg cause to complain that you’re not causing enough trouble.




Update: Thanks to then Young Liberal Democrat Chair Sara Bedford for this photo from that very night, featuring Paddy, her, and then Student Liberal Democrat Chair Paul Simpson.





*Update: Excepting Justine McGuinness, who I am reliably informed was the only member of Conference Committee who voted against kowtowing to the police demands.

Labels: Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Newspapers, Paddy Ashdown, Personal, The Golden Dozen, Top Tips

Amongst the smears and hysteria in today’s Daily Telegraph, if you can bear to pick up a copy, there’s a voucher for a Doctor Who CD. Just cut out and present it at WH Smith and they’ll hand one over; if you don’t already have Genesis of the Daleks on DVD, go for it. Like the Daily Torygraph’s election coverage, the CD edit is highly selective, doesn’t give you the full picture, and is full of fascists. Unlike their ‘news’, it’s still rather brilliant – one of the best and most fiercely political of all Doctor Who stories, intriguingly abridged.

“Today, the Kaled race is ended, consumed in a fire of war, but from its ashes will rise a new race, the ultimate conqueror of the Universe, the Dalek!”

The Torygraph’s been giving away Doctor Who CDs all week – tomorrow’s is Mission To the Unknown, a Doctor Who story without the Doctor where the Daleks are in control (if that grabs you, buy the much longer CD of The Daleks’ Master Plan, which brings in the Doctor and continues the story).

Genesis of the Daleks, though, is perhaps the most natural choice: it stars Tom Baker as the Doctor, the high point of his superb first season; as the title suggests, it introduces the Daleks’ creator, Davros; it’s one of the best-known, most-repeated Doctor Who stories, and in every ‘favourite story’ poll among fans comes either close to or at the very top. When I wrote my mini-guide to all the Dalek stories a couple of weeks ago, I picked it as one of my favourites, too. But it’s not just for its importance in Who history or its undoubted popularity that’s made it a natural choice for a CD giveaway. It’s that 31 years ago, it became the first Doctor Who story you could enjoy at home whenever you felt like it.

A couple of years before the home video revolution, and to coincide with the sequel being broadcast on TV, the BBC released Genesis of the Daleks on LP. It’s difficult to grasp how exciting this was at the time – even though a two-and-a-half-hour story was cut down to one hour, with no pictures, it was the first ‘proper’ home Doctor Who experience, and after I bought the LP in the Blackpool Exhibition I listened to it until I virtually knew it by heart… So often, in fact, that (before I became such an obsessive collector) it was also the first piece of Doctor Who merchandise I deliberately bought a second copy of, so I could switch discs on the record player as I came to be familiar with exactly where the scratches were on each copy. After listening to theirs so many times, many fans of a certain age still can’t help saying “This seems an opportune moment to end this session” at appropriate moments. And it’s that LP version, in effect – some of the cruder editing cleaned up, which is a blessing, but the thrilling cliffhanger in the middle removed, which is a pain – that’s being given away on CD today.

The Politics of Genesis of the Daleks

“Brilliant. Brilliant! It has detected the non-conformity.”
“Aliens! I must exterminate! Exterminate!”

Appropriately for the General Election campaign, this is one of the most political of all Doctor Who stories, and in at least three crucial ways. It’s a story about politics and political machinations, as characters outplot and outmanoeuvre each other – centrally, it’s about the rise to power of a charismatic fascist, and how he holds the seeds of his own destruction. Davros is in a strong position when the story opens, but he doesn’t have absolute power: most of the plot is about how he gains it, and the Pyrrhic consequences. While this is something that works far better on DVD – when there’s time to let the plot breathe – even in the truncated version it feels almost like an historical drama, clearly taking inspiration from Hitler’s rise to power, and ending in the bunker.

The political speeches that pepper this story are also striking. I’ve listened to (and, indeed, given) so many speeches that most I hear in fiction seem to have a tin ear. This, though, has real oratory, with both the script and – particularly – Michael Wisher’s superb portrayal of Davros knowing just how speechmaking works. While the Doctor and many others declaim effectively, what’s really impressive about Davros is that, for a charismatic fascist to work, the story realises that he actually has to be both charismatic and persuasive, rather than mistaking just ‘speaking at length’ for ‘making a speech’. His arguments are horribly logical, passionate and resounding, not just a cardboard stereotype, and they’re properly structured, too – if you’re familiar with speechwriting, you’ll probably be aware of how to build up a phrase with the ‘rule of three’. Davros certainly is (even the Dalek’s speech at the end does it).

Perhaps most important of all is not just the political infighting, or the brilliant speeches, but that the story hinges on real, urgent political issues. Blatantly – and even more so on the DVD, where you can see the uniforms – the Kaleds from whom the Daleks grow are Nazis, and the essence of the story is to pit fascism against free will. The Doctor and the few sympathetic people tend to be characterised by doubt; Davros and all the others who do terrible things by absolute, chilling certainty, with the Daleks themselves conditioned to obey unquestioningly. And it’s the Doctor thinking for himself, asking what right he has to perform the mission he’s been sent on, that provides the story’s central moral dilemma. Notably for Liberal propagandists, the Dalek’s instinct to destroy is encapsulated in a hatred of non-conformity; perhaps disturbingly, some of the story’s weaker moments come with a ‘nice’ Kaled who lurches erratically from weapons developer to proto-pacifist revolutionary and tends to be rather more a walking, wooden plot function than someone who’s as electric in defence of compassion as Davros is on removing it. Then, three quarters of the way through the story, the Doctor and Davros discuss science, morality and the Daleks in a scene so gripping – aided by a brilliant score – that it’s still for me the single most quotable speech in the history of the series.

CD Versus DVD

“Daleks? Tell me more.”

When you cut out more than half the running time and lose all the pictures, obviously you lose rather a lot, but strangely enough I still listen to my own CD from time to time for pleasure anyway (the LP long since having given way to cassette and then CD versions even before today’s giveaway). The sixty-minute edit has charms of its own; you can listen to it when out and about, of course, or simply when you have much less time, and it rattles along at a great pace, with Tom Baker providing an appropriately doomy narration (if with the occasional oddity). The DVD, of course, not only has the full, beautifully remastered TV version, but a host of special features – notably a lively commentary and two pretty solid documentaries.

