Love and Liberty

The Pound collapsing. Marmite threatened. Inflation doubled. All that with years still to go before massive trade tariffs start really hurting ordinary people. The unelected new Prime Minister isn’t just throwing out Mr Cameron’s Conservatism – it’s a Great Repeal of every shred of Tory economic responsibility built from Mrs Thatcher’s Single Market and control of inflation.

What plans does Mrs May’s government have to make the Pound seem like it’s still worth anything? Now it’s already fallen to its lowest value since 1848 and with accelerating inflation about to slash all our cash?

Here are some EXCLUSIVE rival proposals.

• Unelected Prime Minister Theresa May wants to take Britain back to the 1950s. So rumours are she favours repealing decimalisation – because if the Pound has 240 pennies, that must mean it’ll have two and a half times the spending power, right?

• Unbelievable Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is said to have a much more flamboyant idea. Issue new banknotes on REALLY BIG pieces of paper so everyone can see the Pound is still huge (it’s just the economy that got small). The 350 million Pound note will be the size of a bus – but unfortunately no-one will be able to spend it.

• Unshackled-by-reality Brexit Secretary David Davis is understood to favour adopting the leaf as legal tender, so we can all become immensely rich. This has two extra advantages: the Remoaner city dwellers will be immediately impoverished; and when the Pound and the economy have become so small they’re practically non-existent, Britain can proudly remember who won by calling our new currency The Leave.

• (As this is already the fiscal policy of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, there’s a terrifying prospect of a cross-party consensus between the Free Money and Unicorns Grow On Trees thinkers on both sides of the Commons.)

• Obviously there isn’t a proposal from Disgraced Defence Minister and Not Yet (‘97 days and counting’) Disgraced Minister* Without Any Actual Role Liam Fox, because he doesn’t have any actual role. But as in the absence of a proper job he spends all his time contradicting anything David Davis says, watch out for Dr Fox taking matches near any woods. Though obviously none of his government ‘colleagues’ allow him to play with matches anyway.

What isn’t funny is that these plans above are more coherent and detailed than anything the Tory Government’s bickering factions have shared with us. What’s even less funny is that while they fight among themselves without a plan, the Pound continues to fall and the really big inflation dangers get ever closer. Take a read of Nick Clegg’s analysis: Food, Drink and Brexit. The threat to all of us ordinary people from rising prices is scarier than anything for Halloween.


In other news, everyone remembers the one absolutely clear, no-ifs, no-buts, no arguing about exactly what it means commitment made by the Leave campaign – that there would absolutely definitely be £350 million extra for the NHS. Every week.

This week, unelected Prime Minister Theresa May said that that wouldn’t happen. In fact, the NHS must make £22 billion of cuts instead.

And then she said that any elected MPs who dare to ask for a vote on her proposals weren’t “respecting the will of the British people”. What about respecting the will of all the voters who voted to “Take Back Control” and Parliamentary Sovereignty? It’s a kick in the face to them now Parliament’s told instead that all decisions will be made by a tiny ruling elite that not one voter chose to run the country. What about respecting the will of all the voters who voted for £200 billion a year extra for the NHS? It’s a kick in the face to them now an unelected Prime Minister is cutting it by £22 billion instead. Call that “respect”?

So What Does Brexit Mean?

The unelected Prime Minister is committing us – against everything the voters were told in June – to a “Hard Brexit”. Throwing away Mrs Thatcher’s Single Market. Rising prices. Crashing the Pound. Trashing the economy. Call that “Conservative”?

Some commentators don’t want to use the word “Hard” because it sounds butch. Macho. Tough. Decisive. When it’s actually just painful. Panicky. Reckless. Damaging. Without a plan. Ideologically extreme. Not giving a toss about kicking ordinary people in the wallet. It’s as if the Tory Government is trying to cost us all as much as possible.

Some people call this “Chaotic Brexit”.

For some it’s “Expensive Brexit”.

What does Mrs May’s Brexit mean? For me, there’s only one word for our unelected Prime Minister’s ‘plan’.

MAYHEM.


*This joke via Millennium Dome, Elephant, in his own excellent analysis of the increasing threat to the British economy from Mrs May’s wreckers.

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Douglas Adams, Economy, European Politics, Stupid Ideas, Unelected Prime Minister Theresa May

I’m usually busy at Liberal Democrat Conferences. Writing speeches – sometimes even getting called to make them. Writing chunks of policy – sometimes even proposing them. Not writing a blog looking at the telly, while policies I’ve had nothing to do with are debated without my vote or voice. One I’m in two minds over. One I’m proud of. One taking baby steps but going nowhere near far enough. One that’s OK but should’ve been inspiring. One that’s unjust, unaffordable and unworkable. And the big picture: the very few places where my party puts any money where its mouth is.

As my health has gone further downhill, in conference after conference I’ve made fewer speeches and attended fewer debates than I did five years ago, or ten, or twenty. It’s just a bit of a shock to go from steadily decreasing participation and days when I often have to stay in a hotel room rather than in the conference hall to zilch. Hopefully Richard and I will be back next year, more engaged once we’re married (though it’ll be much more expensive for me just as my low income’s been eradicated, thanks to government policies I can’t say I support).

But there is one advantage to watching this Glasgow Conference on TV. I would be sitting in the hall fired up and wondering if I’ll be called to make my speech, listening to dreary meandering mumbles with nothing to say even if they could deliver it, where the only message is ‘My view on this crucial national issue is incoherent but involves a mind-bogglingly dull special plea for my own little local area’ – and it’s not just the MPs, some of the ordinary members are just as bad. I would be thinking hard at the sodding chair of the session, ‘It’s one thing not to call me to make the brilliant speech I’ve crafted so carefully, but calling these ones instead is just insulting.’

At home, I don’t feel the urge to write a speech, I don’t have to worry if I can make it to the hall, and above all, I can record the debates and watch most of them with my finger on the fast-forward button!

In my breaks from Lib Dem Conference, I’ve also been watching Doctor Who – The Pirate Planet, starring Tom Baker and written by Douglas Adams. This brilliant story, is I have to admit, better viewing than pretty much any Agenda item bar the Presentation On Same-Sex Marriage, and its second episode was first broadcast on this night back in 1978. At the time, part of it was a satire about the idea of an “economic miracle” for which no-one has to pay. It also turns out (spoilers) that behind the exponentially increasing devouring of the resources of whole worlds is someone very old to whom no demand is ever enough.

So what’s been happening back at the Conference? You can read all the papers here, and catch many of the debates via the BBC. But here’s why some debates particularly caught my attention…

“One Member, One Vote”

I’m torn on this one. If party membership hadn’t been hollowed out, I’d be wary that these proposals sound like they’re about equality but actually even more heavily in favour of time-rich, money-rich people who happen to live close to the seaside (or, in this case, to Glasgow). The equivalent of electoral reform for the UK being to propose one person, one vote – as long as you can all pay a large registration fee to crowd into the same one polling station. In Glasgow. Or, discarding the party’s current constituency-based representative democracy model, like reforming the House of Commons by saying any UK citizen can turn up and vote there, as long as they can afford to pay to register and pay to stay in London. And I wasn’t totally convinced by the argument that our shrunken membership makes it less likely people will turn up to swing the votes, which seems like an argument that we should completely change the structures just to get no more people turn up anyway. That the proposals themselves were a badly-drafted mess from a Federal Executive that has been record-breakingly navel-gazing and incompetent in its faits accompli this year didn’t help.

And yet… I’ve had times when I’ve been to conference without being an elected conference representative with a vote too, and it’s even more frustrating than being a conference representative who’s not at conference as I am today. The amendments stopped the constitution being turned into incoherence. And the arguments on the OMOV side were simply far better, with too many of those against resorting to pathetic ad hominem attacks.

Watching from home, though, if every member is to get a vote not just if they attend conference but for the major party committees, the small changes in making conference easier to follow over the past few years need to accelerate mightily. During conferences, the party website must have a one-click ‘What is happening right now’ solution rather than a many-click ‘Somewhere here you can work it out’ puzzle box. The back-projections and the chairs of sessions need to give the site address several times during each debate and explain what’s going on in each vote, not just to make it clear to conference-goers rushing about, but to those more members we’re told will be freshly engaged and watching after OMOV. Announcing at the end what the votes have actually decided, rather than just reading out a list of numbers and letters, would help the TV watchers too.

