tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74992488446630980782024-03-09T00:03:30.013+00:00James Sherwood's blogAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-80739266196525730142015-05-06T08:51:00.002+01:002015-05-06T08:51:12.422+01:00Election Night on Guerilla Cricket<div style="border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: Muli, 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 23px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Tomorrow night is election night, and I will be broadcasting on Guerilla Cricket, the internet radio station that normally broadcasts, well, games of cricket. But we are diversifying for one night only from sport into democracy.</div>
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I have a long-standing obsession with election night broadcasts. You may have seen me on ‘Sixty Years of Swing’ with Peter Snow, and if you didn’t, you can still see it here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05tb251/sixty-years-of-swing</div>
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I will be presenting the coverage, with the help of Carrie Quinlan, star of all the best comedy on Radio 4, including the News Quiz. Andy Zaltzman will be joining us on the phone. As will BBC cricket commentator Daniel Norcross, who will be sniffing out tenuous cricket angles in the evening’s proceedings.</div>
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The show will feature Guerilla Cricket’s trademark combination of jingles to illustrate the key events, and a constant Twitter conversation with the listeners. You can tweet us @GuerillaCricket throughout the show.</div>
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Show starts at 10pm, and we’ll probably go on til about 5am, or longer if it looks like something exciting is about to happen. Listen in at <a href="http://www.guerillacricket.com/" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s linear; border: 0px; color: #ff8f85; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.3s linear; vertical-align: baseline;">http://www.guerillacricket.com</a> or download the TuneIn app on your phone, and find ‘Guerilla Cricket’.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-67780276181970924272014-12-05T11:36:00.002+00:002014-12-05T11:36:21.163+00:00What happens next?<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Nothing ever really changes in British politics. It’s always basically the same three groups having the same old arguments. Every now and then, someone declares a revolutionary upheaval in British party politics, and everyone gets up and dances round in a circle. But when the music stops, no one’s removed a chair, so everyone sits back down again. At the end of it, all that’s really happened is that one of the parties has changed its logo.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The biggest party realignment of recent decades was the SDP. In 1981, the right-wing of the Labour party snapped off and formed a new party. Before the general election in 1983, the SDP gained 29 MPs in defections from current MPs - as well as winning a couple of by-elections. All but one of the defections were from Labour - one left-wing Tory joined them too.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As the SDP ultimately merged with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems, there is now little sign that the SDP ever existed, except the invention and addition of the lovely word ‘Dem’. The SDP did not change the landscape, it has just left a few marks for the interested to uncover. The residual effects of the SDP are not seen in political tectonics, but in the occasional piece of palaeontology. The SDP have left behind fossils, not mountains.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But sometimes things really do change. When the Labour Party came along in the early twentieth century, that was a genuine novelty. It wasn’t just a new name for an old thing, a re-brand, or an adjustment. At a similar time - possibly as a pure coincidence - the Liberals faded to become a third party. That was the last time there was a meaningful changing of the guard of political parties.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s possible that things might actually be shifting around again. For the first time in a hundred years, British political parties might actually be on the move.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The main reason that things might change amongst major British political parties is that there’s a vacancy. The Lib Dems have filled in the form applying for the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><a href="http://sherwoodjam.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/how-to-kill-party.html" target="_blank">abolition of their party</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> - or the coalition agreement, as it’s also known. It has taken five years to process their application, but it now seems to be going through on the nod.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the same time, UKIP have decided to become a real grown-up party - though no one’s told them that means they should keep the same policies regardless of who’s talking or which day it is. Once they tie themselves down to something as tedious as a manifesto, and they can’t base their policies on what mood they’re in, they’ll lose some of their fly-by-night appeal. But they will still do well enough to become the third party - in England at least.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The laws of political gravity would suggest that the UK can’t survive long with two right-wing parties, one left, and nothing in the middle but a big gap. Especially in a country that hasn’t actually voted in a Conservative government for more than 22 years, and where </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><a href="http://sherwoodjam.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/something-you-might-not-have-realised.html" target="_blank">right-wing parties have not attracted more than half the vote</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> since the 1950s.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On economic matters, the Labour party are in their furthest-left position for a generation, and the Tories in the furthest right ever devised by non-American humanity. This leaves a very large centre ground. Economics aren’t everything, but they’re not far off. The huge gap in the centre of British economic politics must surely be tempting to any centrist strategist.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anyone who thinks that the NHS shouldn’t be sold off to the highest bidder, but also thinks the government shouldn’t impose a price freeze on energy companies, now finds themselves in a middle ground unserved by any major parties. Admittedly, UKIP oppose NHS sell-offs, but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and even then it depends on who answers the phone.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But that only answers the Why of a new British centre party - you also need a Who, How, and When, or else it never gets off the drawing board. The most likely moment is the post-election pre-coalition deal-making, and the most likely catalyst is UKIP.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is very possible that neither Tories nor Labour will get enough seats to govern alone, and that the Lib Dem return will be so low that teaming up with them wouldn’t give a majority either. It could be that, to make the parliamentary maths work, someone might have to think the unthinkable and talk to Farage. The Labour leadership should be able to resist it, as they won’t want to drown in an avalanche of ripped-up membership cards.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But the Tories may not. They may look at the pure numbers of Tory and UKIP MPs returned, and conclude simplistically that adding those two numbers together gets the desired total. And then the changes start.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The left wing of the Tory party, currently the subject of an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, will reanimate. They will leave the party, loudly, and with righteous indignation. The striking thing will not be the number of defectors, but the quality. Ken Clarke, obviously, but Heseltine and Patten too, and many others who are Tories exactly because they have despised Ukippery since before it was invented.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The exodus won’t be reflected in the House of Commons. Very few current Tory MPs will feel affronted by a UKIP match-up because the parliamentary party does not closely resemble the country, even the portion of the country who might consider voting Conservative. The Tory party could alienate half its voters without alienating more than half a dozen of its MPs.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Clarke, Heseltine, and Patten would surely be branded as ‘yesterday’s men’ by remaining Tories. But people prefer yesterday’s Tories to today’s. This ‘class of 92’ got 14 million votes. The Cameron-Osborne generation couldn’t get 11 million when the alternative was Gordon Brown, who half the country hated more than athlete’s foot.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But if the ex-Tories will amount to any kind of political force, they will need allies. The most obvious candidates would be Blairites who find Miliband’s policy brew too strong. There would also be room for any Lib Dems disaffected with Nick Clegg’s leadership. Which, after the election, will be both of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With the anti-UKIP element in the Tory party gone, Tories and UKIP would be free to merge, and normal three-party politics will resume. The new ConUKIP party will be further to the right, and Labour minus its Blairites further to the left. In the middle, a different kind of centre party. Previously, the middle party has represented some kind of liberalism, claiming that the cause of liberalism over authoritarianism is more important than the battle between left and right.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But this new centre party would fight firmly on the left-right axis, by placing itself exactly in the middle. Instead of a traditional Lib Dem principle of swinging left or right depending on the liberal qualities of each proposal, a new Centrist Party would know exactly where it stood between left and right, and would define itself in those terms. It would embody moderation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And that is potentially a powerful offer to the British people. A centrist party, a moderate party seems to be one very closely suited to the British character. What could be more appealing to British voters than a party whose main message is: ‘Let’s not over-react. I’ll put the kettle on’?</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-74006085437222513482014-11-28T09:34:00.001+00:002014-11-28T09:34:56.611+00:00Truth decay<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Politicians don’t tell the truth.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is hardly an earth-shattering revelation. Though surely we should all be recalibrating our gauges of newsworthiness in the week when ‘David Mellor is obnoxious’ was considered front-page news.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Politicians don’t tell us the truth partly because they only ever speak to the public through a media engagement. If we hear David Cameron it is because a media organisation and the No.10 press team reached an agreement that this would happen. The subject was agreed and the messages rehearsed. It’s not real, it’s not a slice of life, even if the politician is in his kitchen making pancakes for his children. In fact, <i>especially</i> if the politician in a kitchen making children pancakes. It’s probably a studio, and those kids are probably off Outnumbered.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An interview is not a conversation, so the normal rules of polite society do not apply. It is much more like a verbal game, like Articulate. The interviewee draws a card with key messages on it (‘Sensible policies for a safer Britain’, perhaps) and scores a point every time they manage to say it; the interviewer draws a card with a list of gaffes on it (‘I distrust the poor’ or ‘I hate vans’) and scores a point every time they force the interviewee to say one of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The general public listen in and hear two people behaving in a baffling, and pretty beastly way. So they switch over.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is always some truth in what a politician says. They tend to avoid any verifiable inaccuracies, as they can be embarrassing later. It is the truth and nothing but the truth - but never the whole truth. If politicians were forced to swear a court-style oath ahead of interviews, they would have to claim that ‘two out of three ain’t bad’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Politicians don’t answer the question, because they are playing the game. But equally interviewers don’t often ask real questions. They prefer to set traps, because they’re playing the game too. Take the question: ‘What did you do last week?’ What is a true answer to that question? First you have to decode what is meant by it. If you are asked the question socially, it means: “Did you do anything last week interesting enough to warrant inclusion in this conversation?’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the unlikely event that a politician was asked that question in public, it would have a different meaning. During a friendly interview it would mean, ‘Give us a flavour of what it’s like being you.’ If it was asked with venom, it would mean, ‘Name a single thing you did last week to justify your continued existence.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But the politician hears the question as, ‘Which of your well rehearsed key messages is in any way relevant to something that happened last week?’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Interviews where the politician just repeats their message are pretty irritating. But even worse are the ones where they say nothing, then high-five themselves at the end of an interview for not having been caught out. Why did they ever agree to the interview? They seem to think that to avoid saying something stupid on the news you should stonewall an interview. But actually the best way is to decline the interview and stay at home practising the bassoon, or watching <i>New Tricks</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course, if you entirely avoid the question, you end up looking like Michael Howard in May 1997. Howard didn’t realise that if Jeremy Paxman asks you the same question 12 times, people are going to feel that it’s you being evasive, not Jezza being irritating. Howard, in his answers, was trying to suggest that Paxman’s question was in some way not valid. It didn’t work.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This comes across most clearly in the magnificent moment just after Paxman announces that he is going to be “frightfully rude” and ask the question again (a tenth time). Howard, with a staggering lack of self-awareness, says, “You can put the question and I will give you an answer.” Howard really thinks it now looks like Paxman is not asking the right question. Instead, it suddenly seems like the most important question in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The problem with communicating entirely through this media game is there’s not a lot of truth knocking around. And when people hear the truth, they recognise it, and respond positively. And this is a gift-horse to Farage.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">UKIP tell their fair share of political lies. They will bend, ignore, or misrepresent the facts. They will be partial, misleading, and evasive. When they are talking about policies, it’s the same game everyone else is playing - get your message across, and try not to say anything <i>too</i> racist.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But if you ask Farage about elections, votes, and UKIP’s chances of success in individual seats, or nationally, he just seems to tell the truth. There’s no great moral virtue to it. He’s not doing it because he’s a wonderful person, nor necessarily as an evil Machiavellian double bluff. But, whatever is behind it, when you ask Farage to play election pundit, he seems to say exactly what he thinks.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Imagine asking the party leaders about a hopeless constituency. Ask Cameron what the Tory in Kirkcaldy is hoping for, and he’ll say something bland. Ask Ed Miliband about Labour’s chances in Witney, and he’ll say ‘hardworking families’, possibly in a sentence.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But ask Farage how UKIP are going to do in Peckham, he’ll say, ‘We don’t stand a chance.’ Ask him how many seats they will win next year, he says, ‘Could be 30 or 40, if it goes well’. He seems to be giving the same answer as he would behind closed doors. He’s telling the truth. It’s weird.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And it puts him at a very unfair advantage. He gets to tell the truth in public sometimes, where the other leaders are not allowed to. Eventually, politicians get the questions they deserve. No one would ever ask Nigel Farage how he feels when he sees a white van, because he’d probably tell them it was a bloody silly question, and ask them if they were foreign.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If UKIP get some sustained success, then this truth-telling won’t last. Soon, they’ll be calculating and over-thinking every answer like proper politicians, and they’ll have lost their advantage along with their novelty. When Farage tells a UKIP conference, ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government,’ then we’ll know the UKIP threat has finally passed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But until then, their truth-telling example must be followed. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, if a politician has even the most occasional opportunity to tell the truth to the public, they should take it. The public will notice, and give them the benefit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Anything will do. The classified football results. The rivers of Yorkshire. The films of Denholm Elliott. Anything, just as long as it’s true.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-76312009550944115522014-11-21T11:10:00.002+00:002014-11-21T11:10:52.326+00:00The death of the swingometer<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the last election, no one party had a majority. At the next one, we may go one further: no two parties will have a majority.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is very likely that no two plausible partners would have enough seats. The only pairings that could combine to make the 326 seats needed are the impossible Tory ones: with Labour, and with the SNP. A majority coalition government would require at least three parties.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Tories may remain the biggest party, but they will not be able to form a government. Even if the Lib Dems wanted another coalition with them, they won’t have the numbers. The two coalition parties need to lose 34 seats between them to lose their majority. The Lib Dems could easily do that on their own. And if they don’t, Tory losses to UKIP will make up the difference.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is no one else the Tories could do a deal with. The elephant wearing a barbour jacket and insisting on smoking in the room is, of course, UKIP. But because every UKIP gain is likely to be a Tory loss, they won’t give themselves more MPs by allying with UKIP: you don’t make a cake larger by cutting more slices.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And the Tories would be very reluctant to give UKIP the validation of power. Teaming up with the Tories may have been electoral hemlock for the Lib Dems, but it may be viagra for UKIP. And the major parties will be united in making sure they don’t get any.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anyway, a Tory coalition with UKIP would need the Lib Dems too to make the maths work. Surely the Lib Dems would bail out of a coalition if UKIP joined it. The Lib Dems may do anything for power but, even for Nick Clegg, the offer of sharing a cabinet table with Farage would be his Meatloaf moment: ’I won’t do that’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">UKIP will only achieve a moderate breakthrough, and get less than ten seats. This will be terribly unfair, as they will have got about a tenth of the votes. However, they will be unable to complain about it, as the only solution would be proportional representation, which smells foreign.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The ‘swing’ that has traditionally defined British elections may scarcely happen at all. In all elections up to this one, there has been a swing from Conservatives to Labour or vice versa. But there is no sign of it this time. Very few people who voted for one of the major parties last time will now change their mind and vote for the other one.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some Tory seats will go UKIP. And some Labour seats will go SNP, and slightly more Lib Dem seats will go to Labour. And this is all that will happen. It will be like a round of musical chairs where the two favourites are allowed to stay in their seats playing Yahtzee.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Before the last couple of general elections, the period of the campaign has made no net difference to the parties’ standings. The opinion polls fluctuate wildly - in 2010 this was mainly because you never knew if the electorate would wake up thinking Nick Clegg was Churchill or Dr Crippen. But the opinion polls would end up exactly where they started, and the election result would agree. This shows that every single campaign dollar has been wasted, and the parties would have been wiser spending the money on filling a swimming pool with tinned peaches.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This time the feeling of futility is similar, but amplified. This time, it is not three weeks of campaigning that has failed to inspire any voters to change their minds, but five years of government. The Conservatives have not won anyone over as they put their plans into practice. More depressingly, Labour have not landed enough convincing punches on the government, let alone set out an inspiring alternative. Neither party has attracted a significant number of supporters from any source, other than the sinking Lib Dem ship.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In replacing Gordon Brown with Ed Miliband, Labour have simply replaced one kind of electoral liability with another. And David Cameron having power has had very little effect on people’s opinion of him. Before he became prime minister, large parts of his natural supporter base had serious reservations about him. And five years on, they still have.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A very large number of voters are planning on voting for a different party in 2015 from their 2010 choice. But this is a feature of UKIP coming from nowhere, and the Lib Dems travelling in the opposite direction. In terms of the two major parties, very little has changed. Those who vote for the two major parties in 2015 will do so with little enthusiasm, and without changing their minds from 2010.