Though there are many fewer speeches on the CD, some of them have a greater immediacy when you’re just listening to them – Davros turning on a scientist he’s framed as a traitor, for example, is a gripping scene on screen, with terrific direction and music building up to blazing effects as the brand new Daleks make their first ever extermination. Brilliantly, those watching cover their eyes, both communicating the scorching power of Dalek death-rays and symbolising the way they’re closing their eyes to what Davros is doing. And yet… Somehow, for me, when the scene is carried just by Davros’ escalating denunciation and the horrible sound of blasts and screams, the bareness of the sound alone is still more chilling.

The script jumps unevenly on CD, but it’s exciting; on screen, things have time to build, but there are a few longeurs (notably, for me, the odd scene where Davros and one of his scientists have rather stiffly written moral arguments about conscience, laying it on with a trowel). You miss the eerie power of the shattered, war-torn landscape that grounds the early part of the story, establishing its seriousness, and you miss the moody direction, with its war story power overlaid with medieval symbolism (a robed Death sending the Doctor on a mission; tattered, bound plague-carriers stalking the hills…).

Perhaps the most obvious losses are seeing Davros’ performance enhanced by a terrific mask, and the inspired lighting – or, rather, turning the lights down low – that frames so many scenes. Less predictably, the outstanding musical score works much better in the full TV version, simply because it’s allowed to play out and build up, rather than chopping and changing, though there are still striking moments on the CD – Davros’ ‘march’, for example, works perfectly on his first full ‘appearance’. I’m still torn, too, as to whether the edited version presenting Davros first as a commanding leader in front of the Doctor gives him the best entrance, or whether I prefer the DVD introducing him first in tantalising glimpses, whispering orders to destroy and announcing the beginning of the Daleks… Or, indeed, whether it’s better to pick up the Nazi analogy through Davros and the Kaleds’ actions and philosophy, or whether to see them smack in the middle of the screen wearing black uniforms and iron crosses!

Which you prefer comes down, really, to the time you have to enjoy it on any given day. The DVD’s certainly the best for me – but I still love the CD, too, and not just for nostalgic reasons. Sometimes it just seems to work better to finish the story with a Dalek shriek of triumph rather than the Doctor drifting away on a cloud of hope; sometimes it’s more satisfying to breeze through at speed and miss out everything to do with the hilariously unconvincing giant clams. Most of the time, I’d rather be spellbound by the whole thing and struck by the story’s most memorable image, as a dark metal Dalek looms, tank-like, against a violet sky. But either way, if you don’t have Genesis of the Daleks to start with, pick up today’s Torygraph. It’s worth it – and if it whets your appetite, you can always buy the DVD later.


Oh, and make sure you’re listening to Tom Baker reading the novelisation of Doctor Who – The Creature From the Pit on BBC7. It’s the third part today, but you can catch the first two on the iPlayer, and hear each day’s instalment at 2.30, 6.30 and 0.30. It’s a witty fable with a remarkably Liberal message – both in how to treat people, and in economic policy. I might even write a piece about that, too, but I’ve only got so much energy at once…

Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Liberalism, Newspapers, Reviews, Tom Baker

As the year closes, it seems appropriate to give a last hurrah to two great figures whose bicentennials have been celebrated in 2009: Charles Darwin, who changed the way we think about ourselves and opened the world to the wonders of evolution (and whose On the Origin of Species had its own one hundred and fiftieth anniversary); and William Ewart Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of British Liberalism, probably Britain’s greatest ever Prime Minister as well as perhaps the greatest polymath and possibly even the most insufferable human being – though with far greater competition – to hold that office.

Darwin

People have written an enormous amount this year about Darwin and his work, and I’m not going to replicate it all. Not least because, like many other days this year, I’m tired, ill and grumpy, and I want to be nice to Richard before it turns midnight.

But I will say this. The theory of evolution is one of the greatest discoveries in human history. It’s sad that increasingly vociferous nutters still do their best to disbelieve all the evidence, but shocking that they pour money into teaching kids to stick their fingers in their ears and stop thinking. I’m aghast that these theocratic maniacs who think they know everything – and that everything was already known thousands of years ago – have been allowed by the Labour Government to peddle their lies in schools. And David Cameron’s wish to peddle out public services to dodgy “faith-based” clubs fills me with no more confidence. Schools should be places of enquiry; teaching the scientific method is teaching to question, and to look for evidence. Though polling evidence on how much the British public trust the evidence splits, as everything does, on how you ask the question (oh no! It’s a disaster! Oh, phew! It’s quite promising, except in the USA!), I know whose arguments I find more convincing: David Attenborough, or Sarah Palin?


I’ll leave you with the above poster via Paul Belford, and many wise words from a certain elephant with a much better grasp of the science than I have.

Gladstone

When the rather fabulous Victorian werewolf story Tooth and Claw first aired as part of Doctor Who’s 2006 season, one of the many reasons I enjoyed it was that, contrary to my fears, Queen Victoria turned out to be a complete git. I’d recently read Roy Jenkins’ superb and startlingly readable biography of Mr Gladstone, and had strongly come to that conclusion about her myself; she didn’t like Mr Gladstone, understandably, but went to great lengths to frustrate him, undemocratically. She wasn’t a great one for listening to the People’s Will.

“The principle of Liberalism is trust in the people, qualified by prudence:
The principle of conservatism is mistrust of the people, qualified by fear.”

That’s probably Mr Gladstone’s best-known quotation, which I’ve seen recorded in several slightly different forms (for example, via the lovely Stephen Glenn) – I suspect the answer is that he uttered it several times. Despite Mr Gladstone being famous for his six-hour Budget speeches, I used the above version as one of a series of potential Tweets on what the Liberal Democrats stand for. Appropriately enough, I took it from the 1885 publication Why I Am A Liberal, via 1996’s Why I Am A Liberal Democrat. Perhaps more endearing is his account of his own personal evolution:

“I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.”

I suspect that, were he Liberal Democrat Leader today, I’d be in constant conflict with him – though you never can tell, as not only did he believe in all his points of view with a zealous passion, he frequently changed them. It’s a sign of thinking about things that I can’t help admiring, though sometimes he’d think about them in public at such length that it makes me seem like I only ever communicate in txt spk. As his wife Catherine once put it:

“Oh, William dear, if you weren’t such a great man you would be a terrible bore.”

Mr Gladstone was born two hundred years ago this week, so here are a few of the best commemorations. Stephen Glenn refers us to several of his H2G2 articles; the marvellous Helen Duffett brings us the tail-end of the great man’s voice; and the Guardian an unusually to the point “In Praise of…” and a special comment piece. The most startling paeans, however, were found by Paul Walter in those most deeply Conservative periodicals, the Daily Mail – the paper that spits on dead people and refuses to apologise – and the Daily Torygraph. Like so many churches now shyly acceding to Darwin’s discoveries, it seems it takes a hundred years for Tory newspapers to recognise that Liberalism was the right choice after all.