In a spirit of helpfulness, here’s one I prepared earlier: Making It Easier To Follow Liberal Democrat Conference.

Towards Safer Sex Work

Twenty years ago, I was newly elected to the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee – the body that decides on the major policy proposals that go to Conference. I was the youngest person on it by more than ten years, the only out LGBT person on it (putting into perspective today’s debates over reducing ‘diversity’ to only one tick-box quota), and – the unique thing about me that most mattered to me and which made the difference on the Committee – by the reckoning both of those meaning it approvingly and those meaning it critically the most unfilteredly ideologically Liberal. One of the first policy papers that that year’s FPC discussed had something done to it that I can’t remember any other paper save election manifestos. Election manifestos come back several times for FPC debate because there’s so much in them and we need to get them right. This paper was sent away for redrafting not once but twice because it was simply too Liberal for the FPC. I can’t remember any other than wasn’t just redrafted a bit in committee, as was the norm, but rejected in total and sent away to be rewritten from top to bottom (possibly not the best words), then once we saw it again, told it was still too interesting and needed to be completely redrafted yet again.

The neutered and regulation-heavy paper that was eventually permitted to creep into Conference was titled “Confronting Prostitution”. I bear some responsibility for that overly confrontational language: I was the one who pointed out to the FPC that the title “Tackling Prostitution” might be open to ribald remarks and we should get our tackle out.

It wasn’t a bad paper. It advanced us well ahead of the other parties. But I always looked at it with disappointment, because the policy working group had followed its remit, followed the evidence, and followed Liberalism in drafting a civil liberties paper that the FPC gutted stage by stage until it was about ‘getting them off the streets’. When the first draft came to FPC, it was the only policy paper that was ever so unpopular that just one solitary FPC member supported it as it stood. You will not be surprised to read that it was not the only time in which I was in a minority of one, but it was the most significant.

So I was very proud to watch all of Saturday afternoon’s debate, to see how far we’ve come. I particularly recommend you read Sarah Brown’s speech, but I was really pleased at how sensible and Liberal the overwhelming majority of the speakers – and the votes – were, including protecting sex workers both from exploitation and from the state, rejecting the idea of reintroducing ID Cards but just for sex workers, and setting out the principle that informed, consenting sex should simply be legal and is nobody else’s business (even if it’s a business). Well done, Conference! I just hope now that the next FPC will not be as timid about the forthcoming policy paper as its predecessor two decades ago. So if you have a vote, vote for the candidates with some Liberal ideas rather than just a CV on their manifesto.

Doing What Works To Cut Crime

I liked this policy paper – it sets out a practical, evidence-based approach to cutting crime. But its piecemeal nature means it looks more like a compilation than a coherent whole. So I welcome the commitment to crime prevention. And civil liberties. And evidence-based baby-step liberalisation of our useless, gangster-boosting drug laws. And to the interests of victims.

But a bigger question that the paper doesn’t ask is that if we want fewer victims, what about the victimless? What about ‘crimes’ that are not about protecting any victim but only about the state victimising people that aren’t hurting anyone else? Because it’s not only criminals who attack you that can be bullies. The state can, too. And if you want to prevent crime, expand freedom, cut the ground from under gangsters and have fewer victims, then setting out the principle that ‘victimless crimes’ should simply not be crimes at all is something I’d like to see as the keystone of our next crime paper when it looks at evidence for how to implement that.

The Liberal Democrat 2014 Pre-Manifesto – A Stronger Economy and A Fairer Society

I wrote a little about this yesterday, looking at the Introduction and how that’s changed and improved on previous attempts – though it lacks a short, stirring rallying call of What the Liberal Democrats Stand For.

The whole thing’s pretty good. And I particularly liked Duncan Brack’s closing peroration in the debate (Duncan, if you’re reading, please send me your speech and I’ll print some of it in a Liberal Monday). I have to admit, though, save the much-purloined policy to further raise the personal allowance for the lower-paid, I’m a bit hard-pressed to remember a ‘wow’ policy. That suggests that its narrative isn’t all that thrilling. And then at the last minute, someone came along and diluted the best bit.

I might have been tempted to vote against it for the drafting amendment announced this morning: the problem with an amendment that’s accepted into the text at the last minute is that no-one gets to debate it or speak against it. Several years ago, there was a crappy Guardianista fad for “wellbeing”, a meaningless top-down political concept like a New Labour zombie. The Lib Dems made the great mistake of deciding it was the biggest of big ideas, with almost zero enthusiasm, and since then have sheepishly never mentioned it again because it’s a load of rubbish. Until this policy motion, when some utter fool wanted to add it and the bigger fools on the FPC let them. Worse, it means that the motion as passed says that the one big thing we’re really about is “above all to empower every person to realise their potential” – oh, and also “wellbeing”! Which is crud. It’s not one task. It’s two. It means the inspiring, Liberal, bottom-up idea that we are about enabling everyone to decide their own life is now knitting together with top-down Blairite mulch about how we should decide what’s good for people. As no-one mentioned it in the debate, proving yet again how pathetically uninspiring the idea is, my advice is just to pretend it isn’t there.

But at least the Pre-Manifesto remembered to talk quite a bit about the deficit, and didn’t pretend you can fix it while bringing in no new tax revenue at all and giving massive handouts to the wealthiest.

Did We Forget About the Deficit After All? The Big Four Spending Commitments

The Pre-Manifesto was very tough on the deficit this morning. Then there was a huge splurge this afternoon.

I’m not against huge splurges (no, titter ye not). But the Liberal Democrats have carefully costed our Manifestos for more than two decades to only promise what we can afford, even in the good times when the money was rolling in (though less than the Labour Government pretended). Now the money’s not just tight but gone, it’s all the more obvious where the few extra bits are going – while everything else gets slashed.

• The Liberal Democrats are committed to protecting and expanding spending for schools and early years education – we always have. It’s probably our single most consistent commitment.
  

• We’re committed to increasing pensions through the so-called ‘triple lock’ (heads, tails or side, pensioners always win big).
  

• We’re committed to raising the income tax allowance to the level of the current minimum wage – but that isn’t ‘locked’, so it can be eaten away by inflation.
  

• And we’re now also committed to above-inflation increases in the NHS budget. All the previous three follow on from the big promises the Liberal Democrats made in the 2010 election, all three of which were delivered in the LiberaTory Coalition. This one is different: it also happened for every year of the Coalition, but at the last election it wasn’t promised by either the Liberal Democrats or Labour. This part of the Coalition’s record now taken up by every party was only a Tory commitment. We forced them to agree to the others – they forced us to agree to this one.

These four spending commitments are massive. And everything else will have to suffer.

I remember in 2001 – in what Labour told us were the boom years – I put out a really good leaflet across the constituency for which I was standing for election. ‘Follow the money’, I thought, and so this was all about the two biggest spending commitments in our 2001 Manifesto. On one side, a picture of me with local kids, with details of our proposals for children and education and how we’d pay for them. On the other, a picture of me with local pensioners, with details of our proposals for old people and pensions and how we’d pay for them.

I thought this was a great idea until a working person without kids told me angrily, “So you’re offering me nothing, then. I just have to pay for it all.” That should have occurred to me: I was a working person without kids. But though we’d said in our 1997 Manifesto that we’d raise the personal allowance for the low-paid, by 2001 we’d dropped that from our priorities to give a massive bung to pensioners. And back then that didn’t even include the earnings link and ‘triple lock’.

Today we have even less money. We’ve restored the policy of cutting taxes for low-earners – and made it a reality for millions despite the Tories wanting a tax cut for dead millionaires instead and Labour opposing it because they want government hand-outs only to the people they say deserve it rather than letting all the low-paid keep their own money. But that wasn’t a choice between generations. Something for children; something for working people; something for pensioners; now something for the NHS for everyone.

