A balanced analysis of Bromley

A lot of the blogs (Liberal & Tory) seem to be skirting around the Bromley result a bit, with the Tories not mentioning it, and the Liberals considering it an unqualified success. So, I thought I'd have a go at some balanced analysis.

The Good

• The Cons simply can't run a good by-election, even after all this time. A source told me two weeks ago that they'd made a “huge mistake” by letting the local party run the campaign, as so it appeared.

• The debate about the A-List has started, and I stand by my previous thoughts on the folly of this. An A-Lister would have seeped more votes to UKIP and handed the Lib Dems the seat. They'll be tied up in knots about this for the next year at least.

• It shows what we can do against the Tories. In a less safe seat we'd have won, which puts to bed all the nonsense about them being unbeatable. Candidates and agents across the country take note.

• There is no glory for the Tories in winning Bromley. They won't get close to power until they win in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester. Their leadership couldn't find the north of England on a map, never mind know what people who don't drive a Chelsea Tractor actually care about.

The Bad

• We lost. Whichever way you cut it, we spent a lot of money and have no more MPs for it.

• Every time we do this and don't win, another part of the opposition learns more about what we do and how we do it.

The Ugly

• Nobody likes to see an ugly campaign, and we played as much of a part in that as anyone.

• The Tories can't escape the fact, however, that they chose a Pro-European, middle class candidate who didn't live in the area and then signed a false nomination paper, bringing much of this on themselves.

The Lessons

• We're still the best campaigners in the country, and should be proud of that.

• Having a local candidate is vital, and the Tories will pay a huge price for the A-List.

• UKIP are to be encouraged, and David Cameron neglects the right of his party at his peril.

Sky calls Labour defeat in Blaenau Gwent - Updated

Sky News, never shy of calling a result early, has run a story stating that Labour have failed to gain Blaenau Gwent from the (ex-labour) indies.

No word yet on Bromley, which as On Liberty correctly says, means either that they don't know or that they don't much like the result. Having said that, they won't much like The Welsh one either, so it's probably the former.

Update: Labour has conceeded both Welsh elections (BBC Link)

Word from Bromley...

Just had a text from a contact, word from Bromley is "might be worth staying up".

We shall see...

The Irony of the A-List

In the Conservatives do badly in today's Bromley election, either not winning or not winning by much, there will be a lot of debate about the local party's decision to reject the much-touted celebrity A-List. I have no doubt that the national Tory party will throw such a poor result back at them, as a demonstration of their folly in choosing an unworthy candidate (admittedly they might not use those exact words).

However if one reads the press surrounding the election, as well as many things that have been said online and off by conservatives, the main complaint about the candidate that they do have (Three Jobs Bob Neill) is that he is politically incompatible with the formidable Eric Forth, whose death triggered the poll. Eric Forth was a right wing Tory of the old school, fiercely Euroscepticism, pro-capital punishment and often opposed to equal opportunities legislation (he is believed to have once said that he represented “the white, Anglo-Saxon, bigoted majority”).

Now comes our two way comparison. Three Jobs Bob is a Pro-European Tory from the left of the party who does not live in the area, I doubt he was ever on Eric Forth's Christmas card list. Not exactly a like for like replacement? I'm frankly surprised that the local Conservatives chose him.

So, to our A-List. Three Jobs fought off two A-List candidates in the final round of voting, Julia Manning, a married mother of two from Bristol, and MEP Syed Kamall. Can one honestly imagine either of these two being more acceptable to the Tory critics of Three Jobs Bob? I certainly can't, and herein lies the folly of Cameron's tactics. If he had succeeded (and make no mistake, they wanted an A-Lister to win),  the Conservatives would have had an even tougher fight in true blue Bromley, one of the safest seats in the land.

So, extrapolate away from that into seats where the Tories have majorities in four as opposed to five figures, how much will they be hurt in those seats by the imposition of the A-List? Whilst the aim of increasing the number of women and ethnic minority MPs in admirable, the tactics they have chosen to do it leave a huge amount to be desired, and will hurt them at the next election.

Did it never occur to anyone that most Conservatives are white and middle class, and therefore want white, middle class MPs?

Gordon Brown's Doomsday Scenario

It has long been assumed that Gordon Brown would succeed Tony Blair without opposition (from within Labour anyway). Comments a few months ago by certain cabinet ministers indicated that there might be a challenge, and Mr Blair himself has seemed less than keen on handing over the reigns recently. But surely all this is just posturing, and the outcome of any contest is a foregone conclusion? Perhaps not.