My Night With Creationists (With Hilarious Results)

Finally, I thought you might be intrigued to learn that, despite going to a state-funded Catholic primary school, secondary school and sixth-form college, and attending two different churches – Catholic and Baptist – every Sunday until I was eighteen, and knowing much of the Bible very well indeed, picturebook-friendly Genesis more than most, I grew up not doubting for a moment that, with so much evidence in front of me, the theory of evolution was simply factual.

In part, I’m sure this was because I had two very religious and highly intelligent parents (my Dad in particular with an interest in science, having been a librarian back then and today working at Jodrell Bank). In part, it was that evolution was certainly presented as scientific fact even as early as primary school. And in part, of course, I learned to read on all those marvellous Target Doctor Who books, and Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters in particular made it very clear that the Earth had been around for a while, and humanity considerably less so. Later evolutionary fables Full Circle and Ghost Light were even clearer: there might have been old religious authorities that were blind to the truth back in the past sometime, but like any species that couldn’t adapt, they’d long since died out.

Now, bear in mind that at the time I was less familiar with US politics than I am now, and that the religious right was both less powerful and less barking mad – and that the idea of theocratic millionaire ideologues being able to take state funding to indoctrinate children in any old shit was something not even Mrs Thatcher was backing.

So how was it that I came by the revelation that creationists were still going in the UK?

Hilariously, it was only when I went for a university interview that this ever came up. Being quite some way away, they’d put me up for the night with three other young men come for interview, and in the dorm room that night the four of us got talking. I can’t remember how the subject came up, but it turned out that not one but two of the others – all four of us from very different places – were of the creationist view. You wait eighteen years for a loony, then two of them come along at once. You may not be surprised to learn that we didn’t exactly get on. You may be more surprised to find out just what I did that really, really wound them up.

I laughed.

I roared. I pissed myself. Given all my life history thus far, I immediately leapt to the only plausible conclusion: it was a practical joke. They’d met up earlier that day and decided on a prank together, like university students are expected to do. And, of course, the longer I treated them as if they were trying to pull my leg in the most absurd way, the more furious they became, because they thought I was mocking their most deeply held beliefs. Which I was, of course, but only because I didn’t realise anyone could possibly still be that stupid in the late Twentieth Century, and that it must be a wind-up.

As I was a little over a year into being quite politically motivated and out, too, I then mentioned that I was gay at an appropriate point in the conversation. Of course, they immediately assumed that I was now pulling their legs, as they’d never (cough – bollocks) met any who was gay before and, obviously, it was exactly what I’d be expected to do on thinking they’d been taking the piss. It didn’t help my credibility that I laughed all the more at their reactions to my latest challenge to their worldview, but once they started believing me, the real arguments started. Ahhh, to this day it’s still my second-favourite coming out in bed.

The fourth guy in the dorm literally just kept his head down. Under his pillow, in fact, by the end of it. Or maybe he wanted to get some sleep before his interview for some bizarre reason.

Once I got back up north to my parents, I remember relating this story in tones of sheer incredulity, and being told in an embarrassed way by my Dad that there were a handful of people at Church he thought were probably creationists, but they didn’t talk about it. Oh well. Look, they hadn’t done any damage to me, so that was all right.

Of course, Stockport Baptist Church then turned out to have a pretty major problem with my sexuality too, but that’s another story…

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, Education, Gay, History, Ideas, Jodrell Bank, Liberalism, Newspapers, Personal, Religion

A Government position is newly vacant this evening: and for the first time, it’s explicit that only liars* need apply. For Labour Government Ministers, of course, the requirement to lie is only implicit.

This case is very simple. Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs Professor David Nutt told the truth, and was exasperated with Labour Government Ministers lying about their findings. The last Home Secretary said the carefully considered scientific evidence didn’t matter: cannabis was more harmful than tobacco and alcohol because, er, she said so, fingers in ears, lalala I am not listening to you.

Yesterday, Professor Nutt made it clear that she had not told the truth (and who’d have thought, when Jacqui Spliff was such a model of probity she, er, had to resign for being a crook and made the most grudging unpology about it?).

Today Alan Johnson, the current Home Secretary, sacked him (and who’d have thought that Alan Johnson would make a nakedly lying political point when he knows the evidence is completely against him?).

So, it’s official: under Labour, telling the truth is now a sackable offence.

It’s the obvious joke, but you know who the nuts are here.

Obsessive Ideology Over Evidence and Bossing Everyone About – the Labour Way

The evidence has piled up by the decade and the sackload. Cannabis does some harm; it does nothing like the harm it’s made out to; it does nothing like the harm legal drugs tobacco and alcohol do. But this Labour Government can’t even keep to the – brace yourself – lone liberal twitch by David Blunkett. They’re so desperate to sound ‘tough’ that their policies bear no relation at all to reality. Again and again. When Professor Nutt said that you’re more likely to die horse-riding than taking cannabis or ecstasy, to wails of horror from Labour hypocrites, he was simply looking at the facts of risk. Yet even that’s not really comparing like with like: unlike Professor Nutt, I support legalisation, which would enable proper quality checks (as well as destroying the criminal trade) – no-one gets on a horse, trots half-way along the path, then finds the ‘horse’ collapsing under them because they suddenly discover the beast is in fact half-gerbil.

One of my key memories about the harm caused by illegal drugs came about a decade ago. I left home one afternoon just after hysterical national news headlines about a single tragic death allegedly caused by ecstasy (whether the drug itself, or the impurities allowed in because it’s illegal and can’t be regulated)… And arrived at my Grandad’s a couple of hours later, to see a minor headline in his local paper that another single tragic death had come about because of an allergy to nuts (not to be confused with the Labour Government’s allergy to the truth, of which an inability to tolerate Nutts is merely a symptom). Guess which substance causes far, far more deaths, to an almost complete lack of media interest? Yep – the one you buy safely in the shops, not dangerously on street corners. Another win for prohibition.

On Radio 4’s PM programme tonight, Professor Nutt has just said that:

“This is about the difference between evidence and policy… Everything I’ve done has been evidence-based.
“…Gordon Brown made a series of irrational statements that cannabis is lethal, which of course it isn’t.”

