If you want to keep something secret…

…have David Heath state it quite clearly and explicitly, on the record, in the House of Commons.

Tonight, the BBC website is displaying the headline “Clegg says dissolution plans must avoid ‘limbo‘”, bringing us the extraordinary revelation that the Beeb’s (generally very good) Laura Kuenssberg detected earlier in the afternoon, that Nick Clegg might be retreating on the 55% rule by “fudging” a time-limit clause into it to prevent a “zombie government”.

Except it’s not really news at all.

A fortnight ago, David Heath stated, quite clearly and explicitly, on the record, in the House of Commons, that:

The legislation will be framed in such a way that, if no Government are formed within a particular time, Parliament stands dissolved.

He then went on to expand on this, saying:

Returning to where a vote of no confidence has taken place, it is extraordinary to suggest that there would be circumstances in which this House would refuse to vote for a Dissolution when it was clear that a Dissolution and a new general election were the only way forward. However, even given that, we are putting forward the automatic Dissolution proposal, as a safeguard that we will make part of the legislation, if no new Prime Minister can be appointed within a certain number of days. It seems to me that that is appropriate.

I know that the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk has said that we cannot make any read-across to the Scottish legislation, but I am afraid that I do not entirely agree with him. One thing in the Scottish legislation is that although a two-thirds majority is required for an early Dissolution, there is a fall-back position, with which he will be familiar, which provides for automatic Dissolution if the First Minister resigns and the successor is not appointed within 28 days. That seems an entirely proper constitutional safeguard, and I am very happy to propose something of that kind for our legislation.

If you don’t believe me, you can see a complete video record of this, here. The latter quote can be found at timecode 1.09:20.

David Heath said these things on 25th May, the day of the Queen’s Speech, responding on behalf of the government to an adjournment debate specifically about the 55% proposal. And yet, half the media don’t seem to have noticed it. Until Nick Clegg says it at a convenient time of day, it hasn’t happened, as far as the media are concerned. And, it would seem, many in the Labour parliamentary party, who continued to pretend not to understand the proposal properly today in their interventions on Clegg’s speech. Quite rightly, Clegg called them out on grasping for “synthetic” reasons to disagree with fixed term parliaments. It is only when you pay attention to the ongoing debates on this topic, and see Labour MPs and others making the same crappy debating points again and again without ever seeming to listen to the answers, that it becomes obvious this is what they are doing.

Jenni Russell argued recently in a piece packed full of win, that:

This public and media culture isn’t inevitable. It’s just the one that we have developed, where raucous, capricious news machines justify any coverage, no matter how skewed, by pretending that it can all be defined as scrutiny. Too often … denunciation is preferred to understanding.

Sadly, this is the modus operandi of all coverage of political debate these days. “Scrutiny” seems to amount to the general principle that parties should be subjected to a general sort of “stress test” of having a set of stock criticisms flung at them. If they come out the other side still standing, they have been successfully “scrutinised”. If not, they have been found wanting. Nowhere in this process does any concept of objective truth seem to exist; the media long since gave up trying to find such a thing, in favour of maintaining a strict “balance” between government and opposition. The opposition could argue that black is white, and the media would still faithfully put this point to the government, five times a day on radio, TV and in print. They take their cue from MPs, so, even when Labour are being transparently opportunist and partisan, this will be the line of questioning which government ministers face.

Ultimately, we end up with an impoverished national conversation, because the media no longer bother to actually pay attention to what is going on and ask questions of their own. They are so used to being spoon-fed it all by the media operatives of the political parties or by leaks from MPs manoeuvring within their parties, it seems to completely pass them by when something is just said, openly, on the floor of the house. We in the Lib Dems have seen this before, incidentally, in coverage of party conference which seems to owe more to the briefings being given to journalists than to actual reporting of the proceedings of the conference.

I am increasingly struggling to shake off the sense that something has gone seriously wrong with coverage of politics in the UK.

Mandelson: Make life harder for MI6 and Police

Peter Mandelson has hit the news today, his deliberations over internet piracy coming down firmly in the headline-grabbing authoritarian camp, with which Labour is as familiar as ever. “Three strikes and you’re out!” he cries.

Curiously, one thing that seems to have disappeared down the memory hole (or at least been soft-pedalled somewhat)  in today’s reporting of Mandelson’s decision is that it comes after several law-enforcement and intelligence organisations let it be known that they opposed the plans, on the grounds that the inevitable sharp increase in encrypted traffic on the internet would make their jobs more difficult. The Times tell us that…

Law enforcement groups, which include the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Metropolitan Police’s e-crime unit, believe that more encryption will increase the costs and workload for those attempting to monitor internet traffic. One official said: “It will make prosecution harder because it increases the workload significantly.”

A source involved in drafting the Bill said that the intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, had also voiced concerns about disconnection. “The spooks hate it,” the source said. “They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult.”

The slightly more predictable bodies are also opposed to the plans, of course: ISPs, the Open Rights Group, the general public, etc. Just about nobody with any knowledge of this situation thinks this is a good idea.