I just don’t think this can hold – because four massive commitments of extra cash is too many without squeezing everything else until it pops. And one of those four is not like the others. Only one has had no hard choices at all – just constant rises.

Age Ready Britain

Back when I was healthy enough to stand for elections, I went through an assessment to see if I was politically fit to be a Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate. I passed with flying colours, and can still remember my going all Churchill to the assessor role-playing an anti-asylum-seeker voter on the doorstep (as well as remembering that I’d only use the word “refugee”). One of the parts of the approval process of which I most approved in turn was the point where you had to prove you had a Liberal brain by identifying a party policy that you disagreed with and explaining why. I think at the time it was something about well-meaningly bossing young people about – a “wellbeing” policy, if you will – and, if I thought today about which I considered our most wrong policy, I would quite happily blast that Blairite twaddle of a “wellbeing” paper out of existence. But as it’s already been wiped from everyone’s memory through its very blandness, I would answer that the policy I most disagree with is one that has been made even more disagreeable today.

Our policy on pensions is generous, warm-hearted, well-meaning and attractive.

It’s a shame that it’s completely out of touch with reality.

This morning, the Liberal Democrats voted for a Pre-Manifesto that constantly repeats that it is all about “the next generation” and uses that as a primary argument for reducing the massive deficit between what the government spends and the money it has – that we must spend less now rather than saddle ever-increasing debts onto the next generation.

This afternoon, the Liberal Democrats voted for our biggest spending commitment not only to remain humungous increases for pensioners when every single other group in society is suffering cuts, but to put that vast and ever-increasing cost into law so that it can never be changed.

Completely unworkable.

The first time I ever spoke on what might be called the party ‘establishment’ side, after many years of being the radical outsider, was sometime roughly around the year 2000. It was in a debate on pensions that saw the unlikely bedfellows of young people, the party Leadership and elderly members of the House of Lords on one side, with middle-aged Parliamentary candidates on the other. The Parliamentary candidates wanted to restore the link between earnings and pensions because it was very popular. The rest of us said that it was a mistake to make that a principle because we could afford it today – as we then thought, not realising that even in the boom years the Labour Government was already running an unaffordable budget deficit – because there would come the twin pressures of an ageing population and a less rosy economy, and then we’d be stuck with a policy that wasn’t affordable. I can’t remember precisely my age, but I can remember my speech’s opening line that got people’s attention (and got a few boos):

“Conference, I’m twenty-eight. And I want a pensions policy that doesn’t make me pay through the nose and then go bankrupt before I get anywhere near claiming it.”

Back then, sense won the day. Somehow, between then and now, as the nation has got older and the economy has gone down the toilet, as the side that won back then have been proved right, we’ve gone ahead and gone for the unreal option anyway.

A ‘triple lock’ on pensions ratchets up without end, so that whatever happens to wages, or inflation, or the nation’s finances, however children or working people or people on benefits or services or anything else under the sun suffer, one group alone will forever get more and more money even as that group gets bigger and bigger.

We promised it at the last Election. We were wrong.

We’ve delivered it in government. We were wrong.

Today, we’ve proposed locking it into legislation so that every other group, every other service, every other dire need must always by law be subordinate to pensioners not just not contributing much to the cuts, not just staying still, but getting more, more, more while everyone and everything else gets less, less, less. We are stupidly, impossibly wrong.

With today’s pressure on the public finances, this is not merely utterly unworkable but utterly unjust.

I argued for pensions increases and other spending to help pensioners back in 2001. I meant it. It was the right thing to do when we could (seemingly) afford it. I didn’t argue for massive age discrimination and a huge and ever-increasing transfer of wealth from the current generation and the next generation to pensioners who will never be all in this together even when we can afford none of it. Because I’m an idealist, not a complete fantasist.

The Party Leadership and speakers in the debate today told the brave souls who stood up against this dangerous absurdity that they were wrong to say that ever-increasing numbers of pensioners getting a never-ending increase above the country’s wealth was unaffordable, because we just don’t understand the numbers. They didn’t say what the numbers were. Because… Because… Because… It’s magic! Government spending is still way above the money it takes. Everything and everyone else is struggling to keep their heads above water. The benefits bill is being slashed and people having their benefits cut or cruelly taken away altogether – the one exception being the vast majority of the benefits bill, the vast majority of benefits claimants, all of whom get much more than any other benefits recipients. They are the pensioners. But pouring extra cash into by far the biggest chunk of the benefits budget is “affordable”, we were told, and we just don’t understand if we say the emperor has no money to get clothes.

How stupid do they think we are?

One MP replied to criticism – from the unlikely bedfellows of Liberal Reform and a leading member of the Social Liberal Forum – by saying that we shouldn’t turn this into a fight between the generations. Well, that’s exactly what you do say when you’re the victor enjoying all the spoils, but not when you’re the side left bleeding and looted. Behind the scenes, they spin something else: not that it’s right, but that “pensioners vote”, so we need to throw money at them even if we have to mortgage the next generation’s future by borrowing half of it and mug the current working generation for the rest.

Ever wondered why the Tories so readily went along with a massive bung to pensioners – and took the credit? Maybe some of it was that when they got into power Mr Cameron still wanted to detoxify them and saw pensions as a totem that they were now the Nice Party to one group, at least. Before they rediscovered their taste for celebrating kicking the poor in the nuts. But why, do you think, were the Tories so happy to increase pensions while they slash and bash every other benefits claimant? It’s not rocket science, is it? Yes, “pensioners vote”. Pensioners vote Tory. Our most unrealistically expensive policy has been to make everyone else suffer, infamously cutting at our own core voters, to give a massive advantage to the Conservative core vote. For which the Conservatives get all the credit and we see our vote, as it always is, weaker the older the voting demographic gets.

We.
Can’t.
Afford.
This.

There are several good ideas in the Age Ready Britain Paper. There’s also the biggest infection of any policy paper this Conference of, yes, more twaddle about patronising “wellbeing” again, which is just a neon light for me to say that if I had been at Conference I would have urged the other Liberal Democrats to hurl it out and shred it, and start considering fiscal reality, fairness and the next generation’s future.

Labels: Coalition, Conservatives, Douglas Adams, Education, FPC, Labour, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Manifesto, Pensions, Sex, Stupid Ideas, Tax, The Golden Dozen

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

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

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

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

First and Second Principles

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

Second principle: so call in the international police.

…Oh.

And that’s where it all falls apart.

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

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

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

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

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

The Practical Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Religious spin-doctor Cristina Odone has today used what she calls “a huge hit”, US TV mini-series The Bible, to attack the BBC, secularism and, basically, the whole 21st Century. Her propagandaggrandisement in today’s Daily Telegraph, the journal of pre-Enlightenment fantasy, rests on the twin absurdities that 13 million US viewers is “a huge triumph” and tells us anything about British religion or TV viewing.

Ms Odone’s bigging-up of the so-called “History” Channel ignores three important facts.

First, though she claims the BBC ignores religion, in fact the money of all licence-fee-payers by law has to pay for making religious programmes. By choice, happily, almost none of us watch them.

Second, she fails to mention that by any measure you like – church attendance, church buildings, opinion polls of belief – the USA is vastly more religious, and even more vastly Christian, than any country in Europe except the Vatican, and certainly has a wildly different religious make-up to the UK. Despite our having an established Church, again by law. It seems that on two for two, Ms Odone’s demand for people to be forced into religion in law not only irks the silent majority of us who the screaming zealots seize cash from and boss about, but it’s clearly doing no good for religion, either. So perhaps she should pause in her authoritarian diktat that the US so-called “History” Channel’s Bible series should be “compulsory” here, in schools, on the BBC, and presumably by strapping every viewer to A Clockwork Orange-style eye-restraining chairs.

Before introducing the third and most absurdly abused fact that will fisk Ms Odone on her own shaky ground, I should point out that I do not believe TV ratings to be any guarantee of quality, just as I do not believe majorities should be able to push around minorities (or, in this case, vice versa), even when by her own argument we should ignore the Godly Torygraph’s tiny readership in favour of the Satanic BBC’s many millions, causing her entire vindictive rant to disappear in a puff of logic. But as Ms Odone wants to command her beliefs to be “compulsory”, and as she’s using the dubious testament of television ratings as her foundation, this is the appropriate ground around which to march to bring her ludicrous fabrication tumbling down.

