The wisdom of Peter Kelner

Isn't there a flower at Kew gardens that lives for two or three hundred years without flowering, suddenly flowers, gives off a terrible smell and then dies? asks Peter Kelner - president of YouGov, a supposedly independent polling organisation - gleefully likening it to the future of the LibDems on this week's podcast from Guardian politics.

I well remember the same Peter Kelner almost crying on election night in 1992 as his polls - having predicted victory for Neil Kinnock - proved wrong and his beloved Labour party faced five more years of opposition.

He continues if I were Nick Clegg I would regard my time as Deputy Prime Minister as a fixed-term five year appointment and ponder life outside British politics after 2015.

Its nice to know that after all these years there's still plenty of balance from YouGov then...

Big Society

 Let optimism beat pessimism declared Cameron in one of his best remembered lines after taking on the party leadership in 2005 - Let sunshine win the day. Five years on, it seems those lines now define the political future for a generation. A call to arms - a statement of intent - whose purpose is to transform the very relationship between people and the state. For the first time since Lloyd George and another memorable coalition government which set the political course for the next ninety years - state pensions, welfare, social justice and universal sufferage - Cameron has set a new and radical agenda that puts people - and no longer producers - at the heart of government.

In office, Cameron is not only keeping that pledge to the British people, he is building it from the bottom up. Day by day, policy area by policy area, Cameron is transforming the relationship between people and the state in every area of political interaction. In education, free schools will be directly answerable to parents. In health, GP commissioning will put patients in control of their health service. In welfare, local government, policing and even the electoral system itself, people are being empowered in a way that must terrify the reactionary forces of top-down, bureaucratic and centralised control that so terrifyingly dominated the twentieth century.

From the left, no arguments are presented against the Big Society. It is seen simply as a cover for cuts - Labour's deficit cuts at that. Whilst charities say it is incompatible with the an age of austerity. And no wonder. These are Labour's children - nurtured by a profligate state swollen by the revenues of dishonest and incompetent bankers on whose sands the house of Labour were built. But as Rachel Sylvester wrote in yesterday's Times, just as Facebook seems pointless, or incomprehensible, to people brought up to communicate by letter or telephone, so the Big Society is hard to understand when viewed through the conventional political prism.

Prisoner voting rights

By 234 to 22 our MP's have voted to continue breaking the law over prisoner voting rights. Apparently it's a great victory for that paragon of civil liberty David Davis. And the result? - an estimated £200 million in fines for the UK taxpayer. Not the greatest result all round then. Especially since MP's voted against this measure in order to prove their independence from the European Court of Human Rights. Not because they believe prisoners should forego their voting rights whilst being held at her majesty's pleasure. After all, if that were the case, there would surely be concerted efforts to separate out remand prisoners - who are usually presumed innocent until otherwise proven - or perhaps prisoners awaiting immediate release into the community having already served their sentence. Or even prisoners who's sentence was less than the electoral period involved. That would seem to most reasonable people at least an attempt at natural justice.

If you want to change the authority of the ECHR then introduce the legislation to do so. Don't play around with the voting rights of British prisoners.

GP commissioning reforms were always at the heart of the Coalition

Huge criticism this week of the Coalition's plans for GP commissioning, principally on the grounds that there is no mandate for such reform because it was never mentioned during the election campaign. This is quite wrong.

Caroline Spelman told the BBC Question Time audience on Thursday that page 46 of the Conservative manifesto outlines the plans and I'm greatful to @sjbaker for his tweet this morning pointing out that the Conservative Draft Health Manifesto published just over a year ago on Jan 18 2010 also says the party will give GP's the power to hold patients' budgets and commission care on their behalf. Seems pretty straight forward to me. It adds incidentally, that they will also link GP's pay to the quality of the results they deliver something we have not yet heard much about...

Well I think it's a nice idea says Polly Toynbee in this weeks Politics Weekly podcast from the Guardian. Surprisingly, she really is talking about GP commissioning of healthcare as proposed by the Coalition and continues in some ways (it is) quite rational that GP's should control the budget because GP's - these are the ones who really spend it - if so in the end their decision to refer someone to X or Y , if someone really needs this treatment, decides what the NHS spends, so it does make some sense. So why so much opposition to the reform? Because its from the Coalition of course. Pure tribalism as usual. 

It is right at the heart of this Coalition government that the people's interest should be put before those of vested interests - the producers. In every area of policy and under various different titles - big society, free schools, bottom-up politics, voting reform, localism - the people are being put first.