It’s unpopular, it won’t work, and it will make it harder for various people to do their jobs. It’s a perfect Labour policy, in other words. I guess that’s why Mandelson seems determined to plow on regardless.

If you want to do something about this, the ORG have this excellent three point plan:

1) Please download a copy of our MP briefing here (PDF)
2) Contact your MP and ask to see him/her at his next surgery and ask them to back EDM 1997
3) Share any key points from the meeting via this form

There is probably a political space to be filled here. Nick Clegg has already given his opinion in this area, and it’s broadly on the sensible ground that most of the public inhabit on this issuue. Nick’s liberal instinct has left him well placed to make some of the running on this issue. Go for it, Nick!

h/t Slashdot

A List of Labour Hypocrites (and a few who aren’t)

Yesterday, Vince Cable used one of our Opposition Day debates in Parliament to table a motion on Equitable Life policy-holders who have lost their pensions, pushing for justice for them. The motion he tabled was almost identical to an Early Day Motion which many MPs from across the house had already signed, so we had some hopes that reason might win out over tribal idiocy on this occasion.

Sigh.

Here is a list of the Labour MPs who, whilst quite happy to sign an EDM on the matter, couldn’t bring themselves to actually embarrass their own party and vote for the (almost identical) Lib Dem motion when it might make a real difference:

Abbott, Diane
Ainger, Nick
Anderson, David
Anderson, Janet
Atkins, Charlotte
Bayley, Hugh
Begg, Anne
Berry, Roger
Borrow, David S
Burden, Richard
Burgon, Colin
Caborn, Richard
Cairns, David
Campbell, Ronnie
Challen, Colin
Chapman, Ben
Clapham, Michael
Clark, Katy
Clarke, Tom
Connarty, Michael
Cook, Frank
Crausby, David
Cryer, Ann
Cummings, John
Cunningham, Jim
Dean, Janet
Dobbin, Jim
Dobson, Frank
Etherington, Bill
Fisher, Mark
Francis, Hywel
Gapes, Mike
Gerrard, Neil
Godsiff, Roger
Hamilton, David
Hamilton, Fabian
Harris, Tom
Henderson, Doug
Hepburn, Stephen
Hesford, Stephen
Heyes, David
Howarth, George
Howells, Kim
Humble, Joan
Illsley, Eric
Jenkins, Brian
Jones, Martyn
Kaufman, Gerald
Keeble, Sally
Kumar, Ashok
Laxton, Bob
Linton, Martin
Love, Andrew
McCafferty, Chris
McGovern, Jim
Miller, Andrew
Morley, Elliot
Murphy, Paul
Naysmith, Doug
Olner, Bill
Osborne, Sandra
Plaskitt, James
Pope, Greg
Prosser, Gwyn
Riordan, Linda
Robinson, Geoffrey
Ryan, Joan
Salter, Martin
Singh, Marsha
Slaughter, Andy
Smith, Angela C (Sheffield Hillsborough)
Smith, Geraldine
Soulsby, Peter
Stoate, Howard
Stringer, Graham
Taylor, Dari
Taylor, David
Turner, Desmond
Walley, Joan
Wyatt, Derek

I assume they’ll all have very good reasons for changing their minds?

I wish I didn’t have to make a point as partisan as this, but frankly, when you look at the voting on this motion, it’s hard not to.

A genuine well done, however, to the 18 Labour MPs who did manage to vote for the motion, not just sit on their hands and abstain (as a few of the EDM signatories would seem to have done):

Banks, Gordon
Cawsey, Ian
Corbyn, Jeremy
Farrelly, Paul
Field, Frank
Hall, Patrick
Hopkins, Kelvin
Jones, Lynne
Lazarowicz, Mark
McDonnell, John
McIsaac, Shona
Morgan, Julie
Owen, Albert
Simpson, Alan
Truswell, Paul
Wood, Mike
Wright, Tony

Thanks to The Public Whip for the data used to compile this post.

How Shropshire Voted… And What It Got

Well, as I sit here awaiting the trickle of Euro election results, I’ve been doing a spot of number crunching for my local council in Shropshire, a newly created unitary. You can see the results in the chart below. In light of the reputation of Lib Dem bar charts, I thought I’d go with a pie chart. On the outside, you can see the votes cast, and on the inside, you can see the makeup of the council that those votes produced.

As you can see, the wonders of FPTP have struck again. Thank goodness FPTP produces strong, decisive governments. I would hate to think of a party who attracted under 50% of the vote being rewarded with anything other than a stranglehold over the council.

I will console myself with the knowledge that in Shrewsbury & Atcham, we comfortably pushed Labour into third place, with Labour seeing their share of the vote going down by over 14%. In 2005, the county council elections saw Labour in second place, so this could well be an important development for Shrewsbury. In the rest of Shropshire, the Lib Dem vote is more than three times the Labour vote.

Hopefully, this means that, in four years time, if the Tory administration is unpopular, we will be the natural anti-incumbent vote in much of the county.