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If the result is a coalition of ‘everyone against the Tories and UKIP’, this may not be the worst thing for Labour. The current coalition has seen Tory plans (very occasionally) diluted by Lib Dem priorities. In a coalition you expect compromise. But if Labour forms a government with nationalists and Greens, then the junior partners will be pressuring Labour into more truly Labour policies. Labour may end up as the most right-wing party in their coalition.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even the Lib Dems are likely to choose a more left-wing leader after the 2015 election, to draw a line under the Tory coalition years. This would also make them comfier partners in a left-wing coalition. Labour could be falling in with a very improving crowd.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So the BBC may have to retire the swingometer, and stick it in a storage cupboard with Posh Paws and Jan Leeming. But there is a more meaningful change in British politics. No major party has ever written a manifesto expecting a coalition. Labour and Tory manifestos have always been a plan for government, and the Lib Dem one has always been piece of fantasy fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But this time, all manifestos will be written more like a menu, with negotiable options. People will know that, whatever happens, they’re not going to get everything the manifesto promises. Of course, that’s always the case - but previously it’s been the fault of incompetence and duplicity. This time it’ll be for the healthier reason that democracy is complicated.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-22174261070554548102014-11-14T11:38:00.000+00:002014-11-14T11:38:51.519+00:00Ed's invisible campaign<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Labour Party knew what it was getting when it chose Ed Miliband. When they went for him over David, they picked someone with policies they liked over someone more likely to win. It’s a choice familiar to game show viewers - they gambled. They could have made winning easier, but with a reduced prize - but they didn’t. They asked Hughie Green for the jackpot question. They took the larger offer, but let the Chaser come one step closer. In ‘Bullseye’ terms, Ed Miliband is the speedboat.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was the act of a party that had its fingers burnt by Tony Blair, a man who couldn’t have lost them an election if he wanted to, but who scarcely ever warmed their hearts. Ed was the opposite of that. He said exactly what they wanted to hear, but he made them fear he might turn Labour into a pamphlet-writing pressure group, rather than a manifesto-writing, country-running party.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And Labour did choose Ed Miliband, by the way. You may have heard, from everyone who has ever said anything about it anywhere, that Ed Miliband was elected by the unions. He wasn’t. Ed’s leadership victory was largely down to <i>trade unionists</i>, which is a very different thing indeed. Unions are large, fairly rich organisations run by more or less democratically chosen leaders. Trade unionists (or trade</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><b>s</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> unionists, if you want to pretend you’re Tony Benn - and who doesn’t?) are people - human beings with bicycles and nail clippers and opinions. From the way that trade unionists were blamed for Ed Miliband’s win, you would think they’re not allowed to vote. That’s not trade unionists you’re thinking of there, that’s the sovereign and/or the insane.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If Ed Miliband had been elected by the unions, that would be sinister. But he wasn’t, so it isn’t. Anyone caught saying Ed Miliband was elected by the unions should be locked in a cupboard with Dennis Skinner until they’ve had a really good think about what they’ve done.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There’s a grand old American political saying: you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. It’s very wise, very true and, for Ed Miliband, entirely unhelpful. Ed should avoid poetry, or any kind of campaigning that could be vaguely compared to it. Getting Ed to lift his eyes to the corner of the room and murmur ‘I have a dream’ will just make the country cringe. Even simple rhetorical techniques fail in Ed’s hands: when he told us stories of people he’s met, we didn’t picture charismatic walkabouts, we just imagined how relieved those people must have been when he left.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Instead, Ed should take an entirely prosaic approach to forming the next government. He should start doing, immediately, whatever his policies require for successful implementation. He can’t just start governing the country, or behave like he is, before he gets the job. But if Ed Miliband enters Downing Street on 8th May next year and starts work, there will unquestionably be things he’ll wish he’d done six months earlier. And those are the things he should be doing now.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It may seem a bit previous, because there’s an election to win yet. Is it presumptuous to plan for government now, when so much remains to be done to ensure the victory? The fact is, if you start doing the right things now, as much as you can, then that is the campaign. You won’t need to convince people that you’re up to the job if they can all see that you’ve started work already.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And when people see him doing these things, they will see ideas, direction, and purpose. In other words, he will have communicated his passion and his vision without ever having to tell us how darn much he cares. He will never persuade the country by talking - Ed needs to <i>do</i>. And then the country will realise that he’s the leader we need in our lives. Imagine the next six months as a romantic comedy, and Ed is the male lead, and the electorate the female. The point when she falls in love with him is not when he blurts out his feelings in a heart-wrenching speech. It’s when the boiler explodes and he turns up at 3am with a large spanner and a pile of blankets.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997 he said, “Today, enough of talking. It is time now to do.” This line smartly deflected the allegation that New Labour was all about saying things, rather than doing things. When he persuaded us that he was all about the doing, he did it by saying. We really should have smelt a rat.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But Ed Miliband could actually do it. His could be a non-campaign campaign. It could be the ‘I’m too busy to campaign’ campaign. Instead of delivering a speech about Labour’s plans to freeze energy prices, let’s have him convening a meeting with energy companies and poverty campaigners - or some other, much smarter tactical move - and not even having a press conference afterwards.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ed needs to be carrying out the policy equivalent of measuring up for curtains. The problem of opposition is often that you have to create the illusion of action. Being a minister is an incredibly busy job - being a shadow minister really isn’t. A minister is helping run a department of government with thousands of employees doing countless things. As a shadow minister, if you spend a couple of weeks in your pyjamas watching Netflix, there’s a serious possibility no one will notice. And being leader of the opposition is the same problem magnified.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The non-campaign campaign also helps an opposition move the narrative from negative to positive. First you must persuade the country that the government’s approach is wrong, then show them that yours is better. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is a good phrase, but it’s a critique of the current lot, rather than an outline of your own plan. When the slogans change to describe Labour’s plans, the criticism of Tory plans will then be implicit, and so be much more powerful.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you stop members of the public on the street now and ask them, ‘What is Ed Miliband doing?’ you wouldn’t get many replies that would warm the hearts of Labour campaign managers. ‘Getting stabbed in the back’ would probably win, ahead of ‘gurning’ and ‘bacon’. The non-campaign campaign should be focused on that question, and how to get better answers. By election day, they should be hearing a whole range of positive answers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then the papers will have something more interesting to write about than a leadership crisis. Leadership crises are the easiest stories to magic out of thin air. If you decide there is one, then there is one. If you mention it a few days running on your front page, then it’s getting serious. Then the actual politicians start to think that it’s real, and start ringing their friends. And before you know where you are, it’s actually happening. And all because some left-wing publications decided, probably rightly, that a Labour leadership story would sell a few extra copies.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To any anti-Ed plotters, there must be two questions. Firstly - those flaws in Ed’s electability - you’re only noticing them now? What kind of honeymoon-goggles were you wearing for the first four years of his leadership that made you think getting into Downing Street would be a straightforward task?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And secondly, how long did you think this parliament was? Why would you wait four and half years before unseating the leader? Bearing in mind it took Labour four and a half months to get from election day 2010 to Ed’s appointment, that would give his successor a cool six weeks in the job before polling day - and that’s if you persuaded him to fall on his sword this weekend. Or, more likely, the candidates would make that calculation themselves, and decide that a cobbled coronation is a better option - which it is, but scarcely.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ed’s not going anywhere. And if he carries on as he is, he is going to lose, or win very badly. A strategy to get Ed Miliband decisively into Downing Street must be very, very bold, but also utterly realistic. If you think that soundbites and photo opportunities aren’t important, for God’s sake stop making speeches about soundbites and photo opportunities. Instead, decide what’s important. Then don’t even tell us about it - just do it. And if the country and the media have to work slightly harder to understand what you’re up to, that’s fine - it’ll be good for us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A totally different campaign would prepare the country for a totally different kind of government. And people will queue round the block to vote for that.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-34043276139291386212014-11-07T10:29:00.001+00:002014-11-07T10:29:20.574+00:00How not to attack the right<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The debate between right and left can sometimes seem quite unequal, when we get onto the subject of each other. The right accuse us on the left of being unrealistic, idealistic dreamers. Then we accuse the right of being evil. It just sounds like we’re not playing nicely.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For some reason, when left-wing people look at right-wing people, they see them as belonging to a continuum that stretches as far right as you can possibly go. Left-wing people feel that the whole of the right side of political thought is a slippery slope, and if you fall to the right of the gravitational centre, then the only thing preventing you from being Hitler is lack of time or ambition.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s ridiculous, obviously. Conservative moderates can be as sound on their ground as anyone. But on the left, we feel that unless you’re as far left as we are, then you lack a foothold, and you will eventually slide inevitably Hitlerwards. As if Ken Clarke really wants to send all the gypsies to concentration camps, he just doesn’t know it yet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For some reason, the feeling is not mutual. Conservatives seem to understand that their Labour opponents don’t secretly dream of a communist utopia. Tories are happy to mock the left for their stated opinions, without imagining secret ones. Cameron has been known to use ‘socialist’ and even ‘left-wing’ as insults during prime minister’s questions, seemingly unaware that to many people these are simply statements of fact (or even sources of pride). It’s like insulting the opposition bench by calling them ‘suit-wearers’ or ‘bipeds’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe the right don’t exaggerate their opponents’ views because they got all that out of their system years ago. If a Tory accuses a lefty of being a secret communist, it all sounds very 1970s. It harks back to a very specific allegation - that the Soviet government is running you as a secret agent. The communist double agent was, they assumed, being rewarded handsomely by the Soviet Union. So the communist was a traitor - a greedy, greedy traitor. If you call someone a communist now, it doesn’t sound like an attack on their political credo; it sounds like you haven’t noticed that the Soviet Union’s gone away.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We had it easy in this country, of course, compared to the United States. There they were obsessed with communists for a very long time. In the absence of Ebola, they needed something to channel their baseless terror into, and communism fitted the bill perfectly. Anyone to the left of an arbitrary political norm was a dangerous ally of an enemy state, regardless of whether their address books actually contained any Sergeys or Alexeis. And you didn’t have to be a politician or public servant to be targeted - in fact, they preferred it if you made films.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These days, the extremes of left and right are used as insults, rather than actual allegations. But they’re used differently on each side: a bad-tempered left-winger may call an opponent a fascist, but a right-winger won’t accuse anyone of communism. And not just because Tories don’t want to seem out of date. On the contrary - some of them love being out of date, it’s their favourite thing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s because we think we know what an extremely right-wing government looks like: it look like Hitler. But for some reason, we don’t think an extremely left-wing government looks like Stalin. If you get more and more right-wing, the logic seems to go, you will eventually be Hitler. But if you get more and more left-wing, you would have to take a wrong turn to become Stalin. Stalin, we feel, is a perversion of left-wing thought. Whereas Hitler is a perfect distillation of the right. Stalin got left-wing wrong; Hitler got right-wing horribly, horribly right. They both murdered millions, but only one of them did it by being true to his ideology.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s not fair, it’s not reasonable, it’s not right - but it sits behind some of the more virulent anti-right rhetoric. When the left implies that a Conservative policy is tantamount to Nazism, for some reason we can come across as a little judgmental - even impolite. It should be guarded against, because the left will never win any arguments by claiming that Tories are basically very, very diluted Hitlers - that the Conservative Party represents a kind of homeopathic Nazism. There are many, many dangers to the right-wing agenda of the Tory party, but that’s not one of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When the left becomes intemperate in its criticism of the right, the right gains a moral superiority it ill deserves. Left-wingers are much more often accused of hypocrisy than the right. Left-wingers send their children to selective schools, they use private health insurance, they under-pay their cleaners, they wear t-shirts. Left-wing views go along with hypocrisy very easily - like fish and chips with guacamole.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The assumption is that left-wing people lack the moral spine to apply their beliefs in practice. There must therefore be something wrong with either the beliefs or the people who hold them. Right-wing people, however, happily embody all the principles they espouse publicly - with the occasional exception of sexual fidelity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Is this because left-wing people are weak, or their ideals are other-worldly? Are the left a more morally wobbly bunch? No - it is because left-wing principles guard against the human frailty of selfishness. So when a left-winger succumbs to selfishness, they clash with their stated political principles, and hypocrisy is the result. Right-wingers don’t think you should be forced to regulate your behaviour in any way, so they couldn’t be hypocritical if they wanted to be.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you lionise individual liberty, then selfishness is built into the system, or even celebrated. When a right-winger says that you should be allowed to do whatever you like, it is hard to see what kind of behaviour might constitute hypocrisy. If a Conservative minister led a crackdown on begging, and then was seen giving change to a homeless person, would that be seen as hypocrisy? Surely not. A right-winger’s personal compassion would not undermine their hard-line political stance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Right-wingers still have the human instincts of compassion and generosity - often to a very considerable degree. But they believe that generosity has no place in a political system - it belongs to the worlds of charity and philanthropy. A system built on universal selfishness makes the whole of society sit up straight and click into place. Selfishness may be no part of their personal character, but it is an essential driver of their political credo.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Yes, we should condemn hypocrites. But we should condemn more strongly those whose policies make so few demands upon the comfortable that no one could ever fall short. Why should we praise anyone for ‘walking the talk’ if their talk mainly comprises shouting obscenities at strangers, and their walking style involves kicking pensioners in the shins?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Living by your principles is only really admirable if you have admirable principles.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-79373146848632247942014-10-31T08:47:00.001+00:002014-10-31T08:47:50.743+00:00Conspiracy? What conspiracy?<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you think there is a conspiracy to prevent your voice being heard, it is important to remember one thing: there might not be.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you really think there is one, you should do all you can to smash it. But first check and double check that the conspiracy definitely exists. There are few surer ways of looking silly than trying to smash something which isn’t there.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some conspiracies do exist, of course, including some very unlikely ones. For many centuries, half of the human race were complicit in ensuring that the other half had very little power, and encouraged them not to worry their pretty little heads about it. Feminism spotted this and objected to it, and the rest of the world has slowly conceded that they’ve got a pretty bullet-proof point. Now only a small minority disagree, normally for reasons of religion or golf.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For a few thousand years there was another conspiracy that legitimised the idea of owning humans. Bad enough in itself, that conspiracy also ensured that people were often divided up into ‘owners’ and ‘owned’ based largely on skin colour. Another conspiracy made sure that men who want to have sex with men feel really awkward, and women who want to have sex with women feel impossible. And there’s probably another massive conspiracy going on right now which we’re entirely unaware of, which will make future generations look back at us and tut - probably something to do with robots.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One conspiracy that is definitely not happening is the liberal conspiracy. There is not a secret group of powerful people forcing the masses to adopt tolerant, compassionate opinions against their will. No such group exists, and even if it did it wouldn’t have the means, motive, or opportunity to carry out their vile plan. Yet some people demand that this is what is happening.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some people get suspicious when they hear liberal opinions. Why are they saying these things? Why don’t they say what they really think? It doesn’t occur to them that liberal people exist. Liberal people </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">are</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> saying what they really think, they just think different things from you. To claim that no one could possibly think anything different from you shows a dreadful lack of imagination.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is what was behind the ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ Tory campaign at the 2005 election. They wanted us to reply, ‘Yes, and we’re relieved you’ve finally said it out loud’. But the electorate’s actual response was, ‘No, and please stop asking such creepy questions.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Healthy debate requires disagreement. But it also requires respect. When someone says, ‘I believe in X,’ it takes a special kind of arrogance to reply, ‘No, you don’t.’</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If a local council, a quango, or a comedian on a panel show (or a blogging comedian who’s never been on a panel show, but is available at surprisingly affordable rates) - if any of these demonstrates sympathy towards the vulnerable, they are not doing it to annoy you. They are doing it because they believe in it. The fact that it annoys you is just a happy by-product.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The real problem with the imagined liberal conspiracy - compared to the real male or white conspiracies - is the question of who benefits. Sexism and racism prevailed because they benefited the powerful, so the powerful made sure they continued. But what advantage do liberal opinion-formers gain from their stance? There is no evidence that their motive is in any way ulterior. Any prominent liberal mouthpiece rubbing their hands in glee and cackling evilly is kidding themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If the liberal consensus really has gone too far, if political correctness really has gone mad, then society’s project to protect the needy is over.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Since early last century we have, as a society, decided that the poor should receive healthcare, education, and a basic financial safety net; that the sick should receive treatment regardless of their wealth; and the old should be given a third option that is neither ‘work’ nor ‘starve’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Opponents of the imagined liberal consensus must feel that this project is finished - that the hungry now have a constant reliable source of food, and the poor have been abolished. In fact, they must think this was managed a while ago, and every effort made since then has been wasteful and counter-productive. Society is now too compassionate, and the biggest problem the needy face is that they get too much help.