Third, like any good spin-doctor Ms Odone cherry-picks the top viewing figure of 13 million for one “huge hit” episode (not telling us how far ratings have dropped since then) for the so-called “History” Channel’s Bible-story mini-series, just as the programme itself cherry-picks only the most popular bits of the Bible. She exalts this, again in her words, “huge triumph” to disprove the spooky, invisible US atheist conspiracy which televangelists and the lunatic far right make up stories of to raise so many millions. And yet, it surprises me by suggesting that, against all other evidence, perhaps big-budget Christianity in the USA isn’t looking that healthy after all…

The Facts – Ms Odone, Look Away Now (oh, she already has)

The USA is a country of 316 million people (I’m doing Ms Odone the favour of assuming that her pet series’ top rating only included the USA and not world-wide ratings, though as with all her ‘facts’, she isn’t clear). 13 million viewers is a “huge triumph” of, er, just 4.11% of the population. Ms Odone will no doubt tell you that’s an overwhelming majority. That doesn’t mean you should believe her.

By way of one simple factual comparison, the UK is a country of 61 million people. Cherry-picking one huge hit episode, Doctor Who – Voyage of the Damned (guest-starring Kylie Minogue), that was watched by 13.3 million people in the UK alone. That’s 21.11% of the population.

Much as I love it, Doctor Who is not my religion. In my view, it would be absurd and wrong to suggest on the basis of this factual like-for-like comparison that Doctor Who (or Kylie) is far more important than the Bible to the people of the UK, let alone extrapolate that Doctor Who – were it not for the evil conspiracy against it by US TV – is really, deep down, five times as big for the US population as Christianity.

Yet that absurd nonsense is exactly the way that Cristina Odone has extrapolated US viewing figures to scream that everyone in the UK should be ‘compulsorily’ bossed about. It seems that while UK schools’ compulsory religion does no good for most of us, sadly UK schools’ compulsory maths lessons did even less good for Ms ‘Dunce’ Odone.

Of course, it’s unthinkable that she knows that what she’s saying is a nasty, cynical lie to justify her outrageous authoritarianism, because, after all, she mentions the Ten Commandments. Though she claims no-one knows them any more, I do. And “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is one Ms Odone should know, too.


Ms Odone will no doubt point, scream and call for me to be burnt – ‘compulsorily’ – as I’ve just noticed that, as luck would have it, this is my 666th blog post on here.


Update: I’ve been fact-checked in an especially embarrassing way for a chap who bristles every time people misspell my own name. I apologise to Ms Odone for my mistake, and have corrected her Christian name from “Christina” to Cristina each time I used it.

Labels: BBC, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Kylie Minogue, Religion, Stupid Ideas, TV Ratings

The Government yesterday erected a consultation page about online porn. It’s down now. A spokesperson said, ‘Look… This is really embarrassing… It’s never happened before*. Try again later?’ I’d rather they didn’t, but if they do get it up again, steel yourself, look at the horrid thing, and insert your… contribution.

This bloody stupid idea, cooked up like so many others ‘For the sake of the children’ by bullying social conservatives – it’s like the Labour Party were still in Government – is to automatically block porn through everyone’s ISPs and treat every adult as if they were a child, including the two-thirds of households that don’t have children in them.

What do they think the Internet is for, anyway?

I can’t help thinking that this is a sop from Mr Cameron to his raving right-wing backbenchers who weren’t happy with the last consultation, on same-sex marriage. ‘No, we’re still frothing conservatives who like sticking our grubby fingers into people’s bedrooms, honestly!’ is the message. ‘Let’s turn the PC clocks back to when everyone just had floppies!’ Never mind personal responsibility for parents; never mind that we’re having to put up with a lot of horrible things the Tories are doing because there’s much, much less than no money and we have to live with some cuts; there’s just no excuse for this. It’s illiberal, it’s bureaucratic, and it costs a lot more money. And, today, when the Government wants to get its jollies by costing a lot more money, it had better have a bloody good excuse.

Instead, this proposal is a proven car-crash less than a day into the consultation period – long before any law might come into force. Yes, shockingly, they launched the consultation just yesterday. And now they’ve had to suspend it because the online questionnaire has blown open the Data Protection Act by publishing people’s names, contact details and replies.

Why A Porn Filter Would Harm People (Kids Included)

Yes, astonishingly, this cock-up has already proved why having a Government register of porn users is a terrible idea (even if you’re stupid enough not to read that sentence and work it out from first principles). There are already so many, many reasons why getting ISPs to hold everyone’s “Porn filter” records on their databases is wrong, whether it’s forcing every Internet user – or, rather, bill-payer – in the land to opt in in order to view porn. Such filters are a grotesque state-run invasion of privacy, when whether you look at consenting adults’ porn or not is nobody else’s business. Such filters are well-known for blocking medical sites, or helplines – so, far from child protection, they do genuine and provable harm. And just imagine going into your local mobile phone emporium to sign a new contract:

‘Jan-ice! Pass me the porn register! This one looks like he’s not getting any…’

But, as today’s security disaster has proven beyond doubt before the filter databases themselves are created, they are insecure. I can’t even say ‘An accident waiting to happen’ because, well, it’s just happened. They present a danger to people. A danger of being embarrassed for no good reason. A danger of being excluded from, say, your religious membership if they preach against pornography and – heavens! – your name is found to be on the list. A danger of being bombarded with unwanted ‘offers’ from the sex industry. Even the real physical danger of being targeted by extremist religious or other groups. These lists are by nature insecure and dangerous, whether the danger is simply of being forced into social conformity when in your own home for fear that your name will ‘get out’, or that people who want to market to you or do you harm will pay good money to get hold of such records.

At this very moment forty-three years ago, the Stonewall riots – that’s proper Stonewall, not the Labour-licking corporate lobbyists – were into their second day. They were the start of modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender radicalism, and I’ve been listening to the Tom Robinson Band’s excellent Long Hot Summer in celebration. I don’t think there’ll be riots if the Government starts fiddling with people’s porn, though I’d be tempted, but it would certainly harm LGBT people, from LGBT kids unable to look up helpful sites to leaked information being of help to queerbashers. These proposals are simply wrong.

Government – Get Your Hands Off Our… Hands!

I have previously suggested as our core message: “Liberal Democrats – The Party That Thinks Sex Is All Right”. We should very much leave micro-management of people’s lives to the Tories (who want to boss you about because you’re bad) and Labour (who want to boss you about because it’s good for you). And Lib Dem Ministers, you should tell the Tories how daft they’re being.

I have a simple, cost-saving alternative.

If the government wants a list of masturbators in the UK, one already exists: the census. It’s guaranteed to be a far more accurate list than any wildly expensive new self-‘incriminating’ infrastructure would be.

Whereas if they want a list of wankers, just look at the register of MPs supporting this new censorship idea.


*Except for every single time any UK Government ever puts confidential information into a new IT system. You’d think they’d have learned by now.

Labels: Coalition, Conservatives, Gay, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Sex, Stupid Ideas, Technology, What the Lib Dems Stand For

It looks today like Lib Dem Ministers have learnt the wrong lesson from history. Recent history is of the vast majority of Lib Dems supporting the Coalition even when some things it’s done have been sickening, not just because of the give-and-take of agreeing to some revolting Toryism to get good Lib-Demmery through, but because most of the nasty stuff has had a simple justification: there’s no money left, so we’re forced into it. But plans to attack civil liberties aren’t like that. They’re not forced. They’re actively choosing to do something illiberal, wrong and against all our Liberal history. So wake up, Minister, or you’ll suddenly discover the point at which every party member outside Westminster tells the Coalition to fuck right off. This is your most dangerous moment, so stop being so bloody complacent and going with the flow.

