Eaten by missionaries

Scottish independence referendum revisited

2012-01-22T23:30:00.001Z

Last week's article by Katy Gordon on Liberal Democrat Voice this week makes one fear that leading Lib Dems north of the border are still falling into Alex Salmond's trap of branding us with the 'Unionist' parties.

We now run the risk of being portrayed, with some justification, as a home rule party that insists home rule isn't an option in the referendum and as supporting votes for 16-year-olds but opposing it for the referendum. Those will be tricky positions to to explain to the electorate.

I have mentioned recently the very wise advice given by Dan Falchikov on this subject that the party would do well to heed. I note that my former Watford colleague Andy Canning, himself a formidable campaigner, is arguing in similar vein in the responses to Katy Gordon's article. He comments, with regard to the 2011 Holyrood election:

...the active hostility to the SNP led the Lib Dem leadership to totally misunderstand the feelings of the electorate and we were punished by a wholesale switch of the Lib Dem vote to the SNP lock, stock and barrel.

It seems to me that Lib Dems north of the border have such visceral loathing of Alex Salmond that many of them have lost their reason regarding how to fight back against him. But the new Scottish party leader Willie Rennie is an old pro when it comes to electoral strategy. Let's hope he will lead the party back towards rationality.

Is lack of funding really the only possible explanation for a school's weakness?

2012-01-15T12:27:00.003Z

We only get newspapers at the weekend and have just reverted back to the Guardian and Observer after an unhappy dalliance with the Independent (too boring and worthy, often still unread by Monday).

To my delight it appears that Polly Toynbee's column has disappeared from the Saturday paper, with the slot now occupied by Jonathan Freedland, who at least has other things to say besides calling for higher public spending.

But the spirit of Toynbeeism is present in a letter from Dr Selina Todd, an Oxford admissions tutor. Her main point, with which I agree, is that comprehensive education gives students an 'excellent foundation for university' so it is wrong to think of students succeeding 'in spite' of going to comprehensive schools.

So far so good, but Dr Todd then concludes:

Any weaknesses with comprehensive schools are due to the lamentable lack of government investment in them.

Hang on a minute here. Even the late Labour government's worst enemies would concede that it spent a lot of money on schools in the days when boom and bust had still been abolished. There hasn't been time for the effects of austerity (whether one considers it painful but necessary or ideologically driven) to filter through. So if comprehensive schools have been failing because of lack of funding, then there really is no hope. Whatever party is in power, they are unlikely to preside over a further massive increase in school funding so if one accepts Dr Todd's argument then struggling schools will never succeed.

It does seem crudely reductionist to suggest that the only possible explanation for the failure of a school is lack of government investment. Surely schools are complex organisations whose success or lack of it could have a number of explanations (and certainly level of funding is an important one). Do the performance of headteachers, governing bodies, the nature of the intake, the quality of the staff, whether the school has an ethos of aspiration for its students etc. have no impact at all on a school's performance?

One would hope that in the 'imaginative lessons' students take part in at comprehensive schools they learn that explanations for social phenomena are often complex and not easily reducible to a monocausal explanation. One hopes that recognising this won't disadvantage them when their application is read by an Oxford admissions tutor.

Salmond has the right to have the referendum he wants

2012-01-15T11:39:00.001Z

The week's news has been dominated by the spat between Alex Salmond and variously David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Michael Moore over the Scottish referendum.

Despite very sensible advice from Dan Falchikov that

A period of silence from Moore, Cameron and Osborne on the constitutional question would be welcome - and might buy the Scottish party some breathing space to remove itself from the unionist hook it has impaled itself on

according to yesterday's Guardian Nick Clegg had still not managed to let things lie.

Whatevever the legal niceties, the SNP won a mandate for a referendum last year, are pretty much entitled to hold it on their own terms, and a spirit of begrudery and obstruction from Westminster will make independence more likely.

Whichever way, it seems to me that the status quo is not sustainable, with Scotland simply administering the proceeds of taxes set by Wesminster and therefore not having to confront the economic choices that tend to define the differences between political parties. It also means that Scottish politics becomes defined not by genuine ideological choices but by legislation governing the sale of alcohol and the like.

Since 1999 government from Holyrood has basically been in the hands of three different parties all espousing varieties of centre-left social democracy. Although that it the part of the political landscape that I inhabit too (alghough I would stress Liberalism not social democracy) I can't help thinking that for Scottish politics to come of age it requires Holyrood having real control over tax and public spending decisions, not being a supplicant to Westminster.

The Liberal Democrats north and south of the border would be better accepting Salmond's mandate, avoid being painted into the Unionist corner and instead get on with campaigning for devo max.

England, not Westminster is the 'mother of parliaments'

2012-01-12T13:54:00.000Z

The Eurosceptic Conservative MP Bill Cash has written a biography of the Victorian radical statesman John Bright, of whom he is a distant relative.

Although there is no obligation on authors to write about subjects whom they find politically sympathetic, this might seem a bit of an odd match. Yet Bright's resistance to social and welfare legislation would no doubt stand him in good stead with some modern Conservatives. And he did end up as a Liberal Unionist party (after the 1886 split over home rule) which was in an electoral alliance with the Tories.

George Eaton's review in the New Statesman makes a point that is a familiar bee in my own bonnet - namely the way politicians and others so often refer to Westminster as the 'mother of parliaments'. In fact this is a misquote of a famous phrase of Bright's that described England as the mother of parliaments. (See this Guardian editorial on the point'). In other words England gave birth to parliaments. Whether this is a historically accurate observation is open to question. Bright used the phrase rhetorically to promote extension of the franchise.

I would like to be say that I knew this as a result of voluminous reading of Bright's speeches. In fact it's because I remember Norman St John Stevas ticking off Shirley Williams for her misquoting of Bright on an edition of Question Time in the early 1980s. For some reason it has stuck with me.

Journal of Liberal History No. 73

2012-01-12T13:36:00.000Z

The latest issue of the Journal of Liberal History includes my review of Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914 by William C. Lubenow. (The content is only available by subscription online).

This seems a good moment for one of my regular plugs for the Journal, this edition of which includes a review by Michael Meadowcroft and an articles including 'The King of Showland The unusual career of the entertainment entrepreneur and Liberal MP for Walsall, 1922-24, Pat Collins.' by Graham Lippiatt and 'The Lloyd George land taxes' by Roy Douglas.

Subscription details here.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T18:27:00.000Z

For anyone reading this I hope that Father Christmas brings you everything that you asked for tomorrow morning.

A touch of empathy

2011-12-24T18:16:00.000Z

Accustomed as we are to being reviled in the media and held in low esteem by the public, we politicos can do with such crumbs of comfort as are offered to us.

I am currently reading Understanding the British empire, a collection of essays by the eminent imperial historian Professor Ronald Hyam. Whereas historians often display a studied detachment or even mild cynicism towards the politicians they study, Professor Hyam comments:

...government is about taking almost impossibly wide perspectives, and it is an extremely difficult business. Historians should respect that fact, at least when they are assessing intelligent men [sic] of goodwill and sound mind.

He quotes the imperial proconsul Lord Cromer as writing:

More than forty years experience behind the scenes of poltiical life has led me to be a very indulgent critic on the faults of political men [sic again]. I have come to the commonplace but very true conclusion, stated by Taine in the preface to his great work - namely, that the government of human beings is a very difficult task, and that in dealing with them it is far easier to go wrong than to go right.

Even leaving aside Professor Hyam's empathy with the difficulties confronted by those who have to make difficult decisions, this is an excellent book, both scholarly and accessible and the culmination of a lifetimes work. No doubt it will not sell as well as books by more famous and less knowledgeable authors, but it deserves to reach a general audience.

Perhaps to help shift units, the publishers should highlight the essays that deal with Hyam's preoccupation with sexuality and empire, including one entitled 'Penis envyand "penile othering" in the colonies and America'.

Controversialists should not sue for libel

2011-12-15T13:50:00.002Z

Historian Niall Ferguson's threatened libel suit over a negative review of his latest book is discussed on David Allen Green's excellent New Statesman blog (if only his articles appeared in the magazine I might have renewed my subscription).

The moral of the story is that those who make a living from the expression of controversial opinions (and for that matter Bloggers and the like who do it as a hobby) really shouldn't run to the libel laws when they find themselves criticised (however unfair the criticisms might seem).

Last year when Professor Orlando Figes got himself in a spot of bother over anonymous reviews he posted on Amazon, the problem was less that he posted the reviews at all, but rather his threat to sue when (correctly) accused.

Ferguson is always likely to arouse the ire of those who disagree with his neo-Thatcherite take on history and a hostile review in a small-circulation publication is hardly likely to damage his reputation. Figes' trashing of fellow historians' books would have been little more than an amusing curiosity if he hadn't tried to silence them when they rumbled him.

It might be a different matter if, like poor Christopher Jefferies, they were wrongly accused of a vile crime. But for the most part anyone who courts contoversy has to be able to take it as well as give it. The best way to deal with unfair criticism is to rebut it in print. Those tempted to sue would be better taking a couple of aspirin and having a lie down until the mood passes.

Green's article is worth reading in full, but I was rather taken with one quote in it. When A.J.P. Taylor's The origins of the second world war was savaged by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who said it would harm his reputation as a serious historian, Taylor replied:

The Regius professor's methods of quotation might also do serious harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one.

As far as I am aware, Trevor-Roper didn't sue.

Are the Lib Dems really pro-European?

2011-12-11T15:52:00.000Z

I was planning to get my head round this whole Euro row thing so that I could post something vaguely coherent on here. But Jonathan Calder (Small row in Europe, not many hurt) has pretty much summed up my view, so why say the same thing again when one can just post a link?

It seems to me that the reaction of Lib Dems to the Cameron veto has been relatively restrained. I don't really find this surprising. Lib Dem attitudes towards Europe reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's The man who was Thursday. In this novel, the members of an anarchist cell are one-by-one revealed to be undercover policemen. In a similar way, Lib Dem activists, often portrayed in the media as starry-eyed pro-Europeans, are more often than not undercover Eurosceptics. Time and again I let slip in conversation to a Lib Dem colleague that I don't quite share the party's zeal for the European project only to be told that neither do they.

Genuine Euro-enthusiasts seem to me relatively thin on the ground in the Lib Dems, although one did tell me during the 2005 general election that the campaign was a useful building block for the referendum on the European constitution. But such sentiments are relatively rare. I am not of course saying that there are many Lib Dems who are Eurosceptic in the Tory sense (obsessive about sovereignty and regulations). It's just that it wouldn't surprise me if the Euro-doubters are actually a majority in the party, but have simply assumed we are in a minority and not felt strongly enough ever to put up a fight on the issue.

I suppose the next few days and weeks will show quite how brightly the Pro-European star burns within the Lib Dems.

On Hislop and the bankers

2011-12-05T23:13:00.000Z

My critique of Ian Hislop's recent BBC documentary When Bankers Were Good appears on the History & Policy website. It begins:

... although entertaining and informative, Hislop's programme could also serve as a warning against using history to advance a contemporary policy prescription on the basis of very thin evidence.

Among the aims of the website are to: 'demonstrate the relevance of history to contemporary policy making and to increase the influence of historical research over current policy.'

Halfway to New York: Out of time

2011-12-04T22:12:00.003Z

From my stepson travelling in South America I receive a text telling me that a friend he used to be in a band with, is now in a new band and they have a single out. Would I download it from iTunes?

I did so more as a favour than anything else, imagining I might give it a perfunctory listen before reverting to better things.

But it is actually very good indeed, outstanding even - in a kind of indie/rock/pop style. It is called Out of time by Halfway to New York. When they are famous I will be able to say: 'My stepson used to be in a band with the guitarist, you know'. So listen to it via the youtube link and if you like it download the song.

When the left could still laugh, or when a New Statesman article endorsed cannibalism

2011-12-02T20:41:00.001Z

In my possession I have a reprinted copy of article* taken from the New Statesman arguing that as part of a programme of national recovery:

Surplus 'students' of both sexes should be sold to Arab sheikhs for their harems, thus preserving our university art treasures...

Surplus car-workers, politicians, steel-workers etc. should be eaten on a 'natural wastage' basis.

So far as I know no one from the New Statesman apologised for what might be considered a deeply offensive article that is at once racist, homophobic and insulting to students and members of the working class.

It's a bit late for an apology, actually, since the article was published in 1975 and both its author, Auberon Waugh, and the editor who published it, Anthony Howard, are sadly no longer with us. It was clearly intended to by funny - indeed it was part of an extended joke whereby Waugh, whose satire was based on expressing outrageous reactionary views for comic effect, wrote articles for a magazine largely known for its earnest high-minded socialism. Waugh's views were, even in 1975, clearly beyond the pale and meant to be so. They were intended to wind up the magazine's lefty readers.

Of course I mention this in the light of today's controversy over Jeremy Clarkson's use of offensive reactionary views as a humorous device. (Clarkson, though, is nowhere near in Waugh's league as a satirist). My New Statesman example suggests it is not merely dew-eyed nostalgia to think that there was once a time when the liberal left could recognise that views expressed by a humorist might be intended to amuse, and not attract po-faced condemnation and demands for apologies.

* The article is from the New Statesman 23 May 1975 and reprinted in In the lion's den, a collection of Auberon Waugh's New Statesman articles.

George Harrison - not the Fabbest but still pretty Fab

2011-11-29T23:24:00.001Z

For me, remembering to post about notable anniversaries is a bit like sending birthday cards: a couple of weeks out from the day I make a mental note not to forget. Then it doesn't cross my mind until after the event has passed.

In the nick of time I've remembered that today is the tenth anniversary of George Harrison's death. I had intended to watch Martin Scorcese's two-part documentary on the Quiet One and use it as the basis for my argument that he was the true genius of The Beatles. But I forgot either to record the second part or watch it when it was available on iPlayer.

While I note that at least one person has tried, it isn't really tenable to argue for George as the greatest Beatle. He's my favourite because he was the plucky underdog who emerged from the shadows of the other two. I quite like his songs too.

His solo career showed that he wasn't quite the songwriting equal of John and Paul. Yes, All things must pass is a great album because he had built up a backlog of material, having been rationed to two songs per album with The Beatles. The follow up Living in the material world is a fine piece of work also, perhaps underrated because his religious preoccupations are to the fore. But after that he ran out of steam, and I suspect it was because he didn't have the others to keep up with. His solo albums between the mid-70s and mid-80s each had their strong tracks, but overall lacked inspiration or ambition.

It was only when he started working with Jeff Lynne of ELO fame that things got better. 1987's Cloud Nine was a return to form, the first Travelling Wilburys album was very good and the posthumous Brainwashed , probably the second best of his career.

While George was known to complain that his songs didn't always get a fair hearing in The Beatles, I suspect he needed strong collaborators to inspire him to great work, and he was fortunate that they didn't come much better than his Fab colleagues.

The YouTube link is to Sam Brown singing one of George Harrison's very last songs Horse to the water from the tribute Concert for George. His own version, a collaboration with Jools Holland, was recorded shortly before he died and doesn't quite have the oomph that the song deserves. Sam Brown really does it justice. Unfortunately the audio and video are badly out of synch so it's better listened to than watched. Frustratingly also, the song can only be downloaded from iTunes with the whole album. These tribute things are normally pretty uneven overall, but this is one of the best cover versions of a Harrissong.

Coventry, rugby, nostalgia

2011-11-26T21:52:00.002Z

Today, for the first time in six years, I made a trip to the midlands to watch a Coventry Rugby Club home match - this one against National Division One leaders Ealing Trailfinders.

Coventry is my birthplace and I have supported the city's rugby team since childhood. Until the 1980s they were one of the big beasts of English rugby, up there with Leicester, Gloucester and the leading Welsh club sides. The first game I ever watched was the great David Duckham's last home match in a Cov shirt.

Until a few years ago, I would generally get to a couple of home games each year, combining watching the match with a visit to my grandparents. But when grandad died five years ago, and then my grandmother moved south to be cared for by my mother, there was no personal reason to visit Coventry any more. It seemed perverse to take a whole day out of a busy life to watch second tier (and now third tier) rugby. The more so as we have Saracens playing premiership rugby ten minutes' walk away - although Saracens have never really adopted Watford and in turn I have never quite adopted them.

Anyway, because it conjured up family memories it was quite a sentimental trip today, but an enjoyable one, not least because my team won. It is nice to see that at this semi-professional level, players still stop to talk to supporters, club officials are relaxed about people wandering on to the pitch after the game, and generally the corporate takeover of rugby that one sees in the premiership is thankfully absent.

In days gone by Cov were famed for their forward game, and tended to see off southern teams like Rosslyn Park and Harlequins who threw the ball about a lot but never won anything. It was a bit like that today. Ealing came at Cov with their effete passing and offloading game, displaying the kind of skilful play that so disfigures the modern game. But Cov were having none of it and scored a winning try in injury time after a rolling maul which at one point included 13 of Cov's 15 players.

Cov have a long way to go to regain their glory days but perhaps today was a start.

Whatever the truth, Roebuck's suicide was a terrible, lonely death

2011-11-19T16:49:00.006Z

For one with not much more than a passing interest in cricket, I have found myself pondering the fate of Peter Roebuck rather more than I would have expected.

I hope it is not pure ghoulishness. Rather it is the combination of how the story has unfolded and the struggle of a media that likes people to be monsters or angels either to know what to say about someone who may have been a bit of both.

On another day I might not have even clicked the button to read the reports of his death. I remembered his role as Somerset captain in the 1980s and his part in the controversy over the Richards/Garner/Botham departures and vaguely aware that he had gone on to become a cricket writer. But beyond that he hadn't much permeated my consciousness and it was intriguing to learn of this brilliant but tormented soul, whose suicide somehow didn't completely surprise those who knew him.

But there was more than that. However tactfully, most obituaries and tributes referred to his 2001 conviction for caning three 19-year-olds whom he was coaching. This is the sort of information that once known permanently colours one's perception of anybody. An open-minded person might reflect that the history of sport is littered with charismatic coaches with odd methods, and consider that this may have been an error of judgement for which Roebuck was righly punished, but which should not be held against him for all time. Yet it is hard to avoid agreeing with the trial judge's reported comment that: 'It seems so unusual that it must have been done to satisfy some need in you'.

When those who had spent the day of his suicide with Roebuck reported that they saw no sign of what was to come, one sensed the grim inevitability of unpleasant revelations explaining his apparently sudden decision. And so it proved: his leap from a sixth-floor window was triggered by his imminent arrest on a charge of sexual assault.

This leaves judgement on his life and reputation in a strange state of limbo. Any fair-minded person would avoid judging the motivation for his suicide. It might have been fear of his guilt being exposed. But equally, even if innocent he would have known that his reputation would never quite recover. Even if not convicted there would be a sense he had 'got off' rather than been exonerated. The later accusation, combined with the earlier conviction and his charitable work helping young men through university would be combined to create a picture of a sordid predator. Already you don't have to look far to read an article about Roebuck written as if an accusation is proof of guilt and indeed of serial wrongdoing.

