"With a Heavy Heart, and in the UK's National Interest"

Am I really the only person who can see the elephant that fills the proverbial living room as we crank our necks around it to watch the dying throes of the UK’s longest ever election campaign on our television screens this evening?

Much energy has been expended discussing the prospect of anything between 35 and 59 SNP Members of Parliament holding the balance of power, and what an outrage it would be to have Scottish MPs that nobody in England voted for legislating for the whole of the UK in a way that only English parties that nobody in Scotland voted for should be permitted to do. In the constitutional fog that has been visited upon us from Alba we could be excused for forgetting that the Liberal Democrats had ever existed.

And yet in spite of their low poll ratings, the Lib Dems look good for maybe 25 to 30 seats as they fight a rearguard action in their areas of strength whilst remaining content to battle it out with Bus Stop Elvis in the remainder. Thirty seats of course is less than the SNP is expected to receive, but probably enough if combined with either of the major parties to be able to outvote the other one.

NEW DYNAMIC

It occurs to me that, with the SNP having pledged to do nothing to help put the Tories back into office, a new dynamic has been created which moves the hitherto forgotten Liberal Democrats very much centre stage.

Assuming (as we shouldn’t, but for the purposes of this article we must) an outcome tomorrow which is something akin to what we have been seeing in the opinion polls, a 30-seat Lib Dem premium added to either the Tory or the Labour total would, discarding for the moment other parties, give the beneficiary a numerical advantage over its competitor. For whatever reason the assumption would appear to be being made that the Lib Dems will line up with the Tories. But if the combined total number of seats won by Labour and the SNP was to exceed the combined total for the Tories and Lib Dems (possibly fortified by those of the DUP and/or UKIP) then both Tories and Lib Dems would suddenly find themselves powerless. And powerless is not what Nick Clegg aspires to be.

If, on the other hand, the Lib Dems were to throw their lot in with Labour in what would probably still be a minority coalition, it kind of dares the SNP to line up with the Tories or face being effectively airbrushed from the picture. Abstaining on votes would not be enough. In order to defeat the (Lab-LD) government on any vote the SNP and the Tories would have to join forces, if only on an ad hoc basis and strictly for the purpose of.

Would the Liberal Democrats abandon their present course and join with Labour instead? There are a number of catalysts which have the potential to unite to bring this about, the first being the Tories’ proposed EU referendum which is being touted as a red line issue for the Tories in any potential future negotiations. As the most Euro-friendly amongst the parties this cannot be an easy one for the Libs. Labour, taking the opposite position, may have more appeal.

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

And then there is the question of proportional representation. A major negotiating chip for Nick Clegg in the coalition talks of 2010, he somehow allowed David Cameron to schmooze him into accepting the half-arsed Alternative Vote option as an acceptable substitute and then suffered the indignity of watching his coalition partner rubbish it as being, well, a half-arsed alternative, at the ensuing referendum. Although Labour is, on balance, opposed to PR (and for pretty much the same self-serving reasons as the Tories), there is a substantial body of opinion within the party – including, significantly, Ed Miliband – which sees things differently, looking upon PR as having the potential to rally progressive voting support under one roof, thereby providing a near-guarantee against a conservative majority at any time in the future.

Informed opinion has it that Nick Clegg, as Leader of the Liberal Democrats, is instinctively more comfortable around the Tories than he would be with the Labour Party. This could help to explain why reports from Clegg’s constituency in Sheffield Hallam are strongly predicting widespread tactical voting for Clegg from Tory supporters as a counter to a strong electoral challenge from Labour. But were Clegg to lose his seat, or were he to be ousted through an internal coup as soon as the new Parliament is formed, his successor might well be less wedded to the Tories in any event.

Other Lib Dem “red lines” might not prove insurmountable. Clegg has thus far promised more in increased funding to the NHS than has Miliband, but then Miliband has already told us he wishes to be a Prime Minister who “under-promises and over-achieves”. More spending on the NHS is unlikely to be a cause for violent protests from traditional Labour supporters. The Lib Dems also insist upon lifting more of the lower-paid out of tax, which is a euphemism for saying that for an ever-greater number of people wages should be kept so low that their tax contributions will not be missed. As we move towards a society in which “Minimum Wage” effectively becomes the wage that almost everybody can expect to earn, Labour is already doing its bit to manage expectations by raising it to a marginally more generous level.

LEGITIMACY

Which leaves Clegg’s obsession with “legitimacy”, a term which he treats as being synonymous with a party having won the largest number of seats, surely a peculiar position for an opponent of First Past The Post to take. Most of the polls seem to have the Tories slightly ahead in this regard, although unlike Ed’s promises it is far from being carved in stone. But his policy is only to speak to the largest party first, not necessary to ally himself with that party. If a better deal can be made with the second largest party we can bet our bottom euro that is where the Lib Dems will be heading.

When all is said and done the clincher could well be that by allying himself with Labour, and in so doing rescuing Ed Miliband from the indignity of having to depend on the hated SNP for support, Clegg could consider himself to be “acting in the UK’s national interest”, much indulging his penchant for striking a lofty pose. The elephant in my living room tells me that this is a prospect he will find difficult to resist.

Meantime the reaction of the Scottish voters to having been stitched up a second time is unlikely to differ very much from the first. The case for independence will become incontestable. The case for change moves ever forward.

Postponed Until Further Notice? The Fight for Democracy and Social Justice

I’ve been spending rather too much of my time of late on social media, involving myself in arguments of varying degrees of ferocity and passion about the upcoming general election.

Not being involved in anybody’s campaign for once, and having no real enthusiasm for any of the leading contestants, the sensible thing for me to have done would probably have been to have put my feet up, sent off my postal vote when and if I found the time, and looked forward to watching Peter Snow, tinny in hand (me, not Peter Snow), trying to pre-empt the verdict during the counting of the votes. What I have done instead, as is my wont, has been to throw myself into endless online debates and squabbles, typically between loyal Labour voters and those generally to their left who have opted for one or other of the smaller, anti-austerity parties which have been propelled into the public gaze largely as a result of their participation in the various televised leaders’ debates.

Finding myself rather naturally on the side of the revolutionists, I have encountered opposition (sometimes civil, sometimes abusive) from Labour Party supporters who can broadly speaking be broken down into two distinctive categories – the hopeless (and often mindless) partyists for whom Labour can do no wrong and those who argue that, whatever the merits or otherwise of more deep-rooted, radical change, the urgency of the present situation requires a single-minded, “all hands on deck” approach to getting rid of David Cameron and the Conservatives. Any lingering concerns about what might be achieved when the Tories are gone, they argue, can be addressed once the deed is done.

It is fair that I should record, at this stage, that I have long-standing and ongoing quarrels of a purely local character with the Labour Party in my own backyard. Where I live the Labour Party is a vile organisation, opposed almost to the point of derangement to any kind of organisation from within the community, unless it is guided by its own hand. It matters not whether we are talking about a borough-wide tenants’ federation, a single-issue action group or a domino club at a sheltered unit for the over-60s, if the Labour Party isn’t involved in some organisational or directional sense then it has to be crushed. Where such an approach is resisted there is no restraint upon the unholy horrors that may be unleashed. Even physical violence has not proved beyond them, and it is probably only due to lack of personal courage that this has thus far been restricted to property rather than person, and then on a purely hit-and-run basis, but rather than being restrained those responsible have actually been rewarded for their efforts with senior office, telling us all we need to know about the local party on an institutional level.

TRIBAL

Somebody close to me who is a supporter of the Labour Party has suggested that my instinctive dislike of the party may have been influenced by my local experiences. It is a fair point to make, but I don’t think it is true. My observations during this general election campaign have been inspired by what I have seen of the party at a national level, and of the approach it has taken in its quest for national office.

For the tribal herd I have nothing but contempt. In politics our duty surely is to choose, and if necessary to change, our party loyalty according to our principles, not to change our principles according to our party loyalty. One almost forms the impression that some of these types would champion the slaughter of the firstborn if it was in the manifesto. It was this kind of blind organisational obedience which landed us with Tony Blair, and which permitted a party whose leader took us into a war which led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, many of them children, on the back of a lie, to continue along afterwards almost as though nothing had happened.

Those who plead the “urgency” of the situation, on the other hand, deserve to be heard. That said, I believe their argument to be flawed on two very basic counts. The first is that it demands our righteous anger over the treatment of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society by the present government, without paying much heed as to how the lot of these people can be expected to improve when Labour replaces the Tories in office. It is not enough to be stirred by poverty and deprivation. Without a radical programme for the redistribution of wealth from those whose greed has brought the current situation to pass the indignation of the “other side” is meaningless.

