Matthew Parris on the Coalition...

Politics is not about hope, but expectation. Economics is not about dreams, but plans. For most of the people, most of the time, the geography of the future is not about broad sunlit uplands; it's about the puddles before their feet and the gradient of the next hill. The false prophets of modern marketing have warped more than the language of politics through their obsession with the "vision thing": they have skewed the polls by asking the wrong question. Ask what they expect you can do. It is on that latter request you will be judged says Matthew Parris. Call me complacent, but I don't think that the Coalition has to do much to win again, beyond maintaining a unified front and appearing strong. The worst things get, the less it needs to do. None of this is good news for the rest of us, of course - but happy summer holidays, Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Clegg.

Sustainable growth...

We need growth.

If we are to move decisively out of stagnation, create jobs and pay down the deficit - then we need growth. And not just any growth, 0.2% over the second quarter is just not good enough. Anything less than 0.8% to make up for previously disappointing figures is too small to be of any use whatsoever according to the shadow chancellor. Or is it?

It is now widely accepted that although spending cuts have yet to bite, it is the fear of future cuts that is affecting consumer spending - or the lack of it - directly suppressing demand and leading to low, anaemic growth.

Or is it? You see, those earnings must be going somewhere. I grant you that inflation is currently running at over 4% - which will eat into weekly shopping budgets - and unemployment has risen - even if only marginally, which will devastate a small minority of consumers, but where's the rest going? If the vast majority of employed consumers are not spending, where is that money going?

The answer of course is savings. People are making sure that they live within their means. They are paying down their debts, re-paying mortgages, credit cards and loans. The banking figures - a net re-payment of over £2.5 billion over the last quarter - bear this out.

Now I understand that growth is essential to an expanding and thriving economy trying to attract investment. What I am suggesting here is that as well as re-balancing the economy both structurally - through greater reliance on manufacturing rather than financial services - and geographically - to address the north/south divide - we should also be seeing these figures in human terms. These are not just cold figures. These are people voting with their wallets, telling us that they want and are pursuing, sustainable long-term growth. That is, a lower level of overall consumer spending in order to ensure it is both sustainable for the long term, as well as being backed up with a level of individual wealth (or savings) that is both substantial and therefore induces confidence in the future.

Once consumers have built up that blanket of savings security, we will again see a further rise in consumer spending. But I think it is not unreasonable to expect - and indeed the government should be encouraging through active promotion - long term sustainable growth that consumers - always ahead of governments - appear to want.

Welfare protection...

Interesting piece from James Purnell, following on from his #Newsnight presentation, where he argued for welfare protection being built into unemployment provision. A new national salary insurance could offer working people who become unemployed up to 70% of their earnings in non-means tested support for up to six months (capped at £200 a week). This would incorporate their existing entitlement to contributory jobseeker's allowance (£67.50 a week), trebling the amount of support available to people when they lose their job. What a great idea, paid for from increased National insurance contributions when in work.

Cameron, #OutrageGate & Ed Llewellyn...

In an excellent piece, Julian Astle writes of Cameron's Chief of Staff Ed Llewellyn - Far from providing evidence of Llewellyn’s inadequacies then, this episode highlights his strengths – his judgment and his probity. And in the new post-Coulson, post-Murdoch, post-Malcolm Tucker era we are entering, it is these qualities, rather than an ability to induce fear, that Cameron will need in a Chief of Staff. 

Charlie Gilmour

Sixteen months is a shocking sentence writes Daisy Goodwin in today's Times. Charlie Gilmour has been made an example of and has been victimised because of his family's fame and his privilege. Nobody condones what those students got up to during those protests in London, but he was not somebody who'd spent his life agitating or engaged in violence. It may well fit the sentencing guidelines, but sending him to prison is out of all proportion.

This man should be made to face up to having behaved in a way that's not acceptable by working for sixteen months in community service projects, not behind bars.

Power without responsibility...