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That is a caricature of the right-wing position, but it’s the best guess we have about what they think. We never hear their position properly outlined - not because the liberal consensus is so all-powerful that it silences all right-wing voices. The real problem is that right-wingers, when given a platform, use it to complain that they’re never given a platform. They refuse to talk about the real issues, they just speak constantly about how they’re not allowed to speak. It makes you wonder what they have to hide.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-72250330428852269132014-10-24T09:13:00.000+01:002014-10-24T09:13:16.813+01:00Euro vision<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The UK is divided over many issues - about paying the bills, about keeping the lights on and, most ridiculous of all, about the continent we’re on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“Are you in favour of Europe” is a ridiculous question to ask. It’s like asking a Swiss politician if they are in favour of mountains. We live in Europe. It is the continent our country is on. It’s not a matter of political opinion, it’s geographical fact. The narrow strip of water between us and France is not tectonically significant - we are Europeans.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now, of course, in statements about ‘Europe’, people are mostly using the word as a shorthand for the EU. But the laziness of the nickname betrays a sloppiness in the thinking. Many of the evils ascribed to one European body derive from a different one entirely. These unthinking kind of eurosceptics do not distinguish between European unions, commissions, courts, or councils. They will rail interchangeably about Brussels or Strasbourg. When they say Europe, that is exactly what they mean. They mean local foreigners. Foreigners are a worry to these people, and nearby foreigners are just as foreign as distant foreigners, but with the added worry of proximity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Over the last decade or two, the eurosceptic tendency - most often affiliated with the right wing of the Conservative Party - has been a constant presence. They have made a considerable contribution to public life, not least ensuring the frequent unelectable disunity of the Conservative Party - a valuable service to the nation in itself. More surprisingly, there have even been occasions that they have been right.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The euro is the best example. When the euro was a live political issue in the UK, those who advocated British entry were the modernisers, the bold dreamers of the future, the new generation. Needless to say, this bright gleaming bunch were led by Tony Blair, who liked things that were new. At one point, he seemed to like things for no reason other than their newness. We may not know much about Tony Blair’s culinary tastes, but if he were coming round to dinner in the late 90s, you would probably give him new potatoes - it would feel like the safe bet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The euro was a new idea but, it turns out, not a particularly excellent one. The eurozone seems not to have benefited many of its countries in their efforts to manage the financial crisis. When things go bad, it seems that governments benefit from having control of as many financial levers as possible. There is never a good time to lose control of your economy, but this has surely been amongst the worst.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This was always part of the problem of the euro. The problems of Germany and Greece were never likely to be identical, but the euro demands they swallow the same medicine. The chances are that if the prescription matches the needs of one country, it will do no good for the other. And between Germany at one end and Greece at the other, there are sixteen more countries with individual needs. A single economic and monetary policy for all of them will, at any one time, be a compromise that probably serves none of them especially perfectly.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The eurosceptic wing of British politics warned us about the euro. How? Did they talk of the dangers of co-ordinating economic and monetary policy over too widely varied an area? Not exactly. Mostly, they wore suits made of pound signs, and dressed their bulldogs in union jack waistcoats. If that was meant to be a metaphor for the harmonisation of interest rates, it was a pretty damned subtle one.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The one time that the right wing of the Tory party happened to be right about something, they made</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">absolutely sure that they seemed as ridiculous as possible. There’s no use being right if you also make yourselves laughable. If Churchill had spent the 1930s warning about German rearmament while wearing a red nose and oversized shoes, he would have to share some of the blame for being ignored.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The euro was, either in concept or execution, a flawed plan. But not for any of the reasons that its opponents were noisiest about. The fatal weaknesses of European and monetary union were nothing to do with the Queen’s head. National identity was never even remotely at stake. You may have travelled to countries that use the euro: you will have noticed that they are still countries. Crossing the channel, you don’t feel you have entered the part of the eurozone that used to be called France. If you think changing currency will reduce your national character, you surely have a pretty low opinion of your nation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Europe exists, and no amount of pulling faces towards Calais will change that. The EU is an incompetent, partly corrupt organisation that needs massive reform. It is still a good thing that it exists. Before it was created, its countries did not often, if ever, go seventy years without declaring war on each other. Yet the current era, the era of the European project, is on the verge of that record.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And it is still a good thing that the UK is a member. Why would you not want to be a part of the club of where you live? You may not often, or ever, attend your residents’ association meetings, but you’d be pretty annoyed if they didn’t invite you, then in your absence voted to knock your house down. Leaving the EU would be asking to have less of a say.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">UKIP have now inherited the eurosceptic mantle. They feel that something is wrong with the country, they don’t like it, and foreigners must be to blame. Imagine if UKIP had been around in the 1960s. Britain spent that decade begging to be let into the EEC, but France’s General de Gaulle kept saying ‘No’ (or whatever the French for that is). ‘Sixties Farage' would have decried these obstructive continentals, and demanded entry into their cosy private club. How dare these pesky foreigners tell us what to do. If we weren’t in the EU, UKIP would be demanding we be let in.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">David Cameron also thinks that the EU is imperfect, and the best option for Britain is to improve it, and stay in. What eminent good sense. But for some reason, Cameron will only allow himself one attempt at improving it. He is giving European reform one last go, but doesn’t mention this is also his first go. If it doesn’t become what the government wants, we will move towards leaving. Cameron’s motto on European reform is, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, quit immediately.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The UK has done precious little to improve the EU. Before this government, there has been little political will to push for change. During this government, we have seen a prime minister who would rather go home halfway through a summit than influence discussions positively. Neither approach has given EU reform a serious go. Cameron’s attitude is, “Well I’ve tried absolutely nothing - what else is there is to do? I’m at the end of my tether.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">EU reform is a laudable aim. It is an organisation which has repeatedly failed to get its books signed off by its own anti-corruption arm, and frequently behaves with questionable priorities. But reforming it is a lifetime’s work. Any politician genuinely committed to making the EU better would see that the job must be done inch by inch, month by month. It would also be done by engagement, not posturing and flouncing off.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cameron is prepared to do anything to make the EU work for Britain. As long as it happens straightaway and with minimal effort. He has the mentality of an 11-year-old, frustrated that he still can’t play the Flight of the Bumble Bee, even though he’s owned a flute for, like, </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">hours</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Either that or his fides are not entirely bona - he wants failure, but he doesn’t want the failure to reflect on him. Except, that is, from the people who would consider the failure a success, and then he’s eager to take the credit. The EU is a genuinely complex area, with strong feelings on both sides. Cameron wants to be the darling of the eurosceptics, without alienating moderate opinion. In other words, he wants to be popular with two sworn enemies. It’s not going to work.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-58848594421265078602014-10-17T09:41:00.001+01:002014-10-17T09:41:42.263+01:00Talk politician to me<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The relationship between politicians and people, at its best, is an oddly imbalanced one. Politicians should be fascinated with people - but they must remember that people are totally uninterested in them. When it works, it’s not like a healthy marriage, it’s more like cat ownership.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If a political message assumes the public is interested in politicians, it will fail. The general public’s feelings about politicians range from indifference to antipathy. Half of people wouldn’t care if the politicians all jumped in the lake - the other half actively want them to.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Not caring about politicians is quite different from voter apathy. Some people either don’t care about the issues or, more likely, feel that politics has no effect on the issues they do care about. Or they think there is little difference between the available voting options. They feel that voting is a choice between being punched in the face or kicked in the goolies. And that’s why they won’t schlep out to a local primary school on a Thursday next May.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Voter apathy is understandable but sad, and should be fought against. But the public’s indifference towards politicians is not just inevitable, it is healthy and natural. It is the politicians’ job to make themselves relevant to people’s lives, not the other way round. No voter ever heard a politician speak, went away and thought about it for a while, made some calculations on the back of an envelope, and then came back and said, ‘Right, </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">now</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> I’m inspired.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Politicians often make this mistake, but it’s a particularly common error at the moment. And what has caused the party leaders to ignore this golden rule of how to talk to the public? UKIP. A new party with a genuinely gifted communicator at its helm, who always speaks from the point of view of normal people. Admittedly, his definition of ‘normal’ is disgustingly narrow, and his plans for those who fall outside his normality are at best neglectful, if not actually hostile. But he speaks to the people he considers to be his public from an angle they understand. They never have to translate Farage out of Politician and into English.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So this is exactly the worst moment for the main party leaders to forget how to speak. The Tories’ favoured line about UKIP at the moment is, ‘If you go to bed with Nigel Farage, you’ll wake up with Ed Miliband.’ Cameron first said it at the party conference, which is the right place to say it - to a live audience of your own party, and a wider national audience composed entirely of political obsessives. This is the kind of crowd that would laugh at a punchline about the public sector borrowing requirement: nerdiness is allowed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But outside the conference hall, it doesn’t wash. It is undemocratic and patronising. When you vote for a party it might be out of principled conviction, or as a complex tactical hedge, or to win a bet - it is no business of politicians to tell you what your vote means. If you start persuading people that their vote isn’t what they think it is, you are tampering with the democratic process. You’re also likely to get people’s backs up. Voters will quite rightly say, ‘Hey, politicians, you get to run the country the other 1825 days of the electoral cycle. But on election day we’re in charge, so butt out.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Tories are assuming that normal people see politics the same way they do. Their message of ‘vote Farage, get Miliband’ is assuming that UKIP voters have one precise set of opinions about three political parties: they normally like Tories, but UKIP are exciting and new, and Labour are filthy vermin. That’s a lot of assumptions, and if any one of them is wrong, the message breaks down. The claim to understand the minds of so many people in such detail is highly patronising. Many UKIP voters have deserted the major parties exactly because they felt patronised. You’re not going to solve that problem by patronising them a little bit more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Labour have pounced on this tactical error from the Tories by replicating it precisely. The main slogan Labour is using to attack UKIP is ‘More Tory than the Tories’. It’s true of course. If you dislike the political principles of the Tory party, you will object even more strongly to those of UKIP. But what possible campaigning value does that have for Labour? How is comparing the Tories and UKIP going to persuade a single person to vote Labour? It should be a chance for Labour to tell the country what’s good about them - instead it sounds like they’re changing the subject. Every time Labour says, ‘UKIP are more Tory than the Tories’ they may as well be saying, ‘Looks like it might rain’. It's like trying to sell oranges </span>with<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> the slogan, 'Bananas are yellower than apples'.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Looking at the polls, Labour have made a pretty poor job of persuading people that the Tory plan for the British people is bad news. Why do they think there is any value at all in tarring UKIP with the Tory brush? You would think that Labour had vanquished one right-wing foe, and are now gleefully dispatching the next. In fact, having inflicted very few scratches on their first combatant, they are expecting the second to be terrified at their fearsome reputation. No wonder Farage always seems to be giggling a bit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Like the Conservatives’ ‘Wake up with Farage’, Labour’s ‘more Tory than the Tories’ tries to explain political parties by forming an analogy with political parties - as metaphors go, it’s wildly uncreative. It is the sound of politics eating itself. And all the while, the true danger of UKIP goes unskewered.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">UKIP preaches isolation on the EU and intolerance on immigration. It does both in a highly populist way. The mainstream parties are then frightened of their popularity. So the Conservatives offer eurosceptics enough treats to keep them sweet, and Labour attempt to talk tough on immigration. It shows a depressing lack of imagination, and a low opinion of the public.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You don’t oppose UKIP by impersonating them. Then you're giving them little victories, and encouragement. The way to oppose populist intolerance is with populist tolerance. You don’t beat Farage by stealing his song and singing it worse - find a better song and sing it better. He appeals to people’s worst instincts, so appeal to their best instincts. Actually, they will like you better for it. Assume people are tolerant and nice and they’ll take it as a compliment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We can’t complain that the public are intolerant if we never gave them anything inspiringly tolerant to cheer along with. The narrow-minded can say, ‘I agree with Farage’, but currently there’s no credible banner for everyone else. Farage is good at his job, but from the reaction of the main parties you would think he cannot be bettered.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If that is what they really think, they must have a pretty low opinion of the country, and themselves.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-6591128541301974872014-10-10T10:12:00.001+01:002014-10-10T10:12:18.958+01:00Say 'the economy', and the argument's over<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We on the left want make the world fairer, more equal, and happier. Then the right says, ‘Yeah, we’d love to do that too, but I’m afraid it’s not going to work.’ And when we ask why, they say, ’Er, cos of the economy?’ And we run away, terrified by their acuity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is often a perception that the right owns economics. Left-wing plans are idealistic and admirable, but if anyone ever tried them the economy would snap in half. We’d all like to do something for the needy, but if we did, within a week you’d all be carrying your daily wage home in cash in a wheelbarrow.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The right owns economics because the right owns everything, especially the money. The source of most of our economic punditry is large financial corporations. We ask the banks, we ask the City, we ask the markets. And these people predict doom and disaster if a left-wing agenda is proposed. Is this because left-wing policies genuinely cause economic meltdown? Or because so many economists’ employers think a left-wing agenda might make them a tiny bit less filthy rich?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are voices in the economic world that don’t follow this relentlessly pro-business line, but not many. And not because it doesn’t have the arguments - it just doesn’t have the spokesmen. Think tanks, universities, and public sector organisations all employ economists without being owned by a financial behemoth. But they pay a lot less than a bank. So a career economist is unlikely to resist the top wages for their whole career. An economist working in the public sector was probably in the private sector in their previous job, and is probably heading straight back there once they’ve ticked the government box. Banks may not own all the economists all the time, but they own almost all of them most of the time. And any economists the banks don’t currently own either started there or will end up there - banks are their training ground, or at least their pension plan.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are left-wing economists. Some of them have written marvellous books about the harm that the right-wing economic consensus has done the world - including, but not limited to, the financial crisis. But the market in economist employment doesn’t allow many of them to exist. And those that do exist are not accorded a regular platform. The media will talk to them about their new book, but to the media a ‘left-wing economist’ is a newsworthy oddity, like a skateboarding duck. If the media just wants an economist to be an economist, they want a right-wing one that works for a massive bank. For an economic argument you want an economist on the right, and on the left you want an environmentalist, or perhaps an aromatherapist. Anything else would confuse the viewers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In politics, economics used to be thought of as rather a left-wing notion. When Tory prime minister Alec Douglas-Home confessed to understanding little of economics, he wasn’t just being a crusty old booby refusing to get </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">with it</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. He was expressing a political idea of the time that the right held dear: the economy cannot be controlled by politicians, and it’s a damned fool that tries. Harold Wilson’s Labour government later in the 60s introduced a Department of Economic Affairs, because they had this new idea that the economy was something which could be managed by a government. A certain portion of the right will have looked on Wilson’s DEA much as global warming deniers now look upon a ‘Department of Climate Change’: a vast and costly attempt to control something which can’t be controlled and possibly doesn’t even exist.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That’s all a long time ago now. Now economics so firmly belongs to the right in political discourse, any proposal to the left of the status quo is automatically assumed to be financially ruinous. And one big coincidence has really helped cement that idea in people’s minds: when the </span>global<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> financial crisis happened, Labour were in government.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Labour had a very good line about this a year or two ago, which they seem to have stopped using. They said that Lehman Brothers did not go bust because Labour had spent too much on schools and hospitals. Sadly, a really cracking line like that is water in the desert to Labour MPs at the moment, so suddenly everybody said it for about 48 hours. Then they realised they were sounding like over-briefed automata, so they all stopped saying it again.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But it’s right. And they should start saying it again, but perhaps with everyone using their own version of it, substituting the collapsed business and the Labour policy of their choice. (Look forward to ‘Blockbuster didn’t go bust because Labour spent too much money calling Rochdale pensioners a bigot.’)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The global crisis happened ‘during’ the Labour government, not ‘because of’. They are very different things. Labour being in government cannot be blamed for the global financial crisis, any more than Bryan Adams being at number one can be blamed for Boris Yeltsin getting sworn in, Liz McColgan winning World Athletics gold, or Vauxhall launching the third-generation Astra.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The biggest impact on the nation’s finances is the enormous bail-out Labour gave to the banks which no one, and certainly not the Tories, opposed. Nor would they oppose it now. The greatest contribution Labour did make towards the financial crisis was in over-liberalising and under-regulating financial markets. The Tories supported those moves then, and they still believe those things now. The Tory party sometimes criticises Labour for their poor regulation of the markets between 1997 and 2010, but even they never have the cheek to claim that they wouldn’t have done exactly the same themselves - or possibly gone even further.