Indeed, perversely, there is an argument that suggests the fortunes of the poor and hungry may actually deteriorate further under Labour. Certainly many of the food banks have been contributed to and staffed by Labour activists and supporters, whose sincere altruism will not have been lessened by the desire to drive home a political point. When a Labour government assumes office the temptation to make another point – that the food banks are no longer necessary – will certainly be present. Those finding themselves locked out, food cupboards still empty, may have cause to reflect.

TOMORROW NEVER COMES

The second weakness can best be summed up by the old maxim “tomorrow never comes”. If there is an urgency now to get rid of the Tories then in the event of Labour failing in that objective on May 7th that urgency will become all the greater, from the day after polling day all the way to 2020. Conversely if Labour wins the election the imperative will be to keep the Tories out. Either way the cause of working for real, meaningful, lasting, root-and-branch change will be placed yet again onto the back burner, a convenient place for it to stay in the symbiotic eyes of the major parties, both of whom stand to benefit from things remaining precisely as they are in perpetuity.

In any event the election on May 7th provides genuine radicals with an opportunity which may never again arise in our lifetimes – a likely stalemate between the two major parties coupled with the meteoric (although not necessarily permanent) rise of a real anti-austerity force, the Scottish National Party, with the potential to deliver an uneasy pact of convenience which promises (or threatens, depending on where you happen to stand) to shake up our politics forever by corrupting the ethos of the First Past The Post system in a Union of contradictions.

The decision of the SNP to discount at a very early stage any prospect of co-operation with the Conservatives and to offer instead to support a Labour Prime Minister brings in its wake a dynamic all of its own. Now, whether Scottish voters stick with Labour or jump ship to the SNP there is no net gain to be had by the Tories. In other words the Labour soundbite which would have it that a vote for the SNP is a vote for the Tories is revealed to any thinking person to be so much nonsense. Beyond tribal loyalty there is precisely no excuse for any Scottish elector who stands against cuts and austerity to plump for the Labour candidate in preference to the SNP one.

The permutations, and implications, of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster compel us to think the unthinkable. A broadly centrist pro-Union Labour Prime Minister kept in office by a left-wing anti-Union party which doesn’t even need the support or the goodwill of 90% of the voting population of the UK. Or, to consider another interesting scenario, a politically doable but almost universally unwelcome Con-Lab coalition with (probably) Alex Salmond, heading a regional party (in UK terms), as Leader of the Opposition. The mind truly boggles.

In the plans of the “urgency” advocates there is no time for change, not now or not ever. In my eyes and in those of many others, there is no time like now.

As for me, I think I’ve probably said more or less enough on this subject in the course of my many forays into the land of social media. What will be will be. But having sampled the sweet taste of opportunity that the convergence of coincidences can bring I am determined, once this election is over, to do something and to play some kind of role, tiny though in the wider scheme of things it must inevitably be, to hasten the change that some of us desire but have never until now really thought possible.

Leaders’ TV Debates: Middle-Aged, Rich, White Men Telling Us What’s What, Again

Excluding the Greens and other parties in favour of Ukip will leave the election debates devoid of even a modicum of diversity

by Alex Andreou

Broadcasters yesterday announced their proposed format for televised election debates. Sky and Channel 4 are opting for a presidential style, David Cameron v Ed Miliband head to head; the BBC will repeat its 2010 format which included the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders; and ITV will have the same three, plus the surprise inclusion of Nigel Farage, probably holding a pint of bitter.

This structure has caused much reaction from the four parties involved about the inclusion of Ukip. Farage – displaying the same sort of one potato two potato mathematical complexity that yielded “29 million Romanians and Bulgarians” – reckons if one MP means inclusion in one debate and Ukip wins the Rochester byelection, then surely two MPs means inclusion in two debates. The other leaders have expressed anger at Ukip’s elevation.

What is less clear is what any of them believe should be the position regarding parties that hold the remaining 28 seats in the House of Commons and their exclusion from the debates. The Green party has threatened legal action over its leader Natalie Bennett’s omission. Good on them.

COMPLETE NONSENSE

The inclusion of Ukip to the exclusion of others is complete nonsense whichever way one cuts it. If one goes by number of MPs, questions regarding the exclusion of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parties loom large. The answer is, I suspect, that these are not national parties, followed by the non-sequitur that they must therefore have nothing to offer to a national debate. For a triumvirate that only a month ago was pleading with Scotland not to break up this “family of nations”, relegating all non-English parties to the children’s table is unfortunate in the extreme.

If one goes by how parties did at the last general election, then the exclusion of the Greens – who had an MP elected – in favour of Ukip is irrational. Perhaps convincing a constituency that electing the same MP wearing a different rosette represents real change is a magic trick worthy of TV. And how about the Social Democratic and Labour party that has twice the number? The broadcasters have cited the recent European election as a measure of Ukip’s popularity and irrefutable evidence of its worthiness for inclusion. But if that is the criterion, one must question the inclusion of the Lib Dems, who polled lower than the Greens on all measures and came a joint sixth with a host of other parties in terms of MEPs.

The only way to justify the inclusion of Ukip in these debates is by somehow extrapolating its future popularity in the next election by looking at meaningless opinion polls. Essentially the broadcasters are saying, “We think they will do well, so we are pre-emptively including them”. It is not up to a TV executive to be making any such subjective assessment. If you want to open the debate, then do so properly. Make it a panel discussion that includes genuinely diverse views.

I am certain that the expectation the inclusion of Ukip might make for salacious TV has also not been far from TV executives’ thoughts. It is the natural extension of the bizarrely dominant idea that if you include a person saying something sensible in any debate, you must also include the polar opposite, even if inflammatory and illogical, “for balance”. Which is precisely what has secured Ukip its popularity in the first place.

MONOCHROME PALETTE

However, the exclusion of parties such as the Greens, the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru has another deeper effect. It excludes anyone who could lend a modicum of diversity to these debates; who might challenge the status quo on the environment, on devolution, on constitutional change, on free-market economics, on gender politics. What we have ended up with – again – is a platform of two, three or four rich, privileged, white, straight, middle-aged, male, career politicians from a tiny part of south-east England telling the rest of the country what is what.

This monochrome palette, this disturbing example of what Grayson Perry recently described as “the default man”, is bad for political engagement and grossly unrepresentative of the country. It ensures that large swaths of the voting population will flick on to the debates, see a pictorial representation of the same dull grey suits talking in soundbites and switch back to Britain’s Got Talent, secure in the knowledge that, if Britain does indeed have talent, politics is carefully sealed from any hint of it.

Reproduced with acknowledgements to The Guardian

Clacton, Rochester and the Challenge of First Past The Post

I had always been certain the United Kingdom Independence Party would win the by-election in Clacton. Every factor that could point in the party’s favour did so:

1. First of all Clacton was, as it happened, UKIP’s most winnable seat in the United Kingdom to begin with, at least according to the people who have ways and means of calculating these things.

2. It was a by-election, which meant voters did not need to have any fears (or hopes) about who would be running the country the next morning. The “Vote UKIP – Get Labour” mantra much beloved of the Prime Minister David Cameron did not apply here.

3. Being a by-election all media attention was focused on Clacton rather than upon a country-wide contest as would have been the case in May next year.

4. The contest was all about UKIP. It was about a sitting Member of Parliament, Douglas Carswell, who had resigned his membership of the Conservative Party and joined the Eurosceptic group amid a blaze of publicity. Try as the establishment parties might to focus the discussion on the NHS or the economy, this by-election was never going to be about anything other than the United Kingdom Independence Party and its political programme.

5. Carswell was always going to gain kudos from the fact that he had resigned his seat and reverted to the electorate, to give voters a chance to approve or disapprove his decision to change party mid-term. Let us be in no doubt that as a decision it was tactical rather than courageous. Carswell was smart enough to understand that sitting as an anonymous backbencher for the remainder of his elected term was a sure-fired way of courting defeat at next year’s general election, where conditions would favour the big parties. By raising his profile and winning back his seat by a huge majority he has given himself a good fighting chance of retaining Clacton next May. Nevertheless he and his party were able to make much of the fact that he had been willing to incur a certain amount of risk in going back to the electorate to allow them to have the final say on his decision.

For these reasons a UKIP victory was always on the cards. But the magnitude of the win (with some 60% of the votes cast), considered alongside the fact that an unfancied UKIP candidate in the former Labour stronghold of Heywood & Middleton in the North came within a whisker of also being elected on the same night, has persuaded me to reassess my previously held view that the forthcoming contest in Rochester would prove a by-election too far for UKIP. I now believe, as indeed do the bookies, that Mark Reckless will be back in the House to keep his new colleague company when the votes are counted in Kent.

So will Carswell’s victory be the death knell of two-party system as we know it? I suspect not.