A couple of events from the last week or so have had me thinking about scenarios in which Mr Brown might face more of a challenge than he anticipates. It has been assumed that there would be a challenge from the right, now most likely John Reid or Charles Clarke (who is clearly positioning himself as the anti-blair Blairite), as the Blairites don't much like or indeed trust Brown. However, it was always assumed that there would not be a challenge from the left. This was main due to Gordon Brown's greatest trick, convincing the left wing Labour party that he is a left winger, which he is anything but.

However, Gordon's recent comments on Trident were a misguided attempt to reach out to the right (who'll never vote for him anyway) at the expense of the left, who now might not. Unless, in the course of an election campaign, he retracts his support for nuclear weapons he will certainly face a second opponent from the left, most likely Claire Short or Micheal Meacher.

Will they have a chance of winning? Probably not, but given Labour's bizarre electoral structure, with power split between MPs, Unions and members, it is by no means clear cut. In a 3 way scenario, Brown may not get a majority of MPs, as there are at least 100 Blairites and 100 old-lefties in there who would prefer one of the other candidates. He'll walk the membership election (nobody likes John Reid for goodness sake) but the Unions will be crucial. On the same day he made his ill-advised remarks on Trident, one of the biggest unions unanimously voted against any replacement for it, so their support is far from assured.

The situation I'm describing is a traditional vote-split. It remains unlikely that Brown would lose an election, but imagine a scenario where he became Prime Minister with the support of less than half of his own party, never mind the electorate as a whole. He would have no mandate from anybody and would face enormous pressure for a quick general election, something his career-eying advisers (who've waited 10 years to get into Downing Street!) will want to avoid like the plague. Disaster looms for the golden boy.

The Theatre of Human Rights

We all know politicians are prone to saying one thing in public and doing another in private (many people use such behaviour to identify politicians in the first place), but it doesn't always work the way you might expect.

Case in point, the ongoing issue of immigration. The Home Office knows that we need immigrants, and lots of them. So, as the tabloids have continued to muddle immigration and asylum over the last few years, the government has played to that, egging on people's fears and constantly promising “tough” action on both at the same time. In the background however, immigration has been positively encouraged, especially in relation to the enlargement of the EU. Here, we have a demonstration of the government taking a populist line in public, but then actually acting much more sensibly in the executive capacity.

The same approach is currently being used in relation to the human rights act. We've had the tough talk in public (from the Government and now our mate Dave), but in reality nothing major is going to be done, no acts repealed, and the Government will still have to work hard to justify deporting people to countries where they would be tortured, and rightly so. The same will inevitably happen n the coming months with “Megan's Law”.

This is all very well, and in the above examples it is leading to more sensible action than the News of the World might like, but are we not all collectively dodging the issue?

By conducting mock debates in public and then acting differently in private, we are  treating the public with complete contempt, suggesting that they are incapable of rational debate and not worth engaging with.

David Cameron's current talk of a “Bill of Rights” is exactly the same type of nonsense. Anyone with any knowledge of European Law knows that having UK legislation fundamentally disagree with European law is simply impossible (at least unenforceable), so therefore we either have something based on the ECHR or we pull out of it, simple as that.

This continued theatrical, political farce leads only to the man on the street wondering why politicians never follow through on promises (little does he know they are often very busy doing the precise opposite), and apathy reigns supreme. People collectively are reactionary, difficult and often cruel, but individually they are intelligent, reasonable and open to argument. Is it not time for Liberals (and I generously include David Cameron in this, evidence pending) actually confront the issue head on, and explain why we need human rights law? Only then will the policy formed actually be done with a mandate from the people, and not on the basis that we know better than they do.

Or perhaps its Monday, and I'm still feeling a little idealistic from the weekend...

Has the Tory candidate for Bromley been invalidated?

Recess Monkey are reporting that the Conervative candidate for the Bromley By-Election, Bob Neill has been invalidated after making a false statement on his nomination paper. The site reads:

Bob Neill’s ban from parliament stems from his membership of the North East London Strategic Health Authority, a position that explicitly prevents him standing for Parliament under the House of Commons Disqualification Act of 1975.

No mainstream sites are running the story at the time of writing, we'll keep a close eye out.

Cut the bull - Charles is testing the water

The thing about being an aspiring politician is that one pays very close attention to the subtle detail hidden behind what politicians say or do.  So, we come to Charles Kennedy's intriguing appearance on Question Time last night.