With around three quarters of it's main news bulletins currently devoted to every detail of the 'evil empire' that is apparently destroying our freedoms and everyday life, the BBC relentlessly attacks an eighty year old Australian businessman as if he is responsible for every sin committed by staff on one of his many papers between 2000 and 2007.

The News of the World may well have been involved in phone hacking along with many other British tabloids - and who knows, maybe a few broadsheets as well - and no doubt the CPS will in time prosecute those responsible. And quite rightly many will end up in prison. But the BBC coverage has gone much further than that. This is plainly an attempt by one broadcaster to destroy a rival. The BBC has clearly shown tribal jealousy and partisan hatred for Murdoch and his businesses without widening its coverage when it has clearly been shown that such appalling behaviour has been widely practiced across the British tabloid press.

The BBC has by some margin, neglected it's responsibilities as the dominant national broadcaster in covering important news stories that effect ordinary people over the last two weeks - Obama and US deficit default, the potentially disastrous consequences of Euro problems spreading to Italy, the deepest and most severe drought affecting millions in East Africa... I could go on. Any one of these stories could have consequences for Britain which illegal phone hacking at a tabloid newspaper in order to gain titillating stories over three years ago, is unlikely to have.

This is not how a national broadcaster - funded entirely from a compulsory licence fee - should operate. At best the BBC could be said to have been misguided in pursuing a narrow and partisan political agenda being set by a left-wing newspaper and the Labour party - the parties who have felt most hurt by the views expressed in the News of the World.

At worst, the BBC has malignly used its enormous and highly monopolistic power, to destroy a rival broadcaster without being held to account for the consequences for freedom of expression, pluralism of provision or indeed basic fairness. Murdoch has rightly been criticised for the way in which its papers have allegedly conducted themselves in persuit of bigger and better scoops - using power without responsibility. The BBC is now doing exactly the same. The difference, is that we can choose not to buy Murdoch's offerings. The BBC uses its power in our name.

And still Gordon Brown cannot see his complicity...

And still he (Gordon Brown) cannot see his complicity. "This is an issue about the abuse of political power..." he said of Murdoch's news-gathering tactics. Well, duh!, you might say. But oddly enough it isn't, or not as he meant it. At its core, it is an issue of the abuse of political power not by Murdoch, but by Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, David Cameron and every other elected quisling who supped with the devil not with a long spoon but from the devil's own satanic hands. "I came to the conclusion," Mr Brown went on of his urge for a judicial inquiry, "that the evidence was becoming so overwhelming about the underhand tactics of News International to trawl through people's lives, particularly the lives of people who were completely defenceless." Sweet Lord Jesus, isn't the point of a Labour prime minister to defend the defenceless? "I'm genuinely shocked to find that this happened," added the Captain Renault of Kirkcaldy. "If I – with all the protection and defences that a chancellor or prime minister has – can be so vulnerable to unscrupulous and unlawful tactics, what about the ordinary citizen?"

Brilliant piece by Matthew Norman on Gordon Brown's intervention into the phone hacking scandal. It concludes with a call for a Bill of Rights designed to forever formalise the relationship between the electors, commercial interests and the elected.

Johann Hari should resign...

Lot of damning stuff on Twitter over Johann Hari's admission that he includes choice historical quotes when interviewing. We all know its misleading. We all know its wrong. And in any other walk of life he would have lost his job. When you're paid to elicit quotes from people, and you use historical quotes without crediting where they came from, you're not doing your job. You're simply dishonest. 

Retail bloodbath continues...

Yesterday Jane Norman, today TJ Hughes, and Thornton's shutting 120 stores...retail bloodbath continues... tweets Allister Heath of City AM. We should now be very worried at the lack of demand management in the economy by the Coalition. Retailers provide an advanced warning of problems coming down the line and this blog has consistently called for more demand and greater growth in the economy, preferably through raising the tax threashold to £10,000 - something which should have been done at the time of the last Budget in April - with the ultimate aim of achieving parity, through legally syncing the two in statute, with the level of the minimum wage - aroung £11,400. 

Grip, Clout & Bottom...