Whilst I would expect UKIP to hold Clacton next year and also possibly to gain South Thanet, where Farage himself will be standing, in the total seats stakes the party will still be languishing some considerable way behind the unfashionable Liberal Democrats, in spite of the fact that it is likely to win more votes. The reason for this is because the Lib Dems cottoned on to the fact many years before UKIP did the same, that disproportionate power can be gained by concentrating all available campaigning resources in a small handful of areas.

UKIP, of course, are talking up their chances of scoring well in May 2015 because, frankly, they have to. The ball is rolling. If they are going to have any chance at all they must at the very least create an air of confidence. The task before them though – the discontinuation of the endless dreary ritual engaged in by millions of voters of voting against the party they dislike the most every bit as much as for their party of preference – is a massive one. Cameron knows what he is doing when he tries to frighten Tory-leaning UKIP voters with the prospect of a Labour government. Expect a significant chunk of the UKIP-friendly vote to revert to the big parties when the real election comes around.

Unsupportive though I am of UKIP’s main policy planks I nonetheless rejoice at the implications for the old system of the results in Clacton and Heywood & Middleton, because there are few evils in modern politics to match the ongoing fraud perpetuated against the voters by the Con-Lab duopoly. But I do fear we have a long way to go yet before we will see, as one day we certainly will, the replacement of the rotten old system by something more open and inclusive.

Complete Control

The late Celtic football manager Jock Stein was reportedly once asked whether, faced with the opportunity to sign either a Catholic player or a Protestant player who were of exactly equal talent and were both available for the same price, which would he sign?

He replied that he would sign the Protestant.

His reasoning was simple. If he signed the Catholic then the Protestant would probably sign for Rangers. But if he signed the Protestant then Rangers would not want the Catholic, so he could have him too.

I once heard an allegation, completely unproven but from a source that I consider honest and who would know, that in the dim and distant past a local developer offered a substantial pecuniary inducement to councillors on the London Borough of Hounslow in return for planning consent for a major project. What is interesting however is that the inducement was allegedly offered not only to members of the ruling Labour Group, but also to members of the opposition Conservative Group. He was unable to say whether or not the offer was taken up and I cannot vouch for the veracity or otherwise of the story, but if it were true it would make good sense. Grease the palms of the ruling group and the opposition will scream, no matter how small their number. Include them in the deal and there is nobody left to protest.

In business success is about more than just having a good product to sell. If somebody else is selling an equally good product then that guy will be taking a share of the market that could otherwise be yours. You can of course improve the quality of your product, but then so can your competitors. You can cut the price, but your competitors can cut their prices too. But what if you get the opportunity to buy your competitors’ businesses? You can carry on using their brand names, does it really matter if you now own the brand?

To prevent this kind of thing from happening the then government in 1949 set up the Monopolies Commission, now known as the Competition Commission. But of course there is only one of them!

In the world of politics the West is run in practice by a financial elite rather than by sovereign governments or heads of state. Its model is capitalism and its instinct is to grow. It knows no national boundaries, and precious few ethical ones either. Whether it is selling long-range bombers or air-raid shelters, fast food or drugs to combat obesity, the name of the game is to make a fast buck. If there was a financial benefit to be had for Coca Cola to set up a drinks stall at an anti-globalisation protest rally they would do it with neither a pang of conscience nor a hint of irony.

International capitalists control the news media which reports to us on the big political issues of the day. We have seen at election after election how the press can make or break a politician, or a political party, more or less at will. It is completely within their power to talk down good news, talk up bad news, destroy the reputation of one individual or promote another. We have seen time and again how all the major parties court the press, especially in the run-up to an election, because they understand its power. The “free press” is free only to those rich and powerful enough to own it.

So on what basis, and for what reason, will media barons woo politicians, and political parties? Why, for instance, did Rupert Murdoch court New Labour? Was there some deep-felt, fundamental change involved in his political conviction (which he later reversed)? Or did he just recognise a winner when he saw one?

The answer of course is that the relationship between the media barons and politicians is a symbiotic one. Just as political parties need the co-operation of the media to show them in a favourable light before the voters, so the press bosses seek the favour of whichever government is in office, or is about to assume office – for reasons too obvious to be worth stating here.

This doesn’t only apply to capitalists in the media, of course. The list of business luminaries who threw their lot in with Tony Blair and New Labour in preference to their traditional friends in the Tory Party is impressive and the reasons are simple and twofold – first they wanted the favour of the incoming government at a time when the Tories looked destined to be washed up for a generation, and second it was not good for their respective brands to be associated in the public mind with losers.

The powerful financial interests that control the West wield clout not because of their support for the parties of government but due to their willingness and ability to offer support, at whatever level is deemed to be appropriate at the time, to the parties of opposition. Nobody, surely, can seriously believe that when one government leaves office and another steps forward the giant corporations and press magnates and oil barons lose all their power over nations just because their party of preference has lost its majority?

Incredibly some do. I despair of otherwise intelligent people who, whilst recognising the power that big business interests clearly wield over the current government, pine for the election of Labour who, they honestly believe, will (this time) put the interests of the workers and the unemployed, the dispossessed and the underprivileged to the fore and fight the good fight in the cause of fairness of justice.

As for the Labour Party itself, it has played its part well. It denounces Tory attacks on benefit claimants whilst muttering quietly that it doesn’t actually intend to do anything to reverse them. Its members pass resolutions to renationalise the Royal Mail which it publicises loudly before its leaders quietly drop them. In fact beyond a pledge to increase the minimum wage by some negligible amount there is nothing at all of substance for the bosses who currently pull the strings of the Conservative Party to worry about.

What irritates and annoys me most of all is that those hundreds and thousands of basically good people throughout the world of social media who faithfully publicise and expose every Tory sleight of hand and every Labour condemnation thereof are destined, in the event of a Labour government after 2015, either to sit in embarrassed silence for five years or to switch hats and try to defend the kind of shocking abuses of which they are rightly so critical now.

It has long been my belief that the explosive growth of Internet technology and social media, and of the awareness that it generates, must inevitably do for the rotten two-party charade that is our party politics. But I fear we still have a while to wait before that finally happens.

Only Cameron Can Rescue the Coalition. But Does He Want To?

By Andrew Rawnsley

In the honeymoon days, when the atmosphere within the coalition was so light and breezy that David Cameron and Nick Clegg could be amused by the differences between their parties, they shared a private joke. The Lib Dems' attachment to elaborate consultation and exhaustive internal democracy was like "a kibbutz". In contrast, the Tories were "Napoleonic" in their apparent willingness to follow unquestioningly orders handed down from above.

As it has turned out, they have both been proved wrong. So has everyone else who started off with the assumption that there would be a big strain on the coalition from the contrast between obedient, realistic Tories who understood that power involves compromises and difficult, naive Lib Dems who would insist on putting their precious principles ahead of the deals necessary to make coalition government work. Sure, there has been that contrast – but, by and large, it is the Lib Dems who have been the grownups of the coalition and the Tories who have been the juveniles.

The Lib Dems have understood the fundamental premise of coalition: that a marriage between two parties can be sustained only if both partners are prepared to sacrifice their own preferences for the greater cause. Mr Clegg's party has been astonishingly disciplined over the past two years. To a fault, they have often put aside their own desires and interests for the sake of coalition unity. They have held their noses and voted through welfare cuts, immigration caps, tuition fees and a health plan which was not even in the coalition agreement. With one or two exceptions, their ministers have been stalwart defenders of the coalition and their backbenchers have refrained from badmouthing it.

For this, they have paid a punishing price. At local elections, Lib Dem councillors have been slaughtered. On their current opinion poll rating, they have lost more than half of the support they received at the last general election. They have virtually no friends in the press. Their leader has been flayed to within an inch of his political life.

Coalition has generally been much easier for the Conservatives. As the bigger party, they have been asked to make far fewer compromises. It is the snarl of the rancorous tendency on the Tory backbenches that David Cameron has allowed the yellow tail to wag the blue dog, but there is scant evidence to support their cries of betrayal.

Sayeeda Warsi, the Tory party co-chairman, can cheerfully, and pretty much accurately, boast that the government is implementing 80% of the Conservative manifesto. Where the coalition has pursued Lib Dem ideas, such as tax cuts directed at those on low incomes or the pupil premium for schools in deprived areas, Tories have not had to grit their teeth. They have taken up these policies because they liked them. Yet a significant section of the Conservative party was never happy with coalition from the off and these rejectionists have been growing in noise and numbers as time has gone on. Unlike the Lib Dems, they refuse to accept the fundamental basis of coalition: that of give and take on both sides.

This contrast came to a vivid head last week when the government had to beat its humiliating retreat over Lords reform – legislation shaped by a Tory minister and approved by the whole cabinet – because almost 100 Tory MPs defied their whips. This is a debacle with several consequences, none of them good for the health of the coalition. Tory MPs now think they know that when they see the whites of the prime minister's eyes, they can make him blink. The Lib Dems now know that when David Cameron promises he can deliver the Conservative party, his word cannot be relied on.

