Love and Liberty

I’m not at Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference in Glasgow this week. It’s the first I’ve missed in about twenty years, and I am missing it – Richard and I would love to be there, but we’re getting married in twenty days’ time and just don’t have the time or the money. Following it on TV, one person who you can’t miss in Glasgow is Nick Clegg. This morning he was interrupted – I can’t say interviewed – on the Today Programme, so his latest answer on what the Lib Dems stand for is the latest of my Liberal Mondays quotations…

The Limits of the “Centre” and the Bigger Limitations of the “Interviewer”

Some of the random shouting by the random talentless hack from their researchers’ random shouting points and the Labour Party’s random propaganda points on Today this morning involved sneering at “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” and shouting at Nick Clegg,

“Where is your core identity? What is it that the Lib Dems stand for?”

Obviously, none of the random shouting involved listening or engaging with the answer – yawn, he’s answering the question, bored now, time to hear my own voice again – but I’ve managed to piece together what Nick was allowed to get a word in edgeways with in his latest short summary of what the Liberal Democrats stand for.

Earlier in the interview, Nick summed us up in part with a line that doesn’t appeal to me at all, but here goes:

“The Liberal centre ground is where we’ve always been anchored, and where we’ve sought to anchor the government.”

I love the word “Liberal” – but I suspect those who aren’t tribal Liberals, which would be probably in excess of 99% of the population, don’t really respond to a tribal label. Only a minority, too, might respond to a concept, like “Freedom”, but it’ll be a lot more than those that identify with the label. Instead, the concept is “Centre” – which is meant to sound like ‘at the centre of things’ (if only one centre among, er, several in the same place?), but just sounds to me (and I suspect to almost everyone) like a statement that we don’t stand for anything of our own, splitting the difference between the others, neither one thing nor the other but somewhere… Quite a long way behind these days.

To be fair, there are advantages to the “centre” message. It lets you say your opponents are extreme and that only you are reasonable (isn’t really true but which might persuade) or that only you can rein them in (which is really true but which no-one believes). Nick came through with this strongly when contrasting the LiberaTory Coalition with what the Tories are gagging to do if they get “in power on their own” without us to tell them “No”: he focused on last week’s Tory Conference ‘Osborne bombshell’, where the Chancellor wants to abandon taxing the rich more (such as by the Liberal Democrats getting Capital Gains Tax raised above the previous Labour Government’s rich-bribing low level) and through eye-watering cuts alone

“only ask the working age poor to pick up the tab for the mistakes made by the bankers and the black hole in the public finances”.

What you might call the Tories’ “No-tax bombshell”.

The weakness in the “centre” came when Nick tried to attack Labour in the same way, claiming that “Labour move rapidly to the Left”. I don’t think they’re moving anywhere. They’re just a frightened vacuum. And though Nick drew attention to Mr Miliband’s cowardly and incompetent inability even to mention the massive deficit left by Labour, that cowardice and incompetence isn’t red-blooded Leftism. It’s the biggest symptom of an inability to make up their minds about anything at all in the face of a terrifying reality that would tear them apart. But that doesn’t fit with us being ‘somewhere in between’. Nick wanted people to give us credit for “holding firm”, I suppose in a rebuttal of “the centre cannot hold” – but that only opened him up to the interviewer’s sole moment of demonstration that she wasn’t merely a non-Turing-compliant iDevice programmed to shout a limited number of dumb phrases on repeat:

“Holding firm is not an ideology.”

Though I wait for any Today presenter ever to ask what either of the other two stand for and cut them off when their only answer is ‘Labour would tax you more and be nice to poor people and immigrants’ (the latter two points of which, unfortunately, aren’t even true) or ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but oooooh! The Tories! Scary!’ (which is all true, but still gives me no reason to touch them with a barge pole and has nearly killed Labour in Scotland).

Nick Clegg’s Answer To “Where is your core identity? What is it that the Lib Dems stand for?”

“I’ll tell you exactly where we stand, and I feel this has always been the case.

“On the Left you’ve got socialism, the Labour Party, which is all about the state telling people what’s good for them; you’ve got the Right, the Conservative Party, that basically wants to keep the pecking order as it is.

“What has always distinguished British Liberalism, and I feel this very strongly, is an absolute, a huge emphasis on opportunity – that what everybody in politics should be about is trying to spread opportunity, such that everyone can get ahead in life, can live out their dreams, can use their talents to the greatest possible extent.

“And that’s why if you look at the signature tune things that we’ve done – I mean, don’t listen to the words, what we’ve done, our actions, judge us by our actions – whether it’s the massive expansion in apprenticeships, the huge transformation of the tax system so people on low pay keep more money as they work, or the very heavy emphasis on early years education, childcare, putting money into schools that cater for disadvantaged children.

“All of that is about opportunity.”

That is much better, and I’m glad Nick got to say most of it.

It feels recognisably Liberal in spirit as well as in label.

It’s something that Nick clearly believes, and is right at his heart, and that always helps when a politician says what they believe.

Though he didn’t say “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” after the sneering, it chimes right in with that while sounding much more positive and definite than “Centre”.

And it links all that to our priorities in government.

It’s in many ways the same sort of thing I’ve been trying to do with my What the Liberal Democrats Stand For series, unifying ideology with our record in practice (latest version here; version with explanations here).

Any Liberal Democrat could say it themselves or stick it on a leaflet and not feel, ‘Oh, well, if I really have to.’

It isn’t perfect. In my own What the Liberal Democrats Stand For series, I’ve made a point of saying what we stand for – and Nick had already done his knocking copy, and been told not to talk about the others, but us. So starting with another attack on them was a mistake. It was a mistake because it made the statement about them.

Nick, next time you do this, if you must waste positive time being negative, take a tip from the “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeahhhh!” pre-chorus that propelled She Loves You irresistibly to Number One. If you stick otherwise to exactly the same words, then at least let your opening be “The Liberal Democrats are about opportunity for everyone.” People listen to your first line. Make it the most important and the most appealing.

And though your actual one-line sum-ups of the Labour and Conservative Parties were both fine, your first words about them were Centre-propagandist dumb:

“On the Left you’ve got socialism, the Labour Party…”

No, Nick. You haven’t. Leave the word behind. Labour left it behind more than twenty years ago. People so terrified that Ed Miliband is a revolutionary socialist coming to chop their heads down to size will not be voting for us anyway. The vast majority simply will not recognise that as reality, just as Mr Miliband is too frightened to recognise reality. He is not a socialist. He is not anything. He is a pitiful vacuum.

I nod to “trying to spread opportunity, such that everyone can get ahead in life, can live out their dreams, can use their talents to the greatest possible extent.” That’s my inspiration too. I recognise the issue that’s been closest to your heart since before you became Leader in talking with such passion about opportunity and about early years education. I just wish that for all the investment, the passion and the genuine commitment, you could say the word “education” without having cut the ground out under you biggest priority by everyone else hearing “tuition fees”. And you were cut off, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you would have got round to mentioning the environment after criticising Mr Cameron for not talking about it any more.

And it’s a shame that the “interviewer” gave one of her many parroted lines from the Labour Party press office in ruling out any examples of what we’ve done in office connecting to what we believe by saying as ‘fact’ that it’s just a Conservative Government with our support. Too many people believe that. The BBC presenting a stupid Labour lie as a fact doesn’t help. But though you won’t convince everyone – or, I fear, anything like enough people – by saying ‘here are our values, and here’s how we’ve put them into practice in government’, you need to keep at it. Because only saying either without the other will give far fewer people even than that a reason to vote for us.

Possibly wise to find a better phrase than “don’t listen to the words,” though.

How Nick Today Was Better Than Nick On Other Days

It’s not what I would have said. But it’s in tune with what I would have said, and recognisably from the same sort of ideological place. And while it has its own weaknesses, it’s much better than some of Nick’s (and others’) previous statements of what we stand for. I’ll be kind and not repeat what he said in his second debate against Nigel Farage – focus-grouped to death, palpably making him uncomfortable, and the least Liberal ‘statement of principles’ I’ve ever seen from a British Liberal Leader – but it compares very well with the messaged-to-death message at the last General Election, for example. That brought everything down to one word: “Fairness”.