Michael Cockerill talking about Cameron on The Week in Westminster, quotes a number 10 mandarin - well he's got the three things that a Prime Minister has to have: grip, clout and bottom...

Capital punishment is just wrong

I felt physically sick at reading this article arguing for Levi Bellfield - convicted of murdering Milly Dowler - to be hanged. The picture above, showing young men in Iran being hanged for being gay, gives me that same feeling of revulsion and shame. Shame because these people do these things in the belief that they enhance humanity. Life is so much more precious. I apologise for showing a picture which I had always vowed not to post.
Http://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/the-hanged-man/

What Nick can do next...

I contributed recently to a forum on LibDem Voice on what the party should be doing to secure its future. Depressingly - after arguing the success of achieving 70% of Lib Dem manifesto commitments - I was told that my views were unrealistic. Indeed, all the threads from activists were for dropping any hint of supporting a Tory policy and grabbing the nearest thing to a Labour one that could be found in order to bolster a hemorrhaging voting base - currently plumbing the depths at around 10%.

Now I can perfectly understand that Lib Dems should be worried about such figures. What I cannot understand is a party that wants to go in exactly the direction that is hell bent on destroying it. The Lib Dems are being crucified by the Left, not the Right. There is never so much anger as those who think they have been 'betrayed'. But we need to remember that to betray you must first belong, and Lib Dems need to ask themselves - whether its academy's, welfare reform, free schools, elected police commissioners, the NHS or constitutional reforms - Labour now fights on the side of producer interests and against the interests of the people with every major reform being proposed. Despite the fact that most provide an evolutionary fit with New Labour's Blairite agenda, as the man himself has recently pointed out.

Why would the left have such a pull for Lib Dem's? Partly because it's ideology is based on the principles of equality and social justice - concepts so powerful that all parties now subscribe to them - although welfare dependence, poor educational achievement, the lack of opportunity and deeply problematic social structures are now firmly the province of the Liberal centre of British politics and not the old left.  And partly because, for more than a century of great political struggle throughout the world, it offers the promise of a radical alternative to the dominant capitalist model in which we live.

The problem for the left is that when those principles are based not on people, but on building the state and its bureaucratic institutions as the solution to each social problem, then Lib Dems should be leading the criticism - not endorsing it. As Blair says in an interview with Prospect magazine today; caution against the ‘natural inclination of the party to say "we created the state ... we created its institutions, we should be ... defending the way public services are". This position may be a comfortable one, but it is also a losing one'. He should know. He won three consecutive elections. And he is hated by the left for 'betraying' them.

The truth is that the left continue, under Ed Miliband, to offer only a bigger, more centrist and bureaucratic state - where the essentially personal has been lost. We need to start exactly where we have always been - firmly rooted on the centre ground of British politics, putting people and their aspirations first. Start with the brilliant piece by Julian Astle, a director of CentreForum an independent, liberal thinktank, in Monday's Guardian. He points out that the left has always owned the values of equality and social justice, and the right of liberty and aspiration, the modernisers have sought to blend the two - taking base metals from left and right and turning them into political gold. The first point in the discussion 'what Nick can do next' is to stay firmly rooted on the centre ground giving nothing to both the far left and right in the battle for ideas and policy.

Second - and more importantly because this centre ground is also inhabited by a relatively small but intensely bright coterie of both Blairite and Cameron supporters, each some way from the mainstream of their party - Lib Dems must continue to be at the radical edge of this Liberal centrist Coalition. Not the dour, road block which Gordon Brown represented to Blair's swift foil. As Tim Montgomerie - among the most succinct Conservative commentators - noted in a recent article, over the past year, Clegg had appeared to reject the politics of the lowest common denominator, and backed bold reforms. Iain Duncan Smith regarded the Deputy Prime Minister as a decisive ally in his battle with the Treasury in overhauling welfare. The Lib Dems were also radical in switching the balance of educational funding from university to a child's first few years, when investment can make the biggest difference. On other issues, too – such as pensions, local government or lifting the poorest out of the income tax system – there was something exciting about the Coalition, and their contribution to it.