"Cameron didn't work anything like hard enough," says one senior Lib Dem. "He's had two years to think about how he was going to do this and failed." Mr Clegg felt obliged to accede to the prime minister's plea to be given more time to work on the Tory rebels, but there is little confidence among senior Lib Dems that Mr Cameron will be able win over enough of the dissenters to secure a timetable for the legislation when parliament returns in the autumn.

Whatever you may think of these proposals for the Lords, the Lib Dems burn with an entirely understandable resentment that they have repeatedly done their duty by the coalition by swallowing a lot of things they don't like, but a blocking minority of Conservative MPs simply will not reciprocate when it comes to something that Lib Dems care about. From my conversations with very senior Lib Dems I have absolutely no doubt of this: if Lords reform does not progress in September, the Lib Dems will respond by killing the redrawing of constituency boundaries which are estimated to be worth an extra dozen to 20 seats to the Tories at the next general election. Moreover, they will veto the boundary changes as an explicit act of payback for Tory sabotage of Lords reform. It won't be a case of Nick Clegg quietly licensing his backbenchers and peers to work with Labour to vote down the boundary changes. All Lib Dems, ministers included, will vote against.

More than once, and in terms no one could misunderstand, Mr Clegg has warned Mr Cameron that the Lib Dems cannot go into the next election having delivered all the constitutional changes which suit the Tories and not secure a single reform hoped for by the Lib Dems. As one Lib Dem minister puts it: "What will it say about the whole idea of coalition government if the junior partner always gets the shit end of the bargain?"

The Conservatives attach enormous importance to the small haul of extra seats they expect to gain from these boundary changes – a sign of their lack of confidence that they can win the next election. If the Lib Dems vote down the boundary changes, some Conservatives predict that the anger among Tories will be so intense that it will be the death knell of this government. So it is possible that the coalition will collapse in poisonous acrimony and Ed Miliband will be prime minister by Christmas.

On the spectrum of probabilities, this remains an unlikely scenario. Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg have a mutual interest in keeping the show on the road if only for fear of what would happen to their parties at an early election triggered by a squabble over the constitution which would look arcane and self-indulgent to the vast majority of the public. Both men would have a hard time explaining to voters why Lords reform and bagging a few extra seats in the Commons for the Tories were more important to them than sticking to their original promise to work together for a full parliament to fix the economy.

So the coalition will probably endure. The question is in what sort of state. Tomorrow Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg will try to reinvest their partnership with some dignity by making one of their joint appearances, on this occasion to launch their latest ideas for trying to stimulate the economy through housing and other infrastructure projects.

They will never recapture the early romance of coalition when their claimed willingness to put aside party differences to tackle a national economic emergency captivated many voters and deeply alarmed senior people in the Labour party. The sweet scent of the rose garden has evaporated for good. The best they can probably now aim for is to demonstrate that there is still some residual shared purpose to this endeavour.

For Mr Clegg and his party, the long-term point of being in coalition was to prove to Britain that it could be a stable, effective and attractive form of government. A descent into a permanent condition of seething acrimony, punctuated by furious shouting matches and parliamentary defeats, will discredit the very idea of coalition government. Voters will not be minded to repeat the experience, which won't be good for Lib Dem hopes of being in office again.

Quite a lot of the Tory party would be secretly – and not so secretly – delighted if this coalition gave a bad name to the whole notion of coalitions. David Cameron has a decision to make: is he one of them? It was his initiative which led to the formation of the coalition. When he made his bold offer to the Lib Dems on the morning after the last election, it was the most creative gambit of his political career, the best response to the circumstances and highly popular with much of the electorate. Failure to make it work will not say good things about his judgment or abilities.

So the prime minister has some hard thinking to do over the summer. Is he ready to take ownership of the coalition? Can he confront those in his party who want to wreck the government with the determination now necessary to save it? Will he tell the hard truths to the Conservative party about the necessary compromises of sharing power?

If he is not able or willing to do that, then no one else can rescue the coalition.



Reproduced with acknowledgements to The Observer.

Cameron's Big Cut "Idea" Will Only Backfire on the Tories

By Polly Toynbee

Attacking the under-25s might help poll ratings for now, but the real causes of high housing benefit costs lie elsewhere

Behind in the polls, David Cameron cleaves to his one truly popular policy: cutting welfare. Pollsters say people want it cut even more. His speech hits every button, stirring up those on quite low incomes against those on very low incomes, dividing and ruling, distracting from the lifestyle of the rulers. With the rottweiler tendency on his backbenches growing restless, he throws them the vulnerable to chew on – all those luxuriating in the "culture of entitlement" on £71 a week unemployment pay. Politically, it works well – for now.

A red mist of despair poured from children's and disability charities, stunned at yet another assault on those they try to defend. Already the £18bn benefit cut is "without historical or international precedent," according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Cameron's 17 "ideas" may not all see the light of day, but another £10bn will be cut: housing benefit and US-style benefit time limits yield the big money.

Few people realise that 88% of benefit cuts are still to come, with two thirds of disabled children to lose large sums. Housing benefit cuts, driving thousands of families miles from their homes and children from their schools, have only just begun. Without yet knowing the perverse effects of these cuts, with chaos about to engulf the Department for Work and Pensions on the work programme and universal credit, Cameron shoots from the hip.

He sounded plausible, and his sweeping tour of benefits seeming common sense to many. Every system since the Poor Law faces the same dilemma – how to help the needy without weakening work incentives, how to tell a "sturdy beggar" from a hard-luck case and give them enough to live but less than a low-paid job. There are no satisfactory answers – but Cameron's "ideas" are the harshest ever proposed. How knowingly he misled in almost every example he gave, as he pitted "those who work hard and do the right thing" against those on benefits, deliberately disguising that these are mainly the same people. Most of the poor drawing benefits are cleaners, carers, caterers – the 62% living below the poverty line, working hard yet needing benefits to survive.

Cameron's focus on the ever-rising housing benefit bill omitted key facts. The Smith Institute reports that 95% of the £1bn rise in housing benefit this year is paid to people in work. Only one in eight people drawing the benefit is out of work; the rest are low earners. The cost is not about feckless people but the housing crisis, the failure to build social, rented or private housing over the last three decades. Shortage makes rents rise faster than earnings, and faster than price inflation. Cameron's plan to peg housing benefit to prices, not to inflation, will be devastating. Shelter reports that if prices rose as fast as rents since 1971, a chicken would now cost £47.51. Nor is there any sign housing benefit cuts will cause rents to fall: rents are still rising as landlords turn away benefit tenants, easily finding others in this starved market.

 "Labour spokesmen's lack of visceral indignation on this was dispiriting. Confronting popular prejudice with facts is politically dangerous, but bravery wins plaudits too."

In a familiar litany of charges against the workless, single mothers, drug addicts (only 4%), he summons up a familiar portrait of the multi-child household, beloved of television documentaries, seeking worst cases to be entertainingly put right by Ann Widdecombe. Every society will always have enough of those to keep the cameras happy. But the dull lives of cleaners juggling childcare and jobs make bad TV, as do dull statistics that give the lie to the idea that moral turpitude drives the escalating benefits bill.

Low wages and lack of housing are the root cause. A living wage would lift the burden off taxpayers and put it on to employers. Regulated rents and a great housebuilding programme are the way to cut the housing benefit bill. The government prefers mass removal of the workless to low-rent areas with no jobs.
 
Cameron's plan for the under-25s to stay at home springs from his own social milieu, where empty nesters rattle around in echoing home counties mansions, easy for returning children to commute to first jobs. But take housing benefit from 380,000 young people, and what does the student from Middlesbrough College do at the end of their course if they can't move to where the jobs are, get a room, get started? Stay at home and be unemployed for ever. Even in work, the 205,000 under-25s with a child will have to separate, each to move back to their parents. With benefits as well as wages cut in depressed areas, the north-south divide will gape yet wider, with no chance of moving.

Let's hear no more from Cameron about social mobility. If this proceeds, Alan Milburn should resign as social mobility tsar, since nobody will be going anywhere. Bright but poor graduates will be sent home and everyone will stay where they were born. Labour spokesmen's lack of visceral indignation on this was dispiriting. Confronting popular prejudice with facts is politically dangerous, but bravery wins plaudits too.

The dumbfounding spectacle of this wealthy prime minister kicking away slender supports of the weak will be an abiding image of the man and his party. In the longest recession, with 2.6 million out of work and 1.4 million part-timers desperately seeking full-time jobs, the sheer effrontery of suggesting over-generous benefits keep them out work is beyond belief.