Open Primaries: An Alternative Answer?

Looking at the Tory talking heads on the news this morning, it appears that, in an attempt to head off electoral reform at the pass, their response to the public wanting a way to chuck out their MP at the ballot box is…. open primaries, USA-style.

Well, it’d be a start. The difference between that and multi-member STV, of course, is that is retains the idea of a party safe seat, but it does indeed allow the public to chuck out one particular person. It’s not, actually, as bad an idea as AV+, which I think would just give electoral reform in general a bad name. But it’s not great. If this gained a bit of momentum, though, and turned into a wholesale debate, along party lines (Labour: AV+, Tory: Open Primaries, LibDems: Multi Member STV), then obviously we’d be in the right, but if it came down to it, we should probably support the Tories over Labour (assuming the policies I posit above, of course).

A Good Day for Democracy: Government Loses Gurkha Vote

Today’s big political news has just broken – that the government has been defeated in the vote for the first of two Lib Dem motions, which make up our opposition day debate. The motion called for an equal right of residence to be offered to all Gurkhas, rather than the unfair cut-off for those whose service ended pre-1997 which the government was doing all it could to preserve. I should firstly say a big congratulations to Chris Huhne, who opened the debate powerfully, and fended off a number of pathetically twatty interventions from the Labour benches with ease.

What is amazing about this is not the vote itself, so much as the fact that the government allowed itself to lose. Governments really don’t like to lose votes. Even on harmless things like David Heath’s Private Members’ Bill on Fuel Poverty, they would rather defeat good ideas, and then implement them later, perhaps in watered down form, as part of a wider piece of legislation. It completely undermines the way parliament and our democracy is supposed to work, but there you are.

So it was that before the debate, on the Daily Politics PMQs coverage, Nick Robinson sagely told us that it wasn’t a government defeat we should be watching for, but how much the government had to give away in order to keep its backbenchers on side. Look out, he advised us, for little slips of paper being passed to the minister towards the end of the debate if the whips don’t think they can win the vote as things stand, thus prompting further concessions.

As it happens, though, the Labour party is in such a state of complete incompetence/powerlessness that its whips clearly weren’t able to guage support sufficiently accurately. Perhaps they simply don’t have enough leverage over backbenchers who all expect to be out of a job soon anyway. In any case, the government, in not announcing a U-turn or something, has allowed itself to be humiliated. Not only that, but on an issue that has attracted an awful lot of public anger; Andrew Neil and Anita Anand said on today’s Daily Politics that they’d never seen such a large and unanimous email response on a subject before.

The other notable thing about this is the photo opportunity that it produced outside the House of Commons, where protesters were making their own opinions on the subject clear this afternoon. There, sandwiching Joanna Lumley, admittedly, were Nick Clegg and David Cameron, side by side. Some will inevitably read a lot, probably too much, into the body language of the two, and whether they looked to be getting on well. Personally, I think they were both genuinely happy to see the typical workings of parliament, where the government simply stifles the ability of MPs to act as the voice of the nation on such straightforward issues as this, subverted for once.

"Green" Gas?

Reading this report on the BBC News site, I was struck by the following paragraph:

Today’s report will contribute to the growing debate about heat, which produces 47% of the UK’s CO2 emissions – much more than electricity or transport. The government will soon launch a consultation on a heat strategy.

Aaaaaaaaargh!!!! Why the hell hasn’t the government already started working out the most difficult part of achieving its 80% cut to emissions? For fuck’s sake, guys, hurry up, we don’t have long!

That goes doubly so because the problem is an exceedingly prickly one, as anyone who’s read, say, George Monbiot’s “Heat” should be aware. Gas is the most efficient producer of heat (as opposed to electricity), but burning it requires a separate infrastructure for its supply, and shifting to hydrogen and combined heat and power (one option) would likely* require a proper, serious commitment from the government to get around the old “no market until all the infrastructure’s in place / no incentive to install the infrastructure because there’s currently no market for it” problem, because the pipes required are different to the ones we currently use to supply natural gas. (* I say likely because I’m sure market fans would argue that companies should be able to see far enough into the future to see a way to make profit down the line, but I have to say, given how good the market has been at thinking long term so far, I’m skeptical.)

The other option is finding enough renewably sourced gas to replace most natural gas (unlikely, and relies on a wasteful economy just when we’re trying to move away from one), moving to things like woodchip burners (not great, a lot of woodchip to be transported about), electrical heating (inefficient, but, with a lot of renewable electricity, an option), or converting all our housing stock to passive houses (also not easy).

What becomes clear is that all the options involve some serious changes and a big, proper commitment from government to a particular strategy. Electrical generation is one thing, but heating our homes and workplaces is a very knotty problem with no simple answers. Anyone looking at this in even a cursory manner could have told you this years ago. So hurry up, government!