Now, I’d say that Fairness is certainly among Liberalism’s crucial concepts, but on its own it’s just not the one thing we’re about. Fairness should be in the service of something else. Nick says “Opportunity”. I can go with that. I’d say “Freedom” – and it’s always depressing and also a bit bizarre when I’m the only Liberal who seems to be saying that. But it wasn’t just that “Fairness” was only our number one in 2010 because it was what the focus groups said: it was, like several other things in that Election, a hostage to fortune that sounded good during the election but killed us afterwards. It’s absolutely true that throughout the LiberaTory Coalition Government the Liberal Democrats have made the cuts and hard choices fairer than the Tories wanted. But without a Tory Government to measure that against, nobody sees it. It’s absolutely true that the gap between rich and poor – which the previous Labour Government made wider and wider with their doubling tax on the poor and bungs to the rich – has fallen under the LiberaTory Coalition Government, fallen sharply, for the first time since I was at primary school. But when that proof of fairness comes not in the happy way – by lifting everyone up, but those at the bottom most – but in the painful way, by everyone suffering but taking most from the rich and protecting the poor, then nobody feels that it’s “fair”. Because no-one who suffers ever thinks it is fair for them to suffer. It’s a risk to say the one thing you stand for is Fairness even if you’re awash with money, because no effing voter is ever grateful. But to say the one thing you stand for is Fairness when you know that the most you can do is make everybody hurt in the fairest way is pretty close to suicidal.

Where you’ll find the closest relative of Nick’s Today statement today is, unsurprisingly, in the Liberal Democrats’ new Pre-Manifesto, and in Nick’s Introduction to it. As is usually the case, the section on what we stand for is relegated to a ‘personal view’ by the Leader, as if presenting it as actual philosophy or, worse, ideology for a party would send readers screaming to the hills. As is always the case, this is written in part by Nick, in part literally by a committee (the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee, if you want to tell them what you think of it), partly by staff and partly by another committee whose names you’ll find at the back of the booklet. But of course it’s Nick’s every word, officially. Comparing what Nick says in the booklet in these three pages with what he said on the radio in three paragraphs gives you an idea of what’s really closest to his heart.

For me, the Introduction to the 2014 Pre-Manifesto is one of the best that the party has produced. I think – after usually complaining that they’re far too short – that it should really have a short version, probably on the front or back cover. Here’s one I prepared earlier. But it’s persuasive, it’s distinctively Liberal, and the middle one of the three pages gives our policy priorities for the future in a way that fits seamlessly into what we’re about. But without a summary or a short version, it’s not quite clear that there’s one word that motivates it – which is probably quite right, as complex politics don’t usually reduce to just one word. Mine is “Freedom” and, hurrah! for the first time in ages, that appears there quite a lot. Nick’s is “Opportunity”. So does that. Yet though Freedom would be my one word, I’ve more often summed us up with three: “Freedom, Fairness, Future”. Between those, I can pull out most of our policies, as well as thinking they work as a buzzword condensed Liberalism (and, yes, I’m a sucker for alliteration too). So it’s notable that “Future” starts out as the main buzzword in this Introduction, repeated three times in the first line alone. Then, on the middle page, it becomes “the next generation”, repeated in six of the seven priorities and, though in different words, what the seventh is all about – as were most of Nick’s examples in his interview. Then “free”, “Liberal” and “opportunity” all stand out several times, the latter prominent but noticeably less than in Nick’s speeches, but the meaning of all three driving the first and third pages just as the next generation drives the priorities. By contrast, Fairness doesn’t actually appear on its own as a positive noun, instead standing at the back as a few slightly embarrassed adjectives. I hope to get time to write about the Pre-Manifesto in more detail, but if I can’t, it’s interesting that I’ve gone from unusually critical of the centrality of Fairness to the Liberal Democrat message to making it unusually prominent, just by staying still. I suspect Nick is more comfortable using the word closest to his heart this time round.

Today Is So Yesterday

It’ll still be on the iPlayer for a bit, but I wouldn’t bother listening to the whole ‘interview’. And not because of Nick.

Some journalists – by which I mean presenters, not journalists, as they neither write anything nor ever find anything out – want nothing other than to be the next Jeremy Paxman. This is a crapulent ambition, as the old Jeremy Paxman had been an unwatchable panto caricature for decades before he retired to spend time with his many-times-larger-than-any-politician-public-salary millions. Unfortunately, one of the worst examples of this disease is the Today Programme, once a flagship for holding politicians to account and now an unlistenable presenters’ masturbation demonstration with no interest in presenting or prying out information. The ‘big beast’ interviewers, or interrupters, have spent decades now doing nothing but making up their minds about some tiny fiddling point and then constantly repeating it until either the interviewee ‘admits’ to it – which lets them crow – or gets fed up and asks why they’re obsessed with some tiny fiddling point that no listener gives a toss about – which lets them say no-one answers their questions. Or they just talk over people so they never get a chance to answer a question because, oh, anyone else but their own voice is so boring, right?

Evan Davis had been a breath of fresh air: a journalist who knew what he was talking about and who used that to listen to answers and engage intelligently with them, which made him able to genuinely interrogate his subjects and inform his listeners. He’s been recruited to replace Mr Paxman, which suggests Newsnight is acting on a long-buried desire to become a critical news programme again instead of a long-running ‘argument’ sketch that shows why Monty Python were so wise to do a limited run. I’d like to hope that Mr Davis becomes a great success and a household name, making other presenters wish to be the next Evan Davis instead. It’s not a very confident hope, though, because to know what you’re talking about requires both talent and a lot of hard work. It’s far easier to just shout random things your researchers have told you and not let people finish the answers that you’re too stupid to understand anyway. Who does that inform, exactly?

This morning some talentless hack ‘interviewed’ Nick Clegg. I can’t remember her name. I doubt anyone else can. She may as well have come from the same mould as so many ambitious but lazy men and women who want to be Jeremy Paxman. Her equally lazy researchers had given her several stupidly untrue statements to shout and then shout again when Nick contradicted her with something boring like facts. And she got bored when he started answering her questions and decided it was time we heard her voice again. It’s all part of the Today Programme’s inevitable transmogrification into Thought For the Day, the part of the programme I always turn the volume off for and put on a music track instead. Before long they’ll decide that politicians, alternative views and tedious facts only get in the way of not just three minutes of semi-religious inanity but the far more important three hours of presenters’ egos. Someone with very ill-thought-out opinions says something bland and obvious in a monologue for which no-one can hold them to account: bishops today, Today presenters tomorrow. A radio shouting in a human ear, forever.

Labels: Conservatives, Education, FPC, Labour, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, Manifesto, Nick Clegg, Tax, The Today Programme, What the Lib Dems Stand For

Having a hellish day, so this’ll be truncated, but here are three political moments of the day to catch up with. Though my health’s usually poor, the last week and a half have been much worse than usual, today far more horrible still. My comfort is that, while this is personally my most frustrating election ever, politically it’s looking fantastic, and that’s definitely the right way round! But if you’ve been tuned in to the BBC today, you might have noticed that neither are going well for Liam Fox, Chris Grayling or the world’s least competent political Leader, Lord Pearson:

• Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning just before 8.30 had John Humphrys ask grumpy Tory Liam Fox how they were going to deal with the Liberal Democrat surge in popularity. “Complete positivity,” said Dr Fox, then made four hysterical attacks on Lib Dem policies (all betraying the right-wing old Tory policies he’s much happier with than Mr Cameron’s touchy-feely vacuity) before finishing by saying “And we have to get Gordon Brown out.” He rounded up his array of undiluted bile with the hilarious claim that that was the Tories’ completely positive agenda. Now, obviously, Dr Fox has absolutely nothing left to go on – but was Mr Humphrys actually being paid? A five-year-old could have laughed at Dr Fox, poked him and told him that “Complete positivity” can’t consist of nothing but attacks on other parties and having nothing at all to say about your own.