Cameron may saw with the grain of public opinion now, but by the next election, enough of those now clamouring for cuts will have seen their effects at first hand. The British Social Attitudes Survey records how public sympathy for underdogs ebbs after Labour benefit increases – but soon rekindles under Tory harshness.

Reproduced with acknowledgements to The Guardian on Facebook.

How the Political Parties Exclude the General Public

By Peter Watt, former General Secretary of the Labour Party

George Galloway was right. I can hardly believe that I have typed that but on at least one thing he really is right. In his post-election interviews he said that:

“There are very large numbers of people completely disenchanted and alienated from the political process and from the mainstream political parties”.

And he is spot on. The problem is that the mainstream political parties can’t see it or choose not to. On the whole the big three UK Parties operate as a closed shop. They talk the language of reaching out to communities and engagement but they don’t really mean it. Instead they operate a series of cosy closed and highly secretive cabals that suit everyone involved and no one who isn’t. That may sound harsh but it is pretty accurate.

Let’s take selecting candidates for election which is absolutely a closed shop. Candidates are selected from a tiny group of activists who have to preform strange rituals to impress other activists in order to try and be selected. You have to stop having much of a life outside of politics in order to focus your efforts. You have to endure endless and often pointless meetings held in bizarre locations and appear to enjoy them. You have to learn how to access blocks of flats with entry phones in order to leaflets that no one reads. And you have to make sure that you learn the language of the political elite, the lexicon of the politically initiated within your chosen political tribe. And all of this just to be considered. The chances are that the whole thing will end up being stitched up in some way or other anyway and your best bet is that you are the beneficiary of said stitch-up.

"The problem is that the mainstream political parties can’t see it or choose not to. On the whole the big three UK Parties operate as a closed shop. They talk the language of reaching out to communities and engagement but they don’t really mean it. Instead they operate a series of cosy closed and highly secretive cabals that suit everyone involved and no one who isn’t. That may sound harsh but it is pretty accurate."

Or let’s take rational argument and debate which cannot happen within the cabal, in fact has to be stamped out. Put simply, if your side’s front bench says something then it must be true and has to be supported. If the other side’s front bench say it then it is a lie, worse a self-interested lie and must be opposed. So Labour opposes Free Schools because they are a Tory policy; even though for all intents and purposes they are academy schools which Labour introduced. Labour opposes the current welfare reform legislation because it is ‘Tory’ reform and therefore bad; even though Labour would have passed something very similar. The Tories accused Labour of cutting equipment from our troops and say it is typical of their attitude towards our armed forces; and then in Government scrap our aircraft carriers. They condemned Labour for blocking any referendum on EU treaties as evidence of their rampant Europhilia; and then in Government block a referendum on changes to an EU treaty.

Or take policy development within parties which is essentially a fix. Structures are created and the language of inclusion and openness is used to justify them. But in reality the process is exclusive, deliberately designed to make involvement more difficult. Certainly more difficult if you are not in the cabal, all but impossible if you are one of the 96% of the population who are not members of a political party.

In fact the party machines have a language and culture that justifies this exclusion. Member engagement is seen a more important than engaging the public. Allowing the public a glimpse of the inner workings of political life is fought tooth and nail by activists who want to preserve their privileges. So attempts to engage the public end up being barely that at all. They are grudging and desperately unattractive offers to the public to visit the Party rather than the Party going out to visit the public. The result are misnamed ‘open days’ at Conferences which you have to apply to in advance. Or handfuls of ‘real people’ being hand-picked to hear a speech after being carefully vetted for suitability. It’s not engagement at all and in fact just reinforces the sense of separation.

My favourite comment from party members is the one about ‘I did/I didn’t hear that on the doorstep’. As if the odd and snatched conversations between a party canvasser and a member of the public is a rational way to gauge opinion! But to hear activists talk you’d think that there is no purer and efficacious way to ascertain what is really going on out there than knocking on the doors of total strangers whilst wearing a rosette and carrying a clipboard!

So it all ends up in a closed and cosy world that benefits a tiny proportion of the 4% of electors who choose to join a political party. This tiny, exclusive and closed elite have developed a system that justifies its own existence to itself. That has a collective belief in its own sense of superiority. That creates jobs and elected positions from within its own ranks. And that is alienated from the vast majority of the public. But they can’t see it. And to be honest even if they could they wouldn’t want to change it because they like it just the way it is.

It’s why there attempts to look in touch look so desperately staid and inauthentic. Ed Miliband might think that buying sausage rolls makes him look in touch; most people suspect that he dumped them when he got round the corner. David Cameron might think that playing badminton makes him look like action man; most people thought he looked a prat.

But it can’t go on. A healthy democracy needs healthy political parties and right about now we have sick and dying parties. And in order to become healthy they will need to open up. Selections need to be open to the public not closed as must policy development. In fact central control generally has to reduce so that innovation and creativity can thrive. And the emphasis should be on being in partnership with electors not being their master. It will certainly take a damn sight more than any of the so called reforms that the main parties have tried so far.

The big political parties are seen as irrelevant by most voters. For now however they tend to vote for them come election time, even if unenthusiastically. But as Bradford West shows you can’t take even that for granted forever.


Reproduced with acknowledgements to Dale & Co., the current affairs mega blog by Iain Dale & Friends

The Big Society or No Such Thing as Society?

I’m still trying to get my head around “The Big Society”, what the Prime Minister David Cameron describes as his “vision and passion”. I am particularly keen to understand how it is to be reconciled with the view that “there is no such thing as society”, articulated by Margaret Thatcher, now Baroness Thatcher, when she was Prime Minister back in the 1980s.

On the surface of it it would seem to be something of an oxymoron. If society doesn’t exist then it cannot be big. Or, conversely, if it is indeed big then the view that it does not exist has to be wrong.

So what exactly is society? What is this thing that is simultaneously big and yet not really there?

Society in its most basic form must be that state in which we live beyond our own selfish existence. It is that common experience that we share whenever we interact, be it socially, in the supermarket, at the bingo hall, down at the local pub, even indeed passing each other in the street and acknowledging the fact that the other person is there.

It may also be, if you prefer, the way in which we support each other by using the skills each of us possess to benefit others, whether we do so for a wage or out of purest altruism. It could be the shopkeeper taking our order, the postman bring our mail, the doctor making us better, the bus driver getting us to where we want to be. We cannot do all these things for ourselves, but by plying our particular trade in the service of others we all manage to muddle along somehow.

The voluntary aspect of being a society is altogether more special. After all it is something from which we derive no personal gain, and which we really don’t have to do. Running a scout group, giving advice, helping out at the local school, organising a residents’ or tenants’ association or an action group – all of these things serve to make life more enjoyable and the environment in which we live more pleasant.

So when Mrs. Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society was she denying that the altruism of what is admittedly an active minority actually existed, that there was behind all of it an ulterior, selfish motive? Or was it just an expression of wishful thinking?

To say there is no such thing as society suggests that people in general are concerned only with Number One, with the furtherance of their own careers and the unrelenting accumulation of personal wealth. It is a call to those who give of their free time to call it a day and to return home to the counting table. It envisions the whole of life as a metaphorical ladder upon which the objective is to climb whilst if necessary treading on the head of the person below.

If this is indeed what Mrs. Thatcher meant then why is it that a quarter of a century on another Conservative Prime Minister sees fit to champion what he calls The Big Society? He after all has never, as far as I am aware, denounced nor even distanced himself from the shocking opinions of his distant predecessor.

In the light of the commonality that exists between the Thatcherites of old and adherents of modern Conservatism it is reasonable to look upon Cameron’s Big Society with a certain degree of scepticism. What is it about the society that the Prime Minister envisages that would find favour amongst those who continue to venerate the undisputed champion of the culture of self?

The answer must logically be found in the fact that the voluntary sector offers something that professionals employed in the public sector per se cannot – work done for free. Why pay a librarian when a retired person looking to get out and meet people or a student in need of work experience and a reference can manage the local library on a day to day basis for nothing?

This cheapskate cynicism is rightly condemned by the Conservatives’ traditional opponents in the Labour Party. Sadly though the criticism focuses usually not upon the exploitative instincts that underpin the Tories’ new-found commitment to a society the very existence of which they were denying not so long ago, but upon the very rationale of volunteering and community self-help.

“Ordinary” people, we are told, are too busy scratching a living to be much bothered about putting anything into the community of which they are a part. All the average (acknowledgements Neil Peart) are concerned about is putting food on the table and clothes on their children’s backs.

Fortunately, so the argument continues, there exists an expert political class (them) whose calling is to manage all our society’s affairs for us. That political class comprises a social elite (whether by education or birthright is unclear) that is specially and uniquely trained to understand all our needs and to deliver them to us in the way that only it knows best.