Jacqui Smith’s Cunning Plan

Some of my Lib Dem Blogs colleagues have been unaccountably sniffy about Jacqui Smith’s brilliantly clear and incisive analysis of the situation we have with sex trafficking and prostitution. Personally, I think it’s brilliantly sensible, makes absolute sense, and the same strain of thought should be rolled out more widely to solve other problems.

For instance, sweat shops. We all know that the people who are buying garments cheaply from chain stores, without knowing that they haven’t been manufactured by child labourers or otherwise exploited workers, are partly morally culpable, so why don’t we make it illegal for them to buy these garments? Ignorance of the consequences of their actions is no excuse, and we can all agree that this is a stain on the conscience of our society, and action must be taken, etc.

Of course, the business lobby will suggest this will “unfairly” punish customers who buy many “legitimate products”, by simply putting them off buying any products at all. But I think anyone with any sense will recognise that this is a sensible direction to go in. I mean, yes it’s a shame to have an adverse effect on the livelihood of people in good, legal jobs on a living wage, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of cracking down on this great social evil. So lets bang up anyone who buys a cheap item of clothing that turns out to have been made by an eleven year old!

Phew, I’m not sure I could have kept that up much longer. I don’t know how Labour ministers do it.

Seriously, is there anyone who can explain to me what the thinking on this policy is? Can you, dear reader, think of a single other instance where the same thinking would make much sense whatsoever? I can’t. I mean, if people are being exploited, surely the thing to make illegal is the exploitation, and the best way to enforce that is to make said industry as transparent and open as possible, so that it can be suitably regulated and investigated. No?

Jacqui Smith should just be honest, and say that she doesn’t like prostitution, and she wants to ban it. I mean, that’s the only way this makes sense, because as an attempt to tackle trafficking it’s fucking bonkers. But she’s frightened of being honest, because she knows she’d lose the argument: it’s the world’s oldest profession and she’d just drive it further underground, etc. Instead, she fudges a policy together that achieves actually fuck all, is probably worse than either an outright ban or a destigmatisation and legalisation, but which allows her to muddy the political water on this just enough to get away with not doing anything that might be perceived as bold.

Are The Tories Finally Backing Up Their Green Talk?

The most interesting thing the Tories have said today is not, of course, George Osborne’s council tax “freeze”, but Theresa Villiers’s suggestion that they are now opposed to Heathrow’s third runway. I know I should be partisan about this, but I genuinely want to congratulate them on this announcement, not least because certain Tories seem to be in denial about it.

It’s been a long time coming, but on a subject as urgent as this, any conversion is welcome. One might think this means that the Tories have accepted that endless expansion in air travel capacity is not, as so many in the party have argued, simply “necessary” (on the contrary, it has to stop). But don’t be so sure about that. Instead, they are justifying the decision with a two pronged approach:

Firstly, to present a high-speed rail link as in some way an alternative to it. This is, as BAA have pointed out (amongst other squeals of pain from the usual “money must come before planet” brigade), a false choice:

“The total number of flights to Manchester and Leeds/Bradford is only 13,356 or less than 3% of Heathrow’s total flights. Even if every flight from Manchester and Leeds/Bradford were replaced by a new high-speed rail line then Heathrow would still be operating at 97% of capacity.”

Of course, I don’t agree with the conclusion that BAA draw from this (that we still need more air capacity). Rather, I would say that the point to take away from this is that green politicians are, sooner or later, going to have to get away from the soft lie that all our current travel can be replaced with a greener alternative that is in no way less convenient. Quite simply, eventually some brave soul is going to have to tell Britain’s (and the rest of the world’s) flyers that it’s no good, they just can’t feel entitled to go jetting off round the world as often as they like. Cameron sailed close to this with his suggestion last year of a “green air-miles allowance” of one short-haul flight a year per person before punitive taxes kicked in. That, like much of the environmental stuff Cameron’s early rebranding exercise floated, seems to have been dropped six months later.

Secondly, the chatter about a possible Boris Island continues, putting completely to rest the idea that this might actually be a good policy shift from a climate change point of view. On the contrary, if both of these prongs went ahead, they would probably see a greater expansion in greenhouse gas emissions than would be the case with a third runway at Heathrow and no high speed rail link. Of course, even the latter is not desriable.

So, once again, it is left to the Lib Dems to make the green case, since the Labour government have already leapt in on the side of the airport and airline operators, with this choice quote from Ruth Kelly (still here, Ruth?):

“These proposals are politically opportunistic, economically illiterate and hugely damaging to Britain’s national interests. The Tories are posing a false choice – we need both more capacity in Britain’s airports and on our main rail lines.”

Apparently, unchecked growth in greenhouse emissions from the aviation sector are “in Britain’s national interest”. Well it would explain a lot.

Parliamentary Oversight of 42 Day Detention

Just watched PMQs, where all three party leaders did pretty well, I think (Dale continues to push the line that Nick is no good at PMQs, but frankly just looks a bit silly doing so).

What I want to talk about, however, is the point that both Nick Clegg and Michael Howard raised, asking very focussed questions about this parliamentary vote within 7 days business. The Government has suggested that this allows democratic oversight of the use of this power, and that therefore the 42 days legislation does not hand over undue power to an overmighty executive for ever more.