Many Lib Dems, rightly, think it’s important when in Coalition to communicate more clearly what we stand for, so we’re not submerged at elections. Well, it’s even more important to remember what we stand for for the people inside the Coalition, and Lib Dem Ministers should take a moment to think about our history as their civil servants urge them to just act like “the Government” always acts. We all knew that the Tories’ discovery of civil liberties in Opposition would melt away once they had all the goodies of power back in their hands and all the whisperers of the security state back in their ears. We all know that one day it would be up to you, Minister. Today, Lib Dem Ministers, remember that you’re Liberals and what the fucking point of being there is.

The latest news on Government plans for new cyber-snooping powers are virtually indistinguishable from anything Labour came up with, or any other securocrat-written authoritarian rubbish that’s always put forward by “the Government”. Yes, Labour would have done all this instantly and it took the Coalition two years to go native. That’s not good enough. It’s not worth all the pain of being in Coalition to mildly delay being just like Labour. You’re even trampling the Coalition Agreement on which this Government was founded, signed in the heady days when the Tories still said they believed in freedom.

Hearing on the news that the Liberal Democrats may have some concerns but “support the plans in principle” is exactly the sort of thing that makes me wonder – for the first time – if we ought to vote down the Coalition. There’s a lot it’s done that I don’t like, and I daily feel personally scared by the approach to benefits (because I’m still waiting for my next ATOS summons). But there’s a difference between every choice being a nasty choice, every cut a painful cut, because Labour destroyed the economy, and signing off on something that isn’t forced on you by financial necessity but deliberately turning the Coalition into an authoritarian force for evil (and not saving but wasting more money to feed the securocrats’ wet dreams!).

I’ve often wondered what my own “Red Lines” would be. I’m not grateful to Lib Dem Ministers for drawing them for me.

A fortnight ago, Minister, Liberal Democrat Conference said exactly what we thought about governments thrashing civil liberties and spying on our privacy (and one of the key movers of that motion, Julian Huppert MP, is worried today). You were there, Minister. Had you already seen your briefings? Did you decide it was wiser not to hear the Conference pre-emptively tell you, “No, Minister”? Or did you simply nod, applaud, and then flush it out of your brain as you went back to your desk at the Department of Doing Things the Way Governments Always Do Them?

Today, some Lib Dems are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. We like you. We’re glad you’re in Government. But it’s difficult for most of us not to start shouting when you say stupid things like “the Liberal Democrats support the plans in principle”. We do not. Millennium Dome, Elephant does not. Richard Morris does not. Jennie Rigg does not. Neil Monnery does not. Zoe O’Connell does not. Charlotte Henry does not. Mark Valladares does not. With every minute of this ticking time bomb, more Lib Dems will not. These are not just the usual suspects. If you want a party to come back to when you return to your constituency at the weekend, stop this thing now.

Freedom isn’t always popular. The securocrats are already shouting ‘Look – terrorists!’ and ‘Look – paedophiles!’ as if that answers every question. The papers and the Labour Party will be foaming at the mouth for more, more, more. But there is absolutely no fucking point in being Liberals if we don’t stand up for freedom.

Before the last General Election, I stood up and told Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander that I was deeply worried when they’d written a draft Manifesto in our name that stopped talking about “Freedom” and replaced it with “Safety” and “Strength”. You can watch my speech in which I pointed out just who that sounded like (you might think ironically, in hindsight). And, afterwards, I was told I had a point, and they’d listened, and the real Manifesto would be better – and it was, a bit, though I might have hoped that when it came to the first Manifesto since 1992 that I hadn’t been on the Policy Committee to write bits of it, I wouldn’t be proved to be the only member of the FPC who remembered to put in a little thing like “Freedom”.

Remembering Liberal Democrat history isn’t just about learning from the triumphs, avoiding repeats of the disasters and celebrating our tribe. It’s about remembering that the only reason we’re still here: the only reason Liberals survived after nearly a century of splits, near-oblivion, faltering revivals and then near-oblivion again is that we stood for something no-one else can ever be trusted with. Freedom.

Minister, don’t betray that trust, or you might just destroy your party.


Just a few weeks ago, Mark Park came to me with the idea of an article about Party history, one that would let people know that the arguments we have today are ones we’ve had before, that principles we hold today are ones we’ve held before, that splits we’ve had today are… As yet, nothing like as bad as we’ve had before. We threw around some ideas and – horrors – constrained by a tight word limit we wrote six bullet points for the party newspaper, Liberal Democrat News a week and a half ago. Last week, Mark republished it on Lib Dem Voice. But before I republish it myself below, today it seems appropriate to remember a seventh moment from our history – not from an MP, not from a Minister, but simply from an ordinary party member who threw back for a time what “the Government” always does.

Stopped by a securocrat and told to do what he was told for no reason other than that’s what securocrats always do, Clarence Henry Willcock (no, no relation) said

“I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing.”

And freedom prevailed.

Nick, you once said he was one of your heroes. Let him be again. Remember your history. Remember what you stand for. Listen, again, to Lib Dems telling you that freedom is more important than strength and safety. Say “No,” Deputy Prime Minister.

Some Thought-Provoking Reminders of Our Liberal History

Paddy Ashdown once admitted to under-estimating the importance of a party’s history:

“A political party is about more than plans and priorities and policies… It also has a heart and a history and a soul”.

Yet there is no “history of the party” training session for the keen Conference representative nor history briefings for new members. So here are six snippets from the party’s history to entertain, elucidate and illustrate our heart and soul in ways that should still strike a note today.

1. Impressive Firsts

The first Jewish Member of Parliament was Liberal Lionel de Rothschild, elected in 1847 but not able to take his seat until 1858. The first atheist MP was Liberal Charles Bradlaugh, elected in 1880 and finally able to take his seat in 1886. Both fought in Parliament and in multiple elections in order to establish their rights. Also, Robert Throckmorton, elected MP for Berkshire in 1831 as a Whig and then Liberal, was the first Catholic in Parliament for more than 300 years, following the Relief Act of 1829.

The first Asian MP was Liberal Dadabhai Naoroji in 1892. The first female Liberal MP was Margaret Wintringham in 1921, when she succeeded her deceased husband in a by-election. The first female Liberal MP without such a family route to Parliament was Vera Woodhouse in 1923. The first out gay Liberal Democrat MP was Stephen Williams in 2005.

2. Left/Right Confusion

Wanting to make deals with Labour isn’t historically associated with being left-wing. It used to be people seen as being on the party’s Liberal Party’s right (such as Richard Holme) who were keenest on deals with Labour. Conversely, being pro-market forces has not historically been associated with being pro-Conservative. During his time as Leader, Paddy Ashdown both pushed for a much more hard-edged free market attitude and also saw the Liberal Democrats as being part of a common centre-left political mission with Labour.

3. Disputes We’d Rather Forget

The longest and most bitter row after the Liberal Party and the SDP merged to form the Liberal Democrats in 1988 was not over philosophy, policy or even personalities – simply over the word “Liberal” (with no distinction between ‘social’ and ‘economic’). For a while, the new party was named the Social and Liberal Democrats; a mouthful, this was officially shortened to “the Democrats”. Most of the party rebelled and insisted on “Liberal Democrats”. It took several years, an all-member referendum and a constitutional amendment before the name simply became “Liberal Democrats”. Then everyone could get on with shortening it to “Lib Dems”…

4. Heroics We’re Happy To Remember

In 1989, with the new-ish party badly split, a very distant fourth in the European Elections and described by Leader Paddy Ashdown as within the margin of error of nothing in the opinion polls, the most unifying issue the party became known for was a liberal policy on immigration. With Hong Kong about to return to Chinese rule, the Lib Dems were united in saying that Hong Kong residents were entitled to British passports. In contrast, the Conservative Government said only the richest could buy their way in; the Labour Party voted with rebels on the Conservative far right to keep every single one out.

5. Policies That Have Gone From ‘Eccentric’ To Conventional Wisdom

In 1992, the three issues Jeremy Paxman threw against Paddy Ashdown in interviews repeatedly as proof that the Liberal Democrats were extreme and out of touch were Hong Kong passports, green taxes and (what were then called) gay rights. One issue passed; the others are now the mainstream.