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The narrative states that Labour broke the economy, and since 2010 it’s got mended. It’s a gross simplification which conceals more than it reveals about the economic reality. The Tories have pushed this story, understandably; the media have lapped it up, predictably; and Lib Dems have backed it up, irritatingly. In fact, it’s one of the most irritating things about the Lib Dems at the moment. In a list of the most irritating things about the Lib Dems, it would easily make it into the top 300.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Traditionally, the Lib Dems have represented a kind of casting vote. Tories say X, Labour say Y - which way will the Lib Dems jump? Although they have lost any true claim to that role by siding with the Tories, some of that lives on. So when the Lib Dems join in with the Tory chorus that Labour broke the economy, it sounds a little like an independently verified fact. Whereas, of course, the Lib Dems on this subject could scarcely be less independent.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If, in 2010, Labour’s internal election rules had allowed for a swift replacement of Gordon Brown, we could be looking at a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, and the Lib Dems would never have demonised the last government’s economic record to the ludicrous extent they have. If the coalition talks had lasted a few weeks - much closer to the European norm than the hasty weekend that created this government - and if the Labour party constitution allowed a new leader to be elected that quickly, then the Lib Dems would surely have gone for the Labour option. They only opted for the Tories because there was no non-Brown Labour party as a possible partner.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Instead, the Lib Dems teamed up with the Tories, and claimed the nobility of the ‘national interest’ for their unlikely union. That story required a national crisis and a national enemy for it to stick properly - the economy and the Labour party fitted the bill perfectly.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And in so doing, they have perpetuated the myth that the left don’t do economics. This is perhaps their most harmful contribution to British politics. If you are going to shore up the right, and demonise the left, then you are indistinguishable from the right. You </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">are</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> the right. The danger is that when the Lib Dems are extinct, their dangerous lie might live on.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-33201660127904295462014-10-03T21:55:00.001+01:002014-10-03T21:55:54.773+01:00The wrong traitors<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s perfectly natural that David Cameron is suffering from defections, but why on earth are they coming from the right wing of his party? This government is cutting and selling off everything in sight. This should indulge the fantasies of every economic right-winger. They should all be staring moist-eyed at the television saying, ‘It’s happening, it’s really happening. I never thought I would live to see the day.’ But they’re not. They’re getting on the phone to Farage.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It defies the laws of political gravity that the Tories, while continuing their firmly right-wing agenda, should then suffer defections from its own right wing. Given this government’s political direction, the exodus should really be coming from its moderate left. These kind-hearted patriarchs should be saying to the Tory leadership, ‘Hang on a minute chaps, this is just not on, what?’ But where are they?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When Labour moved leftwards in the early 80s, it was the right wing of the Labour party that defected and formed the SDP. That’s the way it should be - when a party moves one way, those at the opposite end get itchy feet. The political river appears to be running uphill at the moment because this is an unusual time for the parties closest to the Tories. There are normally options to the left of the Tories but not the right. At the moment it is the other way round.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For the first time ever there is something credible - at least, electorally credible - to the right of the Tories. Despite there being almost no room on that side, UKIP have squeezed their clapped-out Bentley into the space. They have managed this by focussing on other subjects - Europe and immigration - and been vague and incoherent about bigger issues. When asked about tax and spending, Farage orders another pint, unveils another ex-Tory MP, and everybody cheers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So why is no one jumping off the Tory ship to the left? Because there is no seaworthy vessel within leaping distance. Who in their right mind would join the Lib Dems at the moment? The sole purpose of the Lib Dems over the past four and a half years has been to make Tory dreams come true. A Tory joining the LibDems would look like a spy sent from head office to keep a closer eye on an under-performing branch.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If a Tory joined the Lib Dems, it would be assumed that they were a pro-European (or just suicidal). It must be tricky being a pro-European Tory, much like being a Jehovah’s Witness haematologist. Eventually something has to give. Any Tory MPs leaving the party now because it is too right wing wouldn’t join the Lib Dems. They’d probably just stay quiet, stick around til the election, then find themselves something more lucrative to do with their time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The only examples of a left-wing Tory defecting to the Lib Dems come from the last days of the John Major government. Major’s government was gaining a sleazy reputation. Desertion had a nice mix of high and low motives - Major had lost moral authority, so could no longer be supported by decent people. Or anyone, really, decent or otherwise. As a career move, it was a handy moment to stop being a Tory.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is strange, then, that there were so few defectors under Thatcher - just the one Tory MP who joined 28 Labour MPs in forming the SDP’s Commons presence in 1981. The Tories were tacking hard to the right every bit as much as Labour to the left in the early 80s. But the parliamentary drama only drew attention to Labour’s abandonment of the centre ground - the Tories’ lurch hardly lost them anyone. They were having too much fun winning elections, drinking champagne, wearing striped shirts, and carrying around enormous mobile phones to notice that part of their party’s identity was being discarded.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Strength of leadership is clearly the issue here. People defect from weak leaders and towards strong ones. Partly they are preserving their careers. But it can be a principled move as well. You can leave your party because you think poor leadership would be bad for the country, as well as your personal electoral ambitions.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe, in the Thatcher years, the one-nation Tories on the party’s left were just being patient, and thought the pendulum would swing back their way once she was gone. The problem is, it took her so long to go, and by the time she went she’d changed everything.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She also created a generation of new Tories - and that’s what stands behind the bizarre rightwards exits from an already right-steering party we are seeing now. Tories elected to the House of Commons over the last couple of general elections came of age under Thatcher. Anyone aged 42-57 turned 18 during Thatcher’s party leadership. This was a period where right-wing views were strong, brave, and proud, and the left-wing was weak, wet, and disloyal. Ever further right-wing opinions were lionised, like an escalating drinking game.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And that is where this generation of right-wing Tory candidates comes from. They have never encountered a right-wing opinion they didn’t admire. They know how to play a Tory selection committee, and say the right things about Europe, to get the job. But what they really crave in politics is Thatcherism to the nth degree.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So when a strong, charismatic leader comes along and trumps even David Cameron in terms of right-wing purity, no wonder they are tempted. When asked her greatest achievement, Thatcher said ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’. To that list she can now certainly add Cameron’s current Tories, and UKIP.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Why is a right-veering Tory party losing people to the right? Because of the kind of people we’re dealing with. Tory MPs last year proposed what they called an “Alternative Queen’s Speech”. Their suggestions included bringing back national service and the death penalty, privatising the BBC, and renaming the August bank holiday ‘Margaret Thatcher Day’. That’s what we’re dealing with here. That’s why the parliamentary Tory party is behaving in such an eccentric way. It is nuts.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The bank holiday policy seems unnecessary, though. Surely to people like this, every day is Margaret Thatcher Day.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-30243410935407845332014-09-26T11:00:00.000+01:002014-09-26T11:00:25.240+01:00All together now<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Ed Miliband is never the most exciting speaker in the world. There are worse leaders’ speeches in recent conference history. John Major had very little authority as prime minister, so we can only imagine how underwhelming his speech as prime minister-in-waiting would have been, as he was never opposition leader. And the NHS is still surgically unclenching the buttocks of many people who sat through Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘The quiet man is turning up the volume’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But it’s hardly great news for Miliband that he’s not the worst ever. It’s not the kind of description to build an election platform on: “Vote for Ed: I bet you can think of someone even worse.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of all the things to criticise him for, he seemed to get the most grief for omitting the word ‘deficit’. As if the speech would have been much more exciting if he had. It is hard to see how anything could be made more exciting by the addition of the word ‘deficit’. Try it with film titles - the result is always duller, with the possible exception of ‘Deficit in Venice’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But he did use the word ‘together’. A lot. It’s quite an all-rounder as a word, ‘together’. It can be used in any part of a sentence. You can start a sentence with it, you can end a sentence with it. You can, according to the transcript of the script that I found online, have a sentence comprising the word ‘together’ and nothing else. Now there’s rhetorical confidence.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Miliband must have felt he had created such a world of meaning around this word, he could simply say it and walk away, knowing that the audience were piecing together the whole edifice of political thought that the word embodies. A bit like when Paul McCartney makes a peace sign, and the world understands, and loves, peace a little more than if he’d kept his hand in his pocket. No one can look at Paul McCartney’s index and middle fingers and remain a fan of war. Similarly, no one can hear Ed Miliband say ‘together’ without embracing collectivism.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because presumably that’s what ‘together’ means. It means that the government should be run in a way that values the collective bounds of society, and therefore presumably values individual freedom slightly less. It’s a weak and vague statement, but it confers a slight leftwards lean.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You could say the same thing about “Yes we can”. Left-wing principles spring from the idea of people being together, while the right wing are more inspired by the sanctity of the individual. The left wing think that the government can, and should, do more. The implication of ‘Yes we can’, was ‘And we damn well will’. It outlined the beginning of a political principle without getting bogged down in what it is we can do, or even exactly who ‘we’ are. Or, if you preferred, it meant no more than a few more verses of ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Obama meant the state when he said ‘We’, and Miliband meant the same thing by ‘together’. Tories think we should all be together as well, but they think that the state is not the best means of establishing togetherness - they prefer the family, capitalism, and the Rotary Club. It is understood that Miliband is referring to the government because that’s his job - or at least he wants it to be.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The biggest problem was with the grammar of how the word was used. In one section, Miliband illustrated various things that the ‘principle of together’ stands for. Stretching the metaphor to breaking point, he listed various things that ‘together says’. Together, it seems, has now acquired the power of speech. With so many things that ‘together says’, it starts to sound like a verbose opinionated friend, or possibly a rulebook.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It wasn’t at all clear how this brand new sense of the word together, freshly minted for the speech, was meant to work logically. It is the worst kind of jargon. When very obscure technical terms are used, the users are often criticised for their jargon. Jargon-users - mortgage providers, IT helpdesks, hi-fi salesmen - are guilty of failing to connect with ordinary people, or possibly even trying to hide the truth from them. This second offence is the more serious.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When the jargon word is a new invention, the speaker’s intention is clear. If a businessman starts talking about ‘innoventation’, we’re all meant to look mildly confused and ask for a definition. It’s dreadful jargon, but it’s not pretending to be anything else. Much worse is when jargonisers take a word that you thought you knew, and start using it in a brand new way. This is an underhand ploy to gain your agreement by making you feel you've understood - but you haven’t understood, possibly because there was no meaning there to start with.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Turning ‘together’ into something that ‘says’ things belongs to this nastier, more invidious form of jargon. By using simple words that people know, it disallows the response of: “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. At least ‘neo-endogenous growth theory’ was just begging for someone to say, ‘What the hell’s that?’ When ‘together’ starts ‘saying’ things, there’s the whiff of the kaftan, and people earnestly saying, ‘Oh my God, I know exactly what you mean.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Together does sound better than it reads. Listening to Miliband’s speech, it just felt like he’d said it a lot. Reading the speech, the word ‘together’ starts to swim before your eyes, and do that thing where it looks like you’ve spelt it wrong. Maybe that was why he performed without notes - afraid that when he read the word ‘together’ for the 51st time, he’d start to doubt whether the word actually existed, or perhaps he’d made it up.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Speaking without notes is not difficult. Speaking </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">well</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> without notes is difficult. And Miliband’s performance needed to attract rather wider admiration than it did to justify the method. The most vocal fans of the speech seemed to be people he has the power to sack, and members of his immediate family (not including his brother). Neutrals were not convinced.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Parading his scriptlessness seemed a particularly inept wheeze. It reminded me of the Fry and Laurie sketch where Stephen Fry plays the harmonica very badly for a few seconds, then says to the camera, ‘And the interesting thing is, I’ve never had a lesson in my life.’ Doing a speech without notes is only impressive when the audience is surprised at the news. No one watching Miliband’s speech, and being told afterwards that he was winging it, would have said, ‘No way! That’s a miracle.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s a shame that the presentational clunkiness was such a distraction from the content. The content wasn’t mind-blowing, but it picked the right simple targets - highlighting a coalition policy, and promising to do the opposite. The harmful, divisive, and nasty policies of this government do mean that the Labour manifesto must half-write itself. There are so many coalition policies that simply need to be repealed - and each promise of a change is another tick in another electoral column. Much as John Major in 1990 probably didn’t spend a huge amount of time wondering whether he should keep the Poll Tax, Labour should notice that a large part of their policy agenda is a series of open goals.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Miliband’s speech has been criticised as a ‘core vote strategy’. But in that case, who is Labour’s core vote? People who go to the doctor, people who will in the future get old, and people who have bills to pay. If that is Labour’s target demographic, then that’s a pretty savvy election strategy. The newspapers may have you believe that these policies appeal to a left-wing rump of the country. But then newspapers are exclusively owned by people who own houses worth more than two million pounds.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The brilliant thing about Miliband is that he’s actually talking to the vast majority of the country. The unfortunate thing is that he’s not doing it particularly well.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-28846362458261859142014-09-19T15:26:00.002+01:002014-09-19T15:26:31.314+01:00Don't just stand there, say something<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">David Cameron passionately backed a No vote, but knew that any speech from him would be counter-productive. So what did he do? He went to Scotland and gave a big speech making exactly this point. He went on television, and begged the Scots not to make him a factor in their decision. He stood underneath a bank of stage lighting and said, ‘Pay no heed to me’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When he said, ‘Don’t vote Yes just because you hate me,’ what kind of self-respecting Tory-hater would have been swayed? His fear was that they might have forgotten to ignore him if he hadn’t reminded them to.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I blame whichever idiot was the first person to say ‘no comment’. Until then, if a newsworthy person didn’t say anything, the press would report that the interesting party ‘made no comment’. But since people idiotically started saying the words ‘no comment’ out loud (which is a comment, of course), silence is no longer considered an option.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you want to say nothing, say nothing. If you say stand behind a lectern, clear your throat and say, ‘I have nothing to say at this point,’ you have wasted everyone’s time. And it’ll be your fault if reporters chase you down the road saying at three-second intervals, ‘How about at </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">this</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> point? And what about now?’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There’s a dreadful self-importance about saying ‘no comment’, as if the world couldn’t possibly cope with your actual silence, as if the uncertainty would kill them. Instead you must reassure them that, although you have nothing to say, you’re still there with them. This is how to deal with an upset child, not the public.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">David Cameron clearly understands that the Scots hate him with a righteous passion, as he showed when he called his party ‘the fucking T****s’. So who on earth did he think he was speaking to? Surely in Scotland you can’t be sympathetic to the Tories unless you actually are one. At the 2010 general election, the Tories were down to 16.7 per cent in Scotland. This is the so-called ‘hard vote’, the rump of people who will always vote for a given party - the opposite of a swing voter. These are the only people in Scotland who would give David Cameron a positive hearing - and what is the chance that they did not already agree with him? Cameron’s only possible audience is Scottish Tories who were planning on voting Yes - and the few hundred die-hard eccentrics who answer that description probably don’t own a television.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In his early days as prime minister, Cameron was notable for letting national events go past - a plot development in a soap opera, or perhaps an interesting result in a sports fixture - without giving it a prime ministerial response. He still manages it now, but back in 2010 it was a real novelty.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It all started with Blair, as so much of modern political communication does. Blair’s presidential style meant that he saw himself less as the democratically elected head of the UK government, and more as the lead character in the national soap opera. When the Dagmar burnt down, Dot Cotton would have had something to say about it, even though it wasn’t her storyline. Similarly, it felt totally normal for Tony Blair to talk about anything in the national conversation. He was just a regular kind of guy, as he never tired of telling us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then Gordon Brown took over and, naturally, continued to govern in the same style as Blair, on account of their extraordinarily similar personalities. Brown communicated with the country according to the habits of the Blair years, because everyone had forgotten that there was any other way of doing it. Brown led the tributes to Jade Goody, he publicly congratulated racing drivers on winning driving races, and he told off radio presenters for sleeping with the granddaughter of a Fawlty Towers actor. It was all the kind of thing Blair could have done with ease, but Brown looked uncomfortable.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To be fair, Brown looked pretty uncomfortable doing anything apart from reading out the Budget on Budget Day - and he never looked blissfully happy even doing that. But when Cameron arrived, he managed to let several major events pass without the country knowing what Downing Street thought. In the second half of 2010, Tomasz Shafernaker accidentally gave the finger to BBC Weather-viewers, Nigel Havers walked out of I’m a Celebrity, and Emma Watson had a haircut - and the country never heard the First Lord of the Treasury’s take on it all. The nation, you will recall, felt rudderless.