• BBC2 this afternoon had a clash between the three potential Home Secretaries, hosted by former Murdoch hatchet man Andrew Neil and a proper BBC correspondent at his elbow who actually knew some facts, and – to their credit – they’d got the format down much better than yesterday’s first go, with the same question to all three at several points so viewers can actually compare them. Lib Dem Chris Huhne was excellent: clear, strong and very on top of his facts, with a particularly impressive closing speech highlighting crime fighting that works and the Freedom Bill to sweep away Labour’s authoritarian record. Alan Johnson was there to defend Labour’s authoritarian record (and, though it’s very easy to slip over a word, I do it all the time and it’s very unfair to mention it, I did laugh when he described ID Cards as a “Manifesto mess”) – but I almost felt sorry for Chris Grayling. The BBC having hounded him down and dragged him from his safe house, he looked almost as grey and queasy as I do, and I’ve not seen anyone look more petrified on a TV political panel since the one I totally fucked up when I was 22. Then the poor man opened his mouth…

• By far the least capable, though, and the one I’d love to write about properly if I had the energy, was UKIP Leader Lord Pearson on Radio 4’s Election Call at 1.40 this afternoon. Where to begin? Well, he clearly didn’t know. It’s worth listening to the whole thing – it’s only twenty minutes, and I don’t know whether to feel glad that the BNP’s middle-class mini-me are going down the toilet, sorry that they’ll clearly be incapable of leaching votes from the Tories, or just incredulous at a Leader who’s not remotely up to the job. What would you think of a Liberal Democrat candidate in an absolutely, unimaginably no-hope seat – despite the opinion polls, there surely must still be some seats that Labour or the Conservatives just might win – who’s only just taken over at the last minute, perhaps because a prior candidate fell ill, who went to a local question time in front of a couple of dozen people and, every time they were asked a question about the Lib Dems, replied “I don’t know – I’ve not read our Manifesto.” A little sympathy, perhaps, but it’d be difficult to have much confidence in a vote for someone so lazy and clueless. That was Lord Pearson, earlier. A long-time Conservative activist, then Member of the House of Lords, one of the two Westminster Houses of Parliament. Several times, he was asked for UKIP policy, only to reply (even on people with disabilities, an issue he sounded personally decent about and professed to be interested in),

  “I don’t know – I’m not a professional politician. I’m not sufficiently familiar with our Manifesto.”

  Newsflash: you’re in the House of Lords. You are a professional politician. Just not one that anyone would give a job to. You’re a Party Leader, and you’re supposed to be the one people can call to account on your own policies! He went on: he complained that there weren’t enough questions on Europe – the callers are wrong; he got testy and didn’t know his facts; and, despite saying that immigration was one of only three policy issues he was interested in, when a Briton called to say he worked in France and – with millions of others working in the EU – would lose his rights to residency and reciprocal benefits if UKIP jerked us out of the world’s largest trading area. No, said his Lordship, they’d still have that. The man on the line just laughed: did he seriously think every other country would give us freebies when we’d torn up the treaty that granted them and thrown all their citizens out of the UK? Pearson’s utterly incredible reply:

  “We won’t throw anyone out.”

  Was that a direct lie, or does the man who’s against “immigration” not even support UKIP’s only bang to drum, that there are “too many people here” from the EU? Or is he simply the most incompetent political Leader in the world?

Don’t take my word for it – catch them all on iPlayer.

And as it’s taken me a couple of hours even to write this much, I’m back off to my sickbed. I rang NHS Direct last night (five minutes of ID questioning, repeated three times over – very Labour) when, after a day of feeling like I might be on the road to recovery from the horrible extra stomach illness I’ve had since last week, I suddenly threw up again and was simply fed up with it. When they rang me back, two hours later, to go through all the same questions all over again, I felt reassured: it did sound like it was something that was slowly fading, and not too much to be worried about. They even told me to start eating properly again, and what (no chocolate, sadly). I ate (no chocolate, sadly). At 4am, I woke with a crippling pain in not so much my stomach as my entire torso, and managed to stagger to the bathroom for the most dramatic vomiting since the thing started. My twelve hours since then have essentially repeated the same pattern, of waking, crawling to the bathroom, sipping some water, crawling back, falling into a feverish sleep for half an hour to an hour, then restarting, with occasional breaks stretched out on the floor groaning as I tried to get up energy to do something really taxing, like clean the sink or find the painkillers. It’s not exactly been fun, but I have let occasional BBC news programmes wash over my sickbed.

My health means I’m not up to it – so I’m not asking for anyone to vote me this time. What’s their excuse?

So my level of engagement in this election remains, as I said above, frustrating. If you feel sorry for me and want to make me feel better, all I ask is one tiny little thing: just send a majority of Liberal Democrat MPs to Parliament and make Nick Clegg Prime Minister. There – that’s much less effort than sending a card, some grapes and a box of chocolates, isn’t it?

Labels: BBC, British Politics, Conservatives, Health, Liberal Democrats, Personal, The Today Programme, UKIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what’s it for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This morning’s “Coming up in the next hour” special for why you should shortly switch off the Today Programme: Lord Owen is to talk about Britain’s 1970s nuclear secrets.

My beloved, on his way to the shower after we exchanged exciting fifteenth anniversary presents:

“Is it to be revealed that Lord Owen split the atom?”

This is one of the many reasons why I love Richard.

Labels: Richard, 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

Or, when homophones attack!

I woke up this morning to find The Today Programme announcing that Lord Turner, Chair of the Financial Services Authority, wanted attacks on bankers with excessive bonuses. Woozily, I heard that because people like Fred Goodwin were “socially useless,” it would be fine to vandalise his Edinburgh home, as happened a few months ago, or perhaps give the man a good going-over with a baseball bat. If the FSA Chair – who’s worked with these scum for so many years – has now concluded this is the only language they understand, who was I to disagree?

Clearly, lots of other people had heard the rather more radical than intended proposal that I did, so by the end of the programme, the headlines had carefully split up the words. Lord Turner said there should be a… new… bankers’… tax. Ah. Attacks. A tax.

Oh well.

Look, after a month of being more ill than usual, I’ve been having raging toothache this week and am zombied out on lack of sleep and surplus of painkillers. It was an easy mistake to make.


In other news, a health warning. If, like me, you’re a bit out of it today, don’t look into the scary boggling eyes of Daniel Hannan. Still less listen to his latest coded message to supporters that, ‘it’s fine, under all the “liberal progressive oxymoronic Conservative” veneer, don’t lose heart, we’re still evil and hate poor people (let them die!) and black people (send them away!)’. You might have nightmares.

Update: Mark is more generous to Mr Hannan. I disagree.

Labels: Bigotry, Conservatives, Health, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

We may be barely mid-way through August, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say we’ve already had the winner of this year’s “Silly Season” news stories. If you were listening to Radio 4 at about a quarter to eight yesterday morning, the Today Programme had a feature on the epidemiology of zombie movies, revealing that a zombie infestation would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless terminated with extreme prejudice. You can still hear it on iPlayer, but be careful – it’s followed by Anne Atkins on Thought For the Day, and she will eat your brains.

Zombies On The Today Programme: How Could They Tell?

Apparently, research carried out at two universities in Ottawa using mathematical models of epidemiology warned that the only language zombies understand is to cut their goolies off chop their heads off at once, rather than pussyfoot around looking for a cure or containing the infectees. Although one of the UK’s leading swine flu advisers purported to dismiss the findings as “a little over-pessimistic,” expect our panicking Labour Government to issue swine flu warnings shortly involving guillotines, though with the saving grace of too long a waiting list to give many people the chop.

Of course, there is an ultra-violent alternative to this nasty ultraviolence. As any fule kno, sending that wet liberal Judge Dredd off in an armoured killer-truck to deliver a vaccine to the infected will work just as well, provided he can avoid such deadly perils as US Army vampire robots – of which more later, in case you thought they weren’t real – and the even more terrifying copyright lawyers for McDonalds, Burger King and the Jolly Green Giant (I have those issues, though if you own any of the graphic novel reprints, you’ll find four episodes curiously missing).

You’ll no doubt be aware that news programmes are infamous for sexing up their reports and distorting perfectly sensible and serious scientific works, so here’s a link to the full report, the sober and respectable When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infestation. One of the authors is Professor Robert Smith? – question mark included – which may help explain the erratic punctuation of the otherwise dull and unobjectionable title.

This morning’s Today Programme was much less interesting; I switched on shortly after half-six to hear Evan Davis exclaim “-anker,” and cheerily assumed he’d finally taken his mission as Today’s sole interviewer who tells it as it is to its logical conclusion. But instead of telling a Labour minister what he thought of them, it turned out to be an item about tragedies in Sri Lanka, meaning I started my morning with the burden of guilt over inappropriate levity.

US Army Discovers Sustainability At Cyber’s Diner

Naturally, zombie research is far from the only “Silly Season” news story calling out for attention, but having precipitately offered the award, I should explain why I’ve ruled out two other obvious front-runners.