Sleazeballs of the World Unite

As I previously stated on this blog I haven't thus far allowed myself to get carried away in the debate over Alternative Voting. I cast a "Yes" vote by post and have made a couple of comments in support, but until this morning it was not something that had taken centre stage in my list of priorities.

This morning a document arrived through my letter box that changed that all.

The "No" campaign has brought together the Conservatives and the larger part of the Labour Party who, despite the differences that may appear to exist between them on the surface, have managed to gel seamlessly into a united front for the preservation of their own cosy little carve-up in which the input of the general public into the political process is retained at the scantest level possible whilst still being able to maintain the charade that we live in a democracy.

The no-expense-spared glossy issued by the "No" campaign contrasts markedly with the modest, two-colour A4 sheet issued by the "Yes" group. But the real contrast lies in the depths to which the "No" campaign has been prepared to plunge in order to con the public into voting for the maintenance of their privileged, lazy lifestyles. Thus the contempt that the establishment parties have for the wit and intelligence of the voters upon whose continued support they ostensibly depend in opened up for all to see.

Typically the hook upon which the "No" campaign hangs is money. Not only are establishment politicians themselves obsessed by money, but they assume the general public is also. Pursuing the lie that AV will cost the county £250m to implement, they point out that this amount could provide 2503 doctors, 6297 teachers, 8107 nurses, 35885 hip replacements or 69832 school places.

Putting to one side for the time being the fact that these are annual costs whereas the £250m that is alleged to be the cost of converting to AV - even if it were true, which it isn't - would be a one-off cost, what do really think the chances are that this government will take on all these doctors, nurses or teachers with the money it "saves" from a "No" vote?

Much more likely it will end up in the pockets of the bankers or the non-dom, tax-avoiding fat cats so beloved of the party in power as the rest of us continue to tighten our belts whilst being reassured that "we are all in this together".

One could just as easily ask, of course, just how many teachers and nurses we could be taking on with the money we are wasting prosecuting a dishonest war in Libya, occupying Afghanistan or maintaining a nuclear "deterrent".

Then we are asked to consider the unpopularity of AV and the fact that it is only used in a few countries worldwide, with the inference contained therein that the rest of the world operates First Past The Post.

It doesn't, of course. Much if not most of the world enjoys some form of real proportional representation. But we are debating AV, not PR, precisely because David Cameron was not prepared to have a referendum on anything other than AV and Nick Clegg was, frankly, too weak to call his bluff when the coalition deal was being agreed. Now Clegg is being ridiculed by David Cameron, amongst others, for seeking approval for a voting system that David Cameron foisted upon him! You just couldn't make it up, could you?

But without doubt the most pernicious argument of all appears on the back page of the glossy, under the heading "AV Leads to Broken Promises" alongside a photo of Nick Clegg holding up a placard containing the promises he broke over student fees when he entered into coalition with the Tories. Remember it the Tories, more than anybody else, who are supporting the campaign that has produced and is circulating this glossy leaflet. The Tories are publicly ridiculing Clegg, their own coalition partner, for sacrificing his own credibility in order that they might realise their political objectives.

I dearly hope the general public has the foresight and the intelligence to see beyond the gloss, the spin, and the combined unscrupulousness of the two big vested political interests who have carved up the political process between them in this country and whose self-serving spin machines have for the time being at least come together to try to pull off one gigantic confidence trick against the very people in whose name they purport to govern. But if the self-serving vested interests do succeed, I hope even more dearly that the Lib Dems will take stock of the situation, understand that they have been had, and do something about it very quickly.

There would, after all, be nothing left for them in continuing to support a coalition partner that sets them up and stabs their backs so shamelessly and so publicly whilst pursuing a neo-Thatcherite political programme in government that depends entirely upon Lib Dem support.

This has to be make or break time for Nick Clegg, and I wish him well.

John Baron MP - A Lone Voice of Integrity Amid a Sewer of Deceit

Fair play to John Baron MP, astonishingly the only one out of 306 Conservative MPs in the House of Commons who understands the difference between imposing a No Fly Zone to protect civilians and bombing a sovereign nation into submission in order to steal its natural resources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13091693

It seems clear to me that Cameron and Hague simply assumed that Parliament, and the United Nations, either wouldn't notice when the terms of the original UN resolution were being flagrantly violated, or would turn a blind eye. But unfortunately for these two utterly deceitful and contemptible excuses for human beings it would appear there are some who care for the rule of law, and for truth.

Anybody who has been involved in politics for any length of time will confirm that the very biggest mistake anyone can make is to believe one's own propaganda. Cameron, Hague and the national media have invested a lot of time and effort into selling the conflict in Libya as being one between an entire, unarmed population that spontaneously rose up against oppression in the selfless, lofty pursuit of some high principle and a universally despised dictatorship that suppresses them by force, shooting and killing them indiscriminately for fun.

The reality of course is that whilst Gaddafi's regime certainly is a ruthless dictatorship in a great many respects it also enjoys the support of a signicant proportion, quite possibly a majority, of its population, particularly in the west of the country.

It looks increasingly likely too that the insurgents, far from being unarmed innocents (with a tank division and an air force), represent in fact an unholy alliance of militant Islamists and Western lackeys who were misled into believing that the nature of Gaddafi's regime and its lack of a conventional army of any consequence left it vulnerable to any sudden attack from within, especially when fortified by Western air power.

In their lust to bring about regime change by deception in a country that was threatening to become just a bit too possessive about its own natural resources Cameron, Hague and Sarkozy misjudged an awful lot of people. They overestimated the capablities of their "rebels", misunderstood the structure of Gaddafi's power base in the west of Libya, and probably assumed too that Barack Obama would be keener than he apparently is to out-macho his chimpoid predecessor.

They seem too to have reckoned without the courage and decency of a solitary backbench MP, whose potential to expose them and their agenda is almost limitless should that be his desire.

I want to see more democracy and improved human rights in Libya, but this can only come about by honest pressure and courageous political engagement. Not by deceit, military bombardment and pillage.

The amusing irony is that as everything that can go wrong does go wrong in their increasingly wobbly North African crusade there is one law that Cameron, Hague and Sarkozy are going to find themselves increasingly compelled to acknowledge, and that is the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Whatever humiliations and repercussions they suffer they will only have themselves to blame.

Conservatives in Coalition Do Their Own Thing

The Business Secretary Dr. Vince Cable has this morning criticised comments about to be made by the Prime Minister about the overall impact of immigration into the UK. The full story can be found here at BBC News.

There is of course a debate to be had on immigration, however the significance of this disagreement between coalition partners is that it would appear the Prime Minister is doing his own thing, without first having sought any kind of accommodation or common ground with those upon whom he depends for his continued tenure.

As somebody who has been there myself I instinctively recognise all the signs. Coalition begins with a sense of excitement on the part of all concerned, with a tangible and genuine feeling of elation and promise of great things to come. When credit is due it will be due all round, and everybody involved is entirely cool with that.

Then, after a short while, a negative mentality sets in in which the senior partner, being a major party, begins to feel resentful towards the "imposter" upon which it is compelled to depend for its continued presence in office.

Like the Labour Party, the Conservative Party instinctively believes that democracy is a process that belongs essentially to the two main parties, and that small parties and independents, although an integral and necessary part of the democratic process, are really there to maintain the charade rather than to actually wield real power.

By now the Conservative part of the coalition will be looking at its agreement with the Liberal Democrats as something to be got around rather than honoured in spirit as well as in deed. It will be scrutinising the small print to see how it can be interpreted to its own benefit, rather than troubling itself too deeply about what was actually intended when the agreement was drawn up.

The bad news for the Lib Dems is that it will get worse, as the next election approaches not only the terms but even the very existence of the coalition will be in danger of becoming completely forgotten. The Lib Dems will find themselves undermined, with progressively less co-operation from Whitehall and a gradual but sustained increase in political attacks and general mischief emanating from the national media.

And then, when Labour is returned to office with a thumping majority in 2014, the Conservatives will scratch their heads and wonder, honestly, where it all went wrong.

What can the Lib Dems do about it? The answer is really not very much. Lib Dem voters supported their party in the hope that it would be in a position to exercise some power. To decline to do so when the opportunity arises would be seen by many as a betrayal, and carries with it the risk of rendering a vote for the Liberal Democrats singularly pointless.

The option of coalition with Labour after the last general election was never a realistic one. Notwithstanding the fact that it lacked legitimacy, having acquired less votes, the Labour Party is even more sectarian than the Conservative Party and would not have been prepared to give an inch in exchange for Liberal Democrat support. When a similar situation arose locally in 2006 I don't recall having given the prospect of a coalition with Labour a second thought. It was simply assumed by us all that it was a thing that wouldn't and couldn't happen.

When looked at in this way AV begins to make perfect sense. I am hoping that the Liberal Democrats are holding out, buying time, until a different electoral system empowers them to the point where they no longer have to play the part of the poor relation in somebody else's government.