Increasingly Labour are finding themselves on the wrong side of this argument defending the producer interest in each case. As Janet Daly points out in a well argued article for today's Telegraph entitled Reform must be rushed, or it won't happen at all, the argument we weren't given enough warning really means we need time to organise obstruction to anything that interferes with our habitual ways of doing things. How very Labour. 

Riddell, delusion and hypocrisy

You really could not credibly make up the hypocrisy of it. Take a look at the comments below David Laws' article in the Guardian supporting the Coalition's economic policies. Six of the first twenty five comments have had to be removed by the moderator. This is visceral hatred driven by pure ideological malice. The type that

ends with the words 'ethnic cleansing' and 'final solution' being written by so-called serious commentators who really should know better. It is blind prejudice. Just the sort of language Democrats in America suggest engenders political violence.

Meanwhile over at the Telegraph Mary Riddell - long an apologist for Gordon Brown's disastrous government and after eight months of attacking the LibDems, week in week out, for forming a radical Coalition government - suggests Nick Clegg and his LibDem colleagues should now be cosying up to Ed Miliband as his natural ally to form a 'progressive alliance'. An alliance of hatred no doubt. She concludes any political courtship between Mr Clegg and Mr Miliband may prove, for the Prime Minister, to be a very dangerous liaison. I am just staggered by the sheer delusion of it; the deep hypocrisy.

Warsi, tactical voting & car crashes

Just listened to that interview with Baroness Warsi on the Today program being portrayed in some areas of the blogosphere as a car crash. Unless you were here, unless you were out delivering and unless you were out knocking on doors, you really don't have a right to complain we weren't vigorous enough she tells right wing critics.

Can't see where the words car crash come in, nor that such a call to action should in any way denigrate committed party campaigners. The truth is that this woman is probably the most combative and credible Conservative chairman for many years and deserves support.

What is needed is some refreshing honesty in the party's advice to their voters. Accepting that there is no electoral pact between the LibDem's and their Coalition partners, but as the third party in this by-election and therefore extremely unlikely to be in a position to win the constituency outright, the Tory chairman should have at least publicly discussed the possibility of Conservatives voting tactically for the LibDems as the only party able to defeat Labour.

There may come a time when the AV system provides just such a mechanism for valuing second and even third preferences in our voting system. Until then, such advice should be given.

Old & Sad in AV

Just a thought on how the Old & Sad result might look under AV.

Labour (14,718 votes) hoovers up second preferences from the BNP (1560) and Greens (530), to make 16,803 total (48.1%).

LibDems (11,160) take second preferences from Conservatives (4481) and (by inference) UKIP (2029) making total of 17,670. 51.3%.

Elwyn Watkins elected MP?

Charlotte Gore on Arizona shootings

...but the Republicans, the Tea Party lot? They’re kind of backwards. Stupid. Possibly inbred. Poor hicks with nothing but guns and hate. You can’t trust them to understand it’s just words, that they’re not meant to literally put Democrats to death writes Charlotte Gore in a great post.

She concludes, the fact that people can actually believe that Palin and Beck’s rhetoric could have turned an ordinary GOP voter into a killer is a sign that the dehumanisation of rival tribes is not limited exclusively to Republicans. The hate, the fear, the distrust – the feeling, it seems, is mutual.

Mehdi Hasan on Pakistan

Interesting piece fom Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman blog that I have only just seen and is worth reading.

Miliband, deceit & Labour's legacy

Denying all responsibility for the deficit is a serious political error says Philip Collins replying to Ed Miliband's assertion that the Coalition is deceiving people when they suggest the deficit was caused by chronic overspending rather than a global financial crisis that resulted in recession and a calamitous collapse in tax revenues. Don't blame us for the financial disaster Mr Miliband protests, it happened to everyone else as well, making it perfectly acceptable. I doubt the electorate will see it that way.

The 1997 Labour government were bequeathed a national debt of around £300bn and left it thirteen years later at £900bn. And thats without including PFI deals which have kept a further £267bn of additional government spending, Enron-style, 'off balance sheet'.

Even with the Coalition halving the deficit within this parliament - which Labour is fighting at every opportunity to stop - that debt will actually rise to more than £1.5 trillion.

This staggering level of debt left by Labour will take a generation to repay. A generation who were not responsible for spending it and whose use of the word 'fairness', might legitimately be very different to Mr Miliband and his Labour cabinet ministers who signed off the spending.

By any measure an apology would be appropriate.

VAT is unavoidable

Happy New Year everyone and best wishes to you and your family for the coming twelve months. Unfortunately, I cannot remember a greater sense of foreboding about the coming year. It seems the Coalition have badly managed expectations at this point - so much so that I am fearful of at least a psychological double-dip - if not the real thing. It certainly seems to me that a rise in tax thresholds to £10,000 - already promised within the lifetime of the Coalition - should not only be brought forward in an attempt to stimulate growth, but the government's intentions actually increased to the level of the minimum wage - £11,400 - by the time of the next election. We small people live in hope.