Asked about the Labour Government refusing to take his former committee’s advice on cannabis and ecstasy, because they weren’t interested in any evidence, just in making a political point that he described as Luddism, the interviewer mouthed the meaningless tabloid platitude that these were the “controversial” drugs:

“They’re only controversial if you want them to be controversial – the Government’s views have, they’ve said, had nothing to do with science… I am not prepared to mislead the public about the harm caused by drugs.”

Good for him, and good luck to whoever next gets the job – it had better pay well, because by definition they’ll have to kiss their scientific reputation goodbye to take their position as official Labour Government Liar.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to calm down by eating a large amount of chocolate cake. Bad news: it doesn’t have any dope in it. Good news: it does have lots of chocolate in it. That was once banned as a dangerous, addictive drug by a nutty Westminster Government bent on scarifiying the populace too, you know.

If No-one Agrees With Alan Johnson, Will He Have To Sack the Whole Country?**

I’ve added rather more updates than usual below, as a lot of people seem to have something to say (none of them ‘The Home Secretary was right’). Even ultra-loyalist former Labour minister Lord Falconer said Mr Johnson was wrong on Any Questions.

Starting half an hour later: posts already popping up worth reading from Dr Mark Pack and Duncan Stott (who ironically shares a name with a drug enforcement officer from Doctor Who).

And yay for Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary Chris Huhne in the 7 O’Clock headlines for calling the sacking “disgraceful”:

“What is the point of having independent scientific advice if you’re going to sack the person who’s giving it to you? You may as well have a committee of tabloid newspaper editors advising you on drugs policy.”

Incredibly, the Tories have gone along word for word with the Labour Government.

Continuing the next morning, Mr Mark Reckons has kindly linked to me in a thoughtful post which also has an interesting set of comments. He’s also called attention to the Tories’ ludicrous knee-jerk photocopy of Labour authoritarianism in a far more memorable way than I did above.

Liberal Vision has also linked to me, encapsulating the spirit of my post in a far more memorable headline. Again, I’m just not tabloidy enough. One of the British Medical Journal’s bloggers doesn’t link to me, but finishes on a particularly appropriate request from his friend Kate. You might also glance at Darrell, Jonathan and Jennie.



*Or pot-heads, ironically, as only someone with a distinctly loose grip on reality would believe in the Government’s policy.


**Fortunately for Mr Johnson, he does turn out to have the support of: the Conservative Party; spin-poisoner columnist Amanda Platell; and the Daily Mail, the paper that spits on much-loved dead people and refuses to apologise. And, er, that’s it.

Unfortunately, these are the handful of hate-filled obsessive ideologues who are running the country, whatever the sensible majority of us think.

Labels: Chocolate, Drugs, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Newspapers, Radio, Stupid Ideas

Much heat and little light has exploded in the Liberal Democrat Blogosphere over Sith Lord of Liberal Vision Mark Littlewood’s becoming Director of the Institute for Evil Acquisitiveness. I quite like Mark, despite frequently thinking he gets it wrong, and the party’s worse off for losing a talented individual (I’m with Mat on this) – just as it’s a shrewd move for an often Tory-associated thinktank to pick a non-Tory, all the better to stand up to a potential new government. But outside of our own little enclave, two much less recently ex-Lib Dems have been in the ‘proper’ news – one the party can, I think, feel does us credit to any extent that we influenced him, and one whom we’re probably well shot of…

Martin Lewis

I’ve just heard a heated exchange on the Today Programme’s truncated Yesterday in Parliament early slot where consumer champion Martin Lewis gave evidence to a Select Committee yesterday about lenders’ virulently anti-competitive practices, while bankers and credit agencies offered weasel words and refused to give any figures. Who’d have thought? Yes, when in these credit crunch days it’s even more vital than ever to shop around and compare prices, the money-saving expert (TM) reveals that banks and other lenders are brilliantly penalising anyone who does that when it comes to getting a loan – meaning that, under the guise of ‘protecting’ themselves, people blindly have to take the first rate offered to them, or they’ll be punished for looking around by being forced to take one that’s even higher. Hmm, protectionism giving consumers a raw deal… Again, who’d have thought?

The first time I met Martin Lewis, though, he wasn’t a well-known financial expert; in 1993 or so, he was a bright and rather well-turned-out students’ union president, at a Student Liberal Democrat Conference or an NUS Conference (he may even have attended both). I was the much less well-turned-out students’ union president for Essex University, and although I was a far more active Liberal Democrat, when I few years later I spotted that good-looking young chap on the telly I instantly remembered when he was involved. So, well done him.

Elizabeth Truss

In other news this week, though, you may have read about Elizabeth Truss, a newly selected Conservative candidate who’s been picked for a safe seat and is now ‘in trouble’ with her local party after she was done over by a scabrous rag for – shock horror – having had sex some years ago. Something a scabrous rag had already criticised her for years ago. Now, my views on this sort of ludicrous attack are firmly on record: I’ve suggested the slogan, ‘Liberal Democrats – the Party That Says Sex Is All Right’, and not only is it no-one else’s business who you have sex with or don’t, but it’s a bloody stupid reason not to vote for someone. Of course, it’s a century and a half since John Stuart Mill observed that the Conservatives are the stupid party, and that’s not changed since, but – durrhh, when something’s already been in the public domain for several years, it’s really stupid to say ‘but we didn’t know’. If you vote for a candidate without having done a thirty-second Google check on them, you can’t very well complain that you don’t know everything about their lives: it’s your fault, not theirs, if you believe in prying through your net curtains but don’t bother looking!

If, on the other hand, any dyed-in-the-wool traditional Conservatives would think any worse of Liz Truss if they knew that, again in around 1993, she was a self-styled radical Liberal Democrat who kept attacking me when I was Chair of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students because I wasn’t left-wing enough, and whom I once held a meeting with to try and get her to work with anyone else in the organisation because she was a complete and utter egomaniac pain in the backside incapable of working in a team, that would be entirely a matter for them. I hope she’s as well-loved and effective a teambuilder for the Tories as she was in the Liberal Democrats.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Conservatives, History, Liberal Democrats, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Newspapers, Sex, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

The Prime Minister, on this morning’s Today Programme:

“We’re the insurgents, not the incumbents.”

No, Mr Brown. Just because you’ve been in power for so long, been so incompetent and ground so many people down that no-one in the country can stand the sight of you any more does not suddenly make you the heroic Rebel Alliance. You are the incumbents, and that’s why people hate you. What are you rebelling against? That two other parties are ahead of you in the opinion polls? So that’s you, the Government, ‘rebelling’ against us, the people. Yeah. See how that works out.