Let's just hope they are not so damaged by that time that they still have the opportunity to explain that to the electorate.

Because if their "partners" have anything to do with it, they will be.

The Biggest Lie in British Politics

By Johann Hari

British politics today is dominated by a lie. This lie is making it significantly more likely you will lose your job, your business, or your home. The lie gives a false explanation for how we came to be in this crisis, and prescribes a medicine that will worsen our disease. Yet it is hardly being challenged.

Here’s the lie. We are in a debt crisis. Our national debt is dangerously and historically high. We are being threatened by the international bond markets. The way out is to eradicate our deficit rapidly. Only that will restore “confidence”, and therefore economic growth. Every step of this program is false, and endangers you.

Let’s start with a fact that should be on billboards across the land. As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. Read that sentence again. Check it on any graph by any historian. Since 1750, there have only been two brief 30-year periods when our debt has been lower than it is now. If we are “bust” today, as George Osborne has claimed, then we have almost always been bust. We were bust when we pioneered the Industrial Revolution. We were bust when we ruled a quarter of the world. We were bust when we beat the Nazis. We were bust when we built the NHS. Or is it George Osborne’s economics that are bust?

Our debt is not high by historical standards, and it is not high by international standards. For example, Japan’s national debt is three times bigger than ours, and they are still borrowing at good rates.

David Cameron claims that, despite these facts, they need to cut our debt by slashing our spending because the bond markets demand it. If they do not obey, then our national credit rating will be downgraded, and we will have to pay much higher interest on our debt. But here’s the flaw in that plan. That’s not what the bond markets say. Not at all. Professor Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose predictions have consistently proved right through this crisis, says Cameron is conjuring up “invisible bond vigilantes” who “don’t exist.” Who is the bond market really punishing? It’s the countries that cut too fast, and so kill their economic growth. The last two nations to be down-graded were Ireland and Spain, who followed Cameron’s script to the letter.

It turns out that cutting our debt rapidly doesn’t cause an increase in “confidence” and so save the economy. Professor Krugman mocks this idea by calling it “The Confidence Fairy,” and goes through the historical record to show she doesn’t exist. Cutting doesn’t create fairy-magic. No: it has a very different effect.

Here’s what we learned during the Great Depression, when our view of economics was revolutionized by John Maynard Keynes. In a recession, private individuals like you and me, perfectly sensibly, cut back our spending. We go out less, we buy less, we save more. This causes a huge fall in private demand, and with it a huge fall in economic activity. If, at the very same time, the government cuts back, then overall demand collapses, and a recession becomes a depression. That’s why the government has to do something counter-intuitive. It has to borrow and spend more, to apply jump-leads to the economy. This prevents economic collapse. Instead of spending a fortune on dealing with mass unemployment and economic break-down, with all the misery that causes, it spends the money on restoring growth. Keynes called it “the paradox of thrift”: when the people spend less, the government has to spend more.

Wherever it has been tried, it has worked. Look at the last Great Depression. The Great Crash of 1929 was followed by a US President, Herbert Hoover, who did everything Cameron demands. He cut spending and paid off the debt. The recession grew and grew. Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected and listened to Keynes. He ramped up spending – and unemployment fell, and the economy swelled. Then in 1936 he started listening to the Cameron debt-shriekers of his day. The result? The economy collapsed again. It was only the gigantic spending of the Second World War that finally ended it.

It is working now. There are enough countries in the world trying enough different economic solutions that we examine them like laboratories. which countries have come out of this recession fastest? They are the ones like South Korea, which have had by far the biggest stimulus packages, paid for with (yes) higher debt. Which countries have fallen furthest and shattered most severely? The ones that tried to pay down their debts immediately with huge cuts.

Indeed, there’s an irony here. It turns out that if all you do is fixate on paying your debt now now now, and so you smother your economic growth, you will end up not being able to pay your debts off anyway. That’s what just happened to our nearest neighbor Ireland, may she rest in peace. And it’s what has happened throughout British history. Professors Victoria Chick and Ann Pettifor conducted a detailed study of the last ten recessions, and they found that consistently “fiscal consolidation increases rather than reduces the level of public debt as a share of GDP.” Think of it this way. It’s as if tomorrow you became so panicked about your mortgage that you decided to pay it all off in one year, by ceasing to buy food and water. You get sick, and your house gets repossessed.

So debt isn’t the problem. Debt is part of the cure. The facts suggest need to spend more, not less, to get the economy back to life – and pay back the debt in the good times, when we will be able to afford it.

I am not a doctrinaire defender of the last Labour government. I think Tony Blair should be in prison, and Gordon Brown will be damned by history for his role in deregulating the banks – the real cause of this crisis. But to claim that this crisis was caused by Labour “racking up debt” is simply false. When the Great Crash hit, Britain had the second-lowest debt in the G7 club of leading economies. To react to a recession by increasing spending, and so keeping the economy afloat, is the only rational response. The real criticism is that they didn’t go anything like far enough, and now Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is now too cowardly to defy the false conventional wisdom and make the case for fiscal stimulus, instead promising merely slower, smarter cuts.

The real reason why David Cameron is imposing these massive cuts has nothing to do with the national debt. It is because he regards himself as, in his words, “the child of Thatcher”, and he wants to pursue her agenda harder and faster than she ever dreamed. He can do the difficult job of selling that to the British people if he wishes – but he should stop doing it on the basis of a swollen, suppurating lie.

For further updates on this issue, you can follow Johann on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101 and listen to his podcast here.

The Blood of Our Heroes is On Their Hands

Good news, the deficit has been cleared!

How else - at a time when our libraries are closing, our public services are being cut to the core and we are all being asked to tighten our belts - can we suddenly afford yet another military adventure in an oil-rich country under the guise of a "humanitarian" act? Last time it was non-existent WMDs, now we have a new concept - the ceasefire that only applies to one side!

That's right, the UN resolution on Libya forbids government forces from engaging civilians, but makes no reference to aggressive acts by anti-government forces (whom we keep being told are unarmed but who nonetheless initially succeeded in occupying half the country within the space of a few days and who now seem to have tanks and an air force).

This means in practice that opponents of the regime are free to attack government forces with impunity but if those government forces defend themselves against attack by the "rebels" - who are civilians - then they are in breach of the UN resolution and will provide an instant excuse for the US and its clients to intervene and force regime change in yet another sovereign state.

Is there anyone left anywhere in this country who is still mug enough to buy this crap?

We may have a different Prime Minister, from a different party, but the forces whose role it is to direct a deeply sinister and secretive international strategy would appear to remain in place.

The blood of every heroic British serviceman and woman who loses their life for the government under the false flag of "democracy" is on their hands.

From time to time I am asked why I never joined any of the British establishment's politicial parties. I'm sorry, but I need to be able to sleep at night.

Charity chief warns cuts could 'kill off' Big Society

Reproduced with acknowledgements to BBC News


A leading charity figure has warned David Cameron that the pace of cuts could "kill off" the groups he needs to build his "Big Society".

Community Links co-founder David Robinson was invited to Downing St in May to discuss the social policy idea.

But in an open letter he urged the PM to "allow us to draw breath" and phase in plans to remove Legal Aid funding.

The government said charities could not be immune from cuts but it aimed to open up new funding sources.

Mr Cameron has championed the concept of the "Big Society", which encourages greater personal and family responsibility and community activism.

Community Links, an east London-based charity which provides welfare services, such as housing and debt advice, employment support and youth clubs, was praised by Mr Cameron as an "inspiring" organisation.

Mr Robinson was among charity representatives invited to Downing Street to discuss it with the PM and Deputy PM Nick Clegg after the general election.

In his letter, he said he admired the prime minister's "big hearted vision" and respected his "clear sighted perseverance" in pursuing it.

But he said he was worried about the impact of spending cuts and that organisations like his, which should be the "bedrock of the Big Society", were "wobbling".

Legal Aid

Mr Robinson drew particular attention to changes to Legal Aid and the New Deal which, he said, put most of Community Links' budget for 2011-12 at risk.

With big changes to the welfare system due to come in, he said the government had acknowledged there would be initial confusion - and expected agencies like his to provide support.

"Removing legal aid funding for advice on welfare benefits will wipe out agencies who would otherwise resolve these problems and there is next to no chance of local councils picking up the tab when most are stopping funding, not increasing it," he said.

He said many of the disadvantaged - particularly the elderly - would instead struggle on until they reached crisis point - illness or eviction.

Warning against a "barrage of uncoordinated cuts that hit the poorest hardest" he urged the PM to phase in planned cuts and do a "serious and urgent impact assessment", giving groups more time to adjust. He proposed allowing Legal Aid to support groups giving advice until welfare reforms were "bedded down".

"Allow us to draw breath or you will kill off the agencies you need to build the society you seek," he said.