This is exactly the ground that the Lib Dems should be occupying. Indeed it should go a lot further. Come 2015, the electorate need to understand that the Lib Dems not only delivered the Coalition Agreement including more than 70% of their manifesto, but that they drove the Coalition on some of the most important and radical issues of the day, but which enhanced the lives of the British people - a comprehensive package of penal reform turning prisons into adult education centres and giving re-habilitated prisoners a stake in society, a new deal on the two largest areas of criminal activity which blight our society - drugs and prostitution - bringing them into society, re-writing our privacy laws in answer to outdated super-injunctions, the first comprehensive bill of rights setting out responsibilities of the state and its citizens and incorporating a new UK human rights act, Parliamentary reform including obligatory open primaries for the one third of seats that have a safe majority, expulsion for any members convicted of a serious crime, openly elected parliamentary committee's with the power to set and scrutinise the annual budgets for every quango. Lords reform and, yes, the committment to hold a referendum on PR if a further Liberal centrist Coalition were necessary after the next election.

The answer to the question 'what Nick can do next' is stay radical, stay Liberal and stay at the centre. I really don't think it unrealistic to believe this Coalition is capable of a great deal more. As Julian Astle points out, a majority of the British people are moderate voters unconvinced by the partial solutions traditionally on offer.

Won't get fooled again...

I'm really enjoying BBC2's new series on The Kennedy's rise to power in the early 1960's. We all know the fairy tale - Camelot, Jackie O, '...ask not what your country...' - and the series tells that same compelling narrative that has propelled the myth of the Kennedy's to its current fiftieth anniversary. Gordon Brown even had Ted Kennedy knighted - largely because he was on his deathbed - but then our former Prime Minister did many strange things.

And as I watched, I felt a nagging familiarity taking hold. A young virile new pretender challenges the old order, offering the hope of a better future. His team cleverly harnesses the media, whipping up the kind of optimism, enthusiasm and devotion usually reserved for a rock star. The momentum is stoked to a tremendous crescendo as everyone wants to be part of, and vote-in, the winning team. And once the office has been achieved and the hype dismantled, we experience the deep and profound disappointment at how little is actually achieved.

I see a vision of Tony and Cherie grasping the hands of well wishers as they walk up Downing Street for the first time to the depressing beat of Things Can Only Get Better. I hear the words 'Yes We Can' - emphatically repeated across the lips of a hundred thousand emotionally-drained devotees at a Chicago rally - and realise we have all been here before. And not just once. Three times that I can recall in that last half century of western liberal democracy. Perhaps this is the End of History. Or perhaps history is not repeating itself, just rhyming with its past. But I doubt it. Apart from a rather good spin doctor, on each of those occasions, a young, next-generation, left-leaning candidate has been the phenomena. In each case his greatest attributes have been his looks, his optimism and the lyricism of his oratory - not the content of his manifesto.

Janet Daly on Coalition reforms...

...the only way the Opposition can re-enter the arena as a serious contender is to accept the basic premises of the Right-of-centre prospectus – even if the official Right is busy backing away from them. Among these axioms are: welfare systems which reward people for choosing not to work are socially destructive and morally pernicious; market mechanisms which encourage competition increase the quality and variety of services available to the public; and, arguably most important, tax cuts are the most effective way to stimulate economic growth. Janet Daly on Coalition reforms...

Delingpole on Global Warming...

The Man Made Global Warming industry is a crock, a scam on an epic scale, fed by the world’s biggest outbreak of mass hysteria, stoked by politicians dying for an excuse to impose more tax and regulation on us while being seen to “care” about an issue of pressing urgency, fuelled by the shrill lies and tear-jerking propaganda of activists possessed of no understanding of the real world other than a chippy instinctive hatred of capitalism, given a veneer of scientific respectability by post-normal scientists who believe their job is to behave like politicians rather than dispassionate seekers-after-truth, cheered on by rent-seeking businesses, financed by the EU, the UN and the charitable foundations of the guilt-ridden rich, and promoted at every turn by schoolteachers, college lecturers, organic muesli packets, Walkers crisps, the BBC, CNBC, Al Gore, the Prince Of Wales, David Suzuki, the British Antarctic Survey, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Knut – the late, dyslexic-challenging, baby polar bear, formerly of Berlin Zoo. James Delingpole in characteristically full, passionate roar on the global warming industry...