Accidents are rare in politics, and his presence on the show at all indicated a very deliberate attempt to do something, I just wasn't sure what. His comments on the future leadership of the party we're very carefully worded and probably rehearsed, designed in detail to seed exactly the sort of story The Guardian ran today.

Forgive the presumptuousness that follows, but speculation is at worst good fun, so I might as well indulge, expressing purely personal opinions of course.

Does Charles Kennedy feel he was badly treated? Yes, I think he does (I know I would). Moreover, he might be particularly stung by the way a private issue was dragged through the press in a frankly humiliating fasion.

Does he think he could do a better job than the current leadership? Probably. The ego of any politician more or less dictates that this must be true.

Would he like to be leader again? Yes, I'm certain of it. Logically, it is the highest office open to him as a career politician. Even if we did have the opportunity to warm the seats of cabinet again in a future government, we probably wouldn't be warming many of them and the leader would get first pick. In other words, all future political routes run through the leaders office, so he either gets back there or leaves front line UK politics.

Of course its not that simple, we have a leader who was elected by a majority of our members, and had the support of the majority of MPs. Also, all of the comments that were made at the time about how difficult it is to be a party leader whilst fighting an alcohol problem remain valid, and Charles conspicuously refused to describe himself as teetotal last night. At the moment it's none our business, but it might well be again in the future.

So, what is he doing? He's dropping enough hints to start a debate amongst the media & membership, which may well continue well into the Autumn conference, which is the first time we'll all get together on mass to discuss what Sir Menzies has or has not done over the past 6 months.

Maybe I'm assuming too much, but the way I see it, this is a smart move by an ambitious politician, one who is still easily young enough to have another crack at the whip in 3 or 4 years time.

Why I'm watching Redwatch

Liberty and free speech are at the centre of what we all hold dear, that famous desire to disagree with what someone is saying but defend their right to say it.

However, a story bubbling around the far right website Redwatch (no, not linked) provides an interesting angle on the debate. Redwatch (along with sister site, “Noncewatch”) publishes the names, addresses and photographs of “lefties”, and is backed by Combat 18.

People have been attacked after being featured on the website, and whilst it does not explicitly incite violence, it clearly has that effect.

So, what to do? Should I swallow a hard dose of liberalism and say that someone expressing an opinion cannot be responsible for the actions of those reading it, thereby defending the website's actions? Or should I instead argue that there is a limit to free speech, and when a crime is committed as a result of words spoken or written, then the author is also a criminal?

My main objection to the government's recent laws on the incitement to religious hatred was that I could say, for example, that I thought that Mormonism was “nonsense” and not commit a crime, but if I said something similar and one of my audience then punched a Mormon for believing what I had decreed as nonsense, I would be on the wrong side of the law, despite my own actions being the same in each scenario. This makes an ass of the law in every sense, surely I have to be responsible for my own actions and not those of others, so surely the people who run Redwatch are not responsible for the attacks that follow?

Now, flip the argument around. Is it acceptable for people to be attacked with a knife because of their political persuasion? No, clearly not. Would the person featured in the BBC article have been attacked in Redwatch had not published his details? No, clearly not. Were Redwatch aware of the risk that someone would take such actions? Probably. Therefore, we're Redwatch not guilty of gross negligence in publishing the details?

There we fall on the key question. It's easy to defend the freedom of people who you agree with or see no threat from. However, when the people causing the problem are targeting you or people like you, it becomes emotive. Is there an ultimate right to free speech, or should you be responsible for the words you write, and for the actions of those that read them?

 

Why we shouldn't ignore the news of the world

It is common for liberals (or “carrot crunching lefties”, as the people in my office call us) to be critical and often quite snobbish about the tabloid press.

The recent campaign by the News of the World regarding “Megan's law” is a good example. In the opinion of most of the liberal press, the campaign is regarded as the usual populist, poorly considered and reactionary nonsense we're used to, and to a large degree it is. One must always be careful when interpreting “fact”, but there is a growing body of evidence that Megan's law simply does not work, with sex offenders being driven underground (and not in the sense many vigilante's would like).

We've been here before of course, when the same newspaper published the details of a number of sex offenders, which led to several innocent men being attacked, and a paediatrician having to leave her home after having “Pedo Scum” daubed on her walls, demonstrating the intelligence of those carrying out such attacks. I have little doubt that before long we'll see the same thing happen again, probably triggered by the same newspaper.

With this hysteria, it becomes vogue to condemn anyone supporting or even listening to such a campaign as pandering to the tabloid media, as John Reid has been. However, should the fact that a tabloid is associated with an issue (or a view on an issue) mean that the issue is not worthy of proper debate, or that anyone agreeing with them is a reactionary fool?