Of course, he might be claiming today that he’s rebelling against the evil Murdoch Empire. But he’s left it very, very late after kowtowing to their every demand for a dozen years – and he knows The Sun’s only deserted him because the voters already have, and the evil Empire doesn’t dare be on the losing side. That’s the only reason they switched sides from the other Tories in the first place.

Labels: Labour, Newspapers, The Today Programme

This is an exciting day for Liberal Democrat campaigners, with publication of a very short new set of our priorities for these tight economic times and an interview with Nick Clegg in which he tells us which priorities got dropped (highlighting at least one major blunder). Our new approach in two Twitter-style bites:

• “Lib Dems: no to business as usual! A Fresh Start For Britain: creating a sustainable economy; building a fair society; cleaning up politics.”

• “Lib Dems: right on the banking crisis, environment, cleaning up politics and Iraq. The others were wrong. Who’ll be right on the next mess?”

And a more populist go at it added a bit later in the day:

• “Lib Dems’ Fresh Start For Britain. 1: Green jobs & safer banks. 2: Fair taxes & investment in schoolkids. 3: Give you power to sack your MP!”

Libdemologists’ main source of intrigue today will be in reading between the lines of the new extremely-mini-manifesto A Fresh Start For Britain, trying to work out what the very few commitments mean and what’s left out… And their task will be made easier by this morning’s interview in The Independent, in which Nick Clegg explains the strategy rather well, while also offering a couple of hostages to fortune and serving up a handy bullet-pointable list of major priorities which are still very, very important… But which no longer have a budget or start date attached, because we probably can’t afford them right now. And it’s those that Liberal Democrats are most likely to be up in arms about, rather than what A Fresh Start For Britain actually says.

Now, I spent many long years on the party’s Federal Policy Committee, so I’m just about as experienced in reading between the lines of a policy statement as anyone. Having stood down from the FPC last year through ill health (and I’m more than a little peaky today; pass me another bacon sarnie!), it’s fascinating to read through A Fresh Start For Britain and work out what the arguments over it were. Because, of course, although it’s all in the name of Nick Clegg, he didn’t write it all and he’s very unlikely to have got it all his own way. Our Leaders don’t.

So, before this comes for debate at Conference in September – and you may be thrilled to learn that there’ll be a ‘part 2’ coming soon, spelling out the status of major policies in more detail – it’s already gone through the Federal Policy Committee, in a meeting which I’m told went on for five hours, which’d make it one of the longest since the final meeting on the 1997 Manifesto, after which fourteen of us crawled out alive at a quarter to one in the morning. And I’d love to know what went on at that meeting, so if any of my former colleagues fancy giving me a ring… All of which, of course, means that although if you’ve got a pet peeve with what’s in A Fresh Start For Britain (or, more likely, what isn’t), you should not only send a probing e-mail Cleggwards, but put a rocket up any members of the FPC you happen to know. Particularly as I’m not on there any more, so it’s not my fault (ha ha, ha ha ha ha).

A Fresh Start For Britain

A completely new, bold and fresh (and a little bit patriotic) title, which tells you… Er… Um… Well, all right, it’s not the most exciting title in the world, but it does tell you one of the key themes for the Liberal Democrats now – with both the economy and the political system more infuriatingly rubbish than they’ve been for half a century, that we’ve suddenly become less afraid to say, ‘Look, the whole thing’s been really buggered up for ages, hasn’t it? Let’s chuck it all and start again (and you won’t get that from the other two)’. Ironically, this was the message of the first draft of last year’s Make It Happen, but it was felt that a wildly anti-establishment tone was too scary in what was starting to look like might be a recession, so the tone was made more reassuring. Now that the economy’s much more fucked than anticipated and politicians are being spat at in the streets, ‘tear it all down’ suddenly has a more mass appeal. In line with Lib Dem statements of principles always having too many titles, there’s also the subtitle “Choosing a different, better future,” which includes the “Future” I’ve been using to imply “Green,” but sounds even less bold and distinctive than “A Fresh Start For Britain”.

A Fresh Start For Britain is not, of course, to be confused with 1981’s statement of principles commended by a joint working party of Liberals and Social Democrats and attributed (though probably even less written by them than this is by Nick) to David Steel and Shirley Williams, a set of priorities for an economic and political crisis with the entirely different title of A Fresh Start For Britain. Though some of the ideas in today’s fresh and exciting new approach are, of course, so fresh and exciting that they were there twenty-eight years ago, the new one’s better – at least as far as I can remember. It’s a while since I’ve read it and, despite getting dusty and sneezy excavating some of my thrilling collection of old SDP literature, I couldn’t find a copy. I’m peeved that though my old university promises an online pdf, the link’s dead. We should drop our commitment to university funding as a punishment! No, hang on…

A Slightly Fresher Start For Britain is, however, available as a pdf. Slightly confusingly, it’s not on the admittedly rather fresh-looking A Fresh Start For Britain website; instead, you have to e-mail them and ask for it. Still more confusingly, if you read the pdf you’ll find that this swish new statement of our priorities for a Liberal Democrat Government has been slimmed down to just seven absolutely essential short sections… But, if you read it on the website, there are only six of them. Yes – even one of our key priorities isn’t always a key priority, though I suspect that may be a mistake [update: it’s all on there now].

So, What’s In It?

Having been mean about A Fresh Start For Britain, actually… It’s pretty good. If you’re going to pick out eye-catching headlines rather than make a compendium of all known policy, this is pretty good – though I’ll come to two key things that aren’t there later. If you read it, you get a pretty good idea of what we’d do, and a pretty good impression that we’d actually be able to deliver it. And you’d be able to remember both of those points five minutes later.

In comparison with many election manifestos, that’s not to be sneezed at.

It’s phrased – as these things usually are – as a personal message from the Party Leader, and reads rather better than these things usually are. Whether or not it captures Nick’s ‘voice’, it comes across as a person (I remember writing an introduction “by Charles” for a manifesto in 2001, which was partly cobbled together from something attributed to him in 1999, etc, etc). Still more importantly, though I’d use even more vehement language, it’s the nearest to an angry, anti-establishment introduction I think I’ve ever seen in a Lib Dem manifestoish. It recognises people are angry with politicians and bankers – and sets out a narrative where a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to tell the old parties, the greedy bankers and the whole old way of doing things they’ve got it wrong.