Radiohead at Glasto 97

Thom Yorke's brilliant vocals being shown on BBC4 tonight from their Glasto 1997 performance - Fake Plastic Trees, Creep, Karma Police, No Surprises... and the wonderful Street Spirit. A long and impressive playlist delivered with passion and conviction - great pleasure to watch.

Liberal moment?

Given the lengths LibDems have gone to since the local election meltdown - mostly in saving the country from those nasty Tories - isn't it about time their polling numbers started to rise? #JustThinking

Via iPhone

Blog via iPhone

@BBCstephanie tweets - Firms supposedly started with bags of spare capacity, yet a mere 2% rise in GDP has needed a 2.5% - 562,000 - rise in private sector jobs.

Philip Stevens on Labour...

Behind the personal clashes and score-settling lies a deep-seated reluctance to face up to the mistakes Labour made during 13 years in government and to accept the scale of its rejection writes Philip Stevens in the Financial Times.

Shoesmith, Balls & process

Agreeing with Ed Balls about anything may seem strange, but his decision to sack Sharon Shoesmith was correct. What a pity then, that he abandoned normal procedure in the way that he did it, laying himself open to this week's successful - and morally wrong - legal appeal. We now almost certainly face a compensation claim by an arrogant and incompetent (according to Ofsted) public servant with little or no conscience, now playing the victim.

The truth is that Labour built their centralised top-down state around procedure - of which the distorting impact of targets was the most obvious result. No doubt, in the case of 17 month old baby Peter, all the procedural boxes were ticked, all Sharon Shoesmith's department knew everything required of them about diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism. They just failed to prevent his death. At every miserable stage.

In Labour's legalistic society - remember them actually legislating to halve the deficit as if that would make it disappear? - procedure was more important than morality. Process was more important than people. Sharon Shoesmith says "You cannot stop the death of children" and "I don't do blame". She is the embodiment of everything that Labour's senior managers stood for. Devoid of conscience, humanity and of course responsibility for the department she lead.

And Mr Balls? His behaviour too was exactly what we have come to expect of the Labour party. They of course, enjoyed a "clunking fist" as their leader. Mr Balls was just another bully. 

The rape of Ken Clarke...

I hear a lot of commentators misrepresenting Kenneth Clarke's comments on rape by taking them out of the context of the interview and purposely misunderstanding the words he used. Clarke did not for instance, say that women were in any way responsible if they were drunk, which some commentators have implied - in fact, drinking did not come up in the interview with Victoria Derbyshire at all. So to imply that Clarke said so is just lazy sensationalism.

Clarke did made the mistake of using sloppy language - of using the term 'serious', which people are taking to mean grave or worth worrying about, when he actually meant rape with 'aggravating factors' such as violence, pre-meditation or sadistic intent.

Far from saying that there is a scale of rape, with date rape at the bottom, he said some date rapes are indeed just as 'serious' - meaning date rape can and often is violent and should be treated in the same way as a random park rape (or as Clarke unfortunately put it, a 'proper, serious rape').

Clarke continually tried to stop the presenter from reducing his policy to a tabloid headline, but everyone is doing quite a good job of reducing the interview in the same way. Clarke never said it was less serious if you know your attacker, or if it was a date rape, or any other type of rape. He tried to stop Victoria Derbyshire from using the average sentencing figures (she suggested 5 years) because he said they included figures for statutory rape, which could include consensual sex between an 18 and a 15 year old - legally rape of course because we need to protect people under the age of consent, but anyone who wants to argue that this is the same as a violent rape is just plain foolish. Yes it is still rape and therefore subject to the same law and sentencing regime ('rape is rape is rape' as the presenter put it), but the fact that Victoria Derbyshire read out the judges sentencing guidelines which differentiate between the different circumstances within the crime of rape, shows exactly what Ken Clarke was attempting - rather poorly - to explain.