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But, although Cameron brought a welcome prime ministerial silence to the world of celebrity trivia, he has yet to learn how valuable the same tactic can be in politics. Of course, he would have been criticised if he had kept 400 miles from the independence campaign, but there were lines he could have used to shut that criticism down.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He could have played the high-minded democrat: ‘I don’t have a vote, so I shan’t be in the campaign.’ The No campaign had its leaders and its spokespeople, and David Cameron wasn’t one of them. His respect for the No campaign could have been his public answer for staying away - his desire not to boost the Yes campaign could have been a jokey subtext for Westminster-watchers to enjoy. Basically, Cameron could easily have spent the last month impersonating the Queen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Or he could have played the ‘far too busy’ card, and just hoped that something time-consuming happened in England or Wales - or, even better, on the world stage. It might have been a risky strategy, and if things went a bit quiet you might have to ring up Morocco and persuade them to invade Gibraltar. But, thanks to Isis and Putin, that wouldn’t have been necessary. There has been easily enough on the prime ministerial plate to keep him locked in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, emerging only to narrow his eyes to the cameras and say ‘Cobra’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He was so close. In the weeks and months running up to the referendum Cameron, along with the rest of England, did an excellent job of entirely ignoring the independence debate. With extraordinary self-control, we non-Scots followed our leader’s example and gave not a moment’s thought to anything that happened up there in the weeks and months - probably the years and decades - running up to yesterday. It may have looked like neglect, but it was in fact the profoundest respect.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He kept quiet before the speech, and he certainly kept it buttoned until polling day - you can only imagine what the No campaign must have threatened him with to buy his silence. Something rather more Gordon Brown-ish than Alistair Darling-ish, in political bruising terms.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You can point to Cameron’s speech in Aberdeen on Monday of polling week as one of the moments the Yes campaign started to look like a contender. This makes Cameron the chief villain for every kind of British unionist. Many already blame him for letting Salmond get his way in important aspects of the referendum, not least in allowing the wording on the ballot to give the pro-independence answer the feelgood advantage of being a Yes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cameron’s tactical mistakes and toxic unpopularity have brought him uncomfortably close to defeat. There are many things a politician doesn’t want to be: a loser, a tactical dunce and electoral poison are all pretty high up the list. And to avoid it hew only had to say the simplest thing: nothing.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-23425120359251367712014-09-12T14:21:00.001+01:002014-09-12T14:35:47.692+01:00Scotland: I think I've worked out the problem<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every statement about the Scottish independence debate is missing the point. Including this one.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Normally, in a political debate, you agree or disagree with a politician, then you back the one you agree with. Unless you really distrust them - then you still won’t back them even if you agree with them. You wouldn’t support someone who answers the question, ‘Should we have nuclear weapons?’ with the answer ‘Kittens are furry,’ however much you go along with their kitten stance. It’s just possible they have something to hide.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Scottish independence debate hasn’t been like that. Neither side’s statements have been easy to agree or disagree with. But, unusually, neither have they sounded like cynical evasions, calculated to conceal the truth of their devilish plans. It just sounds like they don’t know how to talk to us about this kind of stuff, or possibly we just don’t know how to hear it. The most natural response to every single point made in the independence debate is, ‘No, that’s not it’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The first mistake was to view the debate as Salmond vs Darling. Voting Yes is likely to get you a bit more Salmond, but there’s no guarantee a No result will get rid of him. And whatever you vote for you won’t get Darling, you poor lovelorn fools. But we understand personality politics, so those instincts kick in. There will still be people voting No because Alex Salmond reminds them of their school bully, or Yes because they swear Alistair Darling once pushed ahead of them in a Wimpy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In an election, your preference of one person over another is a valid element of your decision. If one of the candidates looks a bit shifty, maybe they are - well done you for noticing and voting for the other guy. But this isn’t an election, it just feels like one because it happens on a Thursday, and all the usual Dimblebys are excited.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Our next instinct is to say that politics should be about policies, not personalities - because that’s something people say. So, when Salmond/Darling started to get a bit personal, that corrective instinct kicked in, and the argument shifted to things like the NHS. The Yes campaign focused on the evils that a Tory government has visited on a non-Tory Scotland.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But the referendum question is not about policies either. Hating the privatisation of the NHS - or any Tory policy - is no reason to vote for Scottish independence. ‘Scotland’ and ‘Tory’ are not opposites. Scotland has voted Tory before and - however unlikely it may seem from where we are currently sitting - it may do again. The Conservatives got half of the Scottish votes and seats in 1955. Even Margaret Thatcher got nearly a third of Scottish votes in 1979. Stranger things have happened than the resurrection of the Scottish Conservative Party. And if that happens after independence, Scots who voted Yes because they hate the bedroom tax might feel a bit silly.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Voting for constitutional change because you think it will benefit your party can come back to bite you. Ask the Labour ministers who backed Scottish devolution in 1997 because they assumed the resulting Scottish Parliament would be a permanent Labour stronghold.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The No campaign has also talked about policies. Issues like currency, where the banks’ chairmen have their offices, and the prices in John Lewis are all of vital importance. But they are so much smaller than the question of whether the country should be independent or not. If they vote Yes, the Scots will use the pound, somehow; or much less likely, the euro; or even less likely, some brand new Scottish invention. And it will play out over the first few years of the independent nation’s existence,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and then it will die down. None of these issues are central to whether that country should exist or not. All the policy-based arguments will be relevant for five years, maximum. They are details that concern the launch of the nation, not its on-going seaworthiness.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So it’s not about personalities or policies - it’s about democracy. Alex Salmond (who I’m sure, like Mr Ferguson, used to be called Alec) has said to Scotland that, under independence, “We will get the government that we vote for.” It’s not true, of course. “We” don’t vote at all: I vote, you vote, and so do lots of other people - though not prisoners, the insane, or Russell Brand (Representation of the People Act 1918). The collective will of the people is then imperfectly aggregated into a series of regional decisions, and then even more imperfectly into a national decision. Democracy is messy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Non-Tory Scotland may have got a Tory government, but so did non-Tory Peckham. The fourteen Tory voters in Peckham didn’t get the MP they wanted, but they did get the government they wanted, though their votes contributed nothing towards the victory. Did democracy give them what they asked for? Not really, but then democracy doesn't give everyone what they want. If you could give everyone what they want then we wouldn’t need democracy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Democracy is such a universally agreed </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">good thing</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> that’s it’s easy to forget what a complicated nuisance it is. Everyone agrees that the people should be ruled by the people. We don’t like it when the people are ruled over by one person (monarchy), a few people (oligarchy), the best people (aristocracy), God (theocracy), or clever robots (technocracy).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">By deciding on democracy as a system of government, you’ve effectively agreed to make life enormously complicated for yourselves. Unless you live in Athens about four or five hundred years before Jesus got away in his manger, democracy needs a lot of mechanisms, concessions and fudges to work.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Having the vote in Athens didn’t just mean they got to vote in elections. It meant they voted on the second reading of the Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Bill, the lucky blighters. Everyone - apart from slaves and women, obviously - got to vote on everything, by a show of hands, in a very large hall. Now </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">that’s</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> democracy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These days, people queueing up for elections is the definitive sign that democracy has arrived in a country. To Athenians, nothing could be less democratic than having an election. “Choosing someone to make decisions for us? No thanks, I prefer democracy,” they would have said, almost certainly in Greek.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Democracy has got a whole lot less Athenian since then. Due to the increasing populations of cities - or possibly our decreasing ability to build enormous halls - this method has fallen out of favour. Now we use democracy only to decide who the deciders are. Then the deciders choose one person who gets to decide almost everything, despite the fact that only half the inhabitants of one town in the country directly voted for him (or, in one disastrous case, ‘her’).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Democracy often sounds like a thing of purity and perfection. But it is a messy, muddled mish-mash. Someone has to draw the lines of the constituencies. You have to decide how often an election will happen. You have to decide what falls to local government and what to national government. You have to decide what colour the voting paper will be, and whether you write an X or some numbers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And you have to decide when you stop counting - when you say, ‘Right, that’s everyone.’ And that’s a country.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Everyone wants to get their way - that’s only natural. Democracy serves that desire, and mediates around the fact that it is impossible. Saying, ‘We will get the government that we vote for,’ is a gross simplification, but it’s probably the one statement in the independence debate that has come closest to expressing what the referendum question actually means.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The question is really something more like this: “Often you will not get what you vote for, because lots of people disagree with you. Are you content for this to happen because some of those people live in Surrey?”</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-82093116570930038342014-08-01T11:50:00.000+01:002014-08-01T11:50:44.003+01:00Eyes right<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Being right-wing is a rational, principled position. It is based on an intelligent analysis of the facts, and motivated by a desire to bring happiness and prosperity to as many people as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You may have heard this before. You may have repeated it under your breath as a calming mantra during political arguments with particularly objectionable right-wingers. It is a useful counter-balance to the other voice in your head, which is screaming, ‘They want to eat the poor!’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Political principles deserve some respect - partly because it’s a waste of time to do anything else. They are similar to religious opinions. It is possible, up to a point, to argue with someone whose religious opinions differ from yours. But once you realise that your disagreement is so fundamental, it’s probably sensible to concede that you might not win them round. </span>If you disagree about how the universe comes to exist, what's the chance that you'll agree about council tax bands?</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Equally, when someone with different political principles disagrees with you, the first instinct is to bark back, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ But it’s surely a truer statement - and better for your blood pressure - to say, ‘Yes, I’m sure you do disagree. I thought you would. More than that, I’m glad you do.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And that needn't be said snidely. It doesn’t have to mean, ‘I always know I’m right when </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">you</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> disagree with me,’ as if your conversant is a litmus test of stupidity. It’s simply that when someone with different principles disagrees with your opinions, that would seem to suggest that all is well with the world.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This kind of fundamental respect shouldn’t blunt political argument. In fact, it should provide the necessary parameters that allow both sides to go all out. Mutual respect of political principles are the boxing gloves that allow you to punch your political opponents as hard as you can, repeatedly, in the face. So let’s do that for a bit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is nothing wrong with being right-wing. Being a right-wing politician, however, is absurd.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Right-wing people want the state to be as small as possible. They think that the government should interfere with people’s lives as little as possible. The less government, they reckon, the better.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Politicians want to run the government. Their personal ambition drives them towards acquiring as much power as possible, exercising as much control over the country as they can.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is why being a right-wing politician sends your brain in two different directions at once. Your principles want the government to butt out, but personally you want to muck in. Being a right-wing politician must put you in a state of constant mental breakdown - you have to feel for them, really.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Right-wing people value the individual above the collective. So what on earth are they doing involving themselves in a government? Government is all about the collective - it is the greatest expression of the collective, and its greatest triumph.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is no better example of this brain-splitting problem than the current Tory party’s attitude to the NHS. ‘No top-down reorganisation’ they said, from the comfort of a general election campaign. When you are writing a manifesto, you can let your ideas run free, unfettered by your personal ambition.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But when they got into government, they realised they had the power to tinker with things to make them more to their liking. And the desire to tinker entirely overcame everything else.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">All parties have written manifestos in haste and repented at leisure. Lib Dems must wish they’d never mentioned tuition fees. New Labour got much more than they bargained for from Scottish devolution. And the whole House of Commons must have wondered what they were thinking when they voted through the Freedom of Information Act that led inevitably to the expenses scandal.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But in Tory cases the problem is more fundamental. There’s something not entirely Tory about having policies at all. Policies involve changing things, and that means more work for civil servants - which always strikes the Tory heart as wasteful.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every politician says that they want to make a difference. It has become one of politics most irritating catchphrases: “I didn’t come into politics to (do something dreadful that my opponents like), I came into politics to make a difference.” If you want to tell us why you came into politics, put in your memoirs when you retire, then we an all ignore it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But Tory politicians shouldn’t be allowed to say, “I came into politics to make a difference,” unless they add, “But I also think that no politician should have enough power to make a difference, so now I need a lie-down.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A right-wing politician should be an oxymoron. It should be like an atheist vicar, or a vet who’s terrified of cats. A “right-wing politician” shouldn’t be a description of the twenty most powerful people in the country. It should be the premise of a sitcom. ‘What if a right-wing person wanted to</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">be a politician? That would be funny, right?’ ‘Yeah, but it’s not very realistic - everyone knows it would never happen.’ ‘Hey, calm down, it’s only a sitcom.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So right-wing people should stay away from politics - for their own good. Especially when there are so many other jobs that would suit them so much better. Businessperson is the obvious one, but there are other options. Lighthouse keeper. Frontiersman. Chess grandmaster. Those people who build ships in bottles. Beekeeper.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s not that the country would benefit from fewer right-wing people in positions of power. That would be simply a pleasant by-product. The main concern is that these people should not have to endure one moment more of the mental upheaval that being a right-wing politician inevitably entails. History will judge us harshly if we allow their suffering to continue. It is time to remove all right-wing people from politics, as a kind of humanitarian airlift.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And if just one more ship ends up inside a bottle, it will have been worth it.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-46065218887760862052014-07-24T14:19:00.000+01:002014-07-24T14:19:18.210+01:00Good. Too good.<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The problem with some political ideas is that they’re too good.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Take grammar schools. Grammar schools are clearly excellent. Everyone who went to one will tell you how great they are. It was the greatest contribution to social mobility, half a century before that phrase existed. It’s like a public school, but without the bills and the guilt.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They were small, local bundles of excellence, and everyone had a chance of getting in. People who went to them have risen to prominence in the land, based on nothing but their own excellence. And it provided a pleasant working environment for teachers, so the state sector didn’t lose all of its more delicate flowers to the independents.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">How were grammar schools so wonderful? Because they selected which kids they wanted. This meant that some kids weren’t wanted, and they had to be taught somewhere else. And those schools, the ‘somewhere else’ which used to be called secondary moderns, are the reason why the grammar school system is a bad one.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The conversation goes like this. The left says, ‘The grammar school system was bad.’ The right says, ‘But grammar schools are wonderful.’ The left replies, ‘Yes, I know, that’s exactly the problem.’ And the right says, ‘You bloody lefties - you hate success.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The way it turned out, the grammar schools system was horrible, and created social divisions. Society was now divided up based on how clever you were at age 11. And considering the stupidity of all 11-year-olds, that’s a pretty crazy measure.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are worse ways of choosing how to divide up society - the size of your father’s house, or how many of your family’s generations can you count back, for example. So it was an improvement. And the proportion of people getting into the better bracket was larger than it had been before. But it was still a system based on dividing people up into the right kind and the wrong kind. And without any plan for what the wrong ’uns are then meant to do with their lives.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And, of course, vestiges of the old system remained. Wealthy families would give their children every support they could to pass the 11-plus. And if they failed, they would be shipped out to a public school that specialised in less academic pursuits such as rugby, dressing as a soldier, and geography. And however supportive poorer families want to be towards their 11-year-old scholars, there’s a limit to how much academic preparation they can do in a household short on spare rooms and tables.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It was a cruel system as it turned out, but it was never meant to be like that. The system was meant to be based on three types of school, not two. The idea was that if you wanted an academic schooling, you would go for a grammar school. If you wanted a practical schooling, you went to a technical school. And if you wanted a bit of both, you went to a secondary modern. Think of a grammar as a Lion bar, a technical as a Snickers, and a secondary modern as a Picnic.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They were all meant to be excellent schools. Two different kinds of specialists, and one generalist. But two things happened. First, everyone wanted to go the grammar schools. British parents want their children to go to university, get an arts degree, then settle into an uninspiring job in publishing. They do not want them to become plumbers, and retire a millionaire at 32. God knows why.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The other thing that happened, or more accurately </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">didn’t</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> happen, is that the government didn’t build enough technical schools. So, in practice, very few parents had the full choice. Grammar schools became where you wanted to go, secondary moderns were for the failures, and technical schools were little quirks of local history, like a oddly-coloured windmill or a church with a crooked spire. Confused tour guides would routinely point at technical schools and say, ‘I think it’s some kind of water tower.