All of which might amount to an argument for defendants in cases of sexual assault or rape to be given anonymity, along with the victims. Who knows whether Roebuck, if innocent, would be alive today if there was a chance he could have cleared his name without facing trial by media also?

But issues around anonymity are not that straightforward and that wasn't really my purpose in writing about this. (And for avoidance of doubt I should add that sexual assault is an appalling crime and the police should assiduously investigate any report of it, however talented or philanthropic the alleged perpetrator.) Rather it is just a sense of the cruel vicissitudes that attend the human condition.

Perhaps a young man hoping for a way out of poverty and a new chance in life found himself suffering a grotesque sexual assault at the hands of his supposed benefactor. Or a brilliant but troubled man faced the horror of a false accusation when they were merely trying to do good. Either on its own is awful enough, but whatever happened led to a terrible, lonely death. Whether Roebuck was guilty or innocent, one would need a heart of stone not to feel a profound sense of sadness at the whole story.

PS: Clearly plenty of people have felt troubled by this story. I have also read these very measured pieces by Howard Jacobson and Geoff Lemon.

Book Review: Robert Ingham and Duncan Brack (eds) Peace, reform and liberation

2011-11-19T14:01:00.002Z

This has been a busy, busy week, with no time for blogging. I did, however, make my

debut as a Liberal Democrat Voice contributor, with my review of the Liberal Democrat History Group's new history of Liberal politics, Peace, reform and liberation, edited by Robert Ingham and Duncan Brack.

How they are related: Anna Chancellor and HH Asquith

2011-11-11T22:42:00.000Z

We all know that Helena Bonham Carter is the great grandaughter of Liberal prime minister HH Asquith, indeed she lives in his old house at Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire. But I was curious to discover that she is not the only thespian of note descended from old Squiffy. Specifically Anna Chancellor of Spooks, The Hour and Hidden fame (and still better known as Duckface from Four weddings and a funeral) is his great great granddaughter.

Her great grandfather was Asquith's eldest son Raymond, whose tragic death on the Somme was symbolic of the 'lost generation' who fell in the first world war. Raymond's daughter Perdita was Anna Chancellor's grandmother.

In passing I might also mention that her uncle is Alexander Chancellor, who edited the Spectator in the 1970s and 80s when it was an elegant, eclectic and enjoyable vehicle for fine writing rather than the organ of grim right-wing ideology it is today. And she is playing the lead role in Radio 4's current classic serial, an adaptation by Harold Pinter of Elizabeth Bowen's masterpiece The heat of the day, which is a cut above Spooks, Hidden and other such nonsense.

PS: Had I been blogging at the time I might have remarked that in January of this year, Raymond Asquith's son Julian died at the age of 94. He was just the second Earl of Oxford and Asquith, having inherited the title from his grandfather the former prime minister in 1928. He was therefore an earl for 83 years.

Should a Liberal really be advocating compulsory cycle helmets?

2011-11-08T21:44:00.002Z

I see via Jonathan Calder at Liberal England that Lib Dem MP Annette Brooke's private members bill to make it compulsory for cyclists to wear a helmet has not been given a second reading.

Jonathan reiterates his opposition to compulsion and cites research that it simply reduces the number of cyclists on the road. I am probably a case in point on this. I own a bicycle, but use it all too rarely even though I do enjoy a nice cycle ride. I am middle aged, overweight and am trying to make an effort to eat less and take more exercise. This could include cycling. But it is already a bit of a palaver, remembering where the pump is, checking that the lights are working etc. Having to buy a helmet, find it when I need it and then wear the horrible thing on my head would pretty much guarantee that the bicycle will remain in the shed. I suspect a lot of occasional, recreational cyclists would feel the same.

[EDIT: Perhaps I should have looked a little further before posting the above. I see the bill was aimed at under-14s. But the point still stands - both as regards children who use their bike only occasionally and in that if legislation was passed for under-14s there would soon be pressure to extend it to apply to adults.]

Leaving aside the practical arguments, it annoys me when Liberal Democrats are in the forefront of trying to implement such petty restrictions on personal freedom. Over the years my libertarian instincts have been increasingly tempered by pragmatism. We are not a Libertarian party and are hardly going to call for an end to seatbelt laws or to reverse the smoking ban. But for me, the correct position for Liberals on such matters is that of sceptics not cheerleaders. We should be the ones wanting to see clear and overwhelming evidence that the social good outweighs the infringement of personal choice. So I am disappointed that a bill such as this was put forward by a Liberal Democrat MP

CD Review: The Bangles 'Sweetheart of the Sun'

2011-11-06T20:45:00.001Z

Conventional wisdom has it about right regarding the oeuvre of The Bangles. Their first album, 1984’s All Over The Place, was a fine example of the emerging sixties-influenced guitar-based, jangle-pop ‘Paisley underground’ thing that was happening at that time.

Instead of continuing in similar vein, the band sought a short-cut to stardom, through songs such as Manic Monday and Walks like an Egyptian, enjoyable pop confections in themselves, but less than the band was capable of creatively. And then of coure they recorded the excruciating power ballad Eternal Flame.

So I wouldn’t have bothered with their latest effort Sweetheart of the Sun had I not needed to use up eMusic downloads before they expired and chosen this in haste because I had at least heard of the ban. It is pleasing to find that this album is really rather good, a worthy successor to All Over The Place. Unlike their intervening efforts, most of the material is written by group members without outside help.

All the things that made The Bangles worth listening to in the first place are here: pleasing harmonies, jangling guitars, memorable songs with soaring choruses. Beatles, Byrds and REM influences very much to the fore. Songs like the opener ‘Anna Lee’ and ‘I’ll never be through with you’ even sound like potential hit singles. The only complaint (as more than one reviewer has commented) is that some of the lead vocals sound strained – as if a nasty cold virus was going round and the group members hadn’t quite recovered when they recorded their vocals.

In case it seems a strange leap from writing about CD by the respected-but-obscure Jayhawks to the well-known-but-lightweight Bangles, it’s worth remarking that the producer of this album, Matthew Sweet, has also co-written and recorded with The Jayhawks, while Bangle Susanna Hoffs sang on Jayhawk Gary Louris’s solo album Vagabonds. Degrees of separation and all that.

For some reason I don't seem to be able to embed videos right now but here is a youtube link to a song from the album.

Adoption row: just another exercise in council-bashing?

2011-10-31T13:48:00.001Z

I can’t claim any great expertise (or even knowledge) on the subject of adoption, but instinct and logic incline me to be very sceptical of the government’s latest exercise in council-bashing.

Take, for instance, David Cameron’s statement that "It is shocking that of the 3,600 children under the age of one in care, only 60 were adopted last year - this is clearly not good enough.” This takes it as read that the more children in care under 12 months old who are adopted the better. But is this a reasonable view? Unless parents have explicitly given up their children for adoption, then one hopes that in many cases local authorities will be trying to return babies to their birth parents if at all possible. A rush to arrange adoption is not necessarily the best solution. (One might even expect Conservatives to agree with this).

The other measure mentioned is how quickly councils arrange adoptions after agreeing that this is the best outcome for a particular child. But it hardly takes a moment’s thought to work out how this might be affected by factors other than the council’s ability to arrange adoptions. If the social services department is more reluctant than others to decide that children should be adopted then its success rate will appear higher because it has fewer cases to resolve. The reverse would also be true.
That is leaving aside the issue of whether socio-economic or demographic factors might make it easier to arrange adoptions in some areas than in others.

Given how serious an issue this is, how important to people’s lives, it seems unfortunate to say the least that Cameron and Conservative children’s minister Tim Loughton are using this as an excuse to pick a row with local authorities. Doubtless there will be some councils who really are not doing a very good job, although one suspects there will be others who are ‘named and shamed’ who have actually got sound reasons to explain their performance. Whichever way, government gunboat diplomacy doesn’t help.

Paul Tyler and 38 Degrees - pressure groups should be subject to scrutiny too!

2011-10-30T20:42:00.002Z

Writing on the Guardian website last week, Lib Dem peer Paul Tyler took issue with the lobbying methods on the NHS bill of campaigning organisation 38 Degrees. He commented:

The kind of exaggeration 38 Degrees used made people ask whether simply filling up someone's inbox with a lot of half-constructed half-truths was a respectable way to campaign. The organisation had not asked people to engage with any of the detail of this issue, and had given a false impression about the headlines. Some would say this route leads us into a form of one-click rent-a-mob – what is now termed "slacktivism" – enabling ill-informed and disconnected instant electronic communication to take the place of genuine political discussion and interaction.

Regardless of the precise rights and wrongs on this specific issue, I think Paul Tyler highlights a wider point about the credibility and ethics of 'third sector' organisations and the campaigns they run and the free pass they are often given by the media.

So we see the NSPCC, which provides very little direct care for children, running ever more emotive advertising campaigns, which no doubt provide them with funds for another round of horror-movie-style ads.

Similarly, visiting a National Trust property earlier this year, I was shocked to see them running a disingenous campaign against the government's National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), as if there every National Trust property was about to be surrounded by new housing estates. (The NPPF is far from perfect and many legitimate criticisms can be made of it, but this should not descend into caricature). Likewise, last year we had homelessness charity Shelter engaging in questionable use of statistics to generate publicity for themselves by attacking local authorities.

Third sector organisations are by no means necessarily noble and disinterested parties. They too have their vested interests - publicity helps them raise funds and gain competitive edge over their rivals. So they have every reason to make their claims sensational and their tactics noisy. Equally, they are likely to be represented by those well-versed in the political game. Campbell-Robb, the director of Shelter worked in the cabinet office under Labour; when MacMillan Nurses denounced the government over benefits earlier this year, their media spokesperson was former Labour parliamentary candidate Mike Hobday.

Of course, charities, NGOs, pressure groups and the like have a vital role to play in any democracy, but their arguments and campaigning tactics should be scrutinised as closely by the media and treated with a degree of scepticism. For that reason Paul Tyler's article is timely and welcome.

PS: I suppose for the sake of full disclosure I should mention that I had my own little local run-in last year with a well-known third sector organisation.

The Lib Dems have a duty to contest police commissioner elections

2011-10-28T13:01:00.000+01:00

The decision of the Federal Executive that the party should not contest next year’s police commissioner elections is misguided and wrong. To be clear, FE hasn’t actually said that Lib Dem candidates must not stand, but there will be no federal funding for these elections and its suggestion that ‘Individual Liberal Democrats may support non party candidates’ is hardly a rallying cry for local parties to fight energetic campaigns.

Perhaps I will be in a tiny minority in feeling so strongly about this, but it seems to me that the whole issue has been bungled by the party from start to finish. As a result, we have a mess from which we don’t even emerge with honour intact.

The election of police commissioners was always going to be a problem for the party, as it was one of the few elements of the coalition agreement that provoked strongly-held and near-unanimous opposition among Liberal Democrat activists. Although it was clear that the coalition would have a change of heart on creating police commissioners, in practice it wasn’t a problem as the elections were to take place on the same day as next year’s local elections. So we could fight two elections for the price of one, just as we do when European and council elections are fought on the same day.

Then came this year’s disappointing local election results, in which a difficult situation was made worse by many non Lib Dem voters turning out to vote No in the referendum and Tory or Labour in the council elections. At the Lib Dem local government conference in the summer, there seemed to be a strong view from councillors, campaigners and defeated candidates that having police commissioner elections on the same day as the local elections would be disastrous for our chances of holding council seats, and this opinion was expressed very strongly to ministers etc.

I found myself a lone voice in arguing the opposite case. The referendum did harmed in the council elections because the Conservative party threw all its weight behind getting its supporters out to vote, as the referendum became a must-win for Cameron. By contrast, police commissioner elections would largely be a local matter, influenced more by the ground war than the air war and in my view there was little cause for alarm. In the past we have not been harmed in the past by having European and council elections on the same day – arguably the need to knock up our local vote has helped us to get more MEPs elected. Perhaps the most obvious comparison is with mayoral elections, and there too people largely treat them as local elections. In my view local government colleagues were drawing the wrong conclusion from this May’s double header.

This was not a popular view, however and there was near unanimity that the date of the police commissioner elections just had to be moved. But the consequences of the change of date needed to be considered also. If the police commissioner elections did not take place on the first Thursday in May, we would end up having to spend a lot of money and motivate activists to fight a set of elections that in most places we would have little chance of winning because of the size of the constituencies.

Regardless of whether it would help our prospects in council elections, the announcement in September that the police commissioner elections were being moved to November 2012 meant that it was highly unlikely that the Lib Dems would contest them seriously, or indeed at all. Even before the date changed, the lack of urgency shown by the English party in developing approval and selection procedures for police commissioner candidates was a worrying sign that we were preparing to surrender without a fight any chance of influencing local policing. Likewise, at the recent federal conference in Birmingham there was a noticeable lack of training sessions, fringe meetings and the like on fighting police commissioner elections.

Federal Executive’s decision merely confirms what I feared. But while it may save the party money and spare campaigners the need to tramp the streets on cold, dark November evenings, it remains a bad decision. Effectively the national party is saying that having helped to create these posts it has no interest in ensuring that policing in our communities is carried out in line with Liberal principles. It is leaving it to the sheer chance of whether an independent, liberal-minded figure comes forward. Even then we are faced with the dilemma of whether to divert resources to campaigning for a non Lib Dem candidate or ignoring the election at the price of allowing authoritarian opponents a free run.

In my view, as a minimum, the central party should be look to use these elections as a campaigning opportunity. This would mean picking the best prospect of victory and treating it like a parliamentary by-election with the hope that at least one of the new police commissioners would be a Lib Dem. Elsewhere it should encourage the selection of candidates and a national campaign of talking to our supporters, to reaffirm their support, encourage them to vote in the police commissioner election and to recruit new members, helpers and so forth. In places with elections in 2013 this would help kickstart their campaign.

It occurs to me that there may be a Machiavellian hope lurking in some minds that by not contesting the elections, we are undermining their credibility and that if a series of local mavericks are elected the Conservatives will see the error of their ways and police commissioners will prove a short-lived experiment. I doubt whether this will be the case. Taking away people’s right to vote is unlikely to be popular.

Whichever way, the party nationally cannot expect to be taken seriously on crime policy if it effectively declares that it has no interest in taking responsibility for policing at local level. In my view it has a moral duty to contest these elections and the central party has a moral duty to give active support and encouragement to local campaigners to do so. Is it too much to hope that the party’s great and good will think again?

PS: Both Jonathan Calder and Anders Hanson have put forward strong arguments in favour of the Lib Dems contesting these elections.

One's a master spy, the other an Oxford scholar, yet neither can use a standard reference book

2011-10-26T22:17:00.000+01:00

The recent conclusion of my time as a perpetual student means that I can now occasionally read books purely for pleasure, not as part of my studies. In particular, I can read the occasional novel, an indulgence largely foregone these last few years.

But perhaps because of years of studying obscure monographs and critiquing their arguments, I find myself doing the same with novels – reading them against the grain and searching for the weak link in the plot that undermines the rest of the story.

A case in point is the spy thriller Restless by William Boyd. The plot concerns the exploits of a woman working for British intelligence during the second world war and her revelation of this secret past to her daughter thirty years later as she seeks to resolve unfinished business.

To link the two time periods, Boyd has the mother (and spy) enlist the help of her daughter (an Oxford Phd student) to find the whereabouts of her wartime spymaster and lover who betrayed both her and his country. The only information they have to go on is a memory that at some point he received an honour, either a peerage or a knighthood. To track him down, the daughter has to consult her well-connected thesis supervisor, who seems to know everything there is to know about the great and good (or rich and bad).

At this point I groan and sigh. Our protagonist has been trained in the arts of espionage and can remember the most obscure details of what she has done and seen. Is it likely that she would be quite so vague about what honours have been conferred on someone she had once been in love with and who had tried to have her killed? Is it possible that neither our spy nor her Oxford scholar daughter would be aware that everyone who receives a peerage or knighthood is listed in Who’s Who? And just in case the villain tries to wrong-foot everyone by changing his name on being enobled, Who’s Who cross-references noble titles and family name. Each entry also gives an address for each subject, which would have relieved our heroines of the need for the elaborate piece of deception they engage in to be able to follow their quarry home and find out where he lives. It would have been so much easier to visit their local public library.

Marvellous things reference books! Yet I suppose if Boyd had allowed his characters use of them, the plot wouldn’t have been quite as exciting and I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of reading a whole book in a single sitting, something I haven’t done for many years!

Don't mention the civil war!

2011-10-21T23:28:00.000+01:00

Just about caught up after a fortnight in Andalucia and ready to start blogging again. Andalucia is everything on expects from the guide book: wonderful scenery, centuries of architectural history reflecting that southern Spain was territory contested between Christian and Muslim worlds.

With my interest in more recent territory, I looked out for signs of commemmoration of the Spanish civil war. I realised, however, that since the return of democracy the so-called 'pact of silence' has meant there is little recognition by public bodies of the legacy of the war. Avoiding raking up its poisonous legacy was no doubt intended to help embed a new democratic system.

So I was surprised to see engraved on the facade of the Sagradio church in Granada the name Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, a Falangist leader, who might have become a rival to Franco for the leadership of the nationalist causes, but who was executed by the Republican government in 1936. Around the inscription red paint has been splattered on the wall to symbolise blood.

I ask the guide of our walking tour about this. She tells me that recent legislation (presumably passed by the current socialist government) requires the removal of Francoist memorials from public buildings. But the church is exempt from this. It has clearly been unwilling to remove the de Rivera inscription and this has, quite rightly, led to protests.

While I knew perfectly well that the Roman Catholic Church aggressively supported the nationalist side in the civil war, one might have hoped that today it could be a focus for reconciliation, but evidently not. I ask the guide to what extent the church remains a right-of-centre political force in Spain, in a way that is not really the case in Britain. Diplomatically, she says: 'The church is still very powerful in Spain, and has plenty to say about Spanish society.'

Eric Pickles - a man who never puts the bins out

2011-09-30T14:19:00.000+01:00

Others have written (here and here) about the Eric Pickles' latest daft idea of a £250 bribe for councils to revert to weekly collections of residual waste.

What strikes me is that Pickles doesn't understand the basics of refuse and recycling collections. While he cultivates the image of blunt, plain-speaking man, he is clearly so remote from everyday life that he never actually puts the bins out. Or else he would know that his proposals do nothing to achieve his stated goal.

According to the Daily Mail, Pickles says that:

My aim has always been to pass the chicken tikka masala test, so the nation’s favourite meal can be consumed on Friday night safe from the worry that two weeks later its remains will still be rotting in the bottom of the bin

But weekly residual waste collections don't achieve this. Leftover tikka masala goes into the food/garden waste bin, not general waste. Packaging goes into recycling bins or boxes. In other words, none of the chicken tikka masala or its packaging should end up in the general waste and none of it will be collected any earlier if councils moved from fortnightly to weekly collections.

The only way to end the rotting tikka masala nightmare would be to introduce weekly collections of food and garden waste. To their immense credit, Lib Dem colleagues in neighbouring Three Rivers have pioneered this, although they have met with little but begrudgery from the Conservatives. But Pickles is not proposing weekly food waste collections.

