Conservative Party Reptile

The morality of taxation

2012-01-30T15:21:00.001Z

Mehdi Hasan has a good line from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in his piece calling for higher general taxation.

"I like paying taxes," the US supreme court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, "with them I buy civilisation."

Hasan goes on to argue that the budget deficit could and should be closed largely by taxation, rather than cuts in public spending.

There are three points that this raises. The first is that the structural part of the budget deficit (i.e. that part that we can't just leave to economic growth to sort out) is about £61bn. Total income tax receipts in 2010/11 were £153bn. That's an awful lot of additional taxation, especially at a time when the talk is all of neo-Keynesian financial stimulus. Hasan correctly identifies that a large cause of the deficit was plummeting tax receipts, but to carry on to say that the solution is sky-rocketing tax rates seems to me a bit of a stretch.

The second is here:

Third, poll after poll shows overwhelming public support for a tax on bankers' bonuses; a mansion tax on multimillion-pound properties; a windfall levy on the oil and utility companies; a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions; and a one-off wealth tax of 20% on the richest 10% of households (which would raise a whopping £800bn and, according to YouGov, is backed by three out of four voters).

That people are in favour of tax increases that don't affect them shouldn't be too much of a surprise (but, Jesus, a one-off confiscation of 20% of the total assets of 2.2 million households? I suspect that this won't be making its way into any mainstream manifesto...).

And the third is this:

Perhaps we can update Justice Holmes's mantra for our age of austerity: I like paying taxes, with them I pay down the deficit.

When Oliver Wendell Holmes made his civic minded declaration about the awesomeness of taxes, US Federal tax receipts made up 2.71% of US GDP, with State taxes pushing the total burden up to about 7%. If my tax rates were so low, I'd probably be a bit happier when I saw the state's take off the top of my income.

Cognitive problems

2012-01-26T09:40:00.000Z

In a piece on feminism in the Guardian Suzanne Moore makes the following interesting point about the cognitive difficulties lefties face when it comes to being 'pro-choice':

This is uncomfortable territory for lefties, because if the state should control everything, then no-one can be said to have 'choice' at all.

Oh no, wait. That would be a ludicrous extrapolation based on a fundamental misreading of left-wing politics. What she actually says, with regard to feminist Tories who oppose the sexualisation of children is this:

This is uncomfortable territory for Tories, because if everything is left to a deregulated market, then everybody is up for sale.

Which is, unsurprisingly, a ludicrous extrapolation based on a fundamental misreading of right-wing politics. But then, it's easier arguing against fictional versions of your opponents.

A slightly odd objection

2012-01-19T10:27:00.000Z

One of the mooted solutions to the West Lothian Question (a question that, while it would be superceded by Scottish independence, would be rendered more acute by any sort of Devo-Max outcome from the Scottish referendum) is that English MPs alone should be entitled to vote on matters that have been reserved to the devolved Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. English votes for English laws.

There is, obviously, a problem with this. What happens if the UK Government is unable to command a majority in England - even worse, what happens if the opposition (for which, read the Tories) are able to command a majority in England? As Vernon Bogdanor puts it:

There would, therefore, be one government for English domestic affairs such as education and health, and another government for UK-wide matters, such as economic policy, social security, foreign affairs and defence.

Well, yes. That's the inevitable result of devolution. Democracy is messy and, as we are seeing now, leads to compromises and coalitions. That's not a great argument for getting rid of it though.

Fifteen minutes of fame

2012-01-19T10:13:00.001Z

I'm probably not the best person to talk about Elly Nowell's decision not to accept an offer to read law at Magdalen College, Oxford. For a start I went to a public school, and for a second thing I went to a college that does not immediately overwhelm you with the grandeur of its buildings (it's rugby team, on the other hand...).

But her 'rejection letter' does raise a couple of points that I think are quite serious.

I realise you may be disappointed by this decision, but you were in competition with many fantastic universities and following your interview I am afraid you do not quite meet the standard of the universities I will be considering.