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Grammar schools are a fairly small issue these days. Not many areas still have them, and there are bigger problems to deal with in education. The comprehensive school system that replaced it didn’t repeat the mistakes of the grammar school system - it made a whole load of brand-new ones.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So why bang on about grammar schools? Aren’t there enough real problems in politics without raking over generations-old disagreements?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The grammar school system is a very useful archetype. It is a clear example of when the well-meaning right do something which is partially wonderful, but detrimental overall. They then always use the same debating tactic: distraction. When an unfair system is attacked, the right can say, ‘But look at this beautiful, big, shiny, wonderful thing that everyone likes. Hey everyone, you know that brilliant thing you like? The left want to take it away. Boo.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, the right aren’t very fond of government at the best of times. They instinctively dislike the idea of a big central system controlling everything. Sometimes this means that they don’t have a big central system. But more often, they do have a big central system, but pretend it isn’t there. Then when the left object to the system, the right say, ‘What system? There’s no system here. This is just me and my friends relaxing and having fun - hey, don’t kill the buzz, man.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The right knows that the electorate at large aren’t terribly interested in political theories, and if you object to a policy on national rather than local grounds, that sounds a lot like a theory. They encourage the thought, ‘Well, I don’t know much about your big fancy ideas, all I know is that the trains run on time.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The right likes to pretend that their policies are better, because they can tell stories of individual people who benefit. Whereas the left have to talk in vaguer terms, because it’s not possible to have had a chat with everyone who would benefit from a more equal society. The right like to position themselves as the protectors of the individual. But the left looks after many more individuals than the right. They just may not be individuals you went to school or have played golf with.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Grammar schools were great; the grammar school system was terrible. It’s a very slightly complicated idea - that a single positive by-product cannot justify an entire unfair system - that the right love to pretend they cannot understand. And from the current government, each a beneficiary of an excellent (and often expensive) education, that feigned stupidity is not an edifying - or even particularly convincing - sight.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-30118836266628171272014-07-18T09:22:00.000+01:002014-07-18T09:22:17.081+01:00How many nations?<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I believe the children are our future. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. The world is just a great big onion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Political slogans love to state the blindingly obvious. Whenever a politician says ‘forward together’ we should all looked surprised and say, “I really thought you were going to say ‘backwards, separately’.” A politician who says something that no one could possibly disagree with may as well be the rock band asking a festival audience, ‘Anyone here like sunshine?’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But sometimes the most seemingly unnecessary political statements are the most important. Our rock band were, probably, just trying to get the audience to cheer. But what if someone really was planning to abolish sunshine?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That is the problem that the slogan ‘One Nation Labour’ has encountered. It has been dismissed as a meaningless ‘motherhood and apple pie’ line, but naively so. ‘Who could possibly disagree with the idea of One Nation?’ you might ask. But what if the answer is ‘the government’?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">‘One Nation’ is a phrase with a long history - a long Tory history until now. Disraeli gave one of his novels the subtitle ‘The Two Nations’ fearing that rich and poor were becoming permanently divided. Since then a ‘One Nation Tory’ has opposed the division between rich and poor. Tories disagreeing with this either feel that the separation of rich and poor is no bad thing, or that it is not the government’s job to prevent it. For these hard-hearted types, the description ‘Two Nation Tory’ has sadly never caught on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the early 1950s, several Tories wrote a pamphlet called ‘One Nation: a Tory Approach to Social Problems’ which brought the phrase back into general use. It then became a banner that most Tories were happy to sit under, until Thatcher came along. Thatcher than branded One Nation Tories as ‘wets’, because we all know compassion is a sign of weakness.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And now Ed Miliband has given his party the banner of ‘One Nation Labour’. It shouldn’t work. The Conservatives should be able to say, ‘Hey, don’t be silly. Everyone knows we’re the One Nation lot. It’s our phrase. Use one of your own.’ It should be as ridiculous as the Tories calling their manifesto ‘Workers of the world unite’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But it does work, because the Tories have entirely abandoned their One Nation tradition. Thatcher may have hated One Nation Tories, but at least they were there to be mocked. Cameron hasn’t needed a belittling nickname for the opponents of his divisive policies in his cabinet, because there aren’t any.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">‘One Nation’ describes just one strain - a practically extinct strain - in Tory thinking. But all of Labour can happily claim it. ‘One Nation’ amongst Conservatives is a description of disunity. For Labour it is uncontroversial, and it reminds people that the nice version of the Tories is no more.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s not just that Ken Clarke is gone - though that is harmful enough to the Tory brand’s humanity. It’s that they no longer look like a party cuddly Ken would ever join. Labour’s ‘One Nation’ policies taunt them, saying, ’If you were </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">nice</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Tories, you’d be doing this yourselves.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The idea of Two Nations runs deep in current Conservative thinking. So many of this government’s policies are about dividing people up into goodies and baddies, such as the deserving and undeserving poor. Every call to cut someone’s benefits comes from a desire to divide. And the Tories have never encountered a problem that couldn’t be solved by removing benefits from </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">somebody</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Even their attitude towards prisoners - some actual baddies - starts from the principle that we are better than them. So anything they can be deprived of - comfort, reading, the vote - must be to the benefit of real people. And it doesn’t matter whether any of this makes the punishment ineffective.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, the government’s attitude towards prisoners may be softening as an ever greater proportion of the prison population is known to the cabinet personally. I wonder if the thought of Andy Coulson voting makes David Cameron feel physically sick?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But most of the people the government demonises are not actually criminals - it’s more about making life difficult for people they disapprove of. Regardless of the morality of this, it’s bad tactics. You’re not running a business or a school - you can’t sack or expel people. If you cut someone’s benefits, they’re still there, and you’re still their government. You’ve not solved your problem, you’ve just made it hungry and cross.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This should be the real meaning of ‘One Nation Labour’. Every time the government addresses a problem by splitting the country into goodies and baddies, Labour must jump on them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It will require some courage. The Tories may enjoy demonising people, but the press </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">adore</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> it. Every time the Tories outline their latest culprit, the press dust off the stocks with glee. As Labour attack, the press will accuse them of being soft, and not hating this week’s pariah as much as right-thinking people should. It’s not that Labour are in favour of murderers, benefit claimants, or the unmarried - they’ve just rather sensibly observed that tutting doesn’t make them disappear.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe ‘One Nation Labour’ has struggled because of unlucky timing. At the moment, the biggest factor determining how many nations there are is the Scottish referendum. ‘One Nation Labour’ sounds more like an attack on Alex Salmond than on the rightwards drift of the Tory party. If the Scots say yes, the slogan is unusable.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But if they say no, it should do Labour some good. ’One Nation Labour’ is negative campaigning disguised as positive. It sounds like it is describing what Labour is, but it really highlights what the Tories aren’t. It is a bit like standing on a platform with your opponent and calling yourself ‘the non-sheep-shagging candidate’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">‘One Nation Labour’ crystallises something about the Conservatives that should create many ex-Tory voters. It tells everyone who calls themselves an ‘occasional Tory’ that next year’s election is a time to exercise their veto. There are enough people who believe in a unified society, and a party that sows divisions will be punished. Because people who need people are, after all, the luckiest people in the world.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-49329250828805126342014-07-11T09:08:00.004+01:002014-07-11T09:08:54.599+01:00Ed Miliband: Rock Star<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There’s no way Ed Miliband can win a general election cos he just looks, well, he’s got that face and, he’s just…no.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because everybody knows that if you look a bit weird, you can never win a general election. Like that odd woman who challenged likeable avuncular Jim Callaghan in 1979 and was never heard of again.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In fact, there are plenty of examples of unpromising performers winning elections. Ted Heath was prickly and awkward, but somehow beat the polished and assured Harold Wilson in 1970. John Major was universally agreed to be boring and uninspiring before becoming, in 1992, the only party leader ever to attract 14 million UK voters.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And Clement Attlee’s government would top many people’s lists of the best ever, but his lack of charisma is an accepted historical fact, taught in history lessons somewhere between the Munich Putsch and the miniskirt.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now, of course, these examples are from the past - as quite a lot of history is. The modern logic is that politicians have to be multi-media perform-atons, forever glossy and flawless. Elections, we are told, are entirely media events, and whoever does the media best wins. Maybe in the distant past you could win an election without winning the media, but not any more. The modern world is different. You’ve probably been told that the media will be the decisive factor in this coming election. It was probably the media that told you this.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The thing about being ‘modern’ is that you always think you are. No election coverage ever started with a Dimbleby saying, “Hello and welcome to the last election of the olden era.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every single general election is the most modern one yet. In every election, the media is bigger, more influential, and more demanding than they were at the last one. The media existed when Heath beat Wilson, Thatcher beat Callaghan, and Major beat anyone. By the media standards at the time, they were the less attractive candidate. So how come they still won?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is an element of the beauty contest about an election, but it is not the whole story. If it was, then fresh gleaming David Cameron would have won a handsome majority over grumpy dirty Gordon Brown in 2010. And, of course, he didn’t win a majority at all (which is why he has governed ever since with such an air of consensus and humility).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some politicians’ media performances are so good, they are electorally invincible. Tony Blair couldn’t have lost a general election if he wanted to. But Labour aren’t facing anyone with that kind of telegenic magnetism. Cameron’s lead over Miliband in the charisma stakes is not nearly wide enough to win the election purely on that measure. Miliband can’t win the charisma round - he just has to lose it narrowly enough that he’s still in the race. Like in Krypton Factor - you might be terrible at the assault course, but you have to make sure you at least finish it to be in with a chance of forging ahead during quick-fire general knowledge.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If Miliband confines the debate to this government’s record and both parties’ policies, then the election is there to be won. Why is an election campaign ever about anything else? Ed Miliband needs to avoid photo opportunities, even if they don’t feature a hot sandwich or tabloid newspaper. He needs to avoid narratives, message platforms, and branding. This election needs to be about explaining how his ideas are better than the other lot’s - everything else is wasted effort.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Who should be Ed Miliband’s model for an election campaign? Not Blair, obviously. His brother could have been a neo-Blair, and might even have done it well. But Ed needs to look elsewhere for inspiration. He needs to find someone who did not have matinee idol looks, someone who came across as a bit weird. Someone who was a forensic master of policy detail, who won arguments by the strength of his case. And someone whose principles sometimes led him to shelve his personal ambitions. Surely no such example exists in recent political memory?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What about Robin Cook? Mostly remembered now as the man who ran off with his secretary in protest at the Iraq war, Cook had qualities Miliband could learn from. We will never know if Cook would have been an electoral asset as a party leader. Cook’s death was the largest factor in Labour having no credible alternative to Gordon Brown when Blair resigned two years later. Cook’s public persona was very clearly exactly who he was - spiky, unashamedly bright, and with a steely determination to abide by his principles. He didn’t turn himself into something the electors would go for. He was entirely himself, and if that was something that appealed to voters, that was entirely a matter for them. We can be pretty sure that no style consultant ever suggested he look like that or talk like that.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When faced with Cameron’s sixth-form debating tricks, Ed Miliband could do a lot worse than ask himself, ‘What would Robin Cook do in this situation?’ He wouldn’t care about whether his opponents’ position was more attractive, pressed more of the right focus-group buttons. He would sharply and clinically set about why his opponent’s arguments were not good enough. It seemed he never worried about whether something was the right thing to say. He trusted that his brains and his heart would win him the argument. And if Cook had come up against Cameron, he would have made him work harder than he has ever had to over the last four years.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is very easy to see how Ed Miliband can lose next year’s general election. He will appear on daytime television, cook his adoring family a Quorn tagliatelli, and finally let us know who his favourite member of the The Saturdays is.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If Ed plays that kind of game - the Blair playbook - he will get destroyed, and rightly so. If he ever says, ‘Well, Fearne, it’s been a real pleasure meeting you,’ then Samantha Cameron may as well cancel the removal company straightaway.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If Ed Miliband is going to become prime minister, he has to ignore every media adviser who pushes him in that direction. There are many ways of winning an election. It may sound old-fashioned, but Labour’s best approach may simply be to win the argument. And wouldn’t politics benefit if it worked?</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-33399148690584410862014-07-04T13:04:00.000+01:002014-07-04T14:00:09.240+01:00With a small C<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Beware - conservatives are everywhere. They’re in the government, they’re in the institutions. And, worst of all, you’ve got one in your head.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Everyone’s a little bit conservative. If you’ve ever said, ‘Oh, I was enjoying that,’ about something that’s just stopped. If you struggle to get out the word ‘Snickers’ or ‘Starburst’. If you prefer cricket in white clothing (if you like cricket at all, really). You are, to some degree, conservative if you have ever described someone changing something as meddling, messing, or tinkering.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For some people, the little conservative voice in the brain becomes the defining characteristic of their characters. These conservative people in Britain enjoy the traditional, establishment bits of the country. They probably favour the Church of England, irrespective of their personal opinions on worshipping a deity. They love Radio 4. They respect the police. They revere the armed forces. They prefer public schools, and people who went to them. The royal family, especially the Queen, do a jolly fine job in pretty tricky circumstances, actually. They also, bless their socks, tend to vote for the Tory party.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You get conservatives in other parties too, of course. Tony Blair railed against the ‘forces of conservatism’, and he had in mind mostly Old Labour and the civil service - a very unlikely coalition. Blair assumed that anyone who opposes him must be in cahoots. Like the people who assumed that Osama and Saddam must have been regularly lunching together, simply because they both had spats with the Bush family.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now New Labour Blairites can be seen as conservatives, begging that his legacy isn’t undone by cutting investment or cancelling invasions.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And the Lib Dems have their conservative element, which has carefully ensured that no senior Lib Dem has non-white or female skin.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But, of course, the Tory party has always been the natural home of the conservatively-minded element in British society. What is remarkable is how very badly the Tory party treats these people. The current government may have principally targeted the weak, poor, and vulnerable in their reforms. But the last four years has not been a picnic for the stuffy, the old-fashioned, and the set-in-their-ways (and they bloody love a picnic). They may not have had their livelihoods pitilessly targeted as the needy have - their investments are far too safe for anything like that. But this government has provided very little to warm a conservative heart.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s not the most important example, but look at broadcasting. A conservative person loves the BBC. They are put to bed by the Shipping Forecast, woken up by John Humphrys and, whether they love or hate The Archers, they do so with a life-affirming passion. They’re happy for the grandchildren to watch Doctor Who and, though they claim not to watch any television themselves, can describe the strengths and weaknesses of every single contestant on Strictly Come Dancing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But the Tory party hates the BBC. It is a hotbed of lefty bias and - most grievous of all sins - it distorts the market. The BBC is a hangover from a barbarian past when people got things they hadn’t paid for. To this government, all people are consumers, all the time, in everything; all organisations are merchants; and the world will achieve perfection when it resembles one big market. The BBC doesn’t give customers an itemised bill, so how can we know if any of its services has any value?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Tory party’s preferred broadcaster is Sky. Whereas a natural conservative, unless a major cricket fan, would never have a Sky subscription. Most of them don’t let their children watch ITV.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Tories have parted ways with conservatives on all their sacred cows. The Tories made enemies of the police - conservatives love an honest copper (and still think they all are). The Tories have cut the armed forces extensively - conservatives have Help for Heroes car stickers, and would give all squaddies a job for life. The Tories have given equal marriage rights to everyone, which has left the naturally conservative baffled, if not actually appalled - and it’s made life terribly complicated for the poor old vicar. There are even some conservatives who think the government treated the Queen badly when they removed the gender bias from the primogeniture system of royal succession.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are many aspects to a conservative character, and the current Tory leadership embodies just one. The Tories in government believe in right-wing economics - cutting back the state, trusting the market - and that’s it. To conservatives in the country, that belief is a long way down their list of priorities, if it figures at all.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The conservative is a many-faceted chap; the Tory cabinet minister has a one-track mind. Their love of cutting has extinguished their love of anything else. They are like a gardener who so enjoys weeding, they forget they ever loved flowers, and turn their award-winning garden into no man’s land.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The current Tory appeal to conservatives is entirely negative, based on a shared dislike of benefit scrounging and immigration: “You know those things you don’t much like? Well, we’re doing less of them!” At no point do they cherish anything, or hold it dear. And you can’t build a relationship entirely on hating the same things.