In my opinion, it should not. I'm not a parent, but if I were I am sure I would not want any convicted sex offender within a mile of my children, and who in their right mind would? As that is, to me, a hypothetical situation, it is relatively easy for me to be reasonable about the whole argument, an to see the obvious problems with making information available to the public. But as a parent that distinction would not be so clear, or so easy. Every parent I know would gladly step in front of a train for their child, so what else wouldn't they do? These instincts may well not fit well with our idea of a just society, or indeed be supported by any factual evidence at all, but we cannot ignore basic human nature.

The tabloids are very skilfully (and cynically) exploiting this protective parental instinct to increase their own sales, and they do so whilst taking advantage of their own readership. However, the concerns of those readers are perfectly legitimate, and at the moment the tabloids are the only people listening. Whilst we (the mainstream) refuse to engage directly with these people, they will continue to turn towards the News of the World's over simplistic and poorly weighted argument.

So, as is often the case, the onus is on us to stop sneering at the naivety of large parts of the public, and to instead engage with them to tackle what is a clear and reasonable concern for all parents, all over the country.

The 8 year itch

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it is impossible to effectively govern after about 8 years. Cast your mind back to the last general election, where we were treated to a clearly unsettled Tony Blair telling us that after another victory (with a much reduced majority, and a very small share of the vote) Labour would learn to listen to the public.

Jump to today and we find Hazel Blears telling us the Labour must listen, this time to it's grass roots supporters. So, the spin hasn't changed, but they've narrowed their ambitions somewhat.

I'm sure they don't mean to appear so senile (and I use that word carefully), but we do appear to have reached a slightly nonsensical situation. The Labour Party know they are in a bubble, and their continued assurances that they will listen are probably genuine, but they just don't know how to do so. New Labour formed a whole raft of radical ideas during 18 years of Tory government, so they came to power with a clear idea of what needed doing, with no need to stop an consult the pubic, their own members, or indeed anyone. Now however, all the parts of that original vision that can be achieved (NHS spending, PFI etc) has been, with those parts that have not happened left rotting on the sidelines (the single currency, for example).

This leaves New Labour in a rather unfamiliar position - they don't actually know what to do next. They know the people are unhappy, but like a new parent with a crying child, they have no idea why. So, they pledge to listen, to the public, to their opponents, to anyone who will speak it will seem. However, they have no mechanism for doing so, no way of reaching out to their followers in any meaningful way. Policy has always been dreamed up deep in the bowels of Number 10, and our mate Tony doesn't mix with the public much these days, so how can the real decision makers (which number 4 or 5 at the most) actually listen to anyone except themselves?  People will only speak if they know that they are heard, and it is a true crime of this government that the ears of Whitehall have been firmly shut for so long.

Why tax for the sake of tax?

The Guardian today covers the recently announced liberal democrat tax plans in the context of possible defeat at the Autumn conference.

This is, unfortunately, a realistic prospect. I suspect that a reoccurring theme in my work on this site will be my utter intolerance of those elements of our party who do not see the value of power.

To elaborate slightly, we have a Labour Government which is criticised by many of it's own for not being” socialist” enough. Yet this same Government has dramatically increased the overall tax burden since 1997, and also significantly increased spending, so it is by any definition socialist, at least economically.

We have therefore already had significant tax increases, and this combined with the unquestionable inefficiency with which this government operates, begs the question why taxes need to go up any more? The answer is that they do not, and I fear those that support further tax rises do so for ideological, not economical, reasons.

The question for any future British Government is not how to raise more money, but how to waste less. I am not suggesting the “slice and dice” approach so often favoured by the Conservatives, whereby hard working civil servants are fired en-mass, but an approach that seeks to ruthlessly extract best value from every public pound, and does not automatically assume that throwing money at a problem will actually fix it.

The latest Liberal Democrat tax proposals are a sensible and well thought out method of reducing the burden of tax on the poor, whilst also encouraging everyone to consider their environmental impact, and ensuring that those that harm the environment more, pay more.

They are not a complete solution to some fundamental unfairness in our society, but they are a huge step forward. Most importantly they will not alienate the increasingly large portion of our society who are wealthy, and perhaps more importantly those who believe that one day they will be.

People becoming wealthy and self supporting is good for all society provided they give a fair share back, and that money is then sensibly invested to increase opportunity for all. If we are dragged astray by those who seek to tax for the sake of tax, a long spell on the political sidelines beckons.