You might think that the clear favourite “Silly Season” story over the past few weeks is the thought that Peter Mandelson might become Prime Minster, but while in itself it’s absurd – OK, so he’s just about the only Labour minister who’s not a/ incompetent and b/ terrified right now, but he’s in the Lords until at the very least the General Election, probably for ever, he’s sufficiently hated in enough of the Labour Party that he could never win a Leadership election, and even Labour MPs aren’t stupid enough to inflict another unelected Leader on their party after how the current one’s turned out – many would object that the Government, while certainly stupid, are too dangerous to be labelled “Silly”. With the zombie infestation “New Labour” still pushing us very close to “the collapse of civilisation,” comparing so vile a condition to something as harmless as a world-threatening undead epidemic is in poor taste.

My favourite story of the “Silly Season” also has to be ruled out of contention for the “Silly” prize by virtue of being truly quite scary. In answer to the twin conundrums of soldiers’ body bags and climate change, the US Army has commissioned a battlefield robot. You know that episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa encourages a bankrupt Mr Burns to discover the effectiveness of recycling, with lucrative but horrific results? Well, imagine something probably less lucrative – except for the weapons manufacturers, natch – but far more horrific.

Yes, the US Army is looking to bring into service an “Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot,” or “EATR,” which can trundle around the battlefield killing people but, replacing soldiers, can’t be killed itself. And, to avoid wasteful fossil fuel use, it will run itself off organic matter that it finds lying about the battlefield.

Now, hands up at the back of the class anyone who can tell me a/ how likely it is to be able to distinguish civilians from combatants and b/ what the most prominent, juicily fuel-filled organic matter lying around any given battlefield will be? A clue to the latter: headlines like “Darpa’s Self-Feeding Sentry Robot Is Not A Man-Eater, Company Protests,” reminding me of nothing so much as Good King Yulfric the Wise the Third’s expostulation “The Evil Flesh-Eating Lord of Kraan is not a cannibal! I don’t know why everyone thinks he is!” from Hordes of the Things. The Guardian helpfully reported:

“‘We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,’ said Harry Schoell, the chief executive of Cyberdyne Power Technologies, one of the companies behind the machine.”

“That is not our mission”?! And, apparently, the EATR can be programmed not to recognise human flesh as a top source of nutrients. Well, I’m reassured.


If you want a break from all this real-world undead horror, tonight at 11pm BBC4 is broadcasting Gods and Monsters, a rather lovely and barbedly witty film about the last days of James Whale, one of Hollywood’s foremost filmmakers and homosexualists. Ian McKellen stars as Mr Whale, with the lovely Brendan Fraser as his incredibly buff gardener. Both actors are superb, in a film that covers 1950s mores, Hollywood hypocrisy, being out as gay fifty years before your time, the trenches of the First World War and the making of probably the finest film of the Twentieth Century, Bride of Frankenstein. While perhaps the key scene is the tragic revelation of the stroke-reduced limits of Mr Whale’s talents, and what they mean for the characters, I still fondly remember the way we hooted with laughter at the death scene, and how everyone else in the cinema looked round and glared at us. That’s the peril of going to an arthouse cinema to see what, despite the po-faced patrons, is – like Bride of Frankenstein – a comedy about death.

Labels: Comics, Frankenstein, Health, Labour, Radio, Stupid Ideas, Technology, The Today Programme

You’re rather brought down by the sad passing of the Queen of the Purple, Pink, Auburn, Green and Blue Rinse – and not by the “King of Pop”. Mollie Sugden’s Mrs Slocombe was a magnificent comic creation, always fighting her corner in Grace Brothers with a mixture of her usual assumed haughty grandeur and cutting asides in her real accent, and always vying with John Inman to steal the show in Are You Being Served?

“Before we go any further, Mr Rumbold, Miss Brahms and I would like to complain about the state of our drawers. They’re a positive disgrace.”
“Your what, Mrs Slocombe?”
“Our drawers. They’re sticking. It’s always the same in damp weather – Miss Brahms could hardly shift hers at all this morning. They sent up a man who put beeswax on them, but that didn’t work.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I think they need sandpapering.”
“Would that help, do you think?”
“I puffed French chalk on mine, and they’re smooth as silk.”
“Perhaps you could puff some French chalk over Mrs Slocombe’s.”
“Would that solve your problem, Mrs Slocombe?”
“They ought to be changed. I’ve had them ever since I’ve been here!”

Mrs Slocombe, Mr Rumbold, Miss Brahms and Mr Humphries, from – appropriately for today’s return to its straitened economic times – the Are You Being Served? episode Our Figures Are Slipping.

“I think it would pay us to examine our whole customer handling technique. And to that end, I shall be holding a course in salesmanship this evening, after the store closes.”
“You mean in our own time?”
“It’s very short notice. There’s my pussy to consider.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who’s going to let it out?”

It’s sad to see that Karl Malden went on the same day (I always remember him from Where the Sidewalk Ends, a favourite film noir), with both actors known for remarkably long-lasting marriages. Good for them. And who’d have thought Miss Brahms would go first?

If you’re wondering, the clips of Mrs Slocombe played on this morning’s Today Programme – including her exchange with the woman billed as The Large Brim With Fruit – were taken from the episode Camping In (naturally), which I found just after Our Figures Are Slipping on cranking up our steam-powered laserdisc player to watch our giant disc of Are You Being Served? last night.

She always did very well.

Labels: Comedy, Obituary, The Today Programme

Radio 4’s flagship is the Today Programme – the pips, the self-satisfied presenters, the ludicrous tangents, everything that makes anyone seriously interested in politics wake up shouting at the radio and want to throttle their wireless in the shower. But while today’s Today is being a prime example over the Speaker, there’s more to the station than that. Between 11 and 12 this morning, I’ll be listening to two quite different programmes: The Age of Ming, on the discrimination against Ming Campbell; and On the Outside, It Looked Like An Old-Fashioned Police Box, celebrating Target’s glorious Doctor Who book range.

Yesterday, I know everyone throughout the land was glued to the various forms of BBC news to find out who was going to be the new Speaker – well, a few dozen of us, anyway – and though the last round was in some ways less exciting than the others, an almighty sigh of relief already having gone up that ‘favourite’ Margaret Beckett had polled disastrously lower than predicted and was out of the running, I was still moderately pleased that John Bercow won. As I wrote yesterday, I’m not a big fan of the man… But, given that I was relatively pro three of the possible Speakers (the one I’d probably have voted for first, as predicted, bombed) and dead against six of the candidates, he at least was the one left in the middle that I was wary of but not implacably opposed to, so by default he’d have been my fourth choice.

For once, the aftermath of something in Parliament was more infuriating than the vote itself. Gordon Brown and Call-Me-Dave Cameron both made very House of Commons speeches: amusing in the way that after-dinner speakers who’ve never done it before are, lavishing praise and the odd barb (echoing each other in their nature, too), full of insincerity and the traditional Thing. Nick Clegg, I was relieved to hear, got a frostier reception by choosing not to be ‘a good House of Commons man’, instead focusing entirely not on appealing to MPs’ traditions or hurt feelings and instead on the need for reform – and how Speaker Bercow would have a fight on his hands, because the Commons isn’t naturally inclined that way.

But while the BBC’s online coverage included more from Nick from the other two – because it’s easier to quote something with a point than waffle – naturally the TV news had the other two… But not a word from him, because now they’re no longer bound by election laws of fair coverage, we don’t exist again. Still worse was Nick ‘Mate of Dave’ Robinson, who gave what was even for him an egregiously biased report straight from Conservative Central Office. It was all about how the poor Tories will have trouble with this ‘unknown’ Speaker and he’ll have to work hard to get them to like him. Not a word, as you may have expected, about the key difference between John Bercow and Sir George Young – about a reformer defeating a traditionalist, still less about him doing it by a reasonably large majority across all parties (a majority much bigger than anyone had predicted, suggesting quite a lot of Tories weren’t telling the truth about their votes). And if a Tory Government does come, an independent-minded Tory sounds a pretty good choice for Speaker, rather than a down-the-line well-behaved one, doesn’t it?