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As this relationship breaks down, the Tories may see the results at the polls. British electoral logic says that when it rains on election day, Labour suffers. This isn’t really because Tory voters can get to the polling station without getting wet because they own motor cars and Barbour jackets. It’s because when natural Labour voters become disillusioned, they don’t vote for other parties, they stay at home. When lots of people are ambivalent about whether they can be bothered to vote, that’s when drizzle becomes a decisive factor.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe now, the Tories will start to see the same problem. Maybe natural conservatives will join in with the refrain that the working class have been singing since the invention of New Labour: “We don’t know who you are any more. We’re your natural supporters, but what do you do for us?”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If it starts to rain on polling day, yes, more conservatives may get in the car. But the Tories may find it can just as easily take them to the golf club as the polling station. And the fact that the cabinet went to the right schools might not be quite enough to change that.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-50847302891611020562014-06-27T14:11:00.002+01:002014-06-27T14:11:46.285+01:00It’s not big and it’s certainly not clever<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The government has stopped saying ‘Big Society’ every ten minutes, but they haven’t stopped thinking it. They are still running the country on the basis that anyone offering to do the state’s work should be allowed and encouraged to do it. The state shouldn’t have to do anything that someone else is offering to do for free. As if running the country is a bit like tiling the bathroom or putting up shelves.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Big Society, as a phrase, has spectacularly failed to ignite the public imagination. Partly, this is because those two words don’t match the idea they’re trying to describe: it’s not big and it’s not a society. Nothing is less accurately described, apart from possibly Irn-Bru, and at least they’re joking.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s a phrase that is participating in an argument that no one else is having. No one is suggesting changing the size of society. No one is proposing a Small Society, to which this is the alternative. Maybe someone once said, ‘You’re David Cameron. You used to be big.’ And he replied, ‘I am big. It’s the society that got small.’ It would make no less sense.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A better name for it would be “Small State 2.0”. One of the defining qualities of right-wing thought is that the state should be small - as small as possible. The more the state does, the more it impinges on the personal freedom of the citizenry. If every street light, hospital, and bin-man strikes you as an infringement of your liberty, then this is the philosophy for you.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But even the right have noticed that if the state is smaller, it will end up doing less. And some of the things it does are quite popular. When the right talks about the state, you would think it was staffed entirely by tax collectors and traffic wardens. But even they have noticed that some people might be a bit cross if all the brain surgeons and lollipop ladies disappear.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The problem with the first generation of the Small State idea - from Thatcher onwards - was that when the state got small, people complained about the bits that disappeared. Small State 2.0 ingeniously allowed the state to shrink, but nothing would disappear. For every state service removed, it would be replaced by a non-state version. Everything would be just as good as before, but now some of it would be free. It was like the tax-payer had got a Nectar card.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When the Big Society says, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if all these things were provided, but not by the state?’ the real answer is, ‘No, it wouldn’t be’. How do we know? Because that’s what we used to do before the state existed. This is actually why we created the state, to do stuff like this. Because the way you’re suggesting wasn’t as good.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Big Society would be a return to the days before state education, the NHS, and social housing, when charities, churches, and philanthropists took up the slack. Relying on charity was charming and gentlemanly and picturesque. Those who provided it were admirable and excellent; those who received it were enriched and presumably grateful. The problem was, it scratched the surface. Charity can’t provide universal education, healthcare and housing, any more than free taxidermy lessons for all would end unemployment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Big Society is just the latest attempt to convince people that the old divisions of left and right don’t exist any more. The previous attempt was the Third Way - a name every bit as bad as the Big Society. The ‘Big Society’ is plain wrong, where the ‘Third Way’ managed to be entirely meaningless.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If the best thing you can say about your ‘Way’ is how many ‘Ways’ have preceded it, then maybe you should do a bit more work on it. I’m not sure the Communist Manifesto would have had such a global impact if it had been called ‘My Eleventh Book’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Third Way suggested that maybe there was an alternative to the two old options of left and right, without ever quite spelling out what that alternative might be. Surely that doesn’t really count as an idea. I don’t call myself an inventor just because I’ve written ‘butterscotch-flavoured hover bikes’ in my notebook. The Third Way is not an idea: it’s an idea for an idea. It’s not a solution to a problem; it’s just someone saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a solution to this problem?’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Third Way’s ultimate aim was the electability of the Labour party, rather than increased contentment of the British people. And it worked. New Labour’s repeated electoral successes were the result of excellent communication tactics. New Labour was brilliant at saying the right things to the right groups of people. One group was families, and to them they said ‘Education, education, education’. Another group was centrist political scientists, and to them they said ‘Third Way’. And both groups reacted in just the way New Labour wanted: the families went off and voted for them, and the political scientists went off and wrote some very dull books.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Both the ‘Third Way’ and the ‘Big Society’ have a very negative view of the state. The Big Society takes it as read that less state involvement must automatically be better. The Third Way believed that the old 1970s state-based way of doing things was unpopular, and in New Labour circles there was no greater sin than unpopularity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you think less state is always better, you have to think that the state is wholly harmful to every person who has the misfortune to live under one. Whenever right-wingers say the word ‘state’ they should remember to make a face like they’ve just described something icky. In other words, everyone in the world is living under a dreadful curse, apart from those lucky people in Somalia.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Big Society is still central to the government’s thinking, but even they’ve noticed it isn’t really catching on. It is a long time since the government announced that a charity or well-meaning billionaire has stepped in to provide a public service. There are some free schools, and some libraries run by volunteers, but it’s hardly changed the landscape. Instead small state 2.0 is increasingly reverting back to small state 1.0. The government wants businesses to run public services, or they want public-owned organisations to become businesses.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It sometimes seems that the Big Society was only floated as an idea so that, when everyone said it wouldn’t work, the government would then have an excuse to return to massive privatisations on the basis that no one liked the alternative. Like a bully punching you in the face because you said you didn’t like being kicked in the stomach.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This government has privatised, tried to privatise, or brought privatisation into: the NHS, the Royal Mail, the forest, the courts, forensics, prisons, disability assessment, and child protection. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list. It’s hard to pick which of those is the most awful.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe it’s the range that is the most shocking - all of those services should, in the government’s opinion, be run by private service companies. That suggests an unhealthy fixation. This government looks at people trying to protect abused children, it looks at scientists analysing murder evidence - it even looks at a sodding </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">forest</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> - and it gives exactly the same response every time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That must be crazy, whatever the response. It’s surely even crazier when the response is: “I tell you who’d sort this out - Capita’.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-8607659345785276632014-06-20T15:19:00.001+01:002014-06-20T15:19:56.591+01:00What's the big idea?<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We don’t like ideology in this country. Beliefs and principles make us uncomfortable and </span>suspicious.<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> We don’t think of ideology as a platform to stand on proudly, but a guilty secret. If you can find a way of calling your opponent ideological, you’re half way to branding them a maniac.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We have two parties of government, a left-wing one and right-wing one. But they do everything they can to avoid being described in that way. Even their names are rather avoiding the point. No one ever asks Labour why they’re called Labour any more. It would make sense if the other party were called Capital, but they’re not.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And Conservative is an equally useless name for a party. This is presumably a hangover from a time when ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ were the most common political labels. But they are really not useful descriptions, as they do not represent any kind of political principle. Conservative and radical are not ideologies, they are two kinds of psychosis.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you were asked, ‘Should we change this thing, or keep it the same?’ you would, quite reasonably, want to know what the hell we were talking about before deciding. Some things should change, and other things should stay the same. Generally, bad things should change, and good things should stay the same. Stop me if I’m going too fast.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some people are inclined to want to keep things the same, and others to rip things up and start again. And some people manage to keep these two instincts in check, and simply judge matters on their merits - but we can ignore that kind of weirdo for the time being. Conservatives reckon things should stay the same, without first checking if any of those things is an alligator in a playgroup. And radicals are just as bad, entirely apathetic about the difference between a baby and some bathwater.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And although we no longer group our politicians into pro-change and anti-change, those two flabby ideas still disproportionately inform the debate. Often, the argument against a reform says nothing more than: “We can’t change that, because then it would be different.” The case against the Alternative Vote was shaped in exactly this way. “If we have AV, then the winner might not win!” they would carp. Wrong. If we changed the system, the winner would still win. It might be a different winner, but that’s what ‘change’ means. Surely there was a better argument against AV than ‘it’s not the same’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And the mindless love of change - the ‘something must be done’ tendency - is just as dangerous. We see this in areas like education, where successive governments tinker constantly with the school system. Occasionally, there is an ideological trend: comprehensive schooling belongs to a left-wing agenda, and free schools to the right. But between these two inventions lie 45 years of education policies, very few of which have made a useful contribution towards the education of the nation’s children. And if you randomly selected these policies out of a hat, you would struggle to name which party had introduced them. (This excellent game is a very useful way of getting rid of lingering dinner party guests.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These days, it’s not particularly a party political issue, as the Tory party is no more or less conservative than any other party. The Tories’ most conservative statement of recent years was ‘no top-down re-organisation of the NHS’ and we know how that ended. Once in government, the conservative instinct was replaced by a right-wing desire to introduce the market into as much of the NHS as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Whatever you think of the disgusting changes to the NHS over the last few years (I must remain </span>judiciously impartial, as you can see)<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> at least there is some thought under-pinning it. The Tories’ promise to leave the NHS alone did not come from a feeling that the NHS was perfect as it was, but from a weak conservative instinct to leave well alone. But the decision to start changing it came from a firm ideological position - though they would never admit it. The only people calling it ideological were its opponents - ‘ideological’ has become an insult.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When I argue with a right-wing friend, I try to remember that they are not secretly trying to take over the world, using the poor as fuel, food and furniture. My ideology may say that their policies will lead to those ruinous outcomes, but their ideology says that it won’t. It’s not that they hate the poor and don’t care what happens to them. It’s that they think their policies will ultimately do so much good that even the poor will benefit. And they think that my left-wing priority of starting with the poor would actually be counter-productive.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I think they are wrong. I think they are totally, disastrously wrong. But only according to my ideology. According to their ideology they are right. We have that in common - the belief that your political ideology should inform how you think the world should work. The argument becomes a fascinating search for our fundamental differences, and once we understand each other there is mutual respect - without either side necessarily shifting an inch. This imaginary argument ends in a hearty handshake, an increased love of the diversity of humankind, and a round of drinks.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Why does no national political debate ever look anything like this? When political opponents go head to head, there is never any investigation of the ideological under-pinning of the opposing policies. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a parliamentary debate concluded with both sides saying, “I have a new-found respect for my opponent’s views, as I find them to spring logically and coherently from a central belief. I respect, but do not share, that belief.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is, of course, never anything like that, and the argument gets stuck on the points-scoring level. They say: my opponent is lying. The last time my opponent’s party was in charge, there was a disaster. My opponent’s party hasn’t yet officially got round to jettisoning a discredited policy. My opponent’s colleague has recently said something foolish, been photographed making a silly face, or been exposed in the tabloids in an adulterous act of baroque depravity, which I secretly admire.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some say that politics is not ideological any more. Politics is still ideological, it cannot be otherwise. Any policy is a choice: individual freedom against collective responsibility; state interference versus the law of the jungle, and many others. The policies themselves still bear the imprint of fundamental political ideas, but we have lost the discursive tools with which to analyse, understand, and improve them. It is political </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">debate</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> that is no longer ideological.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But we could get it back. The politicians aren’t going to do anything about it because they don’t see any competitive advantage in changing the tone of the debate. But the media could, if it started to take a more adult view of what neutrality is. Neutrality, as currently practised in the broadcast media, is a brainless process of recounting each side’s position, summarising each side’s critique of their opponent, and ending it all with a shrug and an ‘I dunno’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But if we had intelligent neutrality in the media, a political commentator would explain the ideological under-pinning of each side’s argument. They would ignore the point-scoring, the cheap shots, and the 'I’ll take no lectures from…'. The ultimate message to the audience - and, importantly, the electorate - would be so much more than the current ‘it’s over to you’. It would explain that this party’s policies represent a particular set of principles, that they have made a choice. This kind of political comment would get its hands dirty and say, ‘If you believe x, vote for this party; if you believe y, vote for the other lot.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then maybe the politicians would spend more time explaining why they think their policy is a good idea, and less time sticking their tongues out at the opposite bench. And maybe eventually, somewhere, a politician might quietly confess to believing something.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-62961027588407342592014-06-13T11:22:00.000+01:002014-06-13T11:22:56.259+01:00Make your mind up<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Fans of the monarchy will generally make two claims: ‘monarchy is a good system of government’ and ‘the Queen does a very good job’. There is a strong case for believing either of them. What seems astonishing is how many people manage to think both at the same time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Monarchy is justified in the modern world on the principle ‘well, someone has to do it’. Someone needs to read out the Queen’s Speech; someone has to sign the bills to make them laws; the prime minister needs someone to resign at. A country without a monarch is like a living room without a television. Under a monarchy, the country knows which way to point the furniture.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is the ‘monarch as Muggins’ argument. When the speaker of the House of Commons is chosen, they are ceremonially dragged to the chair, to create the impression they haven’t been ruthlessly lobbying for the position for years. Similarly, it is nice to think that the monarch would dearly love to be a newsagent in Retford but, due to the overwhelming peer pressure of an entire nation, has reluctantly agreed to be head of state until death.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So, a monarch just needs to be, rather than do. It’s appropriate, then, that we have found an unusual way of choosing who has to do it. Hereditary is really just a nice way of saying arbitrary. Which is just a posh way of saying, ’Shut your eyes and hope for the best’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Jobs that involve doing something need to be chosen on the basis of ability or experience. But if your only requirement is to be, you need different selection criteria. You can’t choose someone at random, like jury service, and tell them they’re the Queen - as they could, with some justification, deny it. So we’re lucky that we have a family of volunteers to have their face on the stamps.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe this is a snide and ungrateful view of monarchy. But at least this argument works. If monarchy is a good idea then the monarch must be essentially a mannequin. It needs to be a job that cannot be done well or badly. It needs to be as difficult as having a birthday. Because otherwise it is far too central a role to entrust to someone chosen by a kind of genetic roulette.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The alternative view is that the Queen does an amazing job. She performs a range of delicate balancing acts: being ceremonial yet human; engaging with the country’s well-being, yet remaining politically neutral; being a figurehead, yet also a servant. And all this in a country that is unrecognisable from the one in which she started back in the early 1950s. In public life, only Cliff Richard comes close to her achievement.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But if it can be done well, it can be done badly. This is more than simply ‘the Charles problem’. Charles is just a glimpse of how harmful a bad monarch could be - especially if we believe all the praise the Queen receives. For every positive thing the Queen has done, we must imagine an alternate reality in which it didn’t happen, or that something dreadful happened instead. That is what being a monarchist really means. Anyone can be a monarchist when there’s a good monarch. The real test is when you get a bad one. Charles III is easy - try Edward VIII. What if the Nazi sympathiser somehow weathered the abdication storm long enough to see Poland invaded. How’s your monarchism now?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So, either the Queen has done a good job, or the monarchy is a good idea. It’s like chips and pizza - you can’t have both. And yet almost everyone who thinks one thinks the other. But then, the subject of monarchy is frequently the site of logical </span>contortionism<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We can ignore the argument that the royal family are essential to the tourism industry. Yes, people like to visit Buckingham Palace. But the attraction would be much greater if the royal family had recently been shot in their beds. No question - if the monarchy had just been violently overthrown, the punters would be queuing round the block. It would be the best thing ever to happen to the British tourist industry. Anyone claiming that tourism justifies the existence of the royal family is basically asking for regicide. It is essential these people are locked in the Tower urgently, for the Queen’s protection.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The next time someone says that tourism justifies the monarchy, just ask them, ‘Have you ever visited France? Sorry, let me re-phrase. Has </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">anyone</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> ever visited France?’