Today, the point was raised that any genuine setting out of a case for extended periods of detention in an individual case would require the potential criminal trial which would follow to be prejudiced, or sensitive information to be disclosed at a time when such revelations would be counter-productive in the ongoing investigation. “Quite right”, replies the government, “which is why all that would happen is that the Home Secretary would come before the house, say that she felt this particular case was jolly important, and could she please bang up without charge someone non-specific who in her judgment is a real rotter?”

If this is the case, then what is the point of this check on the power at all? A Home Secretary who comes before the house asking for approval to use this power without having to make any argument that it is justified in the specific case in question is going to get that approval almost automatically. Here is what will happen:

Home Secretary: I come before the house today to ask for approval of the detention of a person who, in our opinion, poses or posed a threat to the security of the country, and who we need to detain for longer to bring them to justice and/or prevent a terrorist atrocity.

Opposition: Why should we approve this, can you give us any evidence we should do so?

Home Secretary: You know full well I can’t, and when this power was legislated for it was made quite clear that no specifics of the individual case could be discussed. BUT, if you don’t approve this, then you might be responsible for the deaths of a lot of people.

Opposition: *sigh* OK then.

I would put money on this happening 99% of the time. Parliamentary oversight would become a piece of ceremony, with little doubt over the outcome. If the government thinks this is a concession worth shouting about, I can’t hold out much confidence for the other concessions that they claim makes this power more palatable.

Labour’s 5 Point Lead… Over the Lib Dems

So there’s a new Guardian ICM poll out today. (I know, I know, one single poll does not a trend make… still). It makes some interesting reading for Lib Dems, not only because Labour support has dropped sharply, but because comparatively little of it has gone to the Tories. Look:

Worth noting also this from the Guardian’s story on it:

Voters are moving away from Labour to a range of opponents, including the Liberal Democrats, who are on 22% today, up three points on last month.

The party is now only six points behind Labour, the narrowest gap since the Liberal Democrats were founded. Support for other parties, 9%, remains strong.

Detailed analysis shows that former Labour voters are transferring their support in almost equal proportions to the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats, while some established Liberal Democrat voters are transferring to the Conservatives.

This is worth noting. I know picking up Labour votes is the easier proposition at the moment, but frankly, we need to be making some running against Cameron. It’s no good soaking up disaffected Labour support only to haemorrhage it right back to the Tories.

Cannabis

I do hope the party is going to make a bit of noise about this. Not because we’re all doped up beardies, you understand, but because reclassifying cannabis as a class B drug would be daft. The police have said they wouldn’t change back to policing it the way they did when it was class B, and now Gordon Brown is clinging to reclassification, desperate not to be called a ditherer, in the face of his own panel of experts’ advice.

Now, I realise that Chris Huhne is already battling away, and I wouldn’t expect anything else from him. But I do hope Nick will make something of this at PMQs, and I do hope there will be no timidity from the party out of fear of being painted as “soft on drugs”. This is a prime example of an occasion when the majority of the public agree with us, if they stop and think about it without the aid of the tabloids. Make a good argument for liberalism here, and it’s likely to stick.

We have some clear political ground here, the Tories don’t want it. New Liberal Tories they may be, but they’re still the party of moralising and “sending messages” through the law. Just like they think paying people in loveless, strained marriages £20 a week to stay in them is going to help those people’s children. Yet again, this is a Cosy Consensus issue. Make something of it.

And Cleggers? If they ask you if you ever smoked cannabis when you were younger, just say yes, for goodness sake. The public know “I think I’m entitled to a private life before politics…” means “yes” anyway. Nothing happened to all those Labour home office ministers who did exactly this, now did it?

Election Night Reactions

So Dimbleby has disappeared from my screen (meh), as have Vine (hurrah!) and Alix (bah!). Things I have learned tonight:

1. I contributed today to the re-election of Sian Reid by quite some margin. So hooray. Not that I’m surprised – the only other party who bothered to deliver leaflets to me and my friends were the Tories. The best claim “In Touch” could make for representing students was “supporting” CUSU’s Access campaign. Pfft. Don’t get complacent, now, Sian.

2. The Lib Dems apparently exist in some kind of parallel universe whereby we compete in an electoral vacuum. This seems to me to be the only possible explanation of the BBC’s logic. In 2004, when these seats were last contested, we were riding the wave of anti-Iraq war protest votes, the Tories were steadily recovering but not exactly looking great, and Labour were deeply unpopular. This was, in short, prime Lib Dem electoral territory.

4 years later, the Tories are having a resurgence, and the Iraq war has died down. Apparently, therefore, a drop of 4% in our vote is a reason to berate us. This, despite the fact that we’ve just MADE NET GAINS IN COUNCILLORS, AND MAINTAINED OUR LEAD OVER LABOUR IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT, PUSHING THEM INTO 3RD PLACE FOR ONLY THE SECOND TIME IN MODERN POLITICAL HISTORY.