6. Avoiding A Coalition Didn’t Work Last Time

The Liberal Party for a short time kept the Labour Party in office in the late 1970s after it lost its majority in the House of Commons. The so-called Lib/Lab Pact was seen by most in the party as at best a missed opportunity and at worst a failure as it did not contain a list of significant policy promises. PR for the European Parliament was lost as the deal only promised a free vote, not the support of Labour MPs.


* Yes, the Liberal Democrat tradition is lists of three things to remember. But there are two of us, OK?

Thanks to Mark Pack for the idea and the drafting, and to Oranjepan for reminding us about Robert Throckmorton.

Labels: Coalition, History, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown, Speeches, Stupid Ideas

Would rent controls be the worst method of controlling housing benefit aside from all the others?

With its mixture of good ideas and painful ones, the Welfare Reform Bill going through Parliament is causing more anguish among Liberal Democrats than anything since… Well, since the last horrible compromise the Coalition Government came up with. The logic is relentless: Labour wrecked the economy and stiffed us with the bill; government is still spending vastly more than it has coming in; the NHS and benefits dwarf all other government spending; the Coalition is committed to NHS increases; benefits need to be cut. It’s just that that means taking money from the people who, by definition, have least – and with the Coalition also committed to pension increases and (a Lib Dem victory) to increasing benefits with September’s high inflation rate, that narrows mightily the field of possible cuts.

Amid all the pain about how wrong it is to restrict benefits and the echoing question of where else to find the money when there’s simply none left, that old political cliché of ‘thinking the unthinkable’ – usually spoken by the unspeakable – is being trundled out on a daily basis. So, looking at where the soaring costs are in the benefits system, one element stands out as a massive problem for which no-one is proposing any action.

I come, inevitably, to the elephant in the room, and Millennium’s howl of pain which, amongst other points, reiterated his support for a Citizen’s Income – at least the Universal Credit is a small step in the right direction – but noted the biggest problem with it:

“And since I've been saying for AGES that I would support a flat Citizen's Income if only I could make the maths add up – the problem remains the disproportional effect of Housing Benefit in a housing market that is still massively over-inflated, which is why that's proving such a botherer in the current debate about a "cap" on benefits…”

If the Coalition Government wants to make really big savings on the welfare bill, arbitrarily finding relatively small groups from whom money can be clawed back (often because they can’t fight back) just isn’t going to do the job. And while I support the Universal Credit as a way of simplifying the benefits system and making work pay, this has its limits when there’s not much work to be had (the government needs to cut benefits more as there’s not enough tax coming in. But there’s not enough work about for being to move off benefits into and pay taxes on. So the government needs to cut benefits more as there’s not enough tax coming in. But…).

Everybody knows there is one big problem in the benefits system, and nobody knows how to tackle it. Which drives me to an unthinkable thought.

Shouldn’t we look at how rent controls might work, a quarter of a century after they were abolished?

And, yes, it’s a bizarre and heretical thought for a free-marketeer in one of the two free-market parties and in coalition with the other one. But there’s a simple answer to the gut-instinct complaint, ‘But that would distort the free market!’ No. It can’t. Because the rented sector reliant on housing benefit isn’t a free market at all. Either you abolish housing benefit and let all the consequences of an untrammelled free market in housing erupt, or recognise that this is a market that is warped out of all recognition by subsidy at the bottom, and that it therefore needs an equivalent pressure downwards.

The obvious solution is a vast new build of social housing, but – though the Coalition Government, incredibly, is building much more than Labour did – to pull that off in a couple of years is both financially and physically impossible. Previous governments have put limits on housing benefit but, blatantly, this hasn’t worked. Whether it’s people having to pay top-ups to their landlords or simply that the problem is too big for controls on the benefits side to handle. Government is still paying out vast sums with no effective control, not going to the people in the greatest need but instead subsidising businesses (some small, some large) in the way that we don’t for any others, yet that endless subsidy distorts and makes unaffordable for many people not just the housing market but the whole of government spending.

Look, the idea of price controls makes me cringe. It summons up ideas of post-War drudgery or Gordon Brown salivating, neither of them attractive images. But with massive cuts needed to government spending, the Coalition is having to do a lot of things that either or both parties don’t want to. So what’s the religious objection to the government setting up trials looking at benefits cuts from the other end of the telescope?

I admit that I don’t much like talking about either housing or benefits policy, either. With housing, in my many years on the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee, there was no other issue that came up so many times to so little effect, and it was, I’m afraid, boring – not because of the vital issue itself, but because over a decade and a half it became clear that I could pretty much deliver all the speeches on either side, and the summing-up that always failed to come to a conclusion:

• ‘This is a really big issue’;

• ‘It costs lots of money and where do we get it from?’;

• ‘But it’s really important’;

• ‘Yes, Simon, but where do we get the money from?’;

• [Half an hour later] ‘Next business’.

And I don’t like talking about benefits because, very simply, I’m on them. I’ve been too ill to work for many years, and I feel ashamed, so I’d prefer to keep my head down. But I noticed in my diary that it was twenty-three years ago tonight that my political career, such as it was, started very small (joining my local party Exec) before its meteoric rise and then health-related complete crash, after which I gave up standing for FPC and now rarely stir myself to write from my pit. But I remember why I started in politics, and it wasn’t to take away benefits from people even worse-off than I am.

Besides, taking money away from landlords might be more popular than taking it away from people with cancer. Who knows?

Of course any rent controls would take a lot of looking at. I don’t want a return to the monolithic sort running for half the last century, or ones that do little for the poorest but give you the jackpot if you’re renting a penthouse. Even regional setting would be far too crude, and any system would probably have to be restricted to rents paid by housing benefit and to bear down very gradually, year by year, so as not to depress the housing market too far (because that inflated bubble is still holding up what’s left of the economy). And I’m prepared to believe – especially after thirteen years of Gordon Brown – that the amount of micro-managing bureaucracy involved would make it impossible to pay off. So it may well be that, after carefully examining the costs and effects, after feasibility studies and pilot schemes, the government might find that it wouldn’t work.

But I still have to ask the question, and propose that we try those feasibility studies and pilot schemes. Would micro-managing bureaucracy for landlords be worse than micro-managing bureaucracy for people who can’t find work, or who are too ill for it? Because that goes on all the time. Would distorting the housing market with a downwards pressure be so shocking, when governments have for decades distorted it with hundreds of billions of pounds of upwards subsidy? And if you have to do something drastic to make savings in the benefits bill, who is better-placed to bear them?



Note: Good grief. Apparently, this is my six hundredth blog post and, thanks to having fallen much more ill than usual (as usual) in December and still being rather worn down, only my second so far this year – this January was only the second month in six years of blogging that I failed utterly to publish a single word on here. Oops. For those of you interested in such things, last year’s 145,792 (ish) words came in uneven bursts of between 37,715 and 314 a month, but none of them were as poor as zero.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Coalition, FPC, Health, Ideas, Personal, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen

I’m not the biggest fan of my local council, but I’d hope their Fireworks Night went with a Bang, rather than the damp squib they promised on blue, touchy paper.

As I was listening to shrieks and bangs echoing all around the Thames, particularly exploding over Blackheath, I couldn’t help thinking of Tower Hamlets Council’s forbidding signage committing to a dark and cold evening gathering across from Island Gardens.

If revellers were lucky, the cock-up will have been in what they said, not in what they did. But long experience of this council means I’ve not got my hopes up.



As you can see, the posters proclaimed:

“Tower Hamlets Council Presents… Fireworks Night”.

In which:

“Please note that fireworks will not be allowed into the park.”

In case we didn’t get the message, they then put up extra notices to make it clear.


Other stern notices put up in the last couple of days announced that there were going to be no open fires, either.

So did they mean to leave residents congregating in the dark and cold, a fireworks display with no fireworks; a Bonfire night with no bonfire? Were they planning on erecting a huge mirror, perhaps, to reflect the Blackheath display? Were they just hoping for cloud cover? Or could it be their signwriting compliance department get just a little overexcited by health and safety and forget that the Council might be supposed to be bringing a little something to the party, even if they didn’t want anyone else to?