CD Review: The Jayhawks - Mockingbird Time

2011-09-28T01:01:00.001+01:00

The Jayhawks' trademark sound was based on the harmonies of joint songwriters and frontmen Mark Olson and Gary Louris. It's sixteen years since they recorded together under the Jayhawks moniker, eight since the band sans Olson released a studio album and three since the two of them recorded the (under appreciated) Ready for the Flood album as a duo. So the reunion album Mockingbird Time has been much anticipated by the band's long-standing followers.

Before the release of the new album they professed the ambition to be the band who produced their best album work later in their career and that Mockingbird Time would be it. This was always going to be a tall order, the more so as their 1992 release Hollywood Town Hall was not only a masterpiece in its own right, but also highly influential, indeed genre-defining.

And so it proves. While Mockingbird Time recaptures the band's classic sound as if a natural successor to Tomorrow the Green Grass, the last Jayhawks album to feature Louris and Olson, this time the songs are not quite there. In particular, the limitations present in Olson's solo work are in evidence here - I liken him to Stephen Stills, writing songs that are worthy and workmanlike but rarely memorable.

One of the things that made the Jayhawks interesting to listen to was the way their songs never went for the obvious hooks (perhaps this is why they never had a hit), but spun off in unexpected directions. That is still the case here, but there is a shortage of good tunes.

This is not to say this is a bad album - the band are too professional in their songwriting and musicianship for that to be the case. The Byrds-influenced 'She walks in so many ways' will be an automatic choice for any future 'Best of' compilations, while Louris's 'Pouring rain at dawn' captures the spirit of wistfulness that is present in all the Jayhawks' best work.

And none of the songs here are weak or embarrassing, it's just that for the most part they are a bit off the pace. One or two reviews I have read suggest that this is an album that grows on you, and perhaps that will be the case. But anyone looking for an introduction to the Jayhawks should still start with Hollywood Town Hall. And for contemporary work in the same vein, try the outstanding Nothing is Wrong by the California band Dawes, who sound like they have listened to a Jayhawks album or two in their time.

So farewell then, REM

2011-09-23T20:58:00.001+01:00

Perhaps more surprising than REM splitting up is that they were still together after so many years of releasing indifferent material, with each new album being hailed as a return to form but flattering to deceive.

It also provokes me to reflect on a quirk in my own musical taste, namely a tendency to lose interest in artists I like as soon as they become successful. I was a relatively early follower of REM, first hearing them in 1984 at the time of their second album, Reckoning, and playing 'Don't go back to Rockville' endlessly. Their wistful, melancholic sound was unmistakeable, as were Michael Stipe's mumbled vocals that left you with the impression of profound lyrics that you somehow couldn't quite hear. For a while I would buy everything they recorded as soon as it was released. I even rather liked their much-derided third album, Fables of the Reconstuction (hence the youtube clip).

They seemed to be a band that would remain a reasonably well-kept secret, admired by those of use who enjoyed now following the mainstream. And then of course the sound got louder, Stipe stopped mumbling, 'Everybody hurts' followed 'Shiny happy people' and the secret was out. While Out of time and Automatic for the people were in their own way fine albums, to me they lacked quintessential REM-ness. One started hearing people describe themselves as REM fans, who hadn't heard anything they had recorded before 1992.

So, listening to REM was no fun anymore and I mostly stopped buying the albums. But once upon a time they were indeed special.

Why I have little sympathy for the 'Philharmonic Four'

2011-09-23T20:29:00.000+01:00

As an avid reader of newspaper and magazine letters pages, I have often found myself annoyed by people expressing what is clearly a personal opinion, but sending it from their employers' rather than their home address. Academics are particularly guilty of this, and unless they are writing specifically on an issue of professional expertise, there can be no justification for it. Often one suspects they are using their university address to give added gravitas to their opinion on a subject where their opinion is no more expert than anyone else's. At worst author's can give the impression that their view represents that of the institution from which they are writing.

It is in this light that I view the suspension of the so-called 'Philharmonic Four' for signing a letter to the Independent objecting to the participation of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in the Proms. The signatories of the letter in the Daily Telegraph defending their right to express an opinion are (deliberately or otherwise) missing the point. The problem is not that the four musicians expressed a view publicly, but that they signed the letter as members of their orchestra.

When expressing an opinion publicly, in whatever forum, it's always worth being clear about on whose behalf one is speaking or writing. I post on this blog, and occasionally write elsewhere, in a purely personal capacity. Sometimes I have to speak or write officially as a Lib Dem councillor or group leader, occasionally as an executive member of Watford Borough Council. On the other hand I don't have a public-facing role in my permanent job and would avoid even the appearance of speaking on their behalf - for example by signing letters to the press from work rather than home.

And that's where the Philharmonic Four have come a-cropper. Had they each signed as 'musician', it's hard to see how their bosses at the London Philharmonic could have objected. But unwisely, they chose to mention their employers. Of course, one could argue that it's wrong to punish musicians for a practice that academics get away with all the time. Which would be a fair point. But it would be better all round if people avoided using their employer's name to add gravitas to the public voicing of their personal views.

The problem with the rugby world cup

2011-09-09T00:05:00.000+01:00

As a fan of the game with the oval shaped ball, I should be rather more excited about the Rugby World Cup than I am. This is because it is a rather unsatisfactory tournament for one simple reason - there are too few games where the result is in doubt and likely to make a difference to who qualifies for the next round.

In soccer there is a sense that in any given match anything can happen. Algeria can hold England to a draw; the cup-holders can be eliminated without winning a game. Even the weaker teams who are unlikely to progress to the next round might have a say in who does qualify.

In rugby this doesn't happen - nearly every time the stronger team will win out, overpowering their opponents, and as teams are allowed to substitute nearly half their players during the course of a match, rugby's powers have ensured an even stronger bias in favour of the bigger rugby playing nations.

By my reckoning , of the 40 pool games only about six that could both be won by either team and make a difference as to who qualifies. (Those involving Wales, Fiji and Samoa in Pool D and Scotland, England and Argentina in Pool B.)

Admittedly, the last Rugby World Cup did offer some surprises - Argentina's victory over France in the opening game, and their becoming the first country outside the traditional eight to reach the semi-finals and Wales's defeat at the hands of Fiji. Yet still the majority of games at the pool stage started as a foregone conclusion.

Rugby also has been poor at broadening its competitive base - Argentina still don't take part in a major international competition, as a result have not built on their success of four years ago and last month were reduced to playing one of their warm-up games against an English club side.

The tournament will open in a few hours with a game in which the only matter in doubt is whether Tonga will be able to restrict New Zealand to a margin of victory lower than 50 points (unlikely). So I shall wish the underdogs well (other than those playing Scotland or, in deference to my dear wife, Wales) but suspect I won't be watching all that many games.

On prejudice against country music

2011-08-22T00:14:00.003+01:00

The Independent's pop music critic Simon Price excuses his surprise at learning that the country and western artist Brad Paisley sold out the O2 arena by saying 'he operates in a genre which still dare not speak its name in sophisticated company.' He adds:

The one thing, in the great tribal Taste Wars of the Eighties, that everyone could agree on was that country-and-western was rubbish. Even its main British proponent had to sneak past the defences by giving himself the self-consciously wacky name Hank Wangford.

While it's certainly the case that people who should know better unthinkingly mock country music, the above comment is testament more to the author's ignorance than anything else. While there was plenty of cheesy and naff country music around in the 1980s that was only part of the story. Elvis Costello recorded an album of country and western standards that spawned hit singles. Bands like Jason and the Scorchers and the Long Ryders fused country and punk influences in a way that was just as reverential to the former as the latter. And Paisley Underground bands such as REM, while hardly belonging in the country section of record shops, were clearly influenced by country music traditions.

If all of the above don't qualify as country, there were plenty of respected artists around who did. Steve Earle (see youtube link) was a kind of country-and-western Bruce Springsteen. Dwight Yoakam revived and reinvented traditional, hard-core country, while Rosanne Cash, kd lang and Nanci Griffith each emerged as serious songwriters working within a country-and-western tradition.

Simon Price's comment is a bit like saying all rock music is naff and citing the oeuvre of Cliff Richard as proof.

Total Politics blogger awards voting thingummy

2011-08-18T20:41:00.000+01:00

I don't really approve of such beauty contests, but in response to the various pleas (now I know how voters feel when they are knocked up) have given in, logged on and voted.

But those folk at Total Politics don't make it easy. For your vote to count you have to name five blogs, then separately name five bloggers, write 'Blank' down the rest of the list, designate the Blank by category (I thought 'Non-Aligned' was best) then name your favourite twitterer or whatever.

It took me three goes to cast my vote successfully. If I didn't have better things to do I wouldn't have bothered.

More on Richard Webster

2011-08-18T14:00:00.000+01:00

There is an obituary at the Good Enough Caring blog by Mark Smith of the writer Richard Webster, about whom I wrote recently. It might seem a little eccentric of me to post twice about a relatively obscure writer whose work is a little removed from the normal subject matter of this blog.

But one of Webster's preoccupations was the concept of 'noble cause corruption' - how people can be less than scrupulous methods in promoting a cause that they believe to have an overriding good. It is regular, if intermittent interest of mine, and part of the reason for the name of this blog.

At St Edmundsbury Cathedral

2011-08-18T13:52:00.001+01:00

The weekend took me to Bury St Edmunds where I was surprised and delighted to realise that the Perpendicular Gothic tower of St Edmundsbury Cathedral was completed as recently as 2005. I didn't think they still did that sort of thing, and can imagine voices saying that there were better causes to spend the money on, or that additions and alterations to the cathedral should be in a contemporary rather than traditional style. The architect Stephen Dykes Bower, was a Gothic revivalist and official 'Surveyor of the Fabric' for Westminster Abbey. When he died in 1994 he left a legacy to St Edmundsbury so that the tower could be completed.

We were told by a guide that before the tower was completed there had indeed been many local people who were sceptical of the tower project, but now it was finished there was almost universal agreement that it was worthwhile. Which I suppose goes to show that sometimes it is worth being bold and courageous even where a project is not universally supported.

The riots: are Labour no longer quite so tough on crime?

2011-08-12T13:46:00.002+01:00

It was predictable that figures on the left of Labour such as Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott should be quick to link the riots to the coalition government’s spending cuts. Less so perhaps that the party’s deputy leader and New Labour establishment figure Harriet Harman should do the same. It raises the question of whether Labour’s curious journey on crime has come full circle.

Back in the 1980s one could be forgiven for thinking that much of the Labour party, while by no means condoning crime, believed that much of it was an understandable if regrettable response to Thatcher’s cuts. Labour viewed the police with suspicion, particularly after the miners’ strike. At local level they could be reluctant to support initiatives like Neighbourhood Watch, or to tackle low-level criminal and nuisance activities that later became known as anti-social behaviour.

Such attitudes were doubtless sincere enough, but they didn’t play well with the sort of voters Labour needed to win a general election. As Labour’s shadow home secretary, Tony Blair set about mending fences with the police and changing Labour’s rhetorical tone to the ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ formula. In doing so he managed to neutralise a perceived weakness of the party. But this wasn’t enough.

When Blair took over the leadership, one of New Labour’s trademarks was establishing that they were the party that was toughest on crime. To this end, the Blair government introduced endless new pieces of legislation and hundreds of new criminal offences introduced in a bid to outflank all comers (including the Tories, the traditional law and order party) on the right on crime policy. Labour were the party that was against crime, so by definition their opponents, especially the Lib Dems, weren’t. (See Nick Cohen’s book Pretty Straight Guys for more on this.)

Any attempt by opponents to suggest that things were more complex than government propaganda implied was derided as a sign that they were ‘on the side of the criminals’. I never ceased to be surprised at how easily Labour activists (even those who were active in the 1980s) adopted this rhetoric, using their ‘tough on crime’ versus ‘soft on crime’ mantra in leaflets, attacking opponents for not issuing enough ASBOs etc.

Now, and perhaps because they can’t resist attacking the cuts, Labour’s tone has come over all atavistic. It is true that in his House of Commons speech Ed Miliband did not blame the cuts for the riots. But one could well imagine that if the riots had happened two years ago, and Nick Clegg had made a similar to speech to the nuanced one Miliband made yesterday, Labour would have been very quick to spin the final section of it as condoning the rioters .

If this event marks a rowing back from Labour’s ‘tougher than the rest’ approach to criminal justice then that is to be welcomed. Things are indeed more complex than being either against crime or in favour of it. A sensible debate free from emotive posturing would be a good thing. Yet in the cold light of day Labour will wish to avoid any hint of appearing as apologists for the rioters, thereby compromising position on law and order. But I can well imagine that Conservative, and perhaps even Lib Dem strategists will be itching to turn Labour’s past rhetoric back on them. Indeed this may well already have started.

The Liberal party and the Spanish civil war

2011-08-10T14:04:00.001+01:00

Sticking to a historical theme, I notice we have just passed the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. Following the nationalist rebellion in July 1936, the main European powers pursued a policy of non-intervention that was flagrantly flouted by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

One of the tragedies of this conflict was how lukewarm, the major democracies were about preserving democratic government in Spain (however flawed it was) and standing up to dictatorship. Most people who have any knowledge of this period will be aware of the International Brigade who fought to defend republican Spain. But what was the position of the British Liberal party? Well-meaning enough, it would seem, in calling for the spirit of non-intervention to be maintained, but hardly heroic. In his book Liberals International Relations and Appeasement, Richard Grayson writes

The Liberal Party never came to see events in Spain as an opportunity for making a stand against the dictators, as the party's main aim was to ensure that the war remained an internatl dispute. By the time it became apparent that this would never happen, it was too late. The work of Wilfrid Roberts, the Liberal MP for North Cumberland, as a political and humanitarian campaigner for the Republic was the only significant Liberal contribution to the struggle.

Journal of Liberal History Issue 71

2011-08-10T13:50:00.001+01:00

I see that the summer edition of the Journal of Liberal History includes my review of Ross McKibbin's Parties and people: England 1914-51.

More than that it there are articles by Martin Horwood MP on Cheltenham's Liberal history, Ross Finnie on Russell Johnston and Kevin Theakston on the afterlives of former Liberal prime ministers. It's an impressive achievement of Duncan Brack (who must also be busy with other things) and his editorial team to keep producing this quarterly journal, which is not only highly-readable, but contains original, peer-reviewed research.

Subscriptions are a bargain at £20, giving also membership of the Liberal Democrat History Group. By subscribing you will not only have an enjoyable read four times a year, but also helping to promote interest in the rich and diverse history of the Liberal Democrats and their predecessor parties.

Pickles on town centre parking: ignoring the evidence, playing to the gallery

2011-08-06T23:33:00.004+01:00

Anyone who has been involved in local politics or community and residents' groups will recognise the following: the person who knows for certain the solution to all an area's parking, traffic and transport problems, who is completely confident that his solutions are the only possible way forward and that only idiot councillors and officials could fail to support everything he proposes. He dismisses all counter-arguments as 'rubbish' and is unable to conceive of alternative points of view, let alone how many of his neighbours see things differently.

For the most part, the job of elected representatives is to listen to all viewpoints, consider the nuances of any policy issue and try to find the best way forward. Sadly, today we have Mr 'I Know Best About Everything' as secretary of state for communities and local government, and his latest pronouncement is that 'fairer' (i.e. more) parking in urban development will help to boost high streets and town centres. Although couched partly in terms of giving councils more freedom, the logic of Mr Pickles' rhetoric is that councils ought to end 'anti-car restrictions' and encourage more parking. This is all part of 'ending Labour's war on the motorist'.

In fact, while Labour's policy was dirigiste in the extreme, they merely continued and strengthened the approach taken by John Gummer in the previous Conservative government. Whether because of genuine support for the sustainability agenda, or because Conservative voters were angry at increasing greenfield development, high streets being destroyed by out-of-town shopping centres etc., the Major government began to re-think planning policy. Whereas since the 1960s the planning system had encouraged low-density development, which militated in favour of building on greenfield, out- and edge-of-town sites, the government now tried to encourage urban renewal, particularly by ending restrictions that meant town centre development had to have suburban levels of parking, amenity space and the like, which had made regeneration more difficult.

So trying to limit parking in urban development was not simply a perverse attack on motorists, but a rational response to planning and transport issues that was broadly shared across the political spectrum (even if Labour were unnecessarily control freakish about it).

Living Streets has posted a brief but pointed critique of Pickles (hat-tip Jonathan Calder). But Pickles would probably regard Living Streets as exactly the sort of tree hugging organisation that wages war on the motorist. So let's look at the practical, straightforward problems with increasing town centre parking that someone only slightly more open-minded than Mr Pickles might sympathise with.

In the first place, many town and city centres suffer from traffic congestion, which can be very frustrating to motorists. Providing more and cheaper car parking to encourage people to drive into town, rather than use other transport methods, will only add to motorists' frustration without doing much to improve town centre economies. Unless of course the government funds a massive road-building programme to enable people to drive to the new car parks. But even those not worried about the unsustainability of such an approach might recognise that large-scale urban road building has hardly been a panacea for town and city centres.

Secondly, parking space provides less economic benefit than business floorspace or housing (it certainly attracts lower business rates) so more parking really doesn't offer good value for money or make urban development more viable. Given the space constraints that often affect urban sites, developers forced to reduce the number of homes, offices or shops in a scheme in order to provide more parking may well seek to develop out-of-town instead, where there is plenty of room for everything. Which will kind of undermine the notion of improving the economic health of the high street.

Lastly, on Pickles' criticism of 'parking fines, soaring parking charges and a lack of parking spaces'. These are things that can and do contribute towards making town centres work effectively. Without parking charges and regulation, spaces would be used by commuters that are needed by shoppers on whose custom town centres depend. Parking controls, pedestrianisation and the like can also help to create reasonably pleasant town centre environments that people want to visit: i.e. that are safe for children, aren't full of car fumes, and either traffic jams or fast-moving traffic. While Pickles claims to want to 'assist mums struggling with their family shop' his policies would make things worse for them: added congestion during their journey, supposedly free car parking spaces already taken up for the day by town centre workers and a feeling that this isn't a safe or environment to bring your children to.

I am not sure which is worse: the thought that Pickles can't and won't understand such arguments, or that he understands them perfectly well, knows his policies will make little practical difference, but is just playing to the gallery to give the impression that there are simple solutions to problems that are in fact rather complex.

(Later): I see my dear wife is advising me not to get wound up by Mr Pickles.

Jayhawks live at the HMV Forum, Kentish Town

2011-08-06T19:38:00.004+01:00

To the HMV Forum last night to see The Jayhawks perform in their classic, mid-90s line up, for the first time in 16 years. They have a new album coming out in the autumn, and apparently the reunion is permanent rather than a one-off tour.

The last time I saw the Jayhawks in this incarnation they appeared set to make the commercial breakthrough with their single 'Blue'. They were supported by a little-known band called Wilco, who were less than memorable (in fairness their first album A.M. released that year gave little hint of the great things to come.) But it was Wilco who made it big, while the Jayhawks lost one of their two main songwriters and remained in obscurity.