Yes, you heard me: We, the supposed third party of British politics, have just beaten Labour, the supposed party of government of British politics, into third place on projected national share of the vote. We’re doing pretty bloody well. And yet, in the BBC’s logic, we are to be berated because we’re not doing as well as a time when we did even better.

3. The Lib Dems got rid of Ming Campbell because we got 26% in the 2007 local elections. Which is funny, because I could have sworn I remembered something about poll numbers in October at around 13%, a terminal slump, and a media determined to sideline Ming, plus a bottled snap elecction. Must have been an idle daydream. You live and learn.

4. The BBC’s “projected national share of the vote”, when fed into their magic general election machine, gives Labour about 159 MPs and Lib Dems about 56 (if I remember correctly). This, lest you forget, off the back of Labour 24% of the vote, Lib Dems 25%. As fucking ludicrous as our electoral system is, even I have to conclude that the BBC’s election predicting machine has some pretty robust assumptions built into it.

Thank goodness for Alix, or I might have felt like I was going a bit bonkers.

Tax Credits as Tax Cuts

So I just watched PMQs and the discussion of it afterwards on the Daily Politics, which you can see again (today anyway) here. The interesting thing to note here is not the u-turn itself, it is the bizarre situation the government have put themselves in regarding the whole issue of taxation.

Andrew Neil was busy putting a lovely, liberal argument to Patricia Hewitt about just not taxing people rather than making them fill in a form to get their money back. I can’t be arsed to transcribe it, but here’s the conversation stripped down to its core meaning:

Neil: My cleaner pays more tax under this system. You are making her pay more tax, then fill in a big form to get some of it back.

Hewitt: The tax credit system has transformed the lives of poor families.

Neil: She doesn’t have a family, she isn’t entitled to most of the tax credits.

Hewitt: Which is why we introduced the working tax credit for single people without children. But yes, some people still don’t qualify for it, so clearly what’s coming is an extention of tax credits.

Now, pay attention at the back! The argument on this stuff has gone basically as follows since Brown first announced the abolition of the 10p rate in his last budget:

Government: We are abolishing the 10p rate.

Opponents: But that leaves many people, mostly poor people, worse off.

Government: But not all poor people. Look, pensioners, people with children, etc. are fine, because we’re giving it back to them with tax credits and the like.

Opponents: Yes, but what if you’re on a low income and you don’t have children. Then you will lose out.

Government: Lalala, I’m not listening.

Opponents: Well, our constituents are, so we’re going to keep this up and possibly destabilise you.

Government: Oh all right then. But we aren’t reversing the decision.

Opponents: Then you’d better think of something else to make it all better then, hadn’t you?

Government: Got it! We roll out more tax credits and winter fuel allowance to make sure nobody loses out.

Opponents: Hmm. That’s a pretty wide net of tax credits, then.

Government: Oh, don’t worry, it will be.

The point has to be made here that tax credits are supposed to be a redistributive measure, smuggled in by Brown to allow him to feel like a Labour chancellor whilst seemingly not doing too much redistribution. And fair play, there is an argument to be made there; after all, if you want to make judgments about how much of their own money people should be allowed to keep based on something other than their income (eg. whether or not they need to look after children with it), this is one way to do that.

But they’re only justifiable as long as that’s what they are, a specifically redistributive thing, designed to allow the government to effectively tax some people more than others depending on whether or not it approves of their life choices. As liberals we may not like that, but you have to admit that it’s got some ideological underpinnings.

Now look again at what the government and its surrogates have done in conceding the argument to the opponents that there must be no losers from this budget, but maintaining that the way to correct this is not to reverse the original decision (or to do something else to the tax system – say, adopting Lib Dem policy). They have made a mockery of the tax credits system. If, as Hewitt and others are suggesting, the point of the tax credits system is simply to roll it out until nobody is any worse off, then we are going to end up in a situation where everyone on a low enough income is eligible for some tax credit or other, and no fiscal difference has been made to anyone. All that will have changed is that now, people are filling in more forms to stay in the same situation as they had before.

This is bonkers. So in addition to simply pointing out who the people who still lose out from this are, can our response start to take a slightly broader perspective too? Please, Mr. Vince?

A Senior Moment

My RSS feed of the BBC News Politics page currently has this as the top item:

Too many short sentences – Straw

Should I be worried that I then clicked on this, out of curiosity as to why Straw was making an intervention on the nation’s prose style? Perhaps, I thought, it was a comment on someone’s speech.

What is wrong with me?

"Ministers Plan Clampdown" – What A Good Idea

Today’s Guardian front page story (and doesn’t it look pretty now?!) tells us that

A legally enforceable cinema-style classification system is to be introduced for video games in an effort to keep children from playing damaging games unsuitable for their age, the Guardian has learned. Under the proposals, it would be illegal for shops to sell classified games to a child below the recommended age.