“Many people believed they would get change for the better in 1997. Instead, under Labour, the gap between rich and poor has got bigger, our politics has got even dirtier, our civil liberties have been eroded, the environment around us is in danger and our international reputation is at a new low. Labour let us all down.”

But, as well as pointing the finger, this is about choosing the right answers. And before you can provide them, you need to analyse the problem. Well done again, then, for succinctly putting it:

“Britain is in the teeth of three crises: a huge banking crisis and recession, a rotten Westminster system abused by too many MPs for personal gain, and the threat of climate change.”

I agree that those are the three biggest crises – though I’d emphasise a crisis of freedom as part of that crisis of politics – but, of course, not everyone would agree with that analysis. What you choose as the problems ought to determine what your solutions are… And you can see that, with the other parties afraid of taking action on the solutions the Liberal Democrats want, they’re afraid to admit to some of the same problems. That far, the narrative Nick’s telling hits home with me.

I’m less sure about where it goes next. Yes, we need big changes, and they need action. Read the problem, but see if you can spot my wariness at the alternative:

“We need big changes to fix our economy, our discredited politics and our environment, yet both Labour and the Conservatives are letting the City, the House of Commons and polluters off the hook. No action against bankers’ bonuses. No action to give people the right to sack MPs guilty of breaking the rules. No action to slash emissions. They say just enough to get in the headlines, but when the spotlight moves on it’s back to business as usual.
“I believe there’s a better way. This country can be fairer, it can be safer, greener, and stronger in the world.”

Despite the party deciding again and again that, when it comes to our philosophy, “It’s About Freedom,” I worry that freedom is, again and again, the bit that drops out of our priorities. Remember “Free, Fair and Green”? That was a good list of our aims, not always met in the detail – but, as so often, while we have “fairer” and “greener,” “safer” and “stronger in the world” convey a very different message. When the British and world economy’s in turmoil, “safer” has to be part of what we offer – but it’s not the be-all and end-all. When the political system’s in turmoil, too, playing it safe isn’t an option; safety for people in trouble, yes, steadying the financial system, but by freeing up the political system and having people bossed about much less. And the tone of A Fresh Start For Britain really isn’t all about playing it safe. In fact, it’s the furthest from that that any statement of our priorities has been for decades.

Add “stronger in the world” to “safer,” and I get actively worried. The detail here is about choosing our commitments more carefully; the rhetoric of “stronger in the world” just doesn’t match. It sounds like we’re desperately trying to butch up to cover up, say, dropping Trident. And that merely sounds confused, not strong. After Iraq, after ID cards, after any amount of Labour bossiness and politicians saying ‘We know best’ that’s got us into all this mess, I don’t want a Liberal Democrat Government to be butcher still, actually. I want us to have the courage to say, government’s done too much, and too much of the wrong things, and you should have more freedom to live your own life rather than throwing a new law at you for every hour of the day. And that will strike a chord with people even if for no other reason than because enforcing stupid laws wastes money, too.

Where I’d say Nick’s introduction does go for freedom at the end, he doesn’t frame it as such.

“Above all, we must do everything to protect the next generation from the mistakes made today. For me, how we treat young children is the most important measure of what kind of society we want, what kind of values we hold dear.
“Even in these difficult times, giving all children from all backgrounds the life chances they deserve will always be my personal priority.”

And I believe he means it. That does indeed come across as a personal priority, and all the more powerful for it. But – and particularly for all those of us who don’t have kids – he also misses a huge opportunity. What kind of society do we want? What values can be seen in a commitment to education? Because just ‘awhh, kids’ is going to leave a lot of non-parents cold. What about tying our priorities together, and showing our approach to kids as the key to our approach in general, as the importance of education has come back round (as it was in the ’90s) to being our USP?

‘Giving all children from all backgrounds wider life chances is the single most vital part of building a fairer society. It’s about helping every child grow up having the freedom to live their own life. And we need to tackle both climate change and the debt crisis today – because if we leave it to our kids, they won’t forgive us the rocketing financial, social and environmental costs we’ve dumped on them.’

“Change for real, change for good” is the punchiest bit of politics in A Fresh Start For Britain:

“Britain is in crisis, the worst in modern times. People are right to be angry. There is a great deal to be angry about.
“The economy is in a mess, but the people responsible are still in charge. The political system is rotten, but the establishment is still blocking change. The gap between rich and poor keeps growing, making British society so unequal that everybody suffers. Dangerous climate change threatens us all, but world leaders won’t act.
“…The two old parties have had their chances and failed.”

It frames the problem as one that only the Liberal Democrats can tackle – because only we understand the mess the country’s in, because only we have the ideas to tackle it all, and because only we’ll be honest enough to tell it like it is. And, rather than using headings like “Trust” and “Honesty” as we’ve rather unwisely done in the past, this section uses one of the simplest, most effective ways of communicating political honesty. As I said yesterday, if you want to tell people what you stand for so it actually means something, it’s got to put some people off:

“If you are happy with the way things are, the Liberal Democrats are not the party for you. If you want business as usual, choose Labour or the Conservatives – we know they won’t really change anything.
“But if you want things to be different, really different, choose the party that is different – the Liberal Democrats. There is hope for a different future, a different way of doing things in Britain, if we’re brave enough to make a fresh start. The Liberal Democrats are ready to make it happen.”

Another curiously familiar turn of phrase, there.

That – well-structured, this thing – leads naturally into setting out what our principles for government would be. And here they are! There are two key points that mark out our different approach… Different from the other two parties, and from what we’ve said before:

• “First, any new spending will be paid for by a specific cut made elsewhere, to ensure it is deliverable even in these tough economic times. This means we will not increase public spending overall.

• “Second, the tax cuts we propose to help those on low and middle incomes will not be funded by cuts in services, but by making taxes fairer and greener, so that the richest pay their fair share and polluters pay for the damage they cause.”

Over this decade, the Liberal Democrats have moved increasingly towards fiscal neutrality – but, while it looks like these two points are upholding that approach, they aren’t. Each of those two commitments sounds balanced, but is actually one-directional. The reason in both cases is that Britain’s balances are in a deep hole: tax takes down as people fall out of work; spending up to look after them; and debt rocketing most of the way to a trillion pounds. We quite literally can’t go on that way. So, look carefully at those two pledges: there will be spending on our new priorities, but always paid for by cuts elsewhere, and that means public spending won’t go up overall. But, with government finances in crisis, will there be cuts that don’t pay for other priorities, but instead aim to cut public spending overall? And all tax cuts will be paid for by tax rises elsewhere… Careful readers will realise that the Liberal Democrats have for some time promised that all tax rises will be paid for by tax cuts elsewhere, and that those two clauses have now been swapped – so the corollary may no longer be the case.