Labels: Labour, Local Government, London, Stupid Ideas

Have you heard of Mitt Romney? Herman Cain? Rick Perry? Almost certainly not Jon Huntsman? Or other damp squibs for Bonfire Night (though a fanatic who wants to blow up the legislature and install a theocracy isn’t a million miles from some of the contenders)? Yes, it’s the exciting world of the US Republican Party, and after studying the race, I can announce a winner. Not of the nomination, naturally, or (I hope) against President Obama. Step forward, instead, Texas Governor Perry, whose brand new “simple” tax plan is surely the most brain-meltingly stupid in the history of the world.

The Republican Frontrunners – More Halloween Than Bonfire Night

If you’ve not been following the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, the most consistently popular contender is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney; but when I say “most consistently popular”, I mean he’s been bumping along at about 25% in the polls for the last year, while several other contenders have shot up, sometimes shot past him, and then fizzled out. It’s almost as if Republicans don’t actually want their ‘front-runner’, and are looking for anyone – almost anyone at all, as long as they’re ‘more conservative’ – to replace him. Romney is relatively competent, doesn’t mess up in debates, and almost completely uninspiring: famously, he’s changed his mind on almost every policy position and then denied it (as a slew of flip-flopping attack ads are now reminding people); he’s not ideologically batshit-crazy conservative (not least in that he was, following the previous point, against most conservative positions before he was for them); his Massachusetts healthcare initiative was the model for Obamacare (the number one evil for Republicans, whose support for life ends at birth); and perhaps most of all, because he’s a Mormon, and so automatically excluded from the swivel-eyed Christianist theocracy that has captured much of the Republican Party. He also has a 59-point plan for the economy, which is at least fifty-six points longer than Republican voters are going to read. On the other hand, he has a lot of money, tends not to self-destruct, and has the support of a lot of Republican grandees who are scared to death that the grassroots will pick someone who’s as nutty as a fruitbat.

So who are the main challengers to Romney? At least until tomorrow? For the last few weeks, they’ve been the macho conservative Governor of Texas – always a happy sign – Rick Perry, and business mogul Herman Cain. Depending on whether you think being US President is more like being a state governor or being a pizza boss, you may feel one of them has more relevant experience. Governor Perry was the last candidate so far to enter the race, sparking off over the summer to zoom high over the polls until he crashed to earth with a pitiful performance in his first TV debate. And again in his second. And by the time he slightly improved for his third, everyone was watching another spectacle, the amazing high-flying business saviour with a memorable policy plan where Rick Perry has a vacuum, while at the same time untainted by any actual political experience. So Mr Cain is, at the moment, still soaring in the polls while Governor Perry has mostly fizzled out – until the last week, during which both have exploded. The press have found details of Mr Cain expensively paying off several woman in his business empire who claimed sexual harassment by him; Mr Cain has fired off in all directions, the press, the liberal elite trying to lynch him for daring to be a black Republican, feminists – all of this playing well with the Republican base – but then, most dangerously, blaming the Perry campaign, who have of course strenuously denied this. Massive intra-conservative explosions followed. So the two leading Not-Mitt-Romney candidates are currently in the middle of making Mitt Romney look much safer (and saintlier).

Call 999 For Herman Cain

There are many elements behind Herman Cain’s sudden success, but the most policy-based is his patent “999 Plan” to reform America’s tax system (and bear in mind that “999” does not have the same connotations in America of ‘Call Mr Cain an ambulance’). Unlike Mr Romney’s 59-point plan for the economy, Mr Cain’s is short, simple and memorable: strip federal taxes to a 9% corporate tax rate, a 9% personal income tax rate and a 9% national sales tax. Problems with this include that it wouldn’t raise nearly enough to cover spending (but no Republicans are going to worry about that); that it would massively slash taxes on business and the very rich, leaving 90% of the population to pick up the tab (but not many Republicans are worrying about that either); and that there isn’t currently a federal sales tax at all. This last one is where he’s being attacked by other Republicans (wild-eyed Tea-Partier Michele Bachmann, a spent firebrand from earlier in the year, suggesting it’s a 666 plan. Yes, the Christian Right are always subtle). You see, it doesn’t matter if there are huge tax cuts elsewhere, or much bigger spending cuts on top – Republicans now regard any tax increase at all as original sin. So the other contenders are running around telling every state with its own sales tax that Mr Cain wants to double their VAT on top, and every state without that HE WANTS A NEW TAX AND MUST BE THE DEVIL! Yet still, the simplicity and apparent low levels of the “999 Plan” remain looking popular in the polls. So Rick Perry, desperate to get back off the ground, belatedly tried last week to come up with a tax policy of his own, his reliance on nothing but his winning personality having come unstuck.

The Republican debate a week and a half ago might well have laid the charges for the big explosion between Cain and Perry this week. Mr Cain, formerly so self-assured, looked distinctly rattled when his sudden front-runner status brought all the attacks that his previous also-ran rank hadn’t, stuck spouting that any criticism of his catchy gimmick was “comparing apples and oranges” (yes, Herman, we know your new sales tax will increase the price of fruit). But with Michele Bachmann hinting in her subtle way that he may be the antichrist, the attack that turned my stomach wasn’t the ridiculous one from the extremist (well, one of them) but the snake-oil slick from the please-can-I-be-the-frontrunner-again Governor: “Herman, I love you, brother, but…” Oh, Perry, please. Does anyone actually fall for that schtick? It’s a simple stratagem: get right behind your beloved brother; stab him in the back with praise for his naivety; unveil your own boldly unrealistic tax plan and hoover up all your beloved brother’s votes! And it was at the last point, of course, that Rick Perry’s own plan blew up in his face.

The Problem With Tax Plans

There’s only one sort of new tax plan that’s ever a brilliant, total success. That’s when you announce it from in government at a time of high growth, and with luck that means any losers will be lifted naturally and don’t notice it. This hardly ever happens, and pretending that it does goes some way to explain why, for at least the last thirty years, UK governments have been living beyond their real means.

Any tax plan – any at all – that you come up with in opposition will be open to one of two attacks (and usually both).

• Some people will lose money!

• Your sums don’t add up!

The first of these is invariably true, and the more you try to avoid it, the more the second will become true as a result.

Anyone involved in British politics can remember tax disasters both by government and opposition parties. I was a member of the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Policy Committee for many years, and tax proposals were always the policies were got to discuss last – usually after a Treasury Spokesperson had been dragged kicking and screaming into the room with bloodcurdling vows that the Party’s democratic policy-making process wouldn’t change a single penny of their grand design – and usually with the aid of numbered papers to be collected in at the end of the meeting. Because nothing can be more unpopular than taxing people more.

Tax has long been a particular problem for the Liberal Democrats for two simple reasons: for nearly two decades, we’ve been the only party that’s had all its policies costed so that election manifestos add up; and we’ve aimed to make the tax system fairer, which means those at the bottom paying less and those at the top paying more. Put those together, and what do you get? That some people are going to lose money, and that we’re going to tell them about it. Which is why, even though all our tax proposals for as long as you can remember have had far more gainers than losers, all the shrieking attention is usually on who’s going to pay more. Liberal Democrats plan to raise income tax thresholds so that the vast majority of low and medium earners will be better off, we said at the last election (and are now delivering in government). Of course, if you have to pay extra tax on the worth of your house above a couple of million pounds, that’s going to hit the very, very poorest, who haven’t a widow’s crotchet to rub together in their two million pound mansion! If you’re getting masses of cash from capital gains that Labour taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary working income and suddenly that rate rises to something almost fair, that’s going to destroy business, because how can bosses be expected to pay anything like the share that their employees do! And so on, as you probably remember. Or, most famously, Charles Kennedy came a cropper trying to explain how our council tax replacement plans stacked up in 2005 – change it to ability to pay and, corks, it turns out the people who are able to pay would have to. What is the world coming to? Even the council tax itself, replacing the poll tax, the most unpopular tax in living memory, was only swallowed because central government whopped in a massive subsidy with it (taking local government more under its control as it did so).