At present only games showing sex or “gross” violence to humans or animals require age limits. That leaves up to 90% of games on the market , many of which portray weapons, martial arts and extreme combat, free from statutory labelling.

Now, whilst it is true that the requirement for age ratings to be followed only applies currently to those games referred to the BBFC, there has for a while been a system of indsutry-wide voluntary ratings, first under ELSPA and then PEGI. The problem, as ever, is not so much with the industry, which did everything you could reasonably expect it to without being particularly firmly regulated. The problem comes in the shops selling the games and the people buying them. Whilst most shops, certainly chains, had some kind of policy not to sell games to people under these ages, on the whole it wasn’t exactly ruthlessly applied.

So to be honest, despite it probably being in some sense illiberal, I am all for this. For one thing, if we can’t trust parents to exercise their own control over children in the field of video sales (which are all covered by the BBFC), then why should we for video games. If anything, there is more of a case for intervention here, since most parents don’t play games, and certainly aren’t likely to play a game through before giving it to their children like they might a film.

Another reason I would be wholeheartedly in favour of this is that it just might drag the games industry into a more mature place. There will always be violence in all artistic depictions of events, as the film industry of today shows. But by making itself one of the major avenues for boys (and, to a much lesser extent, girls) to get their hands on the kind of material they wouldn’t be able to get near (hopefully) in any other medium, the games industry has given itself an image problem. From the outside, it is seen as churning out games full of rather adolescent crap for the sake of it (and not without reason – it does produce a disproportionate amount of this kind of output).

From the inside, many games consumers have got themselves into such a skewed mindset that anything not full of guns and violence is seen as in some way childish and immature. Frankly, companies like Nintendo, which produce an output with some kind of balance of subject matter, deserve to be lauded for their maturity, but they receive precious little of this, and when they do, it often comes from parents, giving them an even worse image.

Gaming still has a problem being taken seriously as an artform in the sense that television and film are. To some extent, this will be the case until the generation which grew up with games supplants its forbears, and the average Mail or Telegraph reader has personal experience of playing games and knows it didn’t turn them into either a gun wielding vigilante or an acrobatic plumber, according to taste. But until such time, a step in the right direction might be brought about by this move. My logic for saying so runs something like this:

A large section of the audience for the kind of adolescent drivel which is released is probably underage. If they cannot buy it (and of course, this will not be absolutely the case, parents will still buy things they shouldn’t, just as irresponsible parents will buy their children DVDs they shouldn’t have), this market will be significantly diminished, rewarding those games companies which have staked their business model on expanding the idea of who their typical customer is (like Nintendo), and punish those who have relentlessly pursued a pretty cynical agenda of pandering (like Sony and EA).

On the other hand, this might see an increase in (ugh) sports games.

Brown Lost All Credibility Today

Today’s PMQs has been rather overshadowed by the speaker having to call for temperate language from Gordon Brown (over an issue, by the way, on which Cameron was quite simply correct; there is a much greater responsibility incumbent on the minister who took a decision than on the parties who didn’t object, which the report (pdf) makes pretty clear). But I thought it was just worth pointing out that Vince did rather better, to my mind, than he did last week.

Here is a transcript of the exchange. I include the toadying question which preceded it from Jessica Morden, since Gordon used it to pre-empt Vince’s questioning to some extent:

Jessica Morden (Newport, East) (Lab): Given that we are being asked to reduce our carbon footprint as part of energy saving week, has the Prime Minister had the chance to see the WWF report that came out yesterday, which ranks Newport as the joint No. 1 greenest city in the UK? Will he commend the residents of Newport and its Labour city council for their efforts to cut their carbon footprint?

The Prime Minister: I applaud Newport, and I applaud what my hon. Friend is doing to promote energy saving. I met the Energy Saving Trust yesterday to talk about the measures that we can take in the future. A huge amount of effort is being made this week to persuade people to take the necessary steps to save energy, whether it involves boiling a kettle, putting things on standby or changing the electric bulbs that they use. I believe that the combination of personal responsibility, public investment in energy saving and the new energy policy that we are adopting will be the best way to secure our climate change agreements. We are also absolutely committed to the European 20 per cent. renewables target.

Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham) (LD): On that specific point, the Prime Minister’s predecessor made a very firm commitment to that 20 per cent. target for renewables by 2020. The Prime Minister’s own Ministers are now trying to renege on that commitment. Does not that suggest that Brown is less green than Blair?

The Prime Minister: To be fair to the hon. Gentleman, I am pleased to see him back in his place this week. Given the turnover of Liberal Democrat leaders, it is great that he is still here. However, I think that I answered his question in my last reply.

We are committed to the targets agreed in the European Union. The European Union will now publish what it believes that each country is able to do, and we will engage in a consultation. However, I must tell both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives that that will lead to difficult decisions that they will have to make.First we have a feasibility study on the Severn barrage, secondly we wish to extend offshore wind turbines, and thirdly we wish to extend onshore wind turbines. I believe that the Conservative party has been totally opposed to something that is necessary to meet our renewables targets.