In other words, even according to what information Labour lets out, the public finances are in a bloody disastrous hole and need filling in. But if we’re elected and actually get to see the proper books, we may well find out they’re even worse, and if spending cuts or tax rises are needed to fill in the hole, while we’re ruling out extra taxes for extra spending and ruling out extra spending cuts for tax cuts…

Having set out the Liberal Democrats’ values, analysis and approach, it then turns to what many will consider the meat – our specific priorities for changing things. And it’s noticeable how very few of them there are, published here as cast-iron commitments. It means that everything here can be delivered – though what’s here isn’t all we would deliver, it’s all that strict honesty means we could say for certain. That’s quite a risk, and there are, for me, two glaring omissions, only one of them for obvious financial reasons…Usually, I advise people to read the small print in any Lib Dem pre-manifestos. That this one doesn’t even have any small print tells its own story.

• Creating a sustainable economy: boosting employment particularly through green jobs; and splitting up the big banks to stop them gambling the economy away again.

• Building a fair society: “We will empower every individual and community, fighting disadvantage and entrenched inequality” – I like that bit – with fair taxes, specifically and impressively keeping the commitment to raise allowances and boost incomes for low- and middle-earners, raising green taxes and the wealthiest’s loopholes to pay for it; and investing in early years education.

• Cleaning up politics: Cleaning up Westminster, expenses, donations and the Lords, and making MPs sackable; and fair votes to get rid of safe seats.

And because the strongest underlying message of A Fresh Start For Britain is that only the Liberal Democrats will be up-front about the terrible mess the economy’s in meaning no government can do everything it wants to any more, it finishes with our approach to public spending – a short-term priority of maintaining investment to see us out of the recession, and a long-term priority of being far stricter with the public finances. And it outlines some of the major spending areas to be cut as the centralised state of quangos and databases, Trident, future public-sector pensions, deliberate expansion of higher education and tax credits for high earners. And there, at last, is the implication of more freedom.

As I put it yesterday in a Tweet-limited line:

“Can’t afford Labour? We won’t boss you about. We won’t knacker the environment. & We won’t waste your money on nukes, invasions or ID cards.”

So, What’s Not In It?

If you’ve noticed a lot that wasn’t in A Fresh Start For Britain and were wondering why, or how much more was missing, Nick Clegg helpfully gave an interview to this morning’s Independent which, as published, is about fifty-fifty underlining the new narrative and, er, being a bit iffy. Though I suspect rather less than 50% of the iffier bit is Nick’s fault.

The main strength of the article is that it positions the Liberal Democrats as making the tough choices up front about public spending that the other parties are petrified of admitting out loud.

The main weakness of the article is that it frames setting new priorities that can definitely be delivered as a great big retreat on all the other policies that might not be.

That strength is very obvious as the key aim of A Fresh Start For Britain; that weakness is partly in how a newspaper decides to spin it, but also reveals some weaknesses in the manifestoish itself. Perhaps the one that most gets in the way of a stronger narrative (there, even I’m butching up now) of a fresh, bold start is that the fresh, bold start is, er, a great big retreat, with nothing much to show for it. I can only guess at the even more eye-watering belt-tightening that would have been required to do it, but there’s an obvious ‘…but this is what you get instead’ positive message that’s missing that might have taken the place of ‘oops, bang go all our goodies’: to make cutting debt explicitly one of our priorities. To say that, if you’ve maxed out your credit cards and then your pay’s been cut, you need to start paying it off before you buy everything you want to.

Instead, the message The Independent delivers is far less about what Liberal Democrat priorities are, than about what they aren’t:

“Nick Clegg will today jettison many of the Liberal Democrats' long-standing policy pledges in an attempt to convince voters they would make the deep spending cuts needed to fill the hole in the public finances.
“In an interview with The Independent, Mr Clegg revealed that many of the promises cherished by his party will be downgraded from official policy to "aspirations" since there would be no money to fund them. They are expected to include flagship pledges to scrap university tuition fees, provide free personal care for the elderly, and bring in a higher basic state pension.
“The Liberal Democrat leader will ask his party's conference in September to make firm commitments in just three areas at the general election: a boost for education, the creation of "green jobs", and constitutional reform.”

You see, even they don’t fit in the bit about tax cuts, do they? But, still, there’s an impressive level of seriousness to the bulk of the article, where Nick talks about asking the difficult questions, and says clearly that while policies aren’t being dropped, we can no longer say for certain we’d implement them, and certainly not implement them immediately, because Labour’s totally fucked the economy. I paraphrase.

“Some of these might be retained as policies that we could not honestly place at the forefront of our manifesto, because we could not honestly claim they could be delivered in the first few years of the next Parliament.”

I know, I know. Saying it’s not the top priority isn’t the same as dumping a policy altogether. But if I were a Parliamentary candidate again, I’d be very careful indeed about what I said about policies that weren’t ‘on the list’. Getting politically involved when the Liberal Democrats were being up-front about what exactly we would spend, if necessary by raising taxes to do it, and when Labour were making mealy-mouthed noises to every interest group going that implied goodies, but termed them all “aspirations,” I learnt to treat every “aspiration” as something that will never happen. So, while in practice I know that governments usually find the money to do more than the few cast-iron promises they’ve pinned themselves to in advance, I can’t apply any less rigour to Liberal Democrat somewhere-down-the-line policies than I did when I was rubbishing Labour windbags. And that’s why it’s so important that the party debates what is, and isn’t, on that list – because if you want a reputation for honesty, you have to stick only to the bits you can be absolutely honest about.

One wince-inducing moment that I’m willing to bet is down to The Independent, not to Nick (note the lack of quote marks):

“Mr Clegg issued a wake-up call to a party which has traditionally had a long shopping list of policies but been less convincing about how it would pay for them.”

I very much doubt that is what Nick said, but it still needs stamping on. A Fresh Start For Britain is by a long way the toughest ‘spending round’ the Liberal Democrats have ever faced – but I’ve sat on the party’s Federal Policy Committee for three separate General Election Manifestos (and one that never was), and I can tell you that not saying how we’d pay for our commitments is a pile of bollocks. Every single time, we’ve said how we’d pay for every promise, always causing great distress to those wanting more spending, and the Institute of Fiscal Studies has given us a clean bill of financial health – unlike Labour and the Tories, who have never, ever published their manifesto costings, and always been frowned at for not saying where the money comes from. And, no, ‘I told you so’ is rarely an attractive line – though it’s not doing Vince any harm – but rubbishing a record of consistently getting it right is no way to build up trust for the future.