This morning’s Today Programme went one better. Not only was Nick ‘Mate of Dave’ Robinson giving it the same old schtick, but the programme’s prime slot just after 8.10 in the morning was given to Nadine Dorries. Nadine Dorries?! The minor Tory MP with a relentless drive for self-publicity, the one who’s always lying, cheating, being found guilty and then lying again that she’s been completely exonerated? The one colloquially known as “Mad Nad”? Yes, for some reason, the BBC thought she was the most important politician in the land this morning, spewing out the unrelenting and embittered poison of a very bad loser, and every time we heard her say “This is a factual statement,” the words ‘Honking great falsehood’ may as well have appeared in neon letters a metre high above our radio (hilariously, she called the election of an independent-minded member of her own party with a record of calling for change being elected instead of an anti-reform Etonian baronet who was deeply culpable in getting Parliament into that mess “sticking two fingers up at the British public”. Ms Dorries, l’État c’est ne pas toi). They didn’t even ask her whether her furious vitriol against Mr Bercow was anything to do with him being the main Tory speaker against her (losing) proposals to slash women’s abortion rights, which you might think would occur to a journalist doing their job. Then, for political balance, they had Alan Duncan – a Tory, half-defending a Tory, against a Tory. Good grief. Followed by Nick ‘Mate of Dave’ Robinson – a Tory, commenting from a Tory briefing on a Tory who was half-defending a Tory against a Tory.

It’s good to know the BBC represent views all across the political spectrums.

Hopefully, then, my faith in the channel will be rekindled at 11 this morning, when Robert Orchard is due to tell “the story of Sir Menzies Campbell’s battle to shake off media claims that he was too old for the job as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Robert asks how far it is acceptable for journalists to poke fun at someone on the grounds of age?” Well, better late than never, I suppose; apparently it takes about a year and a half to produce journalists’ crocodile tears (see the section “Leadership and the Media” in this piece from after the media forced Ming out, and try to ignore the rest). Actually, The Age of Ming might have me shouting at the radio as well…

Thank goodness, then, for something that should be really worth listening to. The Age of Ming is followed at 11.30am by On the Outside it Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box. Here’s what the Radio Times has to say:

“Back in the days before VHS, let alone DVD, the Doctor Who novelisations were the only way a fan could commit the Time Lord’s adventures to memory [mostly right, but have they not heard of nightmares?]. With a child’s big-budget imagination filling in for wobbly sets and monsters, the books became a bestselling phenomenon for publisher Target. Here, Mark Gatiss wallows in some paperback nostalgia as he pays tribute to such authors as Terrance Dicks, Malcolm Hulke and Philip Hinchcliffe [surely Ian Marter] - writers who taught many (thanks to the Who house style) the meaning of the words “capacious”, “crotchety” and “bohemian”, and ended up shaping a whole generation of young readers.”

I learned to read on Target Books, and have written reviews both of whole bunches at a time and individual stories, so I’ll certainly be glued to the set and hoping they don’t make a mess of it. As BBC Audiobooks have now started putting out complete readings on CD – among the best releases so far are Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, Anneke Wills’ reading of my first ever book, and the rather lovely three-book boxed set Travels in Time and Space – I hope to hear clips of some of those readings coming up in the programme…


For your other viewing pleasure, you might like to try tuning in to ITV4 today at 10.50am – or 2.55 this afternoon, it’s the same episode – for The Prisoner in Dance of the Dead, arguably the best of the series. In some ways, it’s a good one for beginners; by our reckoning, despite always being broadcast eighth, in the running order that makes the most sense (key word: “most”) it’s the second one. On the other hand, it’s one of the barking mad ones, though some way from the most barking mad (key word…).

Patrick McGoohan is terrific in it, but the show’s stolen by Mary Morris, by a long way my favourite Number 2: small, elfin, but utterly dominant – one of the few who gives the impression she knows what’s actually going on rather than just being a jumped-up prisoner herself. You’ll get brain control, disillusioned spies, spooky cats, flirty maids and washed-up bodies on the beach… Then it gets stranger. The climax involves a change of identity for the body, Number 6 unwittingly adopting his own fancy dress, and a carnival that becomes a court staged as a cabaret, featuring a grotesque twist and ending in mob hysteria. It’s a surreal and high-concept episode, teetering on but not quite yet completely mad. That it’s played with such conviction by such superb actors makes it all rather threatening, and compelling fun. It’s even got music from The Tomb of the Cybermen in it, too.

Labels: Bigotry, Books, British Politics, Conservatives, Doctor Who, History, Nick Clegg, Radio, The Prisoner, The Today Programme

Nick Clegg had an impressive day yesterday, breaking a 314-year Parliamentary convention to call for the worst Commons Speaker in living memory to go. He was very effective on re-establishing our anti-establishment credentials, but there are still big questions that need asking, and answering, and quickly – not just the Liberal Democrats in general, not just the House of Commons, but specifically the Leader, our Parliamentary Parties, and the Federal Executive this afternoon. Replacing the dodgy rules so far, what should better rules look like? And what’s to be done about people who’ve already taken the loot (and the piss)?

First of all, congratulations to Nick. Yesterday, he really found his voice. I thought he had a ropey week last week; there’s no doubt that the Liberal Democrats were the least dodgy of MPs, but we neither built on nor capitalised on that for most of the time. Several of our MPs were completely open with their expenses, having published them all months ago – why didn’t Nick order all of them to do it, especially as they were coming out anyway? Were the Commons and Lords Parliamentary Parties simply paralysed with fear, or hoping the Torygraph wouldn’t find something? Why didn’t we find the right medium between ‘we’re sorry some MPs took too much’ and ‘come on, a feather duster’s not in the same league as a moat and a flipping great fraud, is it’, when even Jeremy-A-Million-Of-Your-Taxpayers’-Pounds-Paxman could say it? Why did anyone let Ming Campbell go on Question Time and get himself in a complete Eric Pickle? And why didn’t Nick announce in advance of the Torygraph’s Lib Dem revelations that anyone who’d made off with a hefty amount of money they shouldn’t have would be for the high jump – again, we all knew something was coming, yet we’ve been stuck in the embarrassing position of sounding less strict than David Cameron, who seized the initiative paradoxically because moats and mansions and tennis courts were far more corrupt than anything of any Lib Dem MP, and so he could be seen to take harsh action.

Calling for the Speaker to go, though, was exactly the right thing to do, and brave – after all, the Speaker has near-unlimited power to fuck a party over in the Commons. And, despite my utter contempt for Mr Martin, who combines all the worst traits of an exclusive old gentleman’s club chairman and an old restricted-practices trade union shop steward, and who is both rubbish and partisan, Nick was entirely right in sticking to the issue rather than having a go at the Speaker personally. And if you listened to the Today Programme this morning, he was boosted enormously by the grumpy Scottish Labour MP who made wild personal attacks on Nick and everyone who had criticised the Speaker, which probably sounded like a defence to him but sounded to me and I imagine the vast majority of listeners like a corrupt old numpty incriminating the Speaker further with every word.

If they do get rid of him, by the way, who should be the new Speaker? Tradition means Buggins’ Turn, and some old grandee. That is exactly the wrong way to go. Instead, the Liberal Democrats should refuse to support anyone who’s been an MP for more than two or three Parliaments, on the grounds that they’ve gone hopelessly native. Not Ming (fat chance now), not Alan Beith (bless him), not Nick Harvey (have you crawled into a ball of embarrassment when he’s popped up to defend the status quo, too?). It should be someone with a proven track record of calling for and voting for reform before it was fashionable, if Parliament’s to crawl back to any sort of credibility at all. Richard suggested Norman Baker to me this morning (update: and Millennium makes the case for him, as well as having much to say about the whole scandal); I have to admit, he’d be great at it, but I don’t want us to lose one of our best attacking MPs. I don’t know who I’d trust, but – breaking my own rule here within a paragraph – I’ve seen Frank Field’s name being floated about, and though personally I don’t want to see his face on TV even more than it is now, he does seem to have credibility with a lot of the media, and that might help rebuild some trust in democracy, which is the most important thing right now. Plus, it’d stop him bashing immigrants and poor people, so that’d be a bonus.

I wish that a member of the House of Lords I’d have trusted with my life as well as my money, my old friend Conrad Russell, were still alive. With the prospect of the first peers to be excluded from the Lords since the time of Cromwell and the first Speaker to be dragged from his chair since 1690, the brilliant 17th Century historian would be having a field day. And though Conrad and I might have inclined on different ways over the British Civil Wars, we’d agree – or, rather, he made the case and convinced me of it – that the Liberal Democrats’ ‘family history’ begins in the 17th Century, with the desire to limit and oversee arbitrary power. That’s what this is all about – people had the power to do something, so a lot of them did it.