Dr. Cable: If the Government are fully committed to the 20 per cent. target for Britain, why did the Prime Minister’s own energy Minister go on television yesterday and say that he wanted it to be cut to 10 per cent., under pressure from the nuclear lobby? Does the Prime Minister not realise that if he rats on renewable power, not only will that damage the environment, but he will drag his own environmental reputation down to the level of that of his friend George Bush?

The Prime Minister: Perhaps I can explain to the hon. Gentleman what has happened. Europe has agreed on a 20 per cent. renewables target, and each member state will be given a target that it is supposed to agree to and meet in order for the 20 per cent. target to be reached. That has not yet happened; when it happens, we will report back to the House.

I hope the hon. Gentleman will agree that what makes it possible for us to achieve our energy targets is the renewables obligation, which the Conservative party voted against when it came to the House, the climate change levy, which the Conservative party also voted against, and wind power. I hope the hon. Gentleman will join me in supporting wind power and its development for the future through wind farms and turbines.

Interesting that Brown should try to lump us in with the Tories as a bunch of NIMBYs over stuff like the Severn Barrage. Surely he knows that people like Steve Webb have been at the forefront of pushing for this plan to go ahead. Indeed, only yesterday, Chris Huhne reiterated our support for the Severn Barrage in particular and renewable energy in general, as part of a reaction to exactly the issue Vince was asking about today.

Brown tries to turn this into an attack on the other parties, in particular ours, without levelling any specific criticisms at us. The reason is that he hasn’t a leg to stand on. He knows that the nuclear industry hate the idea of big engineering projects in the name of renewable energy, because they want to hoover up the money for themselves. As a result, they are busy lobbying (succesfully, it would seem) for the renewables targets to be as low as possible in the UK.

And by the way, the idea that there is a conflict between nuclear and renewable energy funding is not new. It is central to our party’s opposition to nuclear power. Huhne at conference last year:

First, we reject the nuclear option. Given the time delays, nuclear cannot stop us becoming more dependent on gas over the next ten years.

And it would close off investment in attractive options like the Severn Barrage or lagoon scheme, the Airtricity wind farm in the North Sea, and non-stop tidal power in the Pentland Firth.

How Brown can try to accuse us of being unwilling to take difficult choices for the environment, whilst his government is busy caving in to the nuclear lobby in exactly the way we predicted, is quite beyond me.

Labour U-turn on Renewables

Well, I guess this shows you just how committed to the environment Labour are. They only signed up to the deal in March.

Interesting comments at the bottom of the Guardian’s article on this:

One of the main objections of government to meeting the renewables target set by Mr Blair is that it will undermine the role of the European emission trading scheme. This scheme was devised by the Treasury under Mr Brown and allows wealthy governments to pay others to reduce emissions. “[Meeting the 20% renewables target] crucially undermines the scheme’s credibility … and reduces the incentives to invest in other carbon technologies like nuclear power”, say the papers.

So is this mainly because Gordon would rather just pay others to make the changes we need? Or is this for the nuclear industry’s benefit?

Either way, this is ludicrous. Ambitious targets for renewable energy are surely vital to tackling climate change?

The Cosy Consensus

Whoever came up with making this a central plank of our narrative deserves a medal. The pace with which it makes itself more obvious every day is astonishing.

Hat tip to Paul Walter.

Thank Gord For That

Owing to my disgraceful apathy to a snap election all along, I don’t feel an awful lot is to be said today. It’s all very well to see, up close, the undignified reality of a British Prime Minister so obviously trying to wangle an election his way and abandon it at the drop of a hat . But it doesn’t change the fact that non-fixed term parliaments are just obviously wrong, certainly if the “decider” (to quote Mr. Bush) is in fact very much an interested party.

So essentially I have two things to say about this, neither of which are actually much to do with having a snap election or not, but about the aftermath.

1. Adam Boulton has had a rather good couple of days of it, at least from the non-Labour blogosphere. Meanwhile, Andrew Marr comes out looking decidedly fishy. Not something I really want to see. I believe in the BBC, in publically and government-independently funded newsgathering, and it really doesn’t make me happy to see a great institution like the Big British Castle being regarded as soft on the establishment, and a Murdoch organ, albeit one of the better ones, being (rightly) held aloft by all and sundry as a bastion of (relative) veracity. Nothing good can come of this in the long run. Pull your socks up BBC.

2. Well done to whichever arm of the party apparatus was responsible for this video.

It’s not perfect; it’s a little bit overlong, leading to its becoming repetitive, and could do with a little more polish (eg. The “ten thousand men” point being backed up not by a cloned picture of the same man but of all the Labour MPs and so on who have been trawling the MSM sewing this chatter in the past month or so). Nevertheless, clearly we are well on the way to having another weapon to add to our ground-war arsenal, making the MSM’s insistence on keeping us out of the air-war where at all possible increasingly irrelevant. I’d also like to say that it was nice to see the ad about the phoney Iraq troop withdrawal. More of this kind of thing, please!