"You've staked your political future on the prospect of a stronger, more compassionate society. Don't let your own government's policies undermine it."

'Appalling financial mess'

Plans for a Big Society Bank were announced by the prime minister in July. The independent organisation would help generate income for voluntary groups and social enterprises, using funding from money reclaimed from dormant bank accounts - the aim was to have it established by April 2011.

Mr Robinson said £5bn was needed for the sector, not including the unclaimed assets, to fund preventative work with people "at risk" from social problems.

The Cabinet Office said Britain was "in an appalling financial mess" and charities and social enterprises "cannot be immune from the necessary reductions in spending".

But a spokesman said: "Despite having had to take difficult decisions, the government is determined to open up new sources of funding for charities and voluntary groups to give them independence from state hand-outs and cut away the red tape that holds them back.

"The Big Society Bank will use money from dormant bank accounts to help capitalise the sector and we have worked quickly to open up a £100m short-term fund to help charities and voluntary groups through this transition period."

He added that a total of £470m would be invested in the four years to 2014-15 to support charities and voluntary groups and money would be "targeted where it is needed most" - including a £50m Community First Fund for the most deprived areas and, £10m to match fund private donations.

Britain just became a colder, crueller country - and for nothing

By Johann Hari


Johann Hari is an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post. He also writes for a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines. Publication of this article does not necessarily imply endorsement of every comment expressed therein.


Margaret Thatcher is lying sick in a private hospital bed in Belgravia – but her political children have just pushed her agenda further and harder and deeper than she ever dreamed of. When was the last time Britain’s public spending was slashed by more than 20 percent? Not in my mother’s lifetime. Not even in my grandmother’s lifetime. No: it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country’s debts. The result? Unemployment soared from 6 percent to 19 percent, and the country’s economy collapsed so severely that they lost all ability to pay their bills and the debt actually rose from 114 percent to 180 percent. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it does rhyme.”

George Osborne has just gambled your future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. In the Great Depression, we learned some basic principles. When an economy falters, ordinary people – perfectly sensibly – cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand, and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall. That’s why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers – by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt. Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression. The countries that stimulated hardest, like South Korea, came out of recession first.

David Cameron and George Osborne have ignored all this. They have ignored the warnings of the Financial Times, the newspaper most critical of their strategy. They have dismissed the warnings of Nobel Laureates for Economics like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, whose warnings have consistently been proven right in this crisis. They have refused to learn from the fact that the country they held up as a model for how to deal with a recession – “Look and learn from across the Irish Sea,” Osborne said – has suffered the worst collapse in the developed world. They have instead blindly obeyed the ideological precepts they learned as baby Thatcherites: slash the state, and make the poor pay most.

Osborne galloped through his Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) speech, failing to name almost any of the services that will be slashed or shut down. It’s revealing that he doesn’t want to publicly name them while the nation is watching.

But beneath the statistics, there was a swathe of human tragedies that will now unnecessarily unfold across Britain. PriceWaterhouseCooper – nobody’s idea of a Trotskyite cell – says that a million people will now lose their jobs as a direct result. My father lost his job at the height of the last Tory recession, and had to leave the country to get another one. I remember how that felt. I remember what that did to my family. Now it’s going to happen to a million more families – and probably more after that. For the private sector to get all these people into work, as Osborne claims, there would have to be the most rapid business growth in my lifetime. Does anyone think that will happen?

Osborne has chosen the weakest people to take the worst cuts. The poorest sixteen year olds were given £30 a week to stay on in education, so they could afford to study – until Osborne’s team dismissed it as a “bribe” and shut it down. The most frail old people depend on council services to wash them and feed them – yet Osborne just slashed their budget by 30 percent, which service providers say will mean more pensioners being left to die in their own filth. Every family living on benefits is set to lose an average of £1000 a year – which, as I’ve seen from living in the East End of London, will mean many poor kids across Britain never getting a birthday party, or a trip to the seaside, or a bed of their own, or a winter coat. This isn’t just On Yer Bike, it’s On Yer Own.

The irrationality of this approach is perhaps plainest when you look at housing. We badly need more affordable housing in Britain. Some 4.5 million people are stuck on waiting lists, and the average age of a home buyer is now 37. It’s a cause of constant stress to the real middle class and despair for the poor. By a happy coincidence, house-building is one of the best stimulators of the economy: it employs a lot of people on average wages, who then spend their money quickly in a “multiplier effect.”

Yet Osborne has chosen the opposite. There will be on average one new home built per week in the whole of London and the south-east. That’s one. Indeed, instead of building homes, he’s driving people out of them. By slashing housing benefit, London councils alone say 83,000 people here are going to be forced to leave their homes, with 1.3 million ending up in more debt. Cameron has revealed that his baby daughter sleeps in a cardboard box decorated for her by her big sister. Thanks to him, a lot more people are going to be sleeping in cardboard boxes soon.

It can’t be coincidental that this is being done to us by three men – Cameron, Osborne, and Nick Clegg – who have never worried about a bill in their lives. On a basic level, they do not understand the effects of these decisions on real people. Remember, Cameron said before the election: "The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school." Osborne lives in a £4m trust fund he did nothing whatsoever to earn, and which is stashed offshore to prevent it being taxed. Clegg actually thought the state pension was £30 a week, a level that would kill pensioners.

These attitudes have real consequences. We’re not in this together. Who isn’t in it with us? Them, their friends, and their families. They were asked to pay nothing more in this CSR. On the contrary: they are being let off left, right and centre. To pluck a random example, one of the richest corporations in Britain, Vodafone, had an outstanding tax bill of £6 billion – but Osborne simply cancelled it this year. If he had made them pay, he could have prevented nearly all the cuts to all the welfare recipients in Britain. You try refusing to pay your taxes next time, and see if George Osborne shows the same generosity to you as he does to the super-rich.

There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure. That’s the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about “fairness.”

Britain just became colder and crueler country. And for what? To pantingly follow a disproven ideology over a cliff. On the eve of the general election, Cameron told us: "There'll be no cuts to frontline services," "we're not talking about swingeing cuts,” and “all cuts will be fair.” Is it possible to call him anything but a liar and an ideologue today?

You can enjoy a long rest, Baroness Thatcher – your successors have embarked on a Mephedrone-charged imitation that exceeds your most fantastical dreams.

Who gets shafted in coalition - David or Goliath?

I have read some interesting articles and discussions around the place following the emergence of the Cameron-Clegg coalition from the recent general election.

On Facebook and the local Internet community forums much complaining has taken place, a lot of it to the effect that any agreement would be Conservative dominated and that the Liberal Democrats would end up playing patsy to their larger partner. Understandably a lot of this has emanated from members or supporters of the Labour Party, who could be assumed to be unhappy with the coalition if for no other reason than that it replaced their own regime and that they are not part of it.

Reading the News at the BBC and elsewhere it seems there are rumblings of discontent from some on the right wing of the Conservative Party, who seem surprised and upset that a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition appears unlikely to pursue a purebred Conservative agenda.

An uneasy sense of deja vu overcame me when I read the particular concerns of Lord Tebbit. The reason for this was that I had beheld similar outbreaks of incredulity on occasions as a member of the previous administration at the London Borough of Hounslow, in which the Community Group had itself been a junior partner to the Conservatives, when it had been explained to those concerned that as a coalition the administration would be taking some aspects of the Community Group's programme on board as part of its overall policy portfolio.

What sometimes gets overlooked during the debate as to whether it is the senior or the junior partner that is calling the tune is that political parties and groups are themselves often coalitions of a kind, and the larger the party or group in question the more of a coalition it presumably is. The Leader of Hounslow Council under the coalition administration was a moderate and pragmatic man. It would be fair to say (although usually disputed by Labour for tactical reasons) that on the mundane issues of policy the Community Group on the council had more in common with the "moderate" wing of the Conservative Group - for want of a better term - than with its right wing. And, more significantly, the moderate wing of the Conservative Group had more in common with us.

If I can put that another way, it wasn't always with regret that the Conservative leadership would abandon proposals from its right wing "because the Community Group won't accept them". The Prime Minister would appear to be using his being in coalition with the Liberal Democrats as an opportunity to shape his own policy programme in much the same way, to the evident annoyance of the headbangers.

Of course where the Community Group was more "extreme" than its Conservative partners of both left and right, in the areas of culture change and democratisation, we met a lot more resistance and eventually, in my view, failed to break down the establishment sufficiently in a way that would have prevented the Old Order from being rebuilt, as it is now likely to be.

The Liberal Democrats in government will similarly find their partners to be less co-operative in areas where there are real differences between themselves and the Prime Minister's team.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the mix. For the moment I am just pleased that Clegg would appear to be holding his ground in the face of what must have been some quite formidable pressure.