This reunion would have once seemed very unlikely. But it is still very welcome. Last night they were in fine fettle, trademark sound intact and the harmony singing of their two leading lights Gary Louris and Mark Olson to the fore. The overwhelming majority of the set came from the two albums for which they are best known, Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass, released before Olson left the group in 1995.

Much to enjoy and praise therefore. The only disappointment is the virtual absence of material from the three albums released after Olson's departure. Nor was there anything from last year's Ready for the Flood album by Olson and Louris without the Jayhawks. Perhaps it's a tact and diplomacy thing within the band, so they are pretending the years between 1995 and 2010 never happened. But those of us who have followed the Jayhawks through their career might have wanted a more representative set (or at least I did).

But it's a minor quibble. It was an excellent evening, they played many of my favourite songs, the new material sounds promising. Who knows, maybe this time around they will win the wide audience that their previous work deserved but never got.

I couldn't find a decent clip of their 2011 tour, so the above from 1995 introduced by a very young-looking Jon Stewart will have to do.

Cultural historian Richard Webster dies

2011-08-05T06:45:00.001+01:00

I was sorry to read of the recent death of the cultural historian Richard Webster, who was the subject of a belated Guardian obituary a few days ago.

Although he wrote on a range of subjects, from Freud to the Salman Rushdie affair, he was best known in recent years for his work exposing injustices suffered by residential care workers arising from the 'trawling' methods used by the police when investigating cases of historic child abuse.

While Webster was very clear that abuse can and did happen ('some of those who are now in prison are there for no other reason than that they are guilty of the crimes alleged against them'), he argued in his compelling and thoroughly-researched book The secret of Bryn Estyn that there many innocent people had ended up accused and convicted, as a result of (in the words of the Guardian obituary) 'public hysteria, fuelled by credulous journalists and ratified through inefficient police investigative techniques'.

This was a brave stance to take, and one that was predictably often misrepresented by those he criticised. He was clear that the basis for paedophile (and other) panics was not the anger of the mob. Instead he argued that:

'Witch hunts don’t happen without an educated elite behind them. In the past, bishops and priests let panics loose. Today it is the police, social workers and broadsheet journalists.'

He used the phrase 'witch hunts' not as lazy journalese but as one who had studied the read phenomenon of medieval witch hunts.

Although an atheist himself, he believed that a modern, secular, rationalist society, confident that it had left religious superstition behind, was actually more rather than less susceptible to such collective fantasies than were those of previous eras:

The widespread belief that, belonging as we do to a rational scientific age, we are no longer vulnerable to such fantasies, is itself one of the most dangerous of all our delusions.

In many ways this was the unifying theme in his diverse body of work. His website, which collects the eclectic range of essays he wrote, remains available for the time being.

See also this review of The secret of Bryn Estyn by Edinburgh University academic Mark Smith, which is published on my father's Good Enough Caring website.

Glasman Staggers

2011-07-30T22:59:00.001+01:00

The New Statesman has fallen over itself to come to the rescue of Maurice Glasman after his faux pas in calling for a total ban on immigration. There was a sympathetic editorial last week and an article by the great man this week.

All of which is fine - Glasman has interesting things to say and the Blue Labour concept is a sign of how all parties these days are to some extent embracing community politics.

Yet it is hard to imagine that if any Conservative or (God forbid) Lib Dem figure had made similar comments, the Staggers would have given them such an easy ride.

The message is clear: it's OK to make unacceptably right-wing comments, so long as you're Labour!

Obscure moments in Liberal history: How Lembit Opik deprived Dan Falchikov of a seat on the NUS national executive

2011-07-30T22:46:00.005+01:00

I see that Dan Falchikov has a reservation or two about Lembit Opik's campaign to become Lib Dem candidate for Mayor of London.

What I suspect even Dan doesn't remember is that long ago Lembit effectively denied him a place on the prestigious and exalted National Executive of the National Union of Students.

As a student in the 1980s I developed the eccentric habit of standing for election for the Leicester University delegation to the NUS conference. A couple of times I even got elected, finding myself the lone Liberal among leftists of various stripes. This was also pretty much the balance of representation in the conference as a whole.

In 1987 the Liberals were hoping to retain their single seat on the national executive. Dan was our candidate. His best chance of election was for one of the 12 part-time posts, which were elected by STV in blocks of 3, 4 and 5. As STV afficionados will realise, our best hope was in the block of 5, which needed a lower quota to be elected. There should have been enough committed Liberal or SDP delegates, together with non-aligned non-socialists to scrape a seat.

Unfortunately, Lembit, standing as an independent, spoiled everything by contesting a seat in this block. He had enjoyed positive national coverage as president of Bristol University Students Union during the on-campus demonstrations over Professor John Vincent's Sun column. He then garnered an impressive number of votes in losing to Labour for NUS President. So he could have won a seat in the more difficult elections for the blocks of three or four. But by standing in the block of five he siphoned off the floating votes that we needed to get Dan elected and left the NUS national executive without Liberal representation for the first time in many years.

I am slightly ashamed of remembering all this - it marks me out as a true political anorak. But it was Lembit's first venture onto the national stage. Had things gone only slightly differently, it might have been Dan who ended up as an MP in rural Wales with semi-celebrity status, and Lembit as a "plain-speaking" blogger and party activist. But I suspect Dan wouldn't have blown a 7,000+ majority. And he's certainly right about the folly of Lembit's mayoral campaign.

Who's to blame for the lack of a core Lib Dem vote?

2011-07-29T23:41:00.002+01:00

Via Iain Roberts on Lib Dem Voice, I spotted Simon Titley’s article in the latest issue of liberator about the failure of the Liberal Democrats to build a larger core vote. Unfortunately, Simon does his usual trick of spoiling some interesting arguments by descending into Pythonesque ranting:

If you have ever held back from proclaiming liberal values because you were afraid it might offend someone, it’s your fault. If your Focus leaflets are a politics-free zone, full of hackneyed slogans that haven’t changed for thirty years, it’s your fault. If you think “we can win everywhere” is a satisfactory strategy, it’s your fault. If you think the party can advance solely by a ‘ground war’, it’s your fault. If you think the party can advance solely by an ‘air war', it’s your fault. If you are an anti-intellectual who rejects political thought and debate because it gets in the way of leafleting, it’s your fault…[etc. etc., you get the picture.]

I don’t suppose anyone would answer to the full pantomime villain description conjured up – ‘Yes, I’m an anti-intellectual who rejects political thought’. But, as one who has spent much of the last quarter-of-a-century writing leaflets, helping to organise local and parliamentary election campaigns, while making the political and intellectual compromises that go with such territory, I can’t really avoid considering myself among the accused. The party’s present plight is in a sense all my fault!

But before I book myself into a political re-education camp to be reprogrammed in the ways of Liberalism, let me put in a plea of mitigation on behalf of myself and fellow defendants.

For most of the last century the main political discourse in Britain, the core choice for voters, has been between a small state/capitalist/middle class party and a social democratic/big state/working class party. Voters choose their government from these two options. The Liberal Democrats (and their predecessors) haven’t neatly fitted into this battle and emphasise values that are outside the main debate. We are asking people to opt out of the big decision about who governs and vote for us instead. Which isn't easy, because when it comes down to it most people are likely to have a preference for Labour or Conservative government and a temptation to vote for one to keep the other out of office.

This wouldn’t matter if we had proportional representation. Under a fairer electoral system we could market ourselves as a niche party, drawing support from voters who care about distinctively Liberal issues: civil liberties, workplace democracy, environmentalism, a humane criminal justice policy, constitutional reform and the like. By emphasising such matters in our campaigns, we could build up a small but loyal core support. Perhaps around 10% of the electorate would vote for such an agenda, much less than the Lib Dem vote share in recent elections. But it wouldn’t matter because we could be confident of regularly winning 50 or so parliamentary seats, with reasonable hope of regular participation in government as a junior coalition partner, and exercising a distinctively liberal influence when we do.

But we don’t have proportional representation. Even the largest imaginable core Liberal vote would win us few councillors or MPs. To be politically relevant we need to win council and parliamentary seats under first-past-the-post. Usually this means winning at least 40 per cent of the vote in any given electoral area, more than any core Liberal vote we could dream of. And that militates against taking very controversial positions on major issues, or going on about things that are distinctively Liberal, but which the average voter regards as cranky. To broaden our support, we have gained success through community politics, in particular as adapted by Chris Rennard for parliamentary elections, tactical voting and the idea of Lib Dem MP as local hero. This has meant talking about the issues that matter to voters in ways that make sense to them. As we now have 57 MPs, something that many of us could have barely imagined when we joined the party, our campaigning methods have had some success. They are also not so very different from what the other parties do. Thatcher, Blair and Cameron have in their own way taken their core vote for granted and aimed at winning the support of the uncommitted.

Yet there is a problem here. Perhaps because of the party’s reliance on the genius of Chris Rennard, we have ended up with an over-mighty campaigns department always focused on getting votes in the next election, not in campaigning for distinctively Liberal causes or values. It can be a cause for mockery if someone mentions constitutional reform Europe or civil liberties in a Focus leaflet. The lack of willingness to campaign in a distinctively Liberal manner does get noticed. The drug law reform charity Transform pointed out at the last election that:

Whilst the Lib Dems appear to have made the intellectual journey on drug policy reform… it remains an issue on which they have generally been defensive, (choosing to avoid - sometimes even deny) rather than one they actively campaign on.

Which is fair comment, except that Transform don’t have to fight elections while being vilified by opponents for being ‘soft on drugs’.

There is a difficult balance to be struck between winning enough votes and seats to keep us in the political game versus promoting a distinctive Liberal identity. Those of us charged with campaigning for the party, whether at local or national level have not always got the balance right. But, just perhaps, the problem is a little bit more complicated than Simon Titley suggests, and is deserving of reasoned discussion rather than abuse and blame.

Lib Dems should not be threatening constitutional trickery to stop Scottish independence

2011-06-08T18:45:00.003+01:00

A very good post from Dan Falchikov on Lib Dem Scottish secretary Michael Moore's comments on Scottish independence. Dan writes:

By saying that a second referendum is needed (no doubt to be followed in quick succession by Labour and Tories) Michael Moore again allows the party to be seen to be on the wrong side of the debate and trying to illiberally block the expression of the will of the Scottish people.

There is a danger that the Lib Dems north of the border have become part of the establishment - a sort of rural and suburban version of the Labour party, and arch defenders of the union. It was certainly not always so. Liberal support for Scottish home rule has long historical roots, and before the SNP won seats in the Commons, the Liberals were the only party in parliament supporting devolution.

There is surely a great deal of political territory between supporting independence and using questionable constitutional procedures to prevent it happening. The result of the recent Scottish election shows that voters are at the very least willing to support a referendum, whatever they decide when it happens. Lib Dems ought to respect that wish, welcome the fact that voters can have their say, participate enthusiastically in the debate, make the case for maximum autonomy within the United Kingdom and be willing to accept the outcome whatever people decide.

In saying this I'm letting my head rule my heart. I don't want Scotland to become independent, because I value the union. Indeed I'm a product of it - having a Scottish father and an English mother, supporting Scotland in sports internationals, living in England, but having spent formative years residing north of the border. I would like Scotland to remain part of Britain. (I agree with David Mitchell's recent Observer article on this theme.)

It's not for me to decide, though, but rather for those who live and vote in Scotland. Wistful sentiments from Anglo-Scots will doubtless be counterproductive in protecting the union, but more so will British ministers trying to think of artificial obstacles to thwart Alex Salmond. A revival north of the border, and a successful defence of the union, will require Scottish Lib Dems to show that their hearts (and heads) are in the highlands (and lowlands) of Scotland not in Whitehall and Westminster.

Why are there no Lib Dem media pundits or public intellectuals?

2011-06-08T13:34:00.004+01:00

In her excellent New Statesman blog, Olly Grender asked last week why there are no Lib Dem columnists in the mainstream media. She wrote

Right now, I can think of five journalists, all working in print media, all of whom at some point have been part of the Liberal Democrat party, but who would run a million miles before declaring themselves long-term supporters.

For me, the problem goes wider than this and applies equally to the lack of public intellectuals - academics who write for a general audience, serious journalists and commentators - who identify with the party. I suspect that this is partly because the academic world, just like the media, tends to operate on a left-right axis and it's hard for a distinctively Lib Dem worldview to fight its way into public discourse. It is also the case that the Lib Dems themselves have not always made the best fist of articulating our philosophy and how that guides our policies. (I think this is what people mean when they talk of our 'narrative').

So when Vince Cable was being lionised in the media as the person who foresaw the economic crisis, there was no real sense of this reflecting well on the party, that his insight reflected a distinctively Liberal economic approach. Although he was Lib Dem shadow chancellor, he was presented in the media more as a Frank Field-style maverick than a representative of the Lib Dems. Although it's not hard to find people with strong academic credentials within the party, we have no equivalent of Philip Blond or Anthony Giddens publishing work for a general readership from a Liberal Democrat viewpoint.

The other side of the coin is that even on an issue that we ought to own, such as localism, the two public intellectuals most commonly associated with this cause, writer and pundit Simon Jenkins, and historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt, are both avowed enemies of the Lib Dems. (See here and here).

I suspect also that pundits, public intellectuals and so forth, however much they would claim to be guided by intellectual rigour alone, like to be where the action is and there's no mileage in supporting a minor party in seemingly perpetual opposition. For most of the last fifty years backing the Lib Dems (or predecessor parties) would have been a cop out from the key question of whether Labour or Conservative values should prevail.

Sadly, Lib Dems themselves can't entirely overcome this left versus right discourse. For all its faults in content and timing, the Orange Book seemed to me a genuine attempt to interpret Liberal ideas and apply them to current policy questions. Yet it was interpreted by the media as an attempt to move the party to the right, and was then condemned as such by many Lib Dems who hadn't taken the trouble to read it. And perhaps part of our problem is that there is in some parts of the party a kind of intellectual cringe towards Labour that means that conforming to conventional ideas of being on the left is more important than being Liberal.

Paradoxically, being in coalition may change this and give the party more intellectual ballast. By definition we have to articulate where we disagree with Labour and to maintain our independence we have to highlight our disagreements with the Conservatives. We have a chance to show that there is a distinctive Lib Dem approach to government and gain more ideological support on the back of this.

Of course, there is an argument that none of this matters. The future of the Lib Dems as a parliamentary force dependents on winning at constituency level and for that the publications that matter are Focus leaflets and the like, not heavyweight tomes on Liberal philosophy or op. ed. pieces in serious newspapers and periodicals. But, even so, the wider philosophical and cultural environment can make a difference too, and it would not be a bad thing for the Lib Dems to have some heavyweight intellecutal support in academe and the media.

In defence of conference security arrangements

2011-06-05T14:13:00.007+01:00

I don't like to think of myself as an uncritical supporter of the Lib Dem establishment, but over the furore about registration arrangements for party conference, I'm inclined to agree with Federal Conference Committee that the security precauations that are troubling some members are in fact reasonable and proportionate.

Partly this is because Federal Conference Committee itself contains good Liberals, who I am confident will have been sensitive to the views of party members when dealing with the police over security arrangements.

Secondly, I don't really think it unduly onerous that people attending conference should be able to show that they are who they say they are. Nor that people who are likely to be a serious security risk should be excluded.

But also, in general I agree with late Conor Cruise O'Brien's arguments down the years that liberals can fail to take the terrorist threat seriously and be a bit cavalier about security issues. At the same time I suspect that if there were to be a serious incident at conference leading to loss of life, there would be few people lining up to defend FCC and the police, and many people asking how they allowed this to happen.

After the Brighton bombing at the Conservative party conference in 1984, and Mrs Thatcher's narrow escape, the Provisional IRA said:

Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that as part of a government taking difficult and controversial decisions at home and abroad, the Liberal Democrats might find their conference being targeted and should take suitable steps to protect those attending.

It's perhaps worth adding that in the heyday of Liberalism in Victorian and Edwardian times, much effort was expended by all political parties to stop opponents disrupting their meetings.

This idea of needing expertise in the Lords is a myth

2011-06-03T13:35:00.006+01:00

One of the most common objections made to an elected House of Lords (here and here for example) is that it will exclude those with specialist knowledge or experience (including former government ministers and the like) who may not wish to stand for election but whose insight is invaluable to the workings of parliament.

It's an argument that is not often directly challenged. Yet I have never been convinced by this myth of independent expertise. Success in one walk of life is rarely a guarantee of effectiveness in another. One doesn't need to think too hard to cite examples of people who have been brought into government from outside politics and proved a failure: Frank Cousins in Harold Wilson's first administration; Lord Young of Graffham under Margaret Thatcher, the majority of the so-called 'talents' under Gordon Brown.

One problem is that these outside experts may find the political world an alien culture that they struggle to adapt to. Another is that they are no more than apologists for whatever professional discipline they were engaged in before entering public life. Within our own party's recent history both Evan Harris and Phil Willis were much talked up because of their previous lives as a GP and headteacher respectively. But, though they are both good eggs, when the former was health spokesperson and the latter education spokesperson, I had the uncomfortable feeling that Lib Dem policy on health was being dicatated by the BMA and on education by the NUT.

Such views are reinforced by my experience in local government - both within my own authority and my observations of other councils. Sometimes it can be great to have a professional accountant leading on finance, a teacher on education etc. They know the tricks of the trade and have the insight and understanding to hold officers to account more effectively than a lay person could do. But equally they can see themselves as an extra officer, always backing the professionals rather than providing the necessary challenge and scrutiny that goes with the role of representing the public.

Of course, when we think of expert opinion in the House of Lords, it's only ever a small fraction of top scientists, brain surgeons or whatever who actually get there, presumably the ones whose gifts for self-promotion have been enough to draw themselves to the attention of the powers that be. And someone's possession of experience or expertise doesn't make their views right or even respected. So, for example, while I am a great admirer of Shirely Williams, there are those on the political right who will never forgive her role in the destruction of grammar schools. For them, presumably, her experience as secretary of state for education makes her views less rather than more valid.

Which brings me to another criticism made of an elected Lords - that those who have done their bit fighting elections and have achieved eminent government posts won't take to the hustings again to get elected to a chamber with less power. Yet, I am sure that if Shirley Williams let her name go forward in an internal Lib Dem selection in the East of England region she would be chosen as a candidate by party members. And in a regional STV election where a known name will carry weight she would have a pretty good chance of being elected even if she didn't personally deliver many Focus leaflets.

All in all the dangers of a loss of expertise arising from an elected second chamber are greatly exaggerated.