And so, used to running my beady eyes along the small print that tax planners hope you won’t notice, Herman Cain’s plan is… Well, laughable. It’s impossible to take seriously, and it would never have stood up for five seconds in a Liberal Democrat Policy Committee meeting. It doesn’t bring in nearly enough money to pay for the taxes it would replace. It gives a massive, massive tax cut to the very richest. And it brings in a great big additional tax hike that permanently increases prices for everyone else (remember the crappy VAT rise here? Under the “999 Plan”, it would have been nearly four times bigger). There are, though, three relatively good things to say about it. First, it would slightly simplify the Byzantine US tax system, and that’s a good thing. Second, it looks good on a leaflet, bollocks though it is to anyone who has a clue. And third… Third, it’s nowhere near as dumb as Rick Perry’s alternative.

Rick Perry’s Tax Plan – The Massively More Complicated Side of Simple

Mesmerised by the simplicity and popularity of the “999 Plan”, Rick Perry sat down with his crayons and, only months later and weeks after he’d already blown his best chance at the Republican nomination, he came up with his own “simplification” of the tax code. It’s a 20% flat tax.

In its favour, the good thing about a flat tax is that it’s simple (and the simpler a tax system is, the harder it is to dodge). Remember that.

OK, first problem. A flat tax. These are beloved of conservatives because they sound fair, but actually mean – by demolishing a progressive tax code in which you pay a larger share the more you earn – that, if you’re bringing in the same amount of money overall, the wealthiest get a massive tax cut and everyone else gets a massive tax rise. Still, ‘everyone should be treated the same’ has a ring to it – compare it to the Liberal Democrat ‘(almost) everyone gets the same increase in what they can hang onto before they pay any tax’, and they sound much the same. They’re actually almost exact opposites. Everyone paying the same percentage means the lowest earners get very little actual money and the richest get a fortune; everyone being able to keep the same actual money makes a great difference to the lowest earners and is barely noticed by the richest. And in this case, it would be a 20% flat tax on personal and corporate income but, here’s a thing, not on investments – Rick Perry would abolish the various wealth taxes altogether (great if you’re a mega-rich investor. Shame if you’re an ordinary Jo who has to pick up the shortfall).

But still, the one good thing in theory about a flat tax is that it’s simple, even if it’s not fair.

So, a flat tax is regressive. But it also has a lot of losers, if you’re going to set it at a rate that actually brings in the same amount as the various different rates currently do. And Rick Perry is a Twenty-first Century Republican running for the Presidential nomination in an ultra-conservative Tea Party atmosphere: increasing taxes, even on ordinary people, is unforgiveable evil. So he has a pathological fear (not least having seen his own attacks on Herman Cain’s extra sales tax) of people who’d lose out.

The answer is simple. Forget economic facts, and just set your tax rate well below what anyone could object to – 20%. This isn’t just below the rate at which he’d balance the books (in the UK, a flat tax would have to be at least 40%; even in the US, 20% is absurd, and that’s for current spending, ignoring the trillions of dollars of debts). This is ludicrously below the rate at which he’d balance the books. The technical term for it is ‘totally made up’. But, phew, never mind reality: it’s passed the first part of the ‘Republicans won’t call you Satan’ test, which is the most important one.

Yet even a 20% rate would mean not just cutting the rate for the richest in half, but increasing tax on the lowest earners – so, to his credit (and, under this plan, the US Government would need to run up a lot of credit), as well as the conservative dream of giving billionaires more billions, he’s followed the Liberal Democrat idea of a steep increase in tax thresholds to benefit low and middle earners. Of course, this would mean that a tax rate that already wouldn’t bring in anywhere near enough money would bring in much, much less than that. But so what? It’s only pretend, after all, not revenue-neutral or a plausible plan for government.

And, you still remember, it might not pay for what you’re actually spending, so you can’t begin to reduce your deficit (which Governor Perry’s promised to do, but that’s too absurd a claim even to start on), and that means you can’t even think about paying off your debts, but on the bright side, at least a flat tax should be simple.

But then Governor Perry hit on another problem. Because the US tax system is so complicated – almost as much as the UK’s after a decade of Gordon Brown knitting it – that it’s not just the headline tax rate that determines how much people pay. There are exceptions, and exemptions, and allowances. People get money back, or don’t pay it, or circle it around a bit, if they’re paying mortgages, or charitable donations, investments and so on. Now, Governor Perry’s plan wants to get rid of all tax on wealthy investments, so that’s nice and simple for the very rich, but ordinary people still have mortgages, and those poor billionaires might even have several. And if a flat tax is a proper, straightforward, simple flat tax that simplifies the tax code into one simple rate – remember, the big advantage is how simple it is – then suddenly people might have to pay more on all those sorts of things. People… might… have to… pay… more…‽‽ Oh, Governor Perry! Say it ain’t so (or be damned forever)! So he had another bright idea. All those exceptions, and exemptions, and allowances? They can stay.

Oh. Well… Um, the thing is, it might still need thousands of pages of tax code, oh dear, sorry, and lawyers, and accountants, and Congresspeople putting in loopholes, but at least the rate of the flat tax is still simple. That’s one thing. At least you know you only need pay at one rate. Er, that is it, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, at that point Governor Perry’s advisors found one more problem. It turns out that even with a tax rate so low that no-one can believe it, and a much bigger threshold, and keeping all the allowances and exemptions – even then, they found that there would still be losers. A lot of losers. Mostly from those pesky low-and-middle-earners. So what to do?

Because Governor Perry had told them that simplicity is nice, but the one thing that his tax plan must never, never, ever have is losers. Because he doesn’t have a teaspoon the political courage of a Liberal Democrat, not even one person should have to pay more, and only then would he be anointed the true [made-up] Republican messiah.

So his tax plan has one more idea to make it a brilliant, total success.

And that is…

If you don’t do better under the new tax system, you can file under the old one instead.

And that was the point at which Rick Perry became the undoubted winner of the Mr Shit-For-Brains-Maddest-Tax-Plan-Of-All-Time Award.

The one advantage – the one big reward that even a redistributionist like me can agree on – to a flat tax is that the sodding thing is flat. It’s simple.

Under Rick Perry’s plan, not only would the rich get a massive tax cut (and a more massive one through the genuinely flat 0% investments rate), not only would you still have to calculate all the same exemptions and extras that you do today, but you would have to do all your taxes twice. Just to check which version comes out best.

This is the only “flat tax” proposal in history which increases bureaucracy, increases complexity, and increases the time it takes to fill out your tax returns. All for the sake of a simple headline. Governor Perry appears to have confused simple with “simple”.

Rick Perry’s promise when setting out his tax plan was that Americans would be able to fill out their tax returns on a postcard.

Only if their writing is as small as his own microscopic brain.

The Other One

Incidentally, there’s one Republican in the race who has a solidly successful and fiscally conservative record as a governor, has been an ambassador, has no flip-flops, has his own tax plan and can string three words together without tripping over them. Unfortunately for the health of the Republican Party, Jon Huntsman is bumping along at the margin of error of nothing, so you can safely assume the sane sort of conservatism isn’t getting a look-in this year. Mainstream in every way save being a Mormon (ironically the least anti-gay candidate despite that), he might do well in a proper election, but by Republicans, for Republicans, he’s toast. He believes in science and climate change, he has a grasp of economics, he doesn’t pander to Christianist conservatism, he speaks Mandarin Chinese… He may as well be on a different planet to Planet Republican. Though as the ‘not nutty’ candidate he may have blown it himself by lacking the balls to stand apart from the pack at crucial moments of decision (putting his hand up with all the rest to the economic insanity of refusing deficit reduction by even one part tax rise to ten spending cuts; staying silent as the Republican audience booed a gay soldier). So I don’t spare him that much sympathy.



Update after the next GOP debate, night of 9th November: It turns out that I was badly underestimating Rick Perry’s problem with numbers. If only he hadn’t scrapped Education (arithmetic) and Commerce (numbers) first, he might have been able to count to three.

It surely can’t be long now before he withdraws from running for President of the United States of… of… Oops! I was sure there was a third word…

Labels: American Politics, Coalition, FPC, Liberal Democrats, Religion, Stupid Ideas, Tax