While you may believe your decision to hold interviews in grand formal settings is inspiring, it allows public school applicants to flourish and intimidates state school applicants, distorting the academic potential of both.

The first is that one of the main reasons that Oxford and Cambridge have an over-representation of independent school students is that they are overwhelmingly more likely to apply. State school students are put off from applying (either by their teachers, or by themselves) in part precisely because of this sort of attitude - old buildings are elitist and snobby: this isn't the place for me. Oxford has been working very hard at trying to dispel this image, but if Nowell's attitude is representative then nothing short of flattening two thirds of the University (or only holding interviews at St Anne's) will be enough, though why, if Nowell has such a dislike of grand architecture, she applied to Magdalen is a bit of a mystery.

It's reminiscent of the Laura Spence affair, and as we can see from the University's response, every bit as unfair and misleading.

An Oxford University spokeswoman said: "Despite what the candidate said, we would point out that the actual admissions figures speak for themselves: of the seven UK students who received offers for law and joint school courses at Magdalen, only one was from an independent school."

The second point is that if she really believes that intimidating surroundings and formal settings are such a handicap to state educated people, I only hope she's not intending to become a barrister.

Straightforward messages

2012-01-18T09:57:00.000Z

From behind the paywall, Danny Finkelstein nails the key problem that Labour have in getting their economic message across:

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Labour has no policy, or that its policy is incoherent. My point isn’t even about whether its policy is wrong or right. It’s just that it has made a policy that was already complicated — let’s put up borrowing in order to cut borrowing — even more complicated — we are against the Tory cuts but we accept them.

Complicated messages - even worse, apparently contradictory messages - don't get listened to. And if people aren't listening, they aren't being persuaded.

I didn't leave the party...

2012-01-17T10:49:00.001Z

The defection of Luke Bozier to the Tories caused something of a mini-stir over the end of the weekend. Not really because of any great inherent significance in a former bag-carrier switching parties (brilliantly lampooned by Sadie Smith) but more because of the reaction of lefties to the news. This ran the gamut from baffled rage to furious contempt, none of them really addressing the central point that Bozier was trying to make.

I became a member five years ago, in the final days of Tony Blair's leadership. Back then, New Labour was still the intellectual heart of the party. A pro-business attitude and a commitment to revolutionising our creaking public services made sense to me...

Ed proudly declared that New Labour is dead; how tragic. With it, the passion for reform that made our party electable has gone. So too has the pro-business, pragmatic approach to wealth and enterprise.

But the Labour Party - which has comfortably turned back into Old Labour - no longer speaks for this country. And it no longer speaks for me and the sort of Britain I want for my children. And that is why, today, I am joining the Conservatives.

Why is anyone surprised at this sort of sentiment? Tony Blair made a great play of having changed the Labour Party - he even changed the name. At the heart of this change was the sort of pro-business rhetoric pursued (even in the dying days of the Labour administration) by figures like Peter Mandelson. It was a conscious abandonment of the old Kinnockite and Footite Labour movement, and was resented as such by many of the old guard in the Labour Party.

Those days are now over - the death of New Labour is not an accusation hurled at Ed Miliband by his opponents, but the Labour leader's avowed position. When Miliband was chosen as leader, Neil Kinnock exulted that he had his party back. So why should anyone be surprised that someone who was attracted specifically to the Blairite re-invention of the Labour Party should feel disenfranchised by the repudiation of that re-invention? Luke really didn't leave his party - his party left him, and rejoiced that it had done so.

Diane Abbott

2012-01-05T14:24:00.000Z

David Cameron keeps on being proved right about Twitter (although, obviously you should all follow me @partyreptile). If there were ever an MP you would predict would be caught up in a row on Twitter, a medium that positively encourages speaking without thinking, Diane Abbott would be at the top of your list. And, sure enough...

Inevitably, it was Guido and Harry Cole who made the running with it, on the straightforward basis that it was, unarguably, a racist thing to say (and, c'mon, it just is. It identifies an entire race with a single characteristic. It's textbook) and that if roles were