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A more defensible pro-monarchy position points to the stability, the continuity, the certainty that it offers. Other countries are changeable. We, thanks to our monarchy, are resolute. And the present Queen’s long reign is a fine example of that quality.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But where does this long reign come from? To be a long-serving monarch requires more than just your own longevity - you also need your predecessor to die young. So a lot is down to the fairly early death of the Queen’s father in 1952. If the Queen’s father had lived as long as her mother did, Elizabeth II’s reign would not have </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">begun</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> until August 1997 - about three weeks before Diana died. Then how much credit would she currently be getting for her 16 long years of dutiful service? I have longer-serving shirts.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The circumstances of the current queen’s reign create an illusion of stability and certainty. But that is simply not borne out historically. Having a royal head of state has caused plenty of uncertainty in the past. Most of the stable features of the last 62 years of reign are the exception rather than the rule.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because we all know what the norm is, don’t we? Every reign, unless something bizarre happens, fits this description: ‘The oldest child reigns from the parent’s death until their own.’ That is a basic summation of how the system always works, barring the occasional mishap.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Except that it hardly ever happens. That description certainly applies to the reign of Elizabeth II (unless something very unexpected happens before she dies). But the last one before that? I’m going to have to hurry you. No? It was George II, 1727-1760. In the nearly 200 years between 1760 and 1952, not one of the eight monarchs had a reign that can be described as: ‘The oldest child reigns from the parent’s death until their own.’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe they just had a run of bad luck. So when was the previous one? Then, you’re looking at an even bigger gap - over 300 years. It’s Henry V, who reigned 1413-1422.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">OK, best of three, who was it before that? Between Henry V and the Norman conquest there were just two more - Edward I (1272-1307) and Henry III (1216-1272) - the only time we’ve ever had two back to back.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of the 42ish monarchs from William the Conqueror until today, only five fit the pattern of ‘the oldest child reigns from the parent’s death until their own’. Based on that historical analysis (if half an hour on Wikipedia merits such a lofty description) the odds of a monarch’s reign qualifying for that reassuring definition is worse than eight to one.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We want to believe in the smooth handover. It certainly feels as though monarchy provides certainty and continuity. But that is an optical illusion based on where we’re sitting. It’s not normally like this. We have convinced ourselves that, under a monarchy, the smooth handover is inevitable. The truth is, it has only happened once in the last 250 years. And that’s pretty long odds for the country to spin that roulette wheel.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-81636375163755111572014-06-06T10:37:00.000+01:002014-06-06T11:36:17.507+01:00Straight on or right?<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the last 30 years or so, two ideas have become indistinguishable in British politics: going forwards, and turning right. Any move to the right - privatisation, deregulation, anything that enriches big business - is presented as progress. Resisting these changes, or even, God help us, suggesting a move in the opposite direction, is an offence against modernity. A left-wing stance is not a viable political alternative, it is a betrayal of tomorrow. If you don’t trust market forces to run the world, you basically don’t love your own children.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Going forwards and turning right are different things. It seems ridiculous to have to say that, but the conflation is so widespread it seems necessary. I could understand it if we were French. In French, ‘go straight on’ and ‘turn right’ are very similar phrases - ‘tout droit’ and ‘tournez a droite’, I seem to recall. These phrases are widely used in the French town of La Rochelle to negotiate the tricky path from the town hall to the youth hostel.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But in British politics we have no such excuse. It’s not the language that has introduced this confusion. It was a series of leaders - two in particular - who wanted to take things rightwards. Thatcher and Blair can’t be faulted for following their own principles. Blair occupied a wide-right outcrop of the Labour Party; Thatcher colonised a small island just off the right coast of polite society. So inevitably they were going to tell us all that their vision was progress. The amazing thing is that we went along with them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Those ideas are now thoroughly ingrained: businesses should run as much of the country as possible, and the state should not interfere, but just sign the cheques. This kind of opinion belongs on the lunatic fringe but, with the huge rightwards drift of the last 30 years, it now shockingly belongs to the consensus. There is a received wisdom that everyone is meant to agree with: kittens are cute, ‘Back for Good’ is a decent song, and big businesses should run everything.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You would think it had ended well. The way this right-wing consensus has emerged, you would think the extreme experiment of the last 30 years had culminated in sun-lit uplands, an end to boom and bust, poverty being made history, and affluent contentment spreading around the nation like bird flu. But it didn’t. It ended in the banks going bust and the state signing cheques that were very large indeed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">How can anyone still think that the world of big business is a superior model to anything? The old-fashioned public sector is still widely maligned, but it never failed like the private sector did. The Winter of Discontent of 1978/9 successfully put people off the idea that the public sector should ever be trusted with anything again. But the financial crisis of 2008 seems to have made no difference at all - except to make people spit after using the word ‘banker’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The bins may have stayed uncleared and the dead unburied for a period in 1979, but that failure represents a level of competence and effectiveness that Lehmann’s and HBOS could only dream of. The militant workforce of 1979 may have failed to deal with the rubbish and the corpses for a while, but at least they never built sky-scrapers out of them and told us they were safe.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But ‘Right’ and ‘forwards’ are not the only concepts that have got muddled up.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Labour party has also conflated a couple of ideas, and once again Tony Blair is the source of the confusion. It is easy to forget now how incredibly popular Tony Blair was. To say, ‘I didn’t vote for Tony Blair’ was, for a while, like saying, ‘I am a loveable British eccentric, given to irrational behaviour such as beekeeping and Morris dancing, and the landscape is the richer for my existence.’ It wasn’t normal. But Blair was. Strange to say it about a man that everyone now sees as a swivel-eyed ideologue, but Blair was deeply, deeply normal.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He always seemed like a pretty straight sort of guy. The only time he didn’t was when he said, ‘Look, I’m a pretty straight sort of guy.’ Out loud. With other people - and recording equipment - in the room. Staggering. But when he refrained from that kind of behaviour, he was dynamite. Until Blair came along, the only politicians you recognised as actual human beings were the flawed, sometimes gaffe-prone, ‘characters’. Politicians were either sleek and professional, or they were recognisably human: only Blair was both. Blair was totally professional, but if you met him in the pub, you knew he’d be pretty normal - as long as he stayed off the subject of his own dazzling normality.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Blair was also on the distant right of the Labour party. While his principles and instincts were more egalitarian than the Tory leaders he followed, the tactics were the same. Thatcher and Major had an ideological belief in bringing the market into public services; Blair just thought it would work. And this non-ideological attitude allowed Blair to drift miles to the right of where any Labour politician had ever been before.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And ever since, Labour seem to have lived by a very wonky piece of logic. Tony Blair was the ultimate election-winner. Tony Blair was very right-wing. Therefore right-wing policies win elections. It’s the perfect ‘therefore my dog is a cat’ deduction. Blair didn’t win all those elections because his policies were so right wing. He won because he was the ultimate performer: it’s the singer, not the song. Blair could have run with the 1983 Labour manifesto, if he believed in it, and still beaten most of the Tory leaders he faced.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So, right and forward are different; and so are right-wing and popular. And all that is required to fix both of these misapprehensions is for Labour to adopt a left-wing platform, sell it well, win a general election, and lead the country to a socialist utopia.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Right, that was easy. What shall we do next?</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-90000190870242265842014-05-30T11:35:00.002+01:002014-05-30T11:38:25.520+01:00How to kill a party<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dear Deirdre - I am a reasonably successful British political party. I would like to become a very unsuccessful political party. Is there anything you can suggest to help me achieve my dream? Yours hopefully, a Reasonably Successful British Political Party</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dear Ms Party - Team up with the Tories. Works every time. Lots of love, Deirdre</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If only the Lib Dems had listened to Deirdre. A political party should only team up with the Tories if they don’t really want to be a political party any more. If you enter any kind of alliance with the Tories, the electorate always thinks the same thing: well, they think, there’s not much point in you any more, is there?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A party can’t prop up the Tories in peacetime without suffering a political catastrophe. Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 decided that the best way to deal with an economic crisis was to form a National Government with the Tories. In the election later that year, Labour came the closest to extinction they’ve ever been. The electorate looked at the Labour party, and decided that if voting for them was basically the same as voting Conservative, they wouldn’t bother.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Similarly, the old Liberal party made themselves unelectable after the first world war by continuing to support a Conservative-dominated government. They also took the precaution of splitting themselves in two to ensure there was no danger of looking credible. So there were two Liberal parties, one that supported the Conservative coalition of 1918-1922, and another that didn’t.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Two Liberal parties? Oh, let’s make it three. Such was the Liberals’ capacity for hating each other, these two versions of the Liberal party were still not getting on in 1931, almost a decade after the original spat. But, hilariously, there was now a third Liberal party that was in favour of a brand new coalition - Ramsay MacDonald’s national government. Every time a coalition government was formed, half the Liberals piled in and created a new party. Liberal parties were splitting and dividing like amoebas every time a deal with the Tories was mentioned.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, it was the divisions that turned the Liberals from a party of government at the beginning of the twentieth century into also-rans from 1922 onwards. But what caused the divisions? Every time, it was teaming up with the Tories. The idea is so poisonous, that even if you split in two - usually a Liberal tactic, but Labour also tried it in 1931 - the electorate don’t even trust the anti-coalition version of the party, out of fear that they may reunify after the election.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The current Lib Dems are not going to split into pro-coalition and anti-coalition schisms. Any pro-coalition gathering of Lib Dems would be so tiny they may as well call themselves the Liberal Popular Front (‘He’s over there’). There is only going to be one Lib Dem party, because they are all agreed. They all agreed that joining the coalition sounded jolly exciting at the time, but it all seems to have gone quite badly, which has taken them all by surprise.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They must be quite easily surprised, the LibDems. Even the most clearly telegraphed plot-twist must have then jumping out their seat. To Lib Dems, Postman Pat must be like The Crying Game. (I haven’t seen the new Postman Pat movie, but I suspect that’s not a plot spoiler, unless they’ve taken an extremely bold new direction with the Pat franchise.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">How could they not see this coming? Teaming up with the Tories never ends well. It is not like turkeys voting for Christmas, because that actually makes more sense: at least the turkeys know that turkey-eaters do not want the total extinction of turkeydom. The Tories may not be plotting the extinction of the Lib Dems, but if it happened I imagine they would be, to borrow a Mandelson phrase, ‘intensely relaxed’ about it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The LibDem-Tory coalition is like a suicide pact, but with only one cyanide capsule. The Lib Dem manifesto for the 2015 general election may as well be called ‘So long, cruel world’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And this is not because of what the Lib Dems have done in coalition. They haven’t gone about coalition in the wrong way, or been badly led over the last four years. It was always this bad an idea, it’s just taken an election cycle for the true horror to unfold. In entering coalition with the Tories, they have systematically removed any reason to vote for them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you did not vote Lib Dem in 2010, there is nothing they have done in government that would persuade you to vote for them next year. This is not to say that they have achieved nothing in government. But if you want their achievements to be preserved, it is hard to see how you go about voting for that.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If your favourite government policy of the last four years was the increase in the income threshold before you start paying tax then, yes, that has only happened because the LibDems were in coalition government with the Tories. But you can’t vote for that. If the Lib Dems hold the balance of power again next year, it is impossible to tell who they would do a deal with, and what that deal would be. Yes, you can look at what they promise in their manifesto, but that isn’t a perfect guide: just because the Lib Dems have promised something, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will do the opposite - though that’s always a useful starting point.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And if you did vote Lib Dem last time, did you get what you asked for? Whatever policy tit-bits the Lib Dems can parade, overwhelmingly Lib Dem voters feel they got one thing: a Tory government. And that is not what they asked for.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Conservative party is the defining entity in British politics. We understand all political players by how much they oppose them, if at all. If you do not oppose them, then you are with them. If you do oppose them, then the electorate understands where you sit. But if you help them sustain their power, while claiming to be a different thing, you become a kind of nonsense. The Lib Dems may have thought they would be rewarded for becoming a complex, nuanced paradox of political affiliation. But no one votes for a riddle.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7499248844663098078.post-87439330736429610522014-03-05T14:18:00.001+00:002014-03-05T14:18:27.789+00:00Something you might not have realised about the Conservative Party<div class="ecxMsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.299999237060547px; margin-bottom: 1.35em;">
<span lang="EN-GB">The Conservatives are not very popular. In this country. Ever.</span></div>
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Maybe that’s what you’d expect to hear from a metropolitan leftie who consorts exclusively with like-minded pinkoes.</div>
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And maybe that’s what you’d expect for a party that forms the large part of an austerity government making the difficult decisions to get the country back on its feet after the last lot squandered all the cash on schools and hospitals.</div>
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But I’m not talking about the current Conservatives, the more-than-usually unpleasant generation presently filling the higher ranks in that party. And I’m not just talking about now, three quarters of the way through a parliament, with any honeymoon a distant memory, and an opposition licking its lips at the prospect of an approaching general election.</div>
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I’m talking about any Conservatives, ever.</div>
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Jolly nice bunch of chaps and chapesses, with an interesting and occasionally coherent ideology about how the country should be run. Don’t agree with a word they say, but jolly well done them for still saying it while the rest of the world bleats on about fairness and the poor – yawn.</div>
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But, for some reason, they are not viewed as loveable eccentrics, but as the natural party of government. The electoral system, and the settled state of major British political parties, conspire to give the Conservative party many more decades of rule than it deserves. And this makes the country think it is more conservative than it is. The political establishment’s centre of gravity is well to the right of where it is nationally.</div>
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One reason for this is that we have one right-wing party and two left-wing parties. The Liberal Democrats may have temporarily held their corporate nose and lurched to the right, but the third party has in recent decades always sat closer to Labour than Conservative in terms of its instincts and principles. So the vote of the left has always been split, and the vote of the right never has been.</div>
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In 1983, the high-water mark of Conservatism, 53 per cent of the vote went to the two major left-of-centre parties, and Margaret Thatcher romped to a historic victory with 42 per cent. Thatcher actually came closer to bagging half the voters in 1979, when her smaller majority came from 44 per cent of the popular vote - but more than half of voters (51 per cent) still voted for the other two parties.</div>
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The two left-of-centre, anti-Tory parties always get more than half of the popular vote – you have to go back the 1950s for the last time that rule was broken. And the 1950s was a decade when the third party never hit 6 per cent.</div>
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Of course, the LibDems may look back nostalgically to the 1950s once the 2015 votes are counted. If they score 6 per cent in next year’s general election, there will be plenty in their ranks who will say, ‘Ah well, it could have been worse’. If they hold on to a quarter of the vote they got in 2010, they can feel they have avoided meltdown.</div>
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And it’s not just the high LibDem showing that makes the 2010 general election a compelling example of how un-Conservative the country is. If you see the Labour and Conservative votes as a reflection of the personal popularity of the leaders, Britain starts to look even less blue.</div>
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Who could have been a more attractive Conservative leader than David Cameron? Not yet tarnished by any real-world failures, posh but with the common touch – like Tony Blair, but without the expired CND membership card. Cameron in 2010 was the perfect non-specific magnet for disaffected floaters.</div>
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And who could have been a less attractive Labour leader than Gordon Brown? With memories of him saving the world long since replaced with the image of him claiming to have done so, Brown was the embodiment of a welcome out-stayed, screaming 'bigot' at strangers, and in dire need of smiling lessons.</div>
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Yet, with the likeability factor weighed absurdly in the Conservatives favour, they still only got 36 per cent of the popular vote. The 2010 election could not have been a more open goal for the Conservatives, in the vital area of the leaders’ electability. The Tories put up Prince Charming against Shrek, and barely scraped a third of the votes.</div>
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Is it possible that the votes simply aren’t there for the Conservatives? Maybe there just aren’t enough people who think they are that kind of people. Thatcher never got half the country to think of themselves as Conservative, and the figure has only slumped since then.</div>
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If the LibDems fall of a cliff next year, the left may fail to pick up half the votes for the first time in 56 years. But, in one of those twists that makes UK politics so damned watchable, the left may be sinking below half of the popular vote at exactly the moment when it least matters. Because finally, the right-wing vote may be split as well.</div>
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Nigel Farage is the most exciting thing to happen to the British left since John Redwood’s Tory leadership bid. At last, the minority of British voters who tend to the right have a real choice. They can go for a Tory party that may be economically right-wing, but doesn’t particularly warm the conservative heart. Or they can opt for a man in a tweed jacket who doesn’t mind saying that foreigners make him feel a bit icky. Finally, some serious options.</div>
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And maybe finally, an accurate reflection of the unpopularity of British Conservatism. Or if not 'accurate' then at least a new, reversed inaccuracy.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13792812033686885356noreply@blogger.com0