What a pity he was unable to articulate it better - particularly poor, coming from a Justice Secretary. And what a pity left wing BBC presenters are allowed to cynically manipulate poor expression to sensationalise and sex-up their own dossiers careers...

People First for the Coalition

Or Labour can carry on being what it is now: risk-averse, ill-defined, dull and complacent in its assumption that the failings of the other side will coast them to power. Well, that worked a treat in Scotland, didn't it? suggests Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer, less than seven months after Ed Miliband became Labour's bright new leader.

Meanwhile, a salutary piece from Tim Luckhurst in the Mail as Labour's top-down, producer-interested elite prepare to take on the bottom-up reforms of the Coalition designed to put ordinary people at the heart of public services. As Lord Hutton - once at the centre of the New Labour cabinet that led similar reforms under Tony Blair - answers to the question what was New Labour's great achievement in public service reform?

The important achievement we had across a range of public services was to get through this very fundamental idea that introducing new providers (the private sector), zero tolerance for failure to deliver, for failure to perform, for poor outcomes, that we weren't just going to focus on who provides, we were going to represent first and foremost not the providers but the consumers of public services - that's the platform now which I hope the present government can build and can start really proper reforms of the public services.

Whether its academy's, welfare dependency, free schools, elected police commissioners or the NHS, Labour now finds itself on the side of producer interests and against the interests of the people with every major reform being proposed - despite the fact that most provide an evolutionary fit with New Labour's Blairite agenda. And with Clegg's big idea since super Thursday seemingly to oppose any reforms in the name of 'muscular liberalism', the LibDems, whose localism agenda provided the glue on which this Coalition's reforms were created, look perilously close to following suit.

As Tim Montgomery points out in an excellent piece in today's Telegraph over the past year, Clegg had appeared to reject the politics of the lowest common denominator, and backed bold reforms. Iain Duncan Smith regarded the Deputy Prime Minister as a decisive ally in his battle with the Treasury in overhauling welfare. The Lib Dems were also radical in switching the balance of educational funding from university to a child's first few years, when investment can make the biggest difference. On other issues, too – such as pensions, local government or lifting the poorest out of the income tax system – there was something exciting about the Coalition, and their contribution to it.

He concludes: Spending the next few years sniping at colleagues, navel-gazing about poll ratings and blocking vital reforms won't impress voters. Moreover, it will harm that other great hope of the Liberal Democrats: that experiencing the benefits of hung parliaments and coalition government will at last end the public's reluctance to vote for Britain's troublesome third party.
 
 

Ed Miliband and leadership...

Interesting polling analysis from PoliticsHome.com.

A quiet triumph for the Coalition...

Labour told us nobody wanted it - not the parents, the pupils or the teachers. They told us the Unions would not wear it. They told us it would destroy our state education system.

Today, Michael Gove announced that more than 1000 secondary schools have applied to become academies - 240 in the last month alone. 647 have been approved. 384 have already converted. In the few short months since the Coalition's legislation was passed through the commons, a third of all secondary schools are either now academies, or in the process of becoming an academy. Schools are becoming academies at a rate of two every school day.

It seems that the education system has voted emphatically for the new reforms. What a triumph for Michael Gove and the Coalition government.

When Labour learns to love Tony Blair they will return to power...

First Polly Toynbee, now Jackie Ashley. Its turning out to be a bumper week for the political reality that is slowly dawning on the Labour party.

Tony Blair once said that the New Labour project would only be complete when the Labour Party learned to love Peter Mandelson. Naturally he assumed that after delivering three consecutive and hugely popular election victories, his own position would be unassailable. He also did not recognise the stupidity of the left.

Labour's problem is Tony Blair. The only Labour politician of our lifetime to have inspired a generation with his political vision and aspiration.

When Labour learn to love him, they will return to power.