VAT rises to 20% today as part of the Coalition's drive to reduce the deficit. I have not read his book - The Third Man - but I am told Peter Mandelson records that Alistair Darling twice proposed to Cabinet a rise in VAT to 19% to facilitate just such a reduction. Twice the measure was vetoed by Gordon Brown - the most indecisive and risk-averse Prime Minister in our history. Precisely why he took the easy way out and bailed out the bankers, socialising their losses and creating zombie banks. Our children and grandchildren will still be paying the bills in thirty years time - not the bankers and investors who made the profits. Zombie banks have a long half-life.

The significance here though, is that if Labour were still in power, I have no doubt that VAT would indeed be lower than today. One percent lower. That's a saving of around £78 per household per year. Or £1.50 per week according to the Nick Clegg VAT election calculation. Pretty pathetic really, when you start to read Labour's over-hyped reaction.

The reason VAT has been chosen is that it is the simplest, cheapest and most immediate tax to collect. Businesses up and down the country submit their quarterly VAT returns and payments without HMRC lifting a finger. Its exemptions - food, children's clothing, books, newspapers etc - bring a dose of progression to an otherwise uniform tax, whilst its nature - taxing consumption rather than income - means the consumer has at least some measure of choice about how much and on what they spend their money.

But there is one more reason, not often discussed, as to why VAT is a cleverly targeted choice of tax. For as long as I can remember, many of my neighbours and even several members of my extended family have regularly employed a whole range of professional domestic services - electricians, plumbers, cleaners, gardeners and so forth - every one of which has been paid in cash and usually without a receipt. They are all known by their first names and a mobile phone number. Never a surname or address in sight. They work diligently, at short notice and often engender good relationships with their customers. They are the black economy. Those who pay no taxes or contributions to a society on whom they depend for their livelihood. And VAT is one tax that even they cannot avoid.

I have seen the future and it is hatred

Let us praise Ed Miliband for doing something useless writes Jackie Ashley in today's Guardian. Quite. Her solution? Not forwarding new policy ideas or re-interpreting the way forward or painting that compelling vision of where Britain needs to be. No, just re-directing Labour's hatred - from the LibDems to the Tories. Simple really. Why didn't we think of it before?

Anthony Howard 1934 - 2010

Very sad to hear of the death of Anthony Howard who provided some of my earliest memories in politics. Along with Bernard Levin, I have always thought of these two giants of political journalism as providing the backdrop to politics of the late twentieth century. He will be greatly missed.

License to drugs

Bob Ainsworth suggests we should de-criminalise all drugs. Probably right, but a step too far for most.

What should be considered is the licensing of heroin and it's derivatives so that Smackheads at least can be registered, offered rehab, kept clean - needles, smack etc - and away from some of the more revolting dilutants, not to mention the vast and pervasive low level crime that so characterises drug culture.

Some estimate that drugs fuel nearly half of all crime in the UK - mostly theft, burglary, car crime & muggings - in order to support the vast sums required to fuel the drug habit.

Given Ken Clarke's stance on rehabilitation rather than punishment, licensing heroin and its positive effects on crime levels should be a no-brainer. And the fact that our troops currently control Helmand province in Afghanistan - centre of the world's heroin production - should mean we can effectively control access. What are you waiting for?

Traditional Bleak Christmas

Snagsby, Carboyce, Dedlock, Somerson, Jealaby, Jarndyce and Tulkinghorn. The list of delicious Dickensian names continues. We started to watch Bleak House last night. Again. At what point does annualised Christmas behaviour become a tradition?

Pupil premium

Pathetic says Chris Dillow of the £430 pupil premium suggesting the correlation between school spending and attainment is weak (pdf), and from that he extrapolates that around £100,000 per poorer pupil would need to be spent to equalise opportunities to the levels achieved by Nick Clegg and his privately educated Coalition partners: remember that public schoolboys have the advantages of high expectations, social contacts and good role models, whilst many of the poor have family circumstances not conducive to learning.

But the combination of higher expectations and good role models is exactly what educationalists should be responsible for. Teachers may not be able to provide social contacts, but since when did these enable students to understand calculus? And as to family circumstances not conducive to learning, that is why pupils spend seven hours a day away from their family, in an environment that is designed to be conducive to learning.