Tories' hatred of the public sector

2011-03-06T20:21:00.006Z

There is a good article by Rowan Moore in today's Observer, about Michael Gove's recent attacks on the use of 'award-winning architects' to design schools. As Moore argues:

if environment were irrelevant to learning, then Eton College, the alma mater of many of the present government, would sell its agreeable slab of Berkshire real estate and move to low-cost units in a business park in Slough

Gove's attitude reminds us that even as Cameron et al. try to change the Conservative party's image, many modern Tories just can't help their visceral dislike of the public sector. So local government ministers appear to believe that councils should only employ the least able members of any given profession. And an education minister appears to believe that state-funded schools should be identikit boxes with no attempt to design for site contraints or local context and character.

I can't imagine any Lib Dem minister rubbishing the role of architects in designing schools, as Gove has done. While we recognise that the public sector is far from perfect, has a tendency towards waste and bureaucracy and that such things need to be challenged, we believe that the public sector has an important job to do. So, while there is much we can temporarily agree on with the Tories in reducing the defict, we and they have fundamentally different ways of thinking.

So Marchlands is over, but who drowned the cat?

2011-03-04T21:39:00.004Z

I have just watched the last episode of Marchlands, which unusually I managed to see the whole series of without forgetting to record it or letting so much time elapse that it was no longer available ITV's equivalent of iPlayer.

If one makes allowances for it being a ghost story, it avoided annoyingly implausible endings.

Yet I hate loose ends in plots. So who drowned the cat in the garden pond in episode 2 (or was it episode 1)? Amy, the daughter of the household was suspected, but she blamed it on her imaginary friend Alice.

As a result, Amy was thought to have a personality disorder and was referred to child psychiatrists etc. However, Alice was not imaginary, but a ghost and at the end of the final episode shown to be a benign not an evil one. And Amy's family accepted that Alice was real so their daughter was not a budding psychopath, and all was well.

But in that case who drowned the cat? My experience of moggies is that they don't just fall into ponds, but the cat killer was never exposed. Perhaps this is just paving the way for a second series.

Could Barnsley Central have had a Conservative MP?

2011-03-02T13:23:00.005Z

I hope it's not too disloyal of me to say that I don't expect a Lib Dem triumph in tomorrow's Barnsley Central by-election. Despite the circumstances that triggered the election, I suspect the Labour candidate will win comfortably, indeed well.

But what would have happened if the Lib Dems had followed the advice of bien pensant Guardianistas and so forth, by opting for coalition with Labour?

The government would still have been planning cuts 'deeper and tougher' than under Margaret Thatcher [copyright A. Darling]. It would also have been planning or have already implemented significant tax rises, perhaps including the VAT increase that Labour has so strongly opposed. Led by the party that had been in power for 13 years it could hardly have evaded responsibility for the economic situation. It would have either been led by Gordon Brown whose mandate the electorate had declined to renew or by a new Labour leader who had not even been a candidate for prime minister at the general election. It would also have been widely regarded as illegitimate, a coalition of the losers to keep out the largest and most popular party. All in all there is every reason to suppose the government would be deeply unpopular and that the Conservatives would enjoy a significant opinion poll lead by now.

The coalition would lack an overall majority and have started with only a nine-seat advantage over the Conservatives. Which brings us to the by-elections. Perhaps Elwyn Watkins would have been strong-armed into dropping his legal case in Oldham East and Saddleworth, leading to much bad blood between the coalition partners. But had he persisted, there is every reason to suppose the constituency would now have a Conservative MP. The Tory candidate was in a respectable third place at the general election and would have been the only credible recipient of anti-government votes, including those of Lib Dems who felt betrayed by Clegg keeping Labour in power.

And so to Barnsley Central. It might seem far-fetched to imagine the constituency electing a Conservative MP. But a swing on the scale of previous Tory by-election successes at Crewe and Nantwich or Norwich North would have been enough. If the idea of Barnsley having a Tory MP had seemed just too implausible the Conservatives could have 'done a Tatton' on Labour in the light of Eric Illsley's conviction for expenses fraud and run a Martin Bell-style anti-sleaze candidate.

With the whip withdrawn from Dennis McShane, the coalition's advantage over the Conservatives alone would have been down to four or five seats, putting it further in hoc to SNP, Plaid and Northern Irish MPs. After less than a year in power, the government would have the smell of death about it. Dissident Labour MPs might already have blocked or sabotaged an AV referendum. The Lib Dems would have had to compromise on tuition fees and be incurring opprobrium for unpopular cuts and tax rises. The Conservatives would be optimistic about sooner or later defeating the government on a confidence vote and of a big majority at the ensuing general election, gaining large numbers of Lib Dem seats in the process. The coalition would leave power with few if any achievements to its name.

Given the result of the general election a Lib-Lab coalition was never a serious prospect even had there been much greater goodwill between the parties. It is simply a useful chimera for those on the left who want to damn the Lib Dems' supposed betrayal. But it is salutary to ponder how things would have panned out in practice.

Fleshing out the Big Society

2011-02-26T16:37:00.003Z

I see that on Liberal Democrat Voice Chris White, leader of the Lib Dem opposition on Herts County Council has taken a swipe at the ‘Big Society’ dismissing it for having ‘meatless bones’ and amounting to ‘not very much at all’.

Now don’t want to pick a quarrel with Chris, who I generally regard as a kindred spirit. But I do get frustrated at the tone of begrudgery that many Lib Dems adopt when discussing the Big Society. More generally it is symptomatic of a Lib Dem intellectual cringe towards the other parties – as soon as they adopt our language and ideas we decide that those ideas can’t have been very good after all. So I will just outline why I take a more benign view the Big Society and the debate surrounding it.

In a modern liberal democracy any new idea is likely to be limited in scope. If Francis Fukayama’s proclamation of the End of History after the Cold War was mostly wrong-headed, there was a kernel of truth fighting to get out – that utopian ambitions for organising society were discredited and the best that the western democracies can hope for is to manage our existing system better. So any guiding principle of any democratic government is going to be about what it chooses to emphasise and prioritise not about turning the world upside down. Viewed in that light, the Big Society can be a useful way of thinking about the coalition’s agenda.
As Chris acknowledges, there is much that is Liberal in the language of the Big Society. Indeed in my view it belongs more to modern Liberalism than anything else. Back in the 1980s when I was cutting my political teeth, the divisions between the parties seemed to be as follows. Labour wanted to see a compassionate society with a high level of public services, and saw the state as the only possible vehicle for providing them. But their approach was patrician, they tended to be suspicious of the third sector, community organisations and anything get gave citizens more direct power. They seemed inclined to believe that the state and its experts knew best in all things. On the other side, the Conservatives seemed ideologically at war with the public sector, believing that services, if provided at all, should be delivered by private companies.

By contrast Liberals shared many of Labour’s aspirations, but were sceptical of their 'one size fits all’ attitude towards public services. Community politics meant that public bodies should be accountable to the citizens they served, and needed to engage with voluntary and community groups and the like. The mantra was about giving power back to people rather than concentrating it in the hands of benevolent but paternalistic politicians and experts. Of course things have moved on since the 1980s. New Labour’s advocacy of a ‘stakeholder society’ was symptomatic of a move away from paternalism, and whether through pragmatism or conviction the Conservatives under Cameron have abandoned much of their anti-public sector rhetoric. So both parties have moved towards our worldview.

Therefore, whether or not one likes the specific term ‘Big Society’, we should be attempting to lead the debate and put Liberal flesh on the bones. ‘Volunteering, mutualism, localism and letting people get on with it’ are not a bad starting points for thinking about a healthy society –though they must go hand-in-hand with, not replace business prosperity and strong public services. Chris argues that ‘comfortable conventions of self-confident middle class households cannot be seen as a template for what may be needed in run down estates’. But surely deprived communities would benefit particularly from a spirit of self-help, where people can make their voices heard and where there are active community organisations to speak up on their behalf. Perhaps making sure that poorer and excluded groups have as sharp elbows as the affluent middle classes is a vital part of building a Big Society.

Wiki-wanderings - was the Millionaire quiz fraud Major innocent?

2011-02-26T12:38:00.004Z

I can't remember now what I was looking for, but wanderings in Wikipedia took me to the entry for one James Plaskett, who has written an extended essay arguing that Major Charles Ingram who, along with alleged accomplices, was convicted a few years back for cheating on the television quiz programme 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' is innocent.

I found Plaskett's arguments rather convincing, although he is preaching to the converted in my case. I always thought the prosecution petty, vindictive and self-serving by the production company, and the evidence flimsy and unconvincing.

James Plaskett is clearly an interesting character, being a chess grandmaster, £250,000 winner himself on Who wants to be a millionaire, married to the poet Fiona Pitt-Kethley and brother of the person who invented the snickometer at cricket. At least that's what it says on his Wikipedia entry.

Pop stars ask the big questions

2011-02-19T11:55:00.004Z

Oh dear, this blog seems to have become a bit earnest and angry, focused on defending local authorities against the nonsenses of certain ministers in our otherwise excellent government.

So, it's time to change the mood, calm down and reflect. Here are some important questions to ponder, posed by musical artistes, popular beat combos and the like who appear in my iTunes list.

(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding? – Nick Lowe

Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful? – The Waitresses

Who Knows Where The Time Goes? – Fairport Convention

What Time Is Love? – The KLF

Is This All There Is? – Nanci Griffith

What Good Am I? – Bob Dylan

Has The Whole World Lost Its Head? – The Go-Go’s

What Is The Light? – The Flaming Lips

Why Should The Fire Die? – Nickel Creek

Why Are People Grudgeful? – The Fall

Why Would You Wanna Live? – Wilco

Where Is My Mind? - Pixies

What Is Life? - George Harrison

Conservative minister calls for an end to PE teaching in schools

2011-02-18T13:19:00.007Z

Well, perhaps not quite, but if you follow the logic of DCLG minister Bob Neill's latest comments that's where you end up.

What he has done is attack 'Crazy non-jobs like cheerleading development officers' in local authorities. Now my council does not employ any cheerleading development officers, but ever supportive of the coalition government I'm keen to engage with how Mr Neill's comments might more generally be applied.

Let's reason through why a local authority in its misguided, non-job friendly kind of way, might create such a post. I imagine it has something to do with promoting physical exercise, health and fitness, particularly in the light of much-discussed concerns about obesity levels. Cheerleading is the sort of activity that might just tempt people who wouldn't normally take much exercise to do so. Foolish local councillors might even think that such activities are in line with the government's professed approach to public health, namely that:

society, government and individuals share collective responsibility for public health and the new public health system will encourage all to play their part in improving and protecting the nation’s health and well-being.

But apparently not, and this is simply a non-job. So one must infer that Mr Neill believes councils and public bodies have no business spending taxpayers' money on promoting fitness and physical exercise and should cease such activities forthwith. What does this then imply for public policy?

• Schools to save money by ceasing to teach physical education and sacking their PE teachers.
• No taxpayers' money to be wasted on competitive sport in schools.
• Local councils to stop providing sports pitches for hire, reducing the cost to the public purse of their maintenance.
• Councils also to stop providing swimming pools, swimming lessons and leisure centres.
• The government save money by scrapping all Department of Health initiatives to promote physical to exercise.
• A small fortune to be saved by ending all public spending on the Olympics.

Presumably this is not what Bob Neill is advocating. Indeed if councils actually stopped providing sporting and similar facilities right-wing ministers and media would denounce them for political correctness gone mad etc. So the minister is not actually putting forward an argument that he actually believes: it is merely a cheap shot and the latest instance of ministerial gunboat diplomacy.

For avoidance of doubt let's just pause to say that I quite accept that local authorities like any bureaucracy can and sometimes do have posts that don't achieve much in practice. This may or may not apply to cheerleading coordinators. But to know for sure one would have to look into the specific circumstances - what is the postholder doing, how many people are benefitting, is their work making a different? etc. I doubt very much whether Bob Neill has done this.

A final point: another non-job he cites is 'press officers tasked with spinning propaganda on bin collections'. So one might reasonably expect that there are no press officers in DCLG then. Of course one would be wrong. It has a rather impressive website complete with its own 'newsroom' presumbaby written by paid press officers. And what useful information are they telling us? Well at taxpayers' expense they have published a press release from one of Mr Neill's ministerial colleagues to remind people they can stand for election as a councillor in May. You couldn't make it up etc. etc.!

If ministers want to stop wasting taxpayers' money on non-jobs perhaps they should start with their own department.

Are the Taxpayers' Alliance demanding higher taxes?

2011-02-17T23:33:00.002Z

I've never had much time for the Taxpayers' Alliance feeling that their purpose is not to protect taxpayers but simply to bash the public sector even if they contradict themselves in the process.

Here they are criticising a council for having too many recycling bins, even though the council argues that by getting residents to sort recyclables in this way, it saves the public purse £500,000

The logical implication is that the TPA would rather Newcastle-under-Lyme council ran a more expensive refuse service and put up council tax.

Why not let MPs vote on individual civil servants' salaries?

2011-02-16T13:24:00.004Z

I doubt if any of us who signed last week's letter to The Times imagined that it would leave its target, Eric Pickles, chastened. But his announcement today that the government will require councils to hold a public debate on any appointments of officers on a salary of £100,000 or more removes any lingering doubt.

There are a few points that arise here. I have a gut feeling (though sadly not enough time to research) that in my working lifetime salaries of high earners and senior managers have gone up proportionately more than those at lower end of the salary scale. I have enough lingering leftist sentiment to feel that this is not a good thing and ideally ought to be reversed.

However, local government can hardly be expected on its own to counter what is doubtless a national or international trend across public and private sectors. It ought to go without saying that local authorities can be large and complex organisations, often the largest employers in their areas, and deliver a range of vital services.

Senior local government managers are not part of an unofficial institute of pen pushers and petty bureaucrats. Many of them will be qualified in professional disciplines, at least some of which (law, town planning, chartered surveying, accountancy etc.) have a mature market in the private sector where they could earn more. Whether one attributes their decision to work in local government to an altruistic commitment to public service or to an inability to cope with the alleged extra pressure of the private sector, local authorities surely have to offer reasonably competitive salaries. Unless they really are supposed to recruit only from the least bright and able members of any given profession.

I doubt if many of us who serve as councillors want to pay senior managers more than is necessary to secure appointees who are capable of doing the job effectively, and there isn't an intrinsic problem with councillors having to justify their decisions in public.

But why is this restricted only to local government? If Mr Pickles' concern is to ensure transparency and accountability for high earners in the public sector, then why not apply this to all levels of government and state employment? Last year the government published a list of civil servants on high salaries. Why shouldn't each of these, when appointed, have their appointment and pay voted on by an open parliamentary debate?

The same might apply to those working for arms of the state outside central or local government. Last year there was a local controversy over the salary of the chief executive of the West Herts Hospital Trust, Dr Jan Filochowski, who apparently earned £246,000 in 2008/09. Now I have nothing against Dr Filochowski, under whose leadership the hospital trust's performance has undoubtedly improved. But he appears to earn far more than anyone working for Watford Borough Council and more, even, than the chief executive of Hertfordshire County Council. Why should his salary not be voted on by democratically-elected representatives who are responsible for the service (again this would mean parliament)? [Note here: I realise that the provision is not to be retrospective so I mean his successor if he were to leave his post].

I suspect local government already has more democratic scrutiny of top salary earners than other parts of the public sector - senior appointments have to be confirmed by full council meetings, albeit not currently in public session. If Mr Pickles is seriously concerned to have accountability for salaries of high earners in the public sector, he should get the government to practice what it preaches and give MPs a vote on the individual salaries of senior civil servants. Otherwise this is just a piece of humbug and yet another attack on local democracy.

Is Sally Bercow the new Lembit Öpik?

2011-02-09T13:43:00.002Z

Both seem to have the problem of not appreciating how certain types of publicity undermine such serious political purposes as they may have.

Delayed gratification

2011-02-09T13:33:00.003Z

This blog has been silent for a couple of weeks or so. Such all too common gaps in postings are mainly the result of busy meeting schedules leaving little time and that issues I might have wanted to post about no longer being news by the time I do have an opportunity to post.

Another problem is that often my instant reaction to an issue will differ from what I think after further reflection. But again by the time I have made up my mind the rest of the world has moved on.

So perhaps I should draw inspiration fromt the new magazine being launched called Delayed Gratification, which promises to be 'last to breaking news' and commits itself to 'returning to stories after the dust has settled'.

Whether this will be a success remains to be seen, given that it seems to go against the spirit of the age, that the title is rather middlebrow for such a highbrow venture and that the cover price of £12 is rather steep. But I wish it well!

Musical artists and their imperceptibly radical changes of direction

2011-01-30T18:24:00.005Z

I'm starting to worry whether there is something wrong with my ears. Not that I am going deaf but merely that other people hear things I don't.

This is really to do with listening to music. I keep having this odd experience of critics announcing that the latest album by a band or artist I like is a radical new departure, but where I don't really spot much of a difference.

I have just bought the new offering from The Decemberists, of which the reviewer on AllMusic comments

Raised on a steady diet of Morrissey, Robyn Hitchcock, Shirley Collins, and Fairport Convention, The King Is Dead represents [Decemberists] frontman Colin Meloy's first foray into the musical traditions of his homeland, or more specifically, it proves that he really, really likes R.E.M

To me, however, the latest Decemberists album reminds me uncannily of other Decemberists albums. The singer has a distinctive voice, there still seems to be a lot of fiddle and accordian in there, and the influence of English folk music is apparent. Unlike on their last two efforts, there is no hint of Prog-style concept album or multi-part songs here, but the sound is much the same.

I found this last year when the album The courage of others by Midlake was hailed as a radical departure, sounding like Fairport Convention whereas their previous release The trials of Van Occupanther sounded like Fleetwood Mac. Again, the two sounded very similar to me.

But then I grew up liking Neil Young who in the first four years after I started listening to him realised successive records that switched from heavy rock to electronica to rockabilly to country and western. Spoonfed by such unmissable changes in style, perhaps I just don't appreciate other artists' more nuanced sonic evolutions.

Interested readers can compare this from the Decemberists 2009 album 'The Hazards of Love' with the embedded youtube link in this post to the opening track from their new one. See what you think!

Lib Dem case for a flat tax?

2011-01-30T17:38:00.002Z

I had always assumed that a flat taxw was right-wing nonsense, but Dan Falchikov outlines how it can be progressive. Apparently 'The key is to have a sufficiently high tax rate and a sufficiently large tax free allowance'.

Is the Daily Mail demanding higher public spending?

2011-01-30T13:05:00.011Z

Just occasionally I wonder whether right-wing tabloids might not be entirely ideologically consistent. This week the Daily Mail took to task two councils for limiting households to 80 rubbish sacks per year, or as the headline put it:

Despite ministers' vows, bin police are at it again: Families are rationed to 80 bags of rubbish a year

But hang on a second: Conservative-run Wokingham Council says it will save over £900,000 by this proposal(presumably by reducing landfill costs). Now if there's one thing I thought I understood about right-wing tabloids' attitudes towards local councils, it's that they opposed unnecessary spending of taxpayers' money and the increased council tax levels that inevitably follow. So to be consistent the Mail should be applauding the thrift of Wokingham in saving public money by avoiding unnecessary costs.