And another wince-inducing moment that suspect means Nick and the FPC should have thought a bit harder:

“Could the NHS, protected by both Labour and the Tories, face cuts? In theory, yes, because no area would be immune. In practice, Mr Clegg admitted, he found it "almost impossible" to think his party would not maintain health spending.”

This is, I’m afraid, the worst of both worlds. The Tories, terrified that Labour’s single campaign message of ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but, ooohh! The Tories! Scary!’ actually has some bite on the NHS, have tied themselves in knots saying that they won’t cut a penny from the health budget (which, as it’s such a massive proportion of public spending - over £100 billion out of around £700 billion – means Labour are gleefully talking up the concomitantly bigger slashes to everything else). Do the Liberal Democrats avoid that political danger by saying ‘Not a penny cut from the NHS’ too, or do we get the ‘honesty’ gain by saying, ‘We hate cutting anything, in fact, but look – the NHS is vast and do you seriously think every penny’s well-spent? Let’s look at how every single bit of public spending adds up’? It appears we’ve decided to fall between the two stools.

Whether these came from Nick himself, from our background briefings, or from The Independent looking at our previous big spending commitments and simply circling the missing ones with a big red marker, the article concludes with a handy list of bullet-points summarising the priorities that were – and that might not be any more:

“Mr Clegg has grown in stature in recent months, winning over doubters in his own party with high-profile and timely interventions on the Gurkhas, the former Commons Speaker Michael Martin, the Trident nuclear missile system, and Afghanistan. Now his call for "candour" and a "grown-up" approach to public spending will test whether his party is prepared to grow up too.

Safe policies

• Education £2.5bn "pupil premium" for a million children from disadvantaged backgrounds, smaller classes and extra tuition.

• Tax Raise personal allowance to £10,000, reducing bills for most earners by £705 a year, funded by £17bn package of tax increases including abolition of top-rate tax relief for pension contributions and closing tax loopholes.

• "Green jobs" Package to create zero-carbon homes, insulate existing homes, schools and hospitals, and expand rail network.

• Political reform To clean up politics after MPs' expenses scandal, including proportional representation for Commons, elected House of Lords and state funding for parties.

Under threat

• Universities Free tuition for first undergraduate degrees for full and part-time students.

• Care Free personal care for those over 65 at cost of £2bn.

• Pensions Higher "citizen's pension" with immediate restoration of link between state pension and earnings.

• Disabled £200 a year winter fuel payment.

• Post Offices £2bn pledge to keep open rural post offices.”

So, What Are The Two Big Misjudgements?

A Fresh Start For Britain has the right idea, and most of the right detail (that is, not much). But it makes two serious mistakes, in my view. One of them I’ve mentioned several times along the way already – it needs to punch up freedom as well as security. Because by keeping the balance still towards “safer” and “stronger” and not towards “freer,” it misses a key reason for doing much of what we do, and sabotages its own narrative by making us sound just like the two old, failed parties that boss people about and think they know all the answers. It wouldn’t have taken a major redraft: thinking about the rhetoric; adding the Freedom Bill to our list of priorities (a repeal of some of Labour’s thousands of bossy laws, something which in itself adds no extra public spending, and instead takes a lot of burdens off government departments, the police and people alike)… A major missed opportunity.

You might expect the other big problem I have with all this to be that it doesn’t make paying off the debt a big enough priority. Well… Actually, I’m torn on that one. It makes for a clearer narrative, but blimey, to make a really big impression there’d need to be so much cash paid off that almost all the spending we’d shift couldn’t be to other spending but just to keeping the interest down. So I suspect we just have to pay it off over even longer, as the final section on public finances implies, because there are some things so vital they simply need paying for.

No, the other serious misjudgement in A Fresh Start For Britain is one of its relegated priorities. It means finding more money – but not doing so would simply do us too much damage, in terms of narrative, in terms of practical aims, and in terms of hard-headed politics. While I wish we could find the money for all of those bullet-points The Independent this morning reports us putting a bullet into, dropping – I’m sorry; indefinitely postponing – free tuition fees for first degrees is the killer.

It cuts across our narrative. What are our priorities? Education is back to being our biggest issue… Yet we’re dropping one of our two biggest commitments on it. We’re firm on protecting government spending to keep jobs up and the debt down… So what message does it send to explicitly add to massive student debts, at the very point when graduate jobs have gone through the floor and everyone who’s just been to university realises they’ve got a mortgage-sized hole in their pocket and none of the promised salaries to make it worthwhile? We’re committed to investing heavily in early years education, which I accept is the key place to increase social mobility – but making university the place for the richer and richer clamps down on it too.

And then there’s the hard-headed politics of the issue. Tuition fees and Iraq were Labour’s greatest betrayals. This has for so long been a Liberal Democrat USP that we will be absolutely clobbered for dropping it – I’m so sorry, de-prioritising it into the unguessable future – and, looking at those other big-spending commitments we can no longer afford, to be cynical about it, for all the money we’ve kept down every other priority to throw at them, old people don’t vote for the Liberal Democrats, while students do. Despite the fact that I hope to get help in old age eventually, and have nothing direct to gain from making tuition fees free again – though I believe the economy and society as a whole will gain. And, of course, for those who say that a lot of the cost of tuition fees is a middle class pay-off… Yes, it is. And with taxes rising, pips squeaking and every kind of job looking insecure, with tax credits for the better-off one of the Liberal Democrat targets for cuts, tuition fees are a crucial way to persuade the people who pay most of the taxes that they get something out of it. And on top of all that, free education – at the very least, the education itself – is one of the clearest principles in public spending. Like being a little bit pregnant, this is one of those that’s an absolute.

On grounds of our political message, then, and on the fairness we’re trying to achieve, and naked political calculation, and even – good heavens, I’m so old-fashioned – of sheer political principles, the Liberal Democrats can’t afford to say ‘We can’t afford to pay for tuition fees’.




And in at number 63 on The Golden Ton for 2008-9.

Labels: British Politics, FPC, Liberal Democrats, Newspapers, Nick Clegg, The Golden Dozen, The Golden Ton