Perhaps that pupil premium could be used to further that all-important environment through homework clubs, personal tutors or 1-2-1 tuition? Now that's what I call a premium education on the level of Westminster School. It is also all about teachers, not buildings and expensive resources, where Labour spent our money. And it certainly wouldn't cost £100,000 per pupil per year.

Bottom-up tuition

I know from my own time at university, undergraduates were expected to study five chosen units within their degree area in each of the three years to gain a qualification. The units and their content varied between subjects - and no doubt universities - but in general, each of those five units was taught to students through two one hour lectures and an hours tutorial (a group of around 8 students meeting a tutor) each week. That's 15 hours of formal tuition - well under half of a normal 40 hour working week. And I have certainly come across courses with considerably less tuition time. Its true we were expected to produce a number of essays and took exams at the end of each year, but managing our time and the way it was used was left entirely up to students. But then of course, our three years at university was free. Full grants covered both tuition fees and modest accommodation - usually something resembling a squat - and we were grateful. I never heard of any complaint throughout the time I was there. How things will change.

If students are to directly repay up to £9000 for each year of tuition they receive, they will certainly be demanding value for money. Universities will need to respond. Firstly through a range of more flexible degree courses designed to suit the lives of their learners - not university lecturers. From distance learning, to two year intensive timetables without the usual 20 weeks of holiday, universities will need to offer students what suits them if they are to attract the students to pay for undergraduate studies.

Secondly, within those courses universities will need to offer a level of content that the Facebook generation find both fulfilling and stretching. £9000 should buy you an extensive and highly personal curriculum combining lectures (from senior Professors rather than PhD students obviously) with at least half an hour of open Q & A at the end, at least some 1-2-1 tutorials, personal tutors aimed at matching time management with the universities resources - libraries, archives, laboratories etc - as much as general pastoral care, regularly organised presentations by students to peer groups after research work into specific areas of deeper study within courses, and perhaps even multi-disciplined (across faculty) weekly discussions and debates undertaken by student groups looking at academic issues from differing perspectives. They might even move to the American system of grade point averages whereby grades for each individual assignment throughout the year contribute to the student's overall mark. This ensures both efficient time management and consistent effort throughout the year - not the ubiquitous eight months of alcoholic haze followed by  four weeks of intense revision for an exam.

As students remain content to demonstrate about their having to repay up to £9000 of tuition fees, universities have time to consider the implications. Sometime soon, universities are going to have to start thinking seriously about what that might mean.

Is the BBC a threat to plurality & independence?

State-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy claimed James Murdoch to widespread derision from the mainstream media in his MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in August 2009. Today we might begin to understand what he meant.

Right across the BBC - numerous TV channels, more than thirty radio stations & volumes of online content - the agenda continues unabated: who will rebel against the government on tuition fees? And you would be forgiven for thinking that the outcome will alter all our lives irrevocably for the worse. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ordinary people up and down this country think it's a no-brainer. Students, who benefit enormously from a degree qualification and will be earning over £21,000 before they are asked to pay something back, should shoulder a greater amount of that cost than the low paid. The low paid of course, currently pay for that degree and will never have the opportunity to earn that amount in their lifetime. Its called fairness, and its about time the BBC began to reflect what ordinary people think. Not just the sectional interests of a small but vociferous minority which fits their way of thinking.

A year ago at the Copenhagen climate conference, an army of correspondents dominated news bulletins reporting every last disagreement and suggesting that without an agreed outcome, the world would come to an end. A year later in Cancun, the BBC report nothing. Nothing on climate change that is. Only that Chris Huhn might vote against tuition fees. From Mexico.

Could this have anything to do with the coldest winter for 30 years and records showing no global warming has occured over the last 15 years despite increasing levels of CO2 emmissions?  No? That's just 'weather' not 'climate' right? Or is it just another example of editorial group-think? Similar to the much-criticised group-think amongst bankers that led to the greatest financial disaster for sixty years?

The power of the BBC is enormous. Its involved in every major area of our lives, setting the environment in which events are reported, discussed and decided upon. We need to be constantly questioning whether the BBC is reporting news in an unbiased and honest way. Or does it have an agenda set by group-think? Is it involved in a form of social engineering for its own sectional interests?

Organised hypocrisy

Determined to stay on the wrong side of this argument, Ed Miliband continues his slow car crash on tuition fees at PMQ's.

'An organised hypocrisy' counters Cameron in a really devastating line showing the duplicity of Labour in firstly introducing fees when they had pledged not-to in their previous manifesto - where have we heard that one before? - and in rejecting the recommendations of the Browne report they themselves commissioned in a cross-party consensus when in government.