A variant on this sort of confusion was shown a few weeks ago in the Sunday Times (tabloid in tone if not format and certainly right-of-centre) attacking councils for introducing 'stealth taxes'. On closer inspection it turned out that in many cases councils were actually increasing the fees charges for loss-making services that are to a greater or lesser extent subsidised by taxpayers (allotments, burial plots, bus passes etc.). While a Lib Dem like me might defend the social benefits such subsidies and accept increased charges at best with great reluctance, the Sunday Times surely ought to approve of what is effectively a public spending cut.

But it would be too much to expect ideological consistency from newspapers when government ministers are so confused. Conservative housing and local government minister Grant Shapps is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying on the refuse sacks issue:

If councils think they can hammer residents with stealth taxes through this sneaky route, the Government is prepared to take whatever steps necessary to protect taxpayers’ interests.’

Now there are two points here. In the first place what Wokingham is doing isn't a tax it's if anything a way of keeping tax down. And secondly, I thought the government wants to devolve decisions to local level, which is why it has just published a Localism Bill, which purports to 'shift power from central government back into the hands of individuals, communities and councils'. Now Mr Shapps wants to micromanage how individual councils organise their refuse service, and indeed any other decisions they may make that, however inaccurately, he categorises as 'stealth taxes'.

I suspect that all this reflects the ideological confusion of our age with its wish for Scandinavian-levels of public services at American levels of taxation. Shapps, Daily Mail, Sunday Times want spending cuts, but object to the measures that public bodies actually have to take to deliver such cuts, and the reality that this does have an impact on services to the public.

PS: I should say that Watford Borough Council has weekly waste collections, and uses wheelie bins not black sacks, so we are not planning to follow in Wokingham's footsteps.

Theology of guesthouse management reprised

2011-01-23T20:52:00.002Z

It's always nice to find someone else saying the same things as oneself. I note that Independent columnist Christina Patterson wrote in yesterday's paper on the case of Cornwall guest house owners Peter and Hazelmary Bull:

if you have very strong feelings about other people's sexual behaviour, then you should probably choose a business that doesn't focus quite so heavily on beds.

This is pleasingly in line with my conclusion that

If Mr and Mrs Bull regard their guest house as an articulation of their theological outlook, rather than a service for which people pay money, then perhaps they are in the wrong trade.

Unfortunately, I very rarely read the Independent and only did so yesterday because friends I was visiting had a copy. So I know very little about Christina Patterson and whether or not it's a good thing to find oneself in agreement with her.

Gable Endies go down at East End Park

2011-01-21T23:17:00.004Z

Despite an impressive three goals in the away replay at Dunfermline, Montrose went down 5-3 earlier in the week.

Worse than that, another of my teams, Dundee, have had their 25-point deduction confirmed, sending them in an instant from contending for promotion to fighting against relegation.

And Coventry City are off the boil just now.

But this is where supporting four teams comes in handy. Watford are doing rather well at the moment - as one might expect given that they are managed by a Scot.

Penny dreadful

2011-01-19T13:29:00.004Z

Jonathan Calder has reaped a whirlwind of hostile comment by remarking on the case of left-wing writer Laurie Penny's attempts to recruit an researcher at below the minimum wage.

I don't have a problem with Penny's privileged background. Well and good if someone's views are not conditioned by their upbringing.

But her prose style, consisting largely of student union style rants, is certainly tiresome. So it would take a heart of stone not to feel a sense of schadenfreude at a member of the sanctimonious left being caught using a variation on the intern system, which is at once exploitative and likely to give the already privileged a further advantage.

Christian morality shouldn't mean refusing to allow gay couples to share a double bed

2011-01-19T13:18:00.005Z

Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the guesthouse owners who have been found guilty of discrimination by turning away a gay couple, are the latest on the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph roll call of Christian martyrs. At the same time they present Christianity in an intolerant and petty-minded light.

Despite being a Christian (albeit with irregular church attendance and various heterodox beliefs), I think the judge made the right decision and have little sympathy for Mr and Mrs Bull. But then, mine is a liberal Christianity, and in common with a good proportion of my Roman Catholic co-religionists, I politely disagree with many of the Pope’s strictures on sexual morality. However, even if Mr and Mrs Bull belong to a stricter Christian tradition and accept the traditional teaching of the church (not necessarily that of Jesus Christ) on such matters, I don’t see that this requires them to refuse to let gay couples stay in a double bed at their guest house.

Their policy is described in news reports as allowing only married couples to stay in double-bedded rooms. To enforce this effectively they would have to check the marriage certificates of guests, together with other identification to confirm that the names tally with the certificate. Then there are awkward theological issues of second marriages following divorces, where guests may be legally married but in the eyes of some churches living in a state of adultery. Also, presumably it’s all right for guests of the same gender to share a twin-bedded room. But twin beds hardly preclude sexual activity (and for that matter a double bed isn’t necessarily confirmation of it). Unless Mr and Mrs Bull run their establishment more like a prison than a guest house, then all manner of sinfulness may be going on under their roof and they can’t really hope to prevent it. In which case banning same-sex couples is a selective display of mean spiritedness (at best) rather than a principled upholding of sincere beliefs.

Actually, anyone running a business providing a service to the public is not well advised to select their customers on the basis of approval or otherwise of their lifestyle and personal morality. It’s bound to lead to trouble.

If Mr and Mrs Bull regard their guest house as an articulation of their theological outlook, rather than a service for which people pay money, then perhaps they are in the wrong trade.

Progressivism yet once more

2011-01-18T20:44:00.003Z

It's never to late to restart a quarrel, or rather engage in constructive debate.

I have only just noticed that back in November the Contrasting Sounds blog took me to task for defending the use of the term 'Progressive' (“Progressive”: Orwell himself thinks it’s Orwellian.)

Orwell is supposed to have said that some things are true even if they do appear in the Daily Telegraph, and equally some views be wrong even if they were held by George Orwell. The author of Contrasting Sounds objects to my definition of 'Progressive' as meaning 'those who, regardless of party, see their political outlook as being about championing the poor, the excluded and the disempowered against the established order'. He says that this can be paraphrased as “I care more than other people do”' and implies that non-Progressives are 'Nasty people, presumably, like the Conservative Party'.

But actually, that's not what I meant. The word 'Progressive' contrasts quite neatly with 'Conservative', and although I might say differently when sounding off in the heat of the moment, I accept that it's possible to hold Conservative views without being nasty or uncaring. An anti-Progressive argument might run something like this: 'Attempts to favour the poor have unintended consequences that hurt those they are meant to help, by stifling enterprise and initiative. They can lead to a culture of envy that is damaging to society as a whole. They can be socially and economically destabilising and most people will be happier and more prosperous through the preservation of the existing order.' A perfectly respectable outlook, one with which I sometimes have some sympathy, but with which in the end I don't agree.

So using the word 'Progressive' as a political description is not just a way of saying 'nice not nasty' but of reflecting a politican outlook.

"Labour scourged you with inspection, I will scourge you with Pickles"

2011-01-16T15:10:00.009Z

Lib Dem local government leaders have called for regime change at the Department of Communities and Local government (DCLG). It is hardly a secret that relations between the department and local government are at an all-time low.

This might be dismissed as simply councillors defending producer interests, but none of the Lib Dems quoted, Chris White, Gerald Vernon-Jackson and Richard Kemp are ones to romanticise local councils or deny their shortcomings. They just have a basic belief, which the government is supposed to share, that democratic local government has a part to play in representing and delivering services to people.

It is quite an achievement that when much of the government's localism agenda is welcomed by local government, relations between DCLG and councils are so bad. Even the Conservative chair of the Local Government Association admits that local government has a more civilised relationship with the health and education departments than with DCLG.

The problem is that in Eric Pickles the DCLG has a secretary of state who is not a serious person. He gives the impression of being more suited to sitting in a pub sounding off about how awful the council is than to running a government department. Despite the hands-off, localism agenda professed by the coalition, from the first he has been unable to stop himself trying to micromanage local government by soundbite (further example here). It is not the job of DCLG to be the uncritical champion of local government, but nor should the secretary of state hold it in unconcealed contempt. (Such attitudes may arise from his own period as leader of a council being abruptly terminated at the first opportunity by an ungrateful electorate.)

Richard Kemp may have a point when he suggests:

If [local government is] to be central to public sector delivery wouldn’t it be better to be part of the Cabinet Office which is central to public sector delivery?

Far better that than DCLG, a Mickey Mouse department, currently led by a cartoon character. There would be a delightful irony if Eric Pickles, the denouncer of 'non-jobs' in local government, found the biggest non-job of all was his own.

Progressive problems

2011-01-16T13:28:00.005Z

Alert readers may have noticed my use of the word 'progressive' in inverted commas in the last post.

The usefulness of this term for Liberal Democrats seems to be the source of some debate, most recently in Lib Dem Voice, and which I have previously addressed here.

One can make a case for the use of the term 'Progressive'. It does have some historical validity, it is a suitable description for graduated taxation, and is a useful catch-all term for all those, of differing political traditions, whose goals are to improve the position of the less well off and less powerful in society.

But why say 'Progressive' when what we mean is 'Liberal'? Here, the problem lies in internal debates among Lib Dems, and particularly the tendency on the 'left' of the party to caricature 'economic liberalism' as crypto-Thatcherism.

I am more than happy to be considered Liberal in political, social and economic views alike. As Asquith said, I am a Liberal "without prefix or suffix" (except 'Democrat' in the party title but that's a different matter.) I don't see why the concept of 'economic liberalism' should be defined by those who aren't Liberals but right-wing Conservatives. And for Lib Dems to disavow liberal economics is to preclude any possibility of differentiating our approach to economics from that favoured by socialists.

Unfortunately the term 'economic liberal' is tainted even among many Lib Dems. If I say I support the government's economic policy because it is 'liberal', what I mean is that with some reservations and caveats I believe it to be aimed at protecting the poor and less powerful. But in this context support for 'liberal' policy can easily be misrepresented as meaning that the government is engaged on an ideological Thatcherite project to slash public spending that I endorse. Hence one resorts to describing policy as 'Progressive'.

The answer is for Liberals to champion a consistent Liberal ethic not hedge their Liberalism with qualifying adjectives.

Keynes would back the coalition says Cable

2011-01-16T12:34:00.003Z

Vince Cable has an essay in this week's New Statesman arguing that modern Keynesian economists are wrong to cite Keynes to justify opposition to the government's public spending reductions. The whole article doesn't appear to be available to non-subscribers but there is a summary here.

The essay is a riposte to an article by Keynes's biographer Robert Skidelsky in October. Vince Cable comments:

... we should be sceptical about Keynsian economists, however distinguished, who conspicuously failed to anticipate the financial critis and now blithely ignore its consequences. Skidelsky's essay does not even make passing reference to the banking crisis, like someone dispensing advice on earthquake relief without any refernce to past or future earthquakes.

The article is to be welcomed for a number of reasons. First it is a good thing that Vince is making the 'progressive' argument for the government's measures - this is necessary if the debate is not simply to be polarised as Tory measures facing Labour opposition. Second it is a sign of identying a clear Lib Dem identity within the government - many Tories would not be pleased at the thought of Keynes being on their side. Third it is a hint of some degree of pluralism remaining at the New Statesman.

Incidentally, I can't help puzzling over the political trajectory of Lord Skidelsky, Vince Cable's intellectual sparring partner in this debate. A Labour supporter who joined the SDP, he was among the Owenites who stood out against merger (presumably finding the Lib Dems too lefty and irresponsible). For a time he took the Conservative whip in the House of Lords. During this period I remember him addressing a Liberal Democrat History Group meeting on Keynes and telling us all 'Keynes was right, but he can't be used'. Now it seems Keynes can be used and Skidelsky is criticising the Lib Dems ostensibly from the left.

On the frustrations of deluxe, expanded, legacy editions of favourite albums

2011-01-14T23:07:00.005Z

Next week two CDs by one of my favourite bands, alt-country pioneers The Jayhawks, are re-released in 'legacy' or 'expanded' editions. This gives me mixed feelings. I already own both CDs and in order to obtain the additional material included in the deluxe model have to buy them both all over again. Looking at the new material, a significant amount appears to be alternative versions of songs already released in some shape or form. So to obtain about 10 songs that I don't already have in my collection, I have to buy two separate CDs at a cost even via Amazon of over £20. I suppose I could see if I can download individual tracks, but that won't quite be the same as owning the CD, complete with packaging, liner notes etc.

No doubt I shall give in - The Jayhawks never enjoyed the commercial success they deserve and I should be glad to give them my patronage. But the whole idea of deluxe expanded legacy editions still rankles.

(On the other hand for those who like music in the Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Wilco vein, but who don't own either Hollywood Town Hall or Tomorrow The Green Grass by The Jayhawks then the new editions released next week look like a good buy.)

Are the Lib Dems jinxed in Oldham East and Saddleworth?

2011-01-14T13:32:00.003Z

The latest chapter in this seat's electoral history makes me wonder if there isn't something in the stars that stops it falling into Liberal Democrat hands.

In 1992 a strong performance by Chris Davies in the former Littleborough and Saddleworth constituency made this look made this a prime candidate for a gain from the Tories at the next general election. The Lib Dems were in a close second place with a considerable Labour vote to squeeze.

Then came the by-election following the death of Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens. Although Chris Davies's victory was an important boost to the party when it was struggling to appear relevant at the height or Blair's popularity, it also showed that Labour could win the seat, which they duly did on revised boundaries in 1997.

But the longer-term prospects still looked good - it would surely fall into Lib Dem hands as soon as Labour's national success waned, with now a big Tory vote to squeeze. It was even one of just three seats where the Lib Dems topped the poll in the 1999 European elections (helped of course by Davies heading the Lib Dem list in that election).

Unfortunately the 2001 Oldham riots seemed to work against the Lib Dems, possibly pushing moderate voters towards Labour as the surest way of fighting off the BNP. One might have expected a seat with a high Muslim population to swing to the Lib Dems in 2005 in the wake of the Iraq war. Yet amid controversy about where the Lib Dem candidate lived and other such things, the national swing from Labour to the Lib Dems failed to materialise in the seat.

And last year Elwyn Watkins missed out by just 103 with a frustrating increase in the third-placed Conservative vote. Now the seat has been the scene of the first by-election to take place after the party entered coalition government with all its attendant difficult decisions. So the seat has eluded us once again.

State schools, private schools, universities: here we go again

2011-01-13T19:58:00.008Z

Here I go on a familiar hobby horse.

Ed Long has a very good article on Liberal Democrat Voice, much of his analysis being persuasive, even if I don't really agree with his conclusions. He rightly takes Simon Hughes to task for suggesting that universities should operate quotas for the number of students from private schools that they admit.

Ed correctly points out that universities have to select the students who appear most likely to succeed at their courses, that the problems start further back in the education process and that university admissions departments aren't to blame if a disproportionate number of students with top A Level grades in prestigious academic subjects come from private schools.

However, I'm not so sure about the suggestion that state schools encourage students to take softer subjects in which they are more likely to do well and boost league table scores, but which are less impressive to universities. I can well see the perverse incentive to schools, but my dear wife who taught in comprehensive schools for many years says she has never known this happen. I can believe that there are more opportunities to study classics at private schools and that this helps students to win places on classics courses at Oxbridge. On the other hand it really wouldn't be a kindness for a state school to encourage someone to study a notoriously difficult subject like maths at A level if they may not be up to it. The result wouldn't be an A grade in a prestigious subject, but one fewer A level.

I also have my doubts about Ed's alternative to Simon's prescription, namely that we need:

gifted state pupils being supported to achieve 3 As at A Level if it is within their grasp, through mentoring schemes, after-school clubs and so on; Modern Languages, Classics and hard science subjects being pushed harder in state sixth forms and colleges; and more high-achieving state pupils being encouraged to apply to Oxford and Cambridge – especially to under-represented degree subjects

Of course I am all for state school students being encouraged and helped to fulfil their potential, including gaining a place on their preferred course at their preferred university. But Ed's argument (and the universal voices in support on the comments thread) seems to take it as read that if schools have spare resources their top priority should be to make sure their best students earn places at Oxbridge (rather than ensuring that the merely able, or even the less able, fulfil their potential.)

Which brings me on to the hobby horse. Let us hypothesise two equally bright and able 'A level' students, one at a private school that prides itself on getting students into Oxbridge, one at a state school with less of a track record in that department. With the help of vast support and experience from their school (what to write on the application form, what to say at interview) the first student gets into Oxbridge. The second (despite getting the same or similar grades) wins a place at Hull or Keele or wherever. Why is this a big deal? Both are at respected universities, both can take a degree and advantage of all the academic and other opportunities higher education provides, both can use this as a springboard for whatever career they wish to pursue. What is the problem?

Of course! Going to Oxford or Cambridge or a couple of other elite institutions marks the student for life as among the brightest and the best. Going anywhere else relegates them to the also rans, even if they have comparable A level grades to their Oxbridge counterparts. I believe that some employers only recruit from Oxbridge - so better a lower second from Christ Church, Oxford than a high first from Oxford Brookes.

During these periodic bouts of public agonising about this topic, just perhaps we should consider whether the national culture of snobbery about academic institutions, and the apparent belief that a small number of universities are not just top of the league, but in a different league altogether, is part of the problem.

Obligatory declaration of interest required when discussing such issues: My secondary education was partly in the private and partly in the state sector. I studied as an undergraduate at Leicester University. But just possibly my views are the result of attempts at rational thought rather than conditioned by my educational background.

The world of Naff revisited

2011-01-13T13:16:00.005Z

In reorganising bookshelves at home I have been reunited with one or two comfort books that I occasionally turn to over the years. Among these is The Complete Naff Guide, published as a Christmas stocking filler type thing in 1983. Credited to Dr Kit Bryson, Jean-Luc Legris and Selina Fitzherbert, it was actually written by Willie Donaldson of Henry Root Letters fame.

It became a particular favourite because a friend of mine at the time used it as a basis for a (rather unsuccessful) parlour game which seemed to involve people memorising and then reciting whole chunks of the book. Although just a succession of lists of naff things, people, activities etc. without any further explanation, the entries did seem to have their own resonance. So the list of 'Naff hairstyles' includes: 'Telly Savalas (paradoxically not Yul Brynner)'. Other entries include: 'Naff positions in the batting order: 7', 'Naff dead pop stars: Sid Vicious, Bing Crosby'; 'Naff cats: There are no naff cats, however it is extremely naff to keep a leopard'.

But the best entry in the book is the list of 'Naff remarks by Peregrine Worsthorne', which includes the following:

It should be obvious, except perhaps to a Guardian reader, that Peter Reeve, the escaped Broadmoor killer, will be more dangerous to the public, rather than less, as a result of having studied sociology at the Open University.

History: the underdogs can be wrong sometimes, too

2011-01-12T13:41:00.003Z

History Today launches a new 'Contrarian' column with an article by Royal Holloway academic Tim Stanley arguing against 'romanticising the powerless' in history to the extent of excusing atrocities committed by perceived underdogs. He writes:

whenever someone at the bottom of a power structure does or says something objectively evil, many historians legitimise it by calling it ‘resistance’. No one denies that tyrants and conquerors are oppressive, or that those who seek liberation have just cause. But that doesn’t mean inverse prejudice or terrorism should get a free pass.

This struck a particular chord with me as I have been reading Hemingway's classic novel of the Spanish Civil War For whom the bell tolls. Both the novel and the war itself raise questions of how far a noble cause may be compromised by the moral failings of its protagonists. Hemingway can hardly be accused of ignoring the barbarities committed by the Republican side that he supported. One of the novel's most powerful scenes is an account of the massacre at Ronda, where Republicans killed Nationalist prisoners by forcing them over a cliff. Yet Hemingway fell out with his friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos over the former's apparent indifference to the killing by Republicans of the left-wing intelletual José Robles, allegedly for spying for the fascists. Even now the moral failings of both sides in the Spanish Civil War, and any number of other topics, provokes fierce debate.

Plainly, anyone studying or writing about historical topics will bring their own values and political sympathies to issues they are studying and their historical judgements will be influenced accordingly. But Dr Stanley's point is important and right. Good and honest historical writing should confront rather than gloss over or glibly excuse the moral failings of those with whom the author's sympathies lie.

The King's Speech - with added Churchill (and rather less Chamberlain)

2011-01-11T21:35:00.005Z

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that for any public figure of the 1930s to be seen as a good egg they must have been on the same side as the Greatest Briton Ever, Winston Churchill. So in Tom Hooper's newly-released and much acclaimed film The King's Speech, when the Duke of York reluctantly ascends to the throne after his brother's abdication, who does he turn to for advice but dear old Winston?

But did this really happen? Churchill was a supporter of Edward VIII in the abdication crisis in 1936. Indeed during it he suffered one of the greatest humiliations of his wildnerness years, being howled down in the House of Commons while asking a question that was seen as sympathetic to the King (i.e. Edward VIII). Churchill was suspected of trying to lead a rebellion against Baldwin, the prime minister. (Hansard reference here).

So Churchill would seem an unlikely confidant for the new king, and I wonder whether this scene really happened or whether it was just a way of getting Winston into the action. Likewise, I would be surprised if the arch-appeaser Baldwin, when he resigned in 1937, would have been warning the king in 1937 that Hitler meant war all along. His government had, after all, just turned a blind eye to the destruction of Guernica by the German bombers and to Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia. So this may just be a way of linking the hero of the film to the anti-appeasement side in the 1930s.

In fact, George VI's sympathies were with Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers not Churchill. Indeed a biographer of George VI in the 1950s, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, remarked on the difficulty of writing while Churchill was still alive because the late king had

disliked Churchill's attitude at Munich and doubtless Churchill's championing of the Duke of Windsor at the time of the abdication did not commend itself to George VI and his Queen...

At the high noon of appeasement when Chamberlain arrived home from Munich, the King invited the prime minister to join him in waving to the crowds from the balcony at Buckingham Palace (see picture) - which was an outrageous display of political partisanship.

Therefore I would be also surprised if Churchill in 1939, while only Lord of the Admiralty in Neville Chamberlain's wartime government, would have been chatting to the King like an old chum as portrayed in the film.

Perhaps I am wrong and all these things did indeed happen as portrayed in The King's Speech. But I suspect not!

NOTE: The Wheeler-Bennett quote is taken from the Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce-Lockhart, as cited by Andrew Roberts in his book Emininent Churchilians (Chapter 1 - The House of Windsor and the politics of appeasement, since you ask). I am not a big fan of Roberts, but some things are true even if they are written by historians with Thatcherite views. I may go and check the published volume of the diaries in the library tomorrow, though, just to be sure.

Heroic draw for Gable Endies

2011-01-09T12:37:00.007Z

We exiled Montrose supporters don't get much chance to see our heroes. So I am savouring the highlights on the BBC website of yesterday's 2-2 draw in the Scottish Cup against high-flying Dunfermline, who are two divisions above Montrose and currently at the top of Scottish Division 1. Goalscorer Paul Tosh's tentative dive onto to snow-covered artificial pitch after his injury-team equaliser is amusing to watch.

There is a full match report on the club's website. Here's hoping for similar (indeed even greater) heroics in the replay.

With both Watford and Coventry City winning yesterday, it was an uncharacteristically good day for my favoured football teams.

Conservative minister's skin-deep localism

2011-01-05T13:46:00.005Z

Old habits die hard it seems, perhaps especially so for Conservative ministers. Despite the localism bill supposedly signifying the government's intentions to get off local councils' backs, local government minister Bob Neill has still apparently found time to write to council leaders demanding to know how they will provide better refuse collection services over the Easter bank holidays, compared with the recent Christmas period.

The lesser likelihood of heavy snow across the country in late April than in December might help, and I'm not aware that there has been any great problem with Easter refuse services that warrants the time Mr Neill spent writing his email or that council leaders will have to spend replying.

My understanding is that it is a small number of councils that have a refuse backlog, despite the sustained bad weather in December. Far from regarding refuse collection as 'a favour, not a right', councils hate disruption to the bin collection - mainly because councillors and officers alike do realise how important it is to the public. But, leaving the public service ethic argument to one side for a second, no one likes receiving large numbers of complaints about uncollected bins nor having to deal with a large backlog once the bad weather is over. It's far simpler if at all possible just to stick to the schedule.

Where there is disruption, it will be down to combination of just how bad the snow is and for how long combined with the specific challenges of local topography (large refuse trucks in narrow terraced streets covered with ice being a specific problem). Fortunately, here in Watford, we were hit less badly by the weather than other areas, and although the bad weather did pose problems the council managed to maintain a virtually normal service. But last year refuse collectors were injured trying to carry out collections and large trucks pose a real danger in bad weather to pedestrians and other motor vehicles that is more than just 'health and safety gone mad'.

Even if the (Labour) leader of Exeter City Council's comments, which provoked Bob Neill's response, were insensitive, I have no reason to doubt his assertion that: 'Every day the bin lorries could have been out they have been out'. Of course I haven't been down to Exeter, or any of the other councils where there is a backlog, to find out if they could and should have done more, but neither I suspect has Bob Neill. If he did I expect he would find in almost every local authority, councillors, managers and staff alike wanted to maintain as good a service as possible in the face of very difficult circumstances caused by the weather.

None of which is simply to be a councillor defending 'producer interests'. The public depend on our services. All councils should be trying to learn lessons from the recent cold spell and work out what might be done better next time. No doubt some have made mistakes and have much learning and improvement to do. Maybe there are one or two that are complacent and letting their residents down. But localism means that this should be addressed by residents making their views known and holding councillors to account and by councillors speaking up for their residents and making sure they get a decent standard of service. It shouldn't be done by ministers having nothing better to do and sounding off from a position of ignorance.

PS: Nick Barlow is ahead of me on this one and posted earlier in similar vein.

Kate and Anna McGarrigle - Talk to me of Mendocino

2010-12-31T11:56:00.003Z

Had this blog been active at the time I would have written about the sad death of Kate McGarrigle in January. Latterly, she seemed to be more famous as the mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright, but with her sister Anna, she produced a remarkable body of work that deserves to be better known. This, one of her best songs, has a wistfulnessthat it perhaps appropriate for the ending of a year and the start of a new one.

When Auberon Waugh backed the Liberal party

2010-12-28T18:53:00.005Z

One of the New Statesman's halcyon periods was during the 1970s under the editorship of Anthony Howard, who sadly died just before Christmas. Among the more unlikely contributors Howard recruited was Auberon Waugh, who did some of his best writing for there , precisely because he was going against the grain of his readers' views.

Waugh died nearly ten years ago, but although he was probably the funniest journalist of his generation, newspaper and magazine scribblings have a short shelf-life and all the anthologies of his work published in his lifetime seem to be out of print. So it is good news that a new collection of his articles was published earlier this year, even those of us who own previous volumes and will no doubt find the same material repeated.

The reason Waugh was funny was because he didn't take politics and politicians seriously, which made him more successful at getting under the skin of leftists and liberals than if he had been a mere right-wing polemicist. He held Liberals and Lib Dems in particular disdain, leading the charge against Jeremy Thorpe in the 1970s and never forgiving Shirley Williams for her role in the comprehensivisation of secondary schools.

But in my meanderings through the historical archive of The Times I have found one occasion on which he specifically endorsed the Liberal party. Waugh was much exercised by the plight of the Biafrans in the Nigerian-Biafran War of 1967-70 during which both the Labour government and the Conservative opposition supported the Nigerian Federal government.

In protest, Waugh threatened to stand as an independent pro-Biafran candidate in the 1970 Bridgwater by-election, but in the end withdrew, explaining in a letter to The Times on 20 January:

May I use the hospitality of your columns to urge those voters in Bridgwater who expressed their support for my candidature... to support instead the Liberal candidate, as representing the only political party which carried itself with honour throughout this disgusting episode in our nation's history?

Sadly, Waugh's endorsement didn't do the Liberals much good. The Liberal vote fell by 5% and the candidate only narrowly saved his deposit.

Struggling with the Staggers

2010-12-28T16:45:00.004Z

I hesitated earlier this year before deciding to renew my subscription to the New Statesman, and the Christmas issue, which I have just got round to reading, makes me wonder if I shouldn't have hesitated a little longer.

The Staggers is of course a Labour-supporting paper, and never likely to see eye to eye with the Lib Dems even when we are not in coalition with the Tories. But at its best, it is broadminded, has contributors with a range of different viewpoints and so is a good read even for those who don't agree with its politics.

So while I never expected it to welcome the coalition government, I hoped at least that it would recognise that Labour had outstayed its welcome in power, and offer constructive opposition to the new administration rather than a full frontal assault. Sadly, it has very quickly lapsed into a variant on the unthinking dogmatism that it adopted in the early 1980s, the last time Labour lost power, which made it unreadable to anyone outside the left of the Labour party. Whenever a Labour government loses power without having created a new Jerusalem, the cry of betrayal goes up from the left - normally it's the right of the Labour party that gets the blame, this time the Lib Dems are an even better scapegoat.

The Staggers' political editor, Mehdi Hasan, appears to have a visceral dislike of the Lib Dems that was on display even before the election - taking the view that any criticism of us should be accepted unquestioningly and any possible defence not even considered. So it is no surprise that in the Christmas issue his article is entitled 'Coalition? This is a Tory government'.

It's a measure of Hasan's intellectual standards that the closest he gets to rational analysis and logical argument is a playgrount taunt: describing Danny Alexander as 'George Osborne's red-headed, red-faced bag carrier at the treasury' - a sort of playground taunt. The rest of the article consists of ignoring the late Labour government's more right-wing tendencies (crime policy, civil liberties, tuition fees, setting up the Browne review to consider higher tuition fees); refusing to acknowledge the more liberal elements of the coalition programme (closing the family unit at Yarl's Wood; increasing capital gains tax etc., the levy on banks, making the Browne recommendations more progressive) or else crediting the Tories (prisons, pupil premium). It concludes with a historically misleading reference to supposed previous Conservative-Liberal coalitions. In fact the Liberal Unionists in 1886 and Liberal Nationals in 1931 were breakaway organisations that had seceded from the main Liberal party and entered into an electoral alliance with the Tories.

This sort of thing would doubtless go down well as a piece of rhetoric to an audience of Labour activists, but is hardly to be taken seriously as political analysis. One could do a similar fisking exercise on the magazine's editorial in the same issue, which continues to exonerate Labour and blame the Lib Dems entirely for the failure of the two parties to agree a coalition in May. I have a theory that there is a positive correlation between the readibility of the New Statesman and the electability of the Labour party. If so, then regardless of the fate of the Lib Dems, Labour could be in for a long spell in opposition!!

Vince Cable agrees with me!

2010-12-24T15:54:00.003Z

Thank you to Niklas Smith whose comment on my earlier post draws my attention to Vince Cable's comments on his recent difficulties. As the Richmond and Twickenham Times reports:

The Business Secretary said the Daily Telegraph's tactics had "completely undermined" the work of local MPs and he would need to be “more guarded” in the future.

What is most worrying is Vince's comment that:

I did preface what I was saying by saying if they want to have a conversation about a political matter as well as a personal matter it is confidential, and you do expect people to behave in a trustworthy way, which these people from the Daily Telegraph didn’t.

If Vince is correct, then in future there can be no such thing as an off-the-record or informal conversation between politicians and journalists. If an MP or minister asks for something to be confidential then there can be no guarantee that journalists won't record or quote them anyway. And it is disappointing that those ministers who have been 'caught out' by the Telegraph have apologised and backed down rather than come out fighting.

I write this with some sadness. I grew up reading the Telegraph and continued reading it long after knowing I was out of sympathy with its politics, because there seemed to be integrity both to its reportage and editorial analysis. These days it is in the gutter and I wouldn't stoop to pick it up.

The Box of Delights - a case for child protection?

2010-12-24T15:17:00.003Z

Once every few years I like to watch again the DVD of the classic 1984 BBC dramatisation of John Masefield's The box of delights. I am reassured to learn from Wikipedia that this is 'a nostalgic treat for followers of cult TV' rather than the equivalent of adults reading Harry Potter books.

If I understood rightly from the first episode, the main character, Kay Harker, who must be about ten years old, is allowed to walk back from town to his guardian's house which is out in the countryside after dark. The book was written in 1935 and appears to be set at that time too. These days I suppose there would be tabloid newspaper headlines and calls for intervention by social services.

Do you need to be interested in music to be a Radio 2 disc jockey?

2010-12-24T14:27:00.007Z

I'm not proud of it, but last night I found myself watching ITV's Who wants to be a celebrity millionaire live. One of the contestants was Chris Evans, who despite being a famous Radio 2 disc jockey, was unable to answer a question about the lyrics to the Pogues' Fairytale of New York. As this is one of the best-known Christmas songs ever, it's a bit like Evans thinking that Bing Crosby dreamed of a purple Christmas.

It puts me in mind of the late John Peel writing of his shock at discovering that one of his fellow Radio 1 presenters did not actually own any records. Plus ça change and all that!

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So should elected representatives now assume that all conversations with members of the public may be recorded and used against us?

2010-12-22T23:11:00.006Z

Vince Cable was foolish to speak to a relative stranger about a sensitive and quasi-judicial matter – the Murdoch/BskyB/Ofcom business. It’s hard to believe that he was so unwise – but then I am used to local government under Labour’s Standards Board reign of terror, where planning committee members had to guard against expressing views on planning applications before the matter was debated.

Former Lib Dem MP David Howarth has speculated on whether the Telegraph sting might have been illegal. There has been some hand-wringing in the media about the use of underhand methods, but media outlets have cheerfully recycled the Telegraph’s story.

Clearly elected representatives are never likely to earn much sympathy in crying foul about media unfairness, but in my view there is something destructive about the way the Telegraph obtained the story – an undermining of the basis on which politicians and their electors interact.

Perhaps the biggest frustration I have found over the years about being an elected representative is that, even as a lowly district councillor, one can no longer express purely personal opinions in public – blog postings, letters to newspapers etc. all have to be considered in the context of whether they might prove to be a faux pas that could be used against the party. And I imagine it’s the same only rather more so for parliamentarians and government ministers.

Yet one assumes there is some flexibility. As elected representatives when we speak on the record to journalists, or in formal public meetings, we know that our comments may be noted down, recorded or reported and quoted back at us, and we have to choose our words accordingly. By contrast in the privacy of home, or among close friends, we can perhaps sound off without fear of making a political gaffe.

Somewhere in the middle are conversations with constituents – on the street, over the telephone, canvassing on doorsteps, or as with Vince’s Telegraph encounter, at a surgery. When members of the public get in touch one wants to put them at their ease and converse with them informally – perhaps even to show that politicians too are human beings (well, almost). The conversation is not quite private, but not really public either. We may make off-the-cuff remarks or empathise with someone’s concerns and complaints without feeling that every comment we make is a formal statement of policy.

This is where the Telegraph story is destructive. The risk for anyone holding public office of being recorded by a journalist posing as a constituent may be low. But this episode establishes that the principle is all right. In which case, we are safest not to interact in a natural and informal way with members of the public who contact us. Instead, if we wish to avoid trouble, we are best off (to borrow a phrase from Queen Victorian’s description of Gladstone) speaking to constituents as if they are public meetings, answering questions only with carefully-thought-out, pre-prepared, on-message, formal statements, not the instinctive reactions of one human being talking to another.

Of course, the media being what it is, concerns about the integrity of the democratic process will hardly matter to journalists seeking a good story. But my fears might be valid just the same.

Oxbridge and free school meals

2010-11-25T23:12:00.005Z

Atlhough Nick Clegg has (quite rightly) expressed frustration at the education system failing the least well off, I was disappointed to see that he did so by citing the proportion of free school meal recipients getting places at Oxford or Cambridge.

He is far from alone in doing this - remember the unseemly row earlier in the year between Ed Balls and Michael Gove on this very point. Not to mention the notorious Laura Spence affair some years ago.

Now I am all for children in receipt of free school meals going to Oxford or Cambridge if they want to study there. What bothers me is the implicit (perhaps unintentional) assumption made by Clegg, Balls and Gove that an Oxbridge place is the only possible measure of academic excellence and that anyone who does not achieve this has either failed in life or been let down by the education system.

However wonderful Oxford and Cambridge may be, they are not necessarily for everyone and students may actually choose to study elsewhere, because of a particular course, or the location or ethos of a particular institution. Some may even, for good reasons, choose not to go on to higher education, however excellent their A-level grades. Making sure that educational opportunities are available for everyone should not just be measured by the admission rates of those on low incomes to just two elite institutions.

Howard Flight's apology won't do

2010-11-25T22:45:00.002Z

So, about-to-be Tory peer Howard Flight made an offensive remark about the poor, but he has now apologised and can have his peerage after all, so that's all right then?

Well not quite! In general I'm not one who thinks politicians should be hung out to dry for a gaffe, faux pas or slip of the tongue. But in this case, he said it, clearly meant it and it can't be unsaid. There are of course occasions when people do say things they don't mean: perhaps when we've had too much to drink, or in a fit of anger or when clearly speaking in jest. But he hasn't given any of these as a reason for saying what he did. So no matter how much he apologises and withdraws his remarks, we all know that what he said is is what he really thinks.

His attitude reveals him as having just the sort of attitudes that explains why David Cameron had to spend so long detoxifying the Tory brand, and if Cameron has any sense he will withdraw Flights peerage.

Clegg, Liberalism and Progressivism

2010-11-24T13:33:00.003Z

In giving the Hugo Young lecture Nick Clegg (reprinted here on Comment is Free) contrasted the 'new progressive' outlook of the Liberal Democrats with Labour's 'old progressive' approach. The former 'focus on the power and freedom of citizens' while the latter 'are straightforwardly in favour of more state spending and activity'.

In doing so Clegg arouses the ire of Jonathan Calder: 'Nick Clegg should speak about liberalism not "progressivism"' who endorses the view of Contrasting Sounds that 'the word “progressive” should be taken outside of UK politics and shot. Or rather, restricted to its technical meaning in tax discussions.'

I don't disagree with Jonathan's conclusion that this is really about the 'contrast between liberalism and socialism. Yet the term progressive does have a meaning in British political tradition beyond a narrow one about the tax system. In the Edwardian era (and possibly before), Liberal politicians were in the habit of using the term 'party of progress' as a generic description for their own party and their Labour allies. This contrasted with the Conservatives whom they saw as the 'party of reaction'. On the London County Council after its creation in 1889, the Liberals worked within a broad grouping that included Labour and socialist elements which contested elections under the 'Progressive' label. And historians are in the habit of referring to the co-operation between the Liberals and Labour before the first world war as the 'Progressive Alliance'. (Although my brief online trawl of contemporary publications suggests that this term may not have been widely used at the time.

Whether in a historical or modern context, the word 'Progressive' is still a useful generic term to distinguish those who, regardless of party, see their political outlook as being about championing the poor, the excluded and the disempowered against the established order. So I suppose that in addressed a Guardianista audience, Clegg is referring to 'Progressivism' in order to make the case that Labour don't have a monopoly of such sentiments - we share them but have a different approach to achieving them.

The last Liberal MP to be ejected for corrupt practices

2010-11-06T13:45:00.004Z

If the Woolas judgment is the first election result since 1911 to be overturned on the grounds of corrupt practice, then presumably the last one was the case of C.F.G. Masterman, whose victory at West Ham North in the December 1910 general election was overturned by an election court in June 1911.

In Masterman's case, the verdict turned on irregularities in the declaration of election expenses by his agent, including submitting a return over the permitted spending limit and failing to declare the cost of leaflets donated to the campaign, by the Free Trade Union and others. Remarkably, the counsel for the petitioners (i.e. the Conservative candidate was at pains to stress that 'no imputation was made on the honour, integrity, or conduct of Mr. Masterman in relation to such matters', a proposition endorsed by the judges.

However, Masterman appeared to have a bit of a problem in choosing election agents. He stated in the course of his evidence that he had had three different agents in his three contests in West Ham North. When he stood in 1903 at a by-election in Dulwich, he was also rather prickly in his dealings with Liberal party HQ over who he would and wouldn't have as agent. In general a rather highly-strung character, he might well have been difficult to work for.

For him, this triggered a series of events that would damage his political career. He was forced to find another seat at Bethnal Green South West, for which he was elected at a 1911 by-election. But when he was appointed to the cabinet in 1914, by the convention of the time he had to seek re-election at a by-election, which he duly lost. He then began an unsuccessful quest for an alternative seat, losing another by-election at Ipswich, before ultimately being forced to stand down from the cabinet.

Perhaps if he had employed a more competent agent at West Ham, he would have avoided all the later trouble.

Jonathan Calder at Liberal England has written extensively about Masterman here.

Will the Conservatives stand in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election?

2010-11-06T11:05:00.004Z

Benedict Brogan on his Daily Telegraph blog raises the prospect of the Conservatives not contesting the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. I hope this is mere speculation (or, coming from the Telegraph, mischief-making), but the Lib Dem leadership should discourage any suggestion that the Conservatives should not contest the by-election. Otherwise, we start to move from the realms of coalition, which is a business agreement, to some form of electoral pact, which would compromise the Lib Dems' independence.

The Lib Dem strategy in the by-election will no doubt be to harness the votes of both coalition parties against Labour, but they should do this the hard way, by squeeze messages, bar charts etc. to minimise the vote for the Conservative candidate. You can be sure that the local Conservatives will want to contest the seat, and one hopes that the leadership won't dissuade them.

Thoughts on the Woolas verdict

2010-11-05T22:13:00.002Z

It is tempting to crow about the Woolas verdict, but a more measured response is called for. No true democrat can welcome elections being determined by the courts rather than the voters.

Politics is a competitive activity and those of us actively engaged in local campaigning have to take the rough and tumble. Not a year goes by without one or more of our opponents in Watford complaining about Lib Dem literature that I have written, while I quietly seeth about theirs before deciding to calm down since it’s not worth making a fuss about. There is almost an unwritten rule that however bitter we may feel when things don’t go our way, it’s best to plan to get even rather than whinge.

Yet there has to be a line somewhere, and perhaps Elwyn Watkins has done everyone a favour by taking this case to court and showing that ultimately you can’t just lie about your opponents and then dismiss it as robust political comment rather than an attack on their character. In this case, one of the key points at issue was Labour’s accusation that Elwyn Watkins failed to condemn death threats against Woolas. To say such a thing is clearly not just a political criticism, but an attack on Watkins’ personal character. Most citizens of this country would rightly condemn anyone who condoned (or even failed to condemn) threats of political violence. The more so if said person sought personal advantage from such threats.

It was a clear and surprising error of judgment by Ed Miliband to appoint Woolas to the shadow cabinet, when he will have known the background to the Oldham East and Saddleworth and could have reached a judgment on the ethics of that campaign even without waiting for the court to pronounce. But, however belatedly, Labour have now suspended Woolas from the party and according to Labour List will not be supporting his appeal. (There are also other thoughtful contributions on Labour List from Mark Ferguson and Emma Burnell, even if the former can’t resist a touch of whataboutery with a dig at Simon Hughes over the the Bermondsey by-election, which took place a mere 27 years ago.)

I don’t believe that this judgment will trigger a series of similar actions – legal action is simply too expensive and the results of re-run elections too uncertain. But if it reminds all of us in every party who are engaged in the political ground war that there are limits and the penalties for crossing them can be severe then perhaps this judgment will do some good.

The full judgment, which is available here, is well worth reading.

What does The Apprentice tell us about modern business?

2010-11-03T23:08:00.002Z

By my standards it's been a time of heavy TV watching. More through inertia than anything else I caught part of this evening's episode of The Apprentice, and wondered if it gives a clue as to what is wrong with British business.

I understand that each week "Lord" Sugar divides his contestants into two teams, each with a leader, to undertake a particular challenge. In the snippet I saw, one of the team leaders was trashing one of her subordinates for supposed mistakes. But surely in a business environment, the person in charge should take responsibility for their decisions and be accountable for the success or failure of their project.

Or perhaps not, if you consider either the history of the banking crisis, or the practice of ineffective senior managers getting massive golden handshakes for after taking disastrous decisions that caused people to lose their jobs. So in making her subordinate take the rap, our Apprentice contestant was perhaps just reflecting modern business mores!

Downton Abbey: an anorak writes...

2010-11-03T22:28:00.003Z

The portrayal of politics in soap operas is a strange thing!

Older readers who also listen to Radio 4 will remember how Mark Hebden, first husband of Shula Lloyd (née Archer) was elected in the 1980s as an SDP councillor without ever having to put out Focus leaflets or attend meetings. Viewers of Coronation Street with political interests might puzzle over how an inner city ward in Greater Manchester seemed to elect a succession of independent councillors Alf then Audrey Roberts, then Curly Watts) when contests in such an area would certainly have been party political.

Similarly, the depiction of a by-election in Downton Abbey (last Sunday's episode) had a couple of faux pas. In the first place the returning officer is heard to read out the number of votes for a socialist candidate. But it is highly unlikely that either Labour or other socialist organisation would have stood a candidate in rural Yorkshire (the supposed constituency is clearly centred on Ripon) before the first world war. Nearby, Bradford West had a Labour MP from 1906 and the more overtly socialist Social Democratic Party (a different one from the 1980s Alliance days) contested Bradford East in the January 1910 election. But those were industrial constituencies and Labour had not by then reached out into rural England.

Later in the episode, the eldest daughter of the house later proclaims that although she is interested in politics, it is hard to get excited about by-elections when there is a hung parliament. However, no one really regarded the political situation in 1914 as a hung parliament. True, the ruling Liberal party, led by H.H. Asquith, lacked an overall majority. But it could pretty much depend on the support of the Irish parliamentary party and Labour, neither of which would be likely to ally themselves with the Conservatives. And if the term 'hung parliament' had been coined by 1914, it was not widely in use. Searching the online archive of The Times for the period, I can't find a single use of the phrase. More than this, a by-election is likely to be more interesting rather than less so if there is a hung parliament with delicate parliamentary arithmetic, so Lady Mary's dismissal of them is rather odd. Or maybe that bit of dialogue was a subtle way of showing the character's political ignorance.

Possibly I am being rather petty-minded in getting exercised by such things. But if so I am in good company. Consider the following lyric by Nigel Blackwell from Half Man Half Biscuit's song Surging out of convalescence, off their Achtung Bono album:

Darts in soap operas
Oh so wrong oh so wrong
No one scoring and there's
Too much chat between each throw

Worse than this though is when
Cheers are raised up for a bull
Granted, bull's a double and an out
But I know that they don't know
Therefore I propose no soap darts

For my part I propose no politics in soaps or serial dramas.

Why Tim Farron is the best choice for party president

2010-10-28T13:27:00.005+01:00

I am supporting Tim Farron in the election for a new president of the Liberal Democrats. This might seem a surprising choice, as I have not always been sympathetic to Tim's views on the party's policy direction and was very critical of his chapter in Reinventing the state. If it was simply a matter of voting for the candidate I am most likely to agree with on policy or general political outlook, I would probably support Susan Kramer.

There are a number of reasons, however, why at this point Tim will make a better president. In the first place, it is important that there is a broad spread of opinion in senior roles in the party. While we are in coalition with the Tories there need to be prominent voices from what for the sake of brevity we must call the left of the party in the upper reaches of the Lib Dems. This is necessary if the party is to emerge from the coalition broadly intact and united.

Secondly, there is the danger that the Lib Dems' identity is blurred in the public mind because of the coalition, and that we stop campaigning. Tim is nothing if not an effective campaigner and will help to keep the party outside parliament focused on fighting and winning elections. Thirdly, even those like myself who support the coalition know that it will be a bumpy ride, with constant attacks from the left and difficult compromises to swallow. If there are to be difficult times ahead for the party, Tim will help to cheer activists up and maintain morale.

Had Susan Kramer retained her parliamentary seat, she would have been a strong candidate for ministerial, even cabinet office. She would no doubt have done an excellent job. But for the reasons stated above, I think Tim is a better choice for party president.

I note from Tim's website that my dear wife is also supporting him, which makes for happy harmony in our household.

Helen Lynch wins Central ward by-election

2010-10-15T09:46:00.002+01:00

Congratulations to my new council colleague Helen Lynch who won a tightly-fought by-election in Watford's Central ward last night (see here for details). This has historically been a Lib Dem versus Labour marginal ward and any by-election caused by the resignation of a Lib Dem councillor is going to be tricky. Nonetheless after a hard and at times bitterly-contested campaign, we came through, however, narrowly, making this five by-election wins on the trot for Watford Lib Dems over eight years (and more wins and years if you include the wards of Three Rivers District that are in the Watford constituency).

The morning after polling day is not perhaps the moment for detailed reflections on the election campaign, the final week of which took place against the backdrop of a national row over tuition fees. However, one point is immediately apparent. All governments suffer periods of unpopularity, those that have to take difficult decisions about public spending more so, and left-of-centre parties taking said difficult public spending decisions more so still. Therefore over the next few years at local government level we will stand or fall on our local reputation.

In this case, we have a positive story to tell at council level, we had an excellent local candidate with a strong track record and a vigorous local campaign, yet it still wasn't easy. For those of us fighting the ground war, in the next few years winning elections is going to be tough. But not perhaps impossible.

A 'Staggers' article praising free schools - wonders will never cease

2010-10-08T13:22:00.003+01:00

The New Statesman has been rather painful reading for Lib Dem coalition supporters over the last few months. So there was at least a crumb of comfort to be had in Rachel Cooke's TV review in last week's issue, in which she offered a qualified defence of free schools. (Although she was less sympathetic to free school promoter Toby Young, protagonist of the programme she was reviewing).

Cooke comments:

I was fascinated by the way the NUT's local representative, Nick Grant, oozed only envy at the thought of Young and others like him. Clearly the idea that some free schools might turn out to be quite good fills him with horror.

I wonder why. It seems odd for someone in education to regard collective failure as preferable to any kind of success at all.

Had I been quicker off the mark in reading the magazine I might have posted this while the programme 'Start your own school' was still available on iPlayer. But I rather fear that Toby Young's advocacy of free schools might actually put waverers off the idea.

Scotland's heroic 2-1 win over Liechtenstein

2010-09-09T08:55:00.002+01:00

I'm giving the Spectator a wide berth at the moment for reasons stated here. But Alex Massie's blog post pretty much sums up my feelings after a painful Tuesday evening spent watching Scotland play football.

Coalitions in British politics

2010-09-07T13:39:00.003+01:00

Channel hopping a week or so ago, I felt as though I had suddenly been transported back to undergraduate days as I heard the familiar tones of Dr Stuart Ball from Leicester University talking about the Churchill wartime coalition government.

It turned out that this was part of a seminar held in Portcullis House, Westminster in June on Coalitions in British Politics, which was being broadcast by BBC Parliament. In addition to Dr Ball on the 1940-45 government it included presentations by Professor Martin Pugh on the Lloyd George Coalition and Professor David Dutton on the 1931-40 National Government.

For readers who are interested there are a few days left to watch the programme again on BBC iPlayer here. The best and most relevant advice for Liberal Democrat seems to be to follow the example of the Labour party in both wartime coalitions by continuing to campaign at constituency level no matter what is happening nationally. But perhaps we know that already.

I will support amendment on free schools

2010-09-03T23:15:00.002+01:00

There has been a lively debate at Liberal Democrat Voice on Niklas Smith's defence of free schools. This is in response to a motion due to be debated at the Lib Dem conference later this month effectively calling on Lib Dems to oppose at local level any attempts to set up free schools.

Niklas is promoting an amendment to the motion, asking delegates to endorse a more positive view of free schools and I am happy to support this. While I have my reservations about the free school idea, particularly that they may undermine local education authorities (LEAs), my view is that the pros outweigh the cons. While some may see free schools as part of a right-wing agenda, I see them as in the Liberal community politics tradition of giving power back to the people. It means that if people really are dissatisfied with the schools in their area they can actually do something themselves to change things. And in fact LEAs now have very little power over the management of schools, which can lead to all power being invested in the headteacher with a compliant governing body providing little effective scrutiny of how public money is being spent. Precisely because free schools will be the product of grassroots community iniative they may be more democratic and accountable than LEA schools.

So the idea needs to be given a chance and in my view it would be short-sighted and wrong for conference to reject free schools out of hand.

Blairism: when Labour were happy to support a centre-right government

2010-09-03T13:39:00.006+01:00

The publicity around Tony Blair's memoirs reminds us of just how alien he was from many of the Labour party's traditions and perhaps helps to explain why the Liberal Democrats have been so united and robust in responding to criticism from Labour supporters over the coalition.

This week's New Statesman editorial praises his early achievements in office and believes he went off the rails towards the end of his first term.

In fact, the key to the New Labour project, starting with the period of opposition before 1997, was moving political discourse several notches to the right, particularly on crime and taxation, in a way that was anything but progressive. Blair discarded socialism in order to position Labour as a centre-right Christian Democratic party rather than a liberal one.

On criminal justice, where Labour and Liberals might have once made common cause in favour of humane policies, Blair and New Labour started trying to outflank the Tories on the right, in the process attacking the Lib Dems for being 'soft on crime', maintaining such attacks through to 2010. Having disavowed any intention of increasing income tax, in a bid to win over Conservative voters, Labour began attacking the Lib Dems for being 'high on taxes', despite our proposed 1% income tax increase being relatively modest. Such triangulation to the right continued through Labour's time in office, Gordon Brown's abolition of the 10% tax band being part of a bid to offer bonbons to those on middle incomes. Likewise, Labour's new positioning on crime was not just a rhetorical flourish to secure victory in 1997, but continued throughout their time in office, with hundreds of new criminal offences created, together with constant attempts to portray opponents who questioned government policy as 'soft on crime'.

I remember thinking back at the start of the New Labour project that all those old socialists and those of a more liberal-left persuasion in the Labour party would never tolerate this kind of thing. But in fact they were more than happy to campaign as a low tax, tough on law and order party and to support their leaders in carrying this agenda into government. Indeed throughout late Labour government's existence, any civil libertarian sentiment that might exist in the Labour party was noticeable if not by its complete absence then by its muted tones.

The point is that all those who supported Labour through the Blair years made their own accommodation with a right-wing agenda (did I mention the Iraq war?), prioritising tribal loyalty over any attempt to form a progressive consensus. This is why I find it hard to have sympathy with Guardianistas, New Statesmanites etc. who see the Lib Dems joining a coalition with the Tories as a betrayal of progressivism. They already made their 'pact with the devil' or acceptance of political reality in supporting Blairism. What the Blair and Brown years meant was that we could no longer regard Labour as a broadly progressive party and the Conservatives as a reactionary one. Instead both parties include both liberal and authoritarian, progressive and reactionary elements. In the circumstances it made sense to work with the one that offered the best chance of providing stable government and implementing some Lib Dem policy.

CODA: Blair's apparent endorsement of the coalition's budget policies prompts me to the following piece of counterfactual speculation. Had he chosen to face down Gordon Brown and his allies in 2006/07, declared his intention to lead the Labour party into a further general election and gone on to win it, Blair might now be leading a New Labour government pursuing exactly the same policies as the coalition is doing. In such circumstances, Labour supporters who now condemn the budget cuts would no doubt have tutted and harrumphed a bit, but still accepted and defended the policies they are now so quick to condemn.

Surely Sion Jenkins is either innocent or he isn't

2010-08-11T13:17:00.002+01:00

The BBC website reports that Sion Jenkins, who was convicted, in 1998 of the murder of his stepdaughter, but later acquitted after two successive retrial juries failed to reach a verdict, has been refused compensation.

I can't profess to any knowledge of the legalities of this, but morally it seems a highly questionable decision. Surely if his conviction has been overturned then he ought to be regarded in the eyes of the law as as innocent of the crime.

Before his arrest he enjoyed a successful professional career (he had just been appointed head teacher of a secondary school) and good standing in the local community. To be arrested, convicted, spend several years in prison for a crime of which he is now deemed not guilty is by any standards personally catastrophic. The state that inflicted such a catastrophe on him surely has some duty to compensate him. Not to do so leaves a sense that his innocence is a mere technicality and he is somehow "guilty really" .

From what I have seen of Jenkins (largely gleaned from watching a documentary about the case) he doesn't come across as a particularly warm or sympathetic character. Perhaps he doesn't really need the compenstion money. Doubtless some people still believe him to be guilty. But that shouldn't matter. Either the state regards him as guilty or it doesn't. And if it doesn't it owes him some reparation for having wrongly convicted and incarcerated him, depriving him of his good name, professional career and family life in the process.

RIP Ben Keith

2010-07-31T11:17:00.004+01:00

Neil Young's steel, guitarist who was part of Young's distinctive 'Harvest' sound, but who also played with Patsy Cline died yesterday. The link is to a performance of Neil Young of the song 'Too Far Gone', which perhaps seems appropriate for the moment. Obituary here.