No, They’re Not All On the Take

Of course it’s not every MP, nor every peer, still less every politician. Most of the time I regret that my long-term ill health means I can’t stand for Parliament any more. The last couple of weeks? Well, they’ve been enormously depressing, but they’ve not made me miss it. People long said that all politicians are corrupt – and most those of us in politics have long been frustrated, because it's not true of us and we have to fight against that perception as we pour all our time and effort and, yes, money into trying to get things done. After the last few weeks, everyone just thinks they’ve been proved right all along. It’ll be an absolute bloody nightmare for the thousands of honest, hard-working political activists knocking on doors. I remember all the people on the doorstep who assumed that every politician was wallowing in their riches, and that the second-most aggravating question – after ‘But aren’t you going to come third?’ – was all the people who asked how much I got paid as a Parliamentary candidate. No, not a penny of your money, and not a penny of the party’s, either – if you’re a candidate, all the money goes down an enormous funnel the other way, you stupid prat, and how about getting off your arse and doing something rather than just complaining? As I can say now, given that of course I’m no longer standing.

While I can intellectually understand how much of this happened – that allowances grew far beyond what they should have because wages were held down, in a clever dodge by Mrs Thatcher to massage the figures on MPs’ pay in exactly the same way she brought relatively fit people onto incapacity benefit at a slightly higher rate than if they were classed as unemployed, as a silent deal to keep the unemployment figures down – emotionally I can also say, to every MP that has been on the take, I hate you, because you’ve confirmed every prejudice, brought all the rest of us into disrepute and made the task of changing absolutely anything in this country that much harder.

But though not every MP’s been on the make, the ones who have fit precisely into what Liberal Democrats have been saying for years. Not just that ours are more honest than the others by a mile – though that’s now been proven even if you take some of the Torygraph’s desperate partisan smear jobs to make it look like we’re just as bad at face value – but that this has been boosted by the way the whole corrupt, inward-looking political system works. Liberal Democrats have been arguing for decades for better freedom of information; well, look how the whole system explodes when we get it, even if the Torygraph ironically won’t be free with the information about how they got it, because they were paying crooks. I can't criticise them too much, though, because without their dodgy pay-offs, we’d never have found out about the most crooked of all the widespread practices – “flipping” second home allowances to pay out for house after house in turn.

Liberal Democrats have been arguing for decades that the electoral system isn’t just unfair to people’s party preferences, but doles out safe seats that mean worse MPs – well, look, Mark has analysed the minority of crooked MPs and found that, who’d have thought it, they’re very much more likely to be crooked if they have ultra-safe seats and regard themselves as ‘untouchable’. Costigan reminds us that, with elections via the single transferable vote, we don’t support top-down proportional representation but giving people the choice to sling out an individual MP but still keep their party. You want to know how to make STV ‘sexy’? Tell people to imagine if a General Election were held like that tomorrow! And, tying in with all that (and, hurrah, a party leader agreeing with some of what I said in my first conference speech, half my life ago), Nick yesterday was also calling for MPs that are guilty of misconduct to be subject to recall by their constituents – so, if they don’t like the one they’ve got, they can take it back and get a new one.

That’s all well and good, but it isn’t all. There are still awkward questions to be asked, and some of them are very hard even for Liberal Democrats.

What Awkward Questions Do We Still Need To Ask?

Everyone agrees that the rules so far have been dodgy and need changing. Fine. But the single line most likely to make an ordinary, mild-mannered citizen march on one of their MPs’ homes with a blazing torch is ‘It was within the rules’. No, no, no. Fuck, and indeed, off.

First point: any Liberal Democrat Parliamentarian should be banned by the Chief Whip from using those words.

Second, as any fule kno, it doesn’t matter a toss what the rules were if what you were doing was wrong.

Third, that means we have to consider what to do about what Parliamentarians have done under the existing rules, whether they broke them or kept them, as well as work out what the new rules should be.

I don’t have all the answers, but if there’s one thing Liberalism’s about even more than binding arbitrary power, it’s asking questions. Here are a few we should ask…

So far, a substantial minority of MPs seem to have asked the not-too-difficult questions:

• Is it within the egregiously lax rules?

• If it isn’t, will the Fees Office let me do it anyway?

And, now they’ve been found out, too many of their ‘It was within the rules’ defenders are trying to restrict any comeback to the very lame:

• Is it blatant fraud?

On the other hand, the public mood is to ask just one question:

• Are they all crooks?

With the inbuilt answer, Yes / Yes, do not delete either option.

So here are a few ideas to focus our minds on what expenses should be permissible in the future, and a yardstick for judging what people have done in the past, finding a happy medium between:

• Does this still enable the MP or peer to do their job properly?

• Does this get the taxpayer value for money?

• Will a typical member of the public want to jab a pitchfork into the MP or peer for it?

Perhaps the central question is:

• Is this taking the piss?

A few quick thoughts of answers would be that MPs from outside of easy travel of Westminster – and thank fuck every Liberal Democrat MP in London refused to take the second homes allowance, while the Tories and Labour kept their snouts down – should certainly have somewhere to stay but, as Nick Clegg has been saying, they shouldn’t be allowed to make any profit from it. Where there is any, that should all go to the taxpayer. Flats or houses, though; it’d be daft to say it has to be hotels only while the House is sitting. Not only are hotels a lot more expensive, but imagine doing your job while moving house a dozen times a year…

What I don’t think the party’s been saying, but which we should have been since the days of Derek Conway, is that no MPs should be allowed to have a member of their family working for them. Sorry, but no. Yes, most of the time it’s probably better value for money, and it’s good for keeping relationships together, but people just won’t stand for it any more. It looks like it stinks even when it’s a good deal, so it has to stop. But, on the good side, at least all this orgy of castigation over MPs’ allowances in the last couple of weeks has had so much to feed on that they’ve not been carrying on that crazy media idea of counting all the MPs’ employees and offices as ‘perks’ rather than, er, people doing jobs and a place to do them.

And, of course, all our Parliamentary candidates should have to sign up to our own, very strict, rules, before they can stand under the Liberal Democrat label.

Now for the really hard part.

Without getting into all the detail on named individuals – because I don’t know it all, and I don’t trust everything I read in the papers – the people who are going to have to decide about people who have been named in the papers have to do something. It isn’t an option to say ‘They were within the rules’.

So what questions do Nick Clegg, do the Commons and Lords Parliamentary Parties, and do the Federal Executive this afternoon have to ask?

• First, of course, as above, would any reasonable person think you were taking the piss?

• Is what was said in the paper true, and if not, can you prove otherwise?

• How do we balance being fair and proportionate with being fast?

I’ve not read the full Bones Commission on reforming the Liberal Democrats’ internal structures. Sorry and all that, but I’m a policy wonk, not a process wonk. Still, people who have are saying it provides for setting up some sort of audit body that can investigate people’s actions, so we should get those going pronto.

For people who have taken the piss, we need to ask further questions:

• What level of taking the piss is acceptable?

• Is fraud on a large scale the only thing to really get people on?

• Are big luxury items too bad to be borne?

• Is even a few quid misspent at our expense too much? Remember, the single item that’s caused the most public outrage was a tenner on porn.

And then, what sanctions are appropriate?

• Paying the money back and apologising?

• Losing your frontbench position?

• Losing the Liberal Democrat Whip?

• Being expelled from the party for bringing it into disrepute?

Basically, we’re a party of the Rule of Law. It’s pretty much our founding ideal – it’s how we control abuses of power. So we should set out those questions above before we get onto the individuals.

I frequently argue on this blog that laws are there to protect nasty people as well as nice ones. That rights aren’t rights if they only apply to people you like.

Well, the converse of that is also true. Laws have to apply to nice people as well as nasty ones.

There are some of the Parliamentarians who’ve been attacked who I know and like; there are some I know less or don’t like all that much. In a semi-judicial enquiry, that can’t matter. The purpose of all this is not to clear their names, but to clear ours – to make sure that the Liberal Democrats as a whole will deal with dodgy actions if they’re found to have taken place. I’ve had friends who’ve gone into court, and I’ve stood by them and hoped they weren’t going to be guilty. But I wouldn’t have smuggled them out of the country or perjured myself just because they were my friends.

Some of them might be easy. When I heard from the Torygraph, for example, that Andrew George was said to have bought a flat for his daughter with taxpayers’ money, I had one simple question: ‘Were you living there to do your job as an MP, or was it just a student flat?’ And the very next day, yes, it was where he lived to attend the House of Commons, it was a small rather than luxury flat, and he’d even paid for a third of it himself to make sure it was above board. So who the hell should care about who lives there, unless they were claiming any money too?

Some of the accusations of spending money wildly are more difficult, and it’d be easier for the Leader or the Federal Executive to close their eyes and hope it all goes away. They can’t, and it won’t. The biggest two, obviously, are Ming Campbell and the one who most people outside the Liberal Democrats won’t have heard of, Chris Rennard. I have a huge amount of respect for Ming, but one of his drawbacks is that he’s been in the House of Commons a long time and has taken on too much of its culture – he was a disaster on Question Time last week, not because he was corrupt, but because he simply didn’t understand what the fuss was about. And Chris Rennard, a Liberal Democrat peer, for a long time the party’s elections guru and now its Chief Executive, is the person named in all of this that I’ve known for longest and admire the most. I have both a tribal and a personal loyalty to him and I really, really hope that he has a good explanation for what the News of the Screws – a paper I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw Chris and a vanful of Focus leaflets – said about his second home. I hope he comes out of it fine, and people who’ve always had it in for him who’re saying he should be sacked on the spot really aren’t helping. But for anyone – anyone – who really has spent a large amount of taxpayers’ money that they shouldn’t? The MPs got rid of Charles Kennedy, and while over the years I’ve gradually accepted that that was the right decision, I think the public’s far more tolerant of alcoholism than shopping sprees with the public’s credit cards, still less fraud.

Any investigation can’t be a witch-hunt – but it all has to happen if we’re to live up to our ideals of openness, honesty and controlling arbitrary power.

And, above all, it has to be fast. Because people’s patience is at an end.


Apologies for this article being less discursive than usual, and for a lack of links (other than the two I particularly remembered). Two reasons: for the last couple of weeks I’ve been rather ill, having carried back lurgies generously offered to me by my Mum and younger niece on a family visit, and right now my head’s feeling particularly full of cheese; and, also for the last couple of weeks, my Internet connection’s been a bit poorly, too. My computer’s managed to get online just twice in the last week, and while Richard’s gets through more often, typing on it knackers my back and hand – so going between computers with a data stick isn’t the best way to refer to sources.

Now more Lemsip, and back to bed.

Labels: British Politics, Conrad Russell, Corruption, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

Christmas is, more than any time of year, the season when Christianity gets a good press. Huge numbers of people who have no time for churches for eleven months simply like the Victorian traditions and warm, fuzzy bits of the Christmas story. I’m no longer a believer (sorry, Mum and Dad), but last night I was typing to a CD of A Carol Symphony (or ‘that music from The Box of Delights’). So what could possibly go wrong for Christianity at this festive time? Turning on the radio this morning and hearing the Pope and the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool – I’m an ecumenical critic.

If there’s one thing more likely to alienate people from Christianity at Christmas than the Daily Mail shrieking that the true meaning of Christmas has been lost (in between shrieking that there’s chaos / penury on the high street, and promoting its advertisers), it’s pontiffs pontificating, particularly in ways that are self-seeking, un-self-aware and, most of all, stridently attacking love and ordering people about.

Oh, No, Not the Pope Again

Imagine the winces around the breakfast tables of British Christendom, then, when this morning brings news that the Pope chooses Christmas to attack gays and transsexuals and anyone who doesn’t fit, by nature or choice, into his prescribed worldview of sex. Hey ho. Well, we all know the old fascist has a problem there. He’s been queerbashing for years, and we bash the bishop in return. No-one can ever believe that “love” is the founding belief of this loathsome bigot. Admittedly, this morning he’s trying to reach a new low in offensiveness, arguing that people who don’t procreate (and he doesn’t recognise that that’s not all of us anyway) will destroy humanity. As Mr Quist (another fan of Christmas) points out this morning, for the leader of the Catholic Church, this is in so many ways shaky ground. But perhaps I’ve misjudged him. Maybe he was just trying to prepare the ground for his softer side. Is there something you want to tell us, your holiness? Will the New Year bring the patter of little Benedicts?

Using Dead Children To Protect Your Job

Just this once, though, I found an Anglican Bishop far more offensive than Pope Benedict; after all, I’ve had years to get used to the old bigot. If you can stomach it, then, tune in to this morning’s Today Programme and find, from around ten to eight, Thoughtless For the Day, in which the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool starts off merely by being overpoetic and then uses a boy’s murder to make special pleading against disestablishing the Church of England. A more gut-wrenching piece of opportunism is hard to imagine: ‘Save my stipend, or the little babies will get it!’ Of particular note was his one, hurried reference to a Catholic priest who was also involved; because, as is well known, there’s hardly a Catholic to be found in Liverpool, and Catholic churches can’t survive without being organs of the state. Anyone would think that would completely undermine his special pleading. Still, it’s hardly the first time shameless clerics have stood on kids to assert their special rights.

Special Rights To Discriminate Not Popular In Court Shocker

In happier news, then, last week fulminating bigot and hypocrite Lillian Ladele had her demand for special rights over anyone else rejected on appeal. She’d claimed against Islington Council, her secular employer with responsibility for representing all citizens in the borough, that her own personal religious whims should allow her to pick and choose which bit of her secular job to bother to do and which citizens to decide to reject. A registrar, she’d refused to officiate over civil partnerships, claiming this was because her Christian beliefs meant that marriage could only be for one man and one woman, for life. Aside from the fact that, sadly, civil partnerships aren’t marriages, she blatantly perjured herself by having had no problem in marrying divorcees. Oh, but they’re different – they’re not dirty gayers, as her highly-funded-by-extremist-Christians lawyer coached her not to say.

As the lovely Cosmodaddy points out, Ms Ladele was time and again offered compromises by the Council, but she decided that her knee-jerk desire to treat people unequally was so important that the basic element of the Rule of Law that everyone should be treated equally under the law was in fact a Liberal conspiracy to discriminate against her, personally. How the original court case didn’t tell her she was not only wrong but a barking egomaniac is a mystery, but thankfully the Employment Appeal Tribunal decided that her claims were obvious nonsense. As usual, it’s religious bigots calling for special rights for themselves to take rights away from gay, lesbian and bisexual people. After all, can you imagine a court ever siding with a lesbian registrar refusing to marry Christians because they’re against her beliefs, or a Grand Wizard of the KKK in obeying his sincerely held belief that mixed-race marriages are morally wrong? If you want to be a bigot, do it on your own time.

Contrast these quotes. First, the astonishing lies from her lawyer:

“She wants to make it clear that, whatever other commentators may have said, this case has never been an attempt to undermine the rights of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender communities.
“The evidence showed that Lillian performed all of her duties to the same high standard for the lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender communities, as she did for everyone.”

Except for not touching them with a barge pole and refusing to do her job, obviously. To be fair, she was at least undiscriminating enough to accept gay council tax-payers’ contributions to her pay.

Then there was Justice Sir Patrick Elias, President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal, pointing out the “fundamental problem” with the original ruling that there had been religious discrimination (if a little unfair to anarchists):

“Let’s say I am an anarchist and I feel strongly that I want to go around blowing things up, but my employers object.
“It may well be that anarchy is my genuinely held belief. But it does not mean that my employer’s decision not to allow me to is discriminating against that belief.”

A Merry Christmas to all of you at home, and goodwill to all people, including the ones that self-styled Christians shriek false witness against, and here’s a seasonal song for you all.

Labels: Bigotry, Gay, Religion, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

Packed with great stories, this is possibly Doctor Who’s most brilliant year: three-year-old me starts watching with Tom Baker’s debut story, Robot; The Ark In Space and The Sontaran Experiment give me wonderful far-future nightmares; Terror of the Zygons brings the best-ever one-off monster; deep space Planet of Evil and historical Pyramids of Mars pleasurably terrify me; even The Doctor Who Monster Book is published. And some say the Time War starts with:

Genesis of the Daleks

“Yes… I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods! And through the Daleks, I shall have that power!”

A superbly filmed and scored war story, peppered with enthralling speeches. Perhaps the Doctor’s sharpest moral dilemma is whether to destroy the Daleks at their birth, but this is essentially the story of Davros, a fascist with depth and intelligence, who engineers his own destruction.


The most-repeated, most-released Doctor Who story of all, it’s not hard to track this one down, whether it’s second-hand copies of the several editions of the VHS, the book, the script book or the 60-minute audio version I played constantly on LP, then cassette, now CD (did anyone record the 90-minute edit they showed in the ’80s? I’d like to see that) – and, of course, the DVD, two discs filled with documentary goodies. It’s one of the best ones to buy, either on its own or in the Davros Collection.

Labels: Bigotry, Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, Music, Personal, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, Speeches, The Brigadier, The Today Programme, Tom Baker, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

As Labour ministers go, I’ve often found Alan Johnson one of the more tolerable ones. He can come across as a human being, and even on occasion answers the question. So in many ways I’d rather not have heard his interview with Eddie Mair on PM earlier, where Mr Johnson was an unspeakably smug shit, far more interested in partisan point-scoring than in helping people with mental health problems. He patently just didn’t give a toss about mental health, smug, dismissive and bringing up an issue which has been shamefully ignored by Labour only to attack hapless Tory Andrew Lansley.

Andrew Lansley Puts His Foot In It Again

You may have heard that Tory health spokesperson Mr Lansley’s made a ‘gaffe’, which is the term for when a politician opens their mind and their mouth at the same time. In a piece he wrote about the probable mental health effects of a deep recession, he made an aside to the effect that some people might become physically more healthy, as they can less afford to drink, smoke and eat rich food. On the one hand, you can understand what he means; think of all those programmes about how healthy people were during rationing. On the other hand, what about people who because they can’t afford to eat well just get any old cheap crap, or people who are so depressed that they drink or smoke more to cope? I know that, stuck at home, unwell and getting little exercise, I’ve been Mr Comfort-eating and have put on masses of weight this year. But if Mr Lansley was dimly not considering all the effects, at least his main focus was on real health problems that the Labour Government’s done fuck all about, and if he was offensive and didn’t put enough thought in… Well, he may be a lot less bright than Sir Keith Joseph, but at least he’s far less offensive.

The reaction, of course, has been predictable. Labour has screamed that this callous, vicious Tory is so out of touch he’s preaching that the recession can be good for you. The BBC news page has ignored that most of what he wrote was about mental health. And the Tory Party has made him apologise and take down his article. While I think Mr Lansley was a bit out of touch and didn’t think through his point, I feel a lot more sympathy with him than with some of his attackers, particularly when mental health is something Labour has spent so many years underfunding and ignoring, presumably because mental health patients don’t look so good in a sympathetic photo-opportunity. It’s something Nick Clegg in particular has been banging on about for ages – in speeches as Leader, in his Leadership campaign last year, repeatedly in Prime Minister’s Questions – and so hearing Mr Johnson’s crocodile tears on PM today just drove me up the wall.

Alan Johnson and Labour Hypocrisy

The BBC went quite some way towards atoning for their online story with an intelligent and searching interview from Eddie Mair on PM tonight. The Tories wouldn’t put anyone up (though someone dragged out Edwina Currie). And Alan Johnson was detestable. After years of being so desperate to sound and act exactly like Tories, Labour are now gagging to refight the 1980s with a cry of ‘We might be crap, but the Tories are eeevil and they just love unemployment’ – yes, I can see how they want to damage Mr Cameron’s ‘caring’ brand, but the ’80s went so well for them, didn’t they?

Mr Johnson did the job he’s employed for – not speaking for the interests of sick people, that would be absurd, but laying into the Tories. He said he was trying to be kind to Mr Lansley, as he was sure he was a decent human being… But he’s proof that the Tories are eeevil and they just love unemployment (I paraphrase, but not by much). In a hammily ‘more in sorrow than anger’ tone, he ignored the question about physical health, talking about the terrible consequences of an economic downturn on mental health, then also ignored the point that Mr Lansley had raised that before he did when it was rightly put to him by Eddie Mair.

My stomach was already turning through all this, but that point at which I really became furious was when, after Mr Mair pressed him on the fact that there are huge waiting lists to see any sort of counsellor and that more people with mental health problems are just shoved full of anti-depressants, Mr Johnson became loathsomely smug. He boasted that, far from there being any problem with mental health provision, Labour was recruiting an extra 3,000 mental health professionals (though of what kind, and at what charge to patients, and whether full- or part-time, he didn’t say). Well, that’s good news, and it’s only taken them eleven years to notice the problem. But, hang on… I noticed, and I’m glad that Mr Mair did too, that Mr Johnson was boasting that the Labour Government had already planned for and started hiring these people.

Eddie Mair asked Alan Johnson, flat out, how the system would possibly cope if they were only just hiring people to cope with the crisis in mental health provision that already exists, but the recession’s just about to create a surge of people with mental health problems. We’ll have enough people, said Mr Johnson, bored now, we’ve planned for it. In a tone of incredulity, Mr Mair asked, “So you factored in the effect of the recession before you knew there’d be one?” But Mr Johnson just brushed it aside in the most bored, complacent, utterly smug answer I’ve heard even from a Labour Minister in a long time, just repeating languidly “Yes, of course” that there would be enough people to cope. When he evidently doesn’t have a clue, and doesn’t give a toss, the unspeakable shit. He may as well just have held up a sign saying, ‘Look, bored now, I don’t really give a toss about this issue, can’t we get back to the main topic which is that Tories are eeevil and never mind the small print?’

This, on the same day that Health Minister – oh, look – Alan Johnson has decided that, rather than doctors issuing sick notes to say how ill someone is, because their professional training is to make diagnosis of health problems, they must from now on issue “Fit Notes” to say what people can work at. Because, obviously, making doctors benefits enforcers is in no way a conflict of interest that might get in the way of them helping people to get better, and GPs are in no way busy, and have nothing better to do than be amateur work counsellors writing out long lists of possibilities. Presumably it’ll let Labour cut the jobs of people who are actually skilled in working out what work people can do, though, so they’ll see this eye-boggling stupidity as an efficiency gain.

Work To Rule

This latest piece of authoritarian drivel from a Labour Government intent on turning every organ of the state into a petty, prying, suspicious boss that orders us into what it thinks is good for us is all of a piece with what’s been Gordon Brown’s big idea since he first became Chancellor, and which is now exploding more out of control than ever before. He sincerely believes in the morally improving nature of work. So, it follows, everyone not in work is immoral. Look at the stigmatisation of benefits and the beneficence of tax credits, twisting people through every possible hoop to spoon out a pittance to working people and not the sick or the unemployed or the otherwise undeserving poor (choosing your own life? Pah!).

It’s Labour’s rule that you must work, or you must be Frowned at. The Tories simply hate the poor; Labour hate the ‘undeserving’ poor. With such a choice, it’s difficult not to hate both of those parties, isn’t it?

I didn’t write about it at the time, but the last Labour Minister interview that really infuriated me was with James Purnell, on the Today Programme towards the end of last week; of course, that was with John Humphrys, so it had the added difficulty that the interviewer was offensively smug and stupid as well. This one was about the Labour Government cracking down on people so evil as to be on benefits, forcing them to find work or have their already poverty-line benefits cut by 40% (40% below the minimum for survival!) if they were ill, or parents, or other such unproductive malingerers. The Labour Government’s own advisers had just told them that, in a recession when unemployment is spiralling, enforcing their moral views on parents was a luxury that no-one could afford, would cause more poverty and made no sense, so why not put it off so that people desperate for jobs can compete in the crapulent job market – a close friend of mine, for example, had a business that went under earlier this year after a decade of trading, and despite hundreds of applications still hasn’t managed to find a job – while parents who want to look after their kids can actually do that, which is also something positive for society? No, said Mr Purnell, he was having none of it; people really wanted jobs, and the Labour Government would help them attain that wish they didn’t know they had on pain of death. But what about there being no jobs, because unemployment’s spiralling? No, said Mr Purnell, people want to work, it won’t be put off (it didn’t help that Mr Humphrys said that, of course, no reasonable person could disagree with these proposals in better times, a statement so breathtakingly offensive that it had me wanting to hit the radio so hard that it might knock some sense into him). But what about parents who were concerned that their kids would grow up better if someone was there to look after them, and didn’t want to be forced away from their kids and into work? No, said Mr Purnell, people want to work, it won’t be put off. But what about there being less than a hundredth the childcare places needed with so many more children unable to be looked after at home? No, said Mr Purnell, people want to work, it won’t be put off. Seriously, it was like there was a string in his back.

And all because Gordon Brown, moralising workaholic that he is, demands that only people in work have any virtue, that scrubbing a loo in McDonalds is infinitely more rewarding than making your child smile. If there wasn’t such a shortage of mental health professionals, I’d suggest he gets his head examined.

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Health, Labour, Nick Clegg, The Today Programme