Opposition & Labour

Even with incredulous-looking poll ratings Ed Miliband's position seems tenuous. Labour blusters furiously for a couple of hundred million ring-fenced for school sport whilst its MP's practise the new sport - bullying the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, the most radical government for a century takes apart - brick by brick - the old centralised, bureaucratic state that built Labour. 

The opposition have yet to realise just how radical this Coalition really is. The largely spent and thinly typecast cries of 'Thatcher's children' betray the irrelevance of Ed Miliband's position - testament only to his continuing politics of the twentieth century. A futile clinging to the nakedness of old labour's tax & spend that brought us to near destruction. A leader of vision is needed to move Labour on, engage and begin to contribute to the new political settlement.

The glue that binds this Coalition is a smart, de-centralised, bottom-up agenda that unifies the Cameron/Liberal tradition across the full spectrum of government. Even the Thatcherite right - so hated in Labour's caricature of laissez-affair and social stigma - remains mercifully irrelevant.

Ed Miliband increasingly finds himself on the wrong side of each radical reform - the latest being tuition fees, without which universities have no long term future (thanks to Labour's deficit) whilst the settlement is both progressive and enhances fairness - despite the obviously selfish arguments of the 'kettled generation'. What is more interesting is how vociferously students reject debt when it belongs to them. In the public sphere, only Labour it seems, so dismissively believes in debt.

This Coalition is effectively beginning to question the reason behind Labour's existence. The central tenet of the Coalition's agenda - progressive fairness - coupled with putting people at the heart of government, will become increasingly and deeply compelling, the further it progresses. Labour needs to be there.

Balance & the BBC

What have the following people in common?

BBC Director General Mark Thompson, Labour shadow Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, a left wing lawyer defending Neil McKinnon against US extradition & latterly taken on by WikiLeaks and finally, Annie Lennox, UN campaigner for AIDS in Africa?

They were all guests on The Andrew Marr show this morning.

No political bias there then...

Today's articles...

Three really good pieces in today's papers from Peter Oborne (on the chilling prospects of Ed Miliband as the invisible Labour leader), Charles Moore (how the Eurosceptic analysis was proved right all along) and Matthew Parris (in praise of the courageous Nick Clegg) in the Times(£). Well worth reading.

The LibDems need to take the argument to the people, not abstain from it

LibDem talk of abstaining or voting against increased tuition fees is just wrong. If you believe in something, then you need to take it to the people and argue why it is right. And this proposal for university funding is right in so many ways.

Firstly it puts the funding of our universities on a stable and sustainable basis for their long-term future, something which successive governments - unwilling to make courageous decisions that require robust and intelligent arguments - have ducked over many years. This proposal allows us to build and sustain world class, research-based universities which are essential to the country's future.

Secondly, it is not about tripling the cost of higher education as so many naive freshers seem to think. The cost of university education is not changing. We are simply deciding how that education should be funded. Whether it should be from general taxation by all taxpayers irrespective of means, or increasingly by students, who are substantial and lifelong beneficiaries of a university education, not least in their earning abilities.

This proposal goes to the heart of a fair society. It is about students accepting greater responsibility for their good fortune by shouldering a higher proportion of the funding from their enhanced earnings. Starting above £21,000 per year. Well above the pay of dinner ladies who currently pay for the university education of our largely middle class children.

Both students and the Labour opposition are on the wrong side of this argument. Not only are these proposals fairer - ensuring that those 'with the broadest shoulders' provide proportionately more funding - they are also progressive. Far more progressive than the current arrangements introduced by Labour. They enhance the participation of poorer students, cover part-time courses and ensure that as tuition fee's move towards their highest permitted levels, wider engagement is actively sought. 

Like so much else that is now being re-evaluated of Labour's thirteen years of expensive, centralised, statist orthodoxy, the most we can say is that they may have had the right intentions. But lazy, self-righteous hysteria against anything proposed by this Liberal-Conservative Coalition who represent 59% of the electorate, is worth fighting. Not abstaining from.

Morality, indignation & Labour

...we have to be humble enough to accept that we do not exclusively own truth and morality... says former party chairman Peter Watt in a perceptive piece for Labour Uncut. He explains,

But there is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure. It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous. We then mistakenly define ourselves as being distinctive from our opponents because we are morally superior rather than because we have different diagnoses and solutions. It is lazy, wrong and politically dangerous.

If you think that I am being harsh, just think about what we say about our opponents. We assume that they are all in it for themselves, that they are indifferent to the suffering of others. In fact, that they are quite happy to induce more suffering if it suits their malign ends. What we don’t think is that they may want the same things as us, but just have a different approach. Instead, we cast high-minded aspersions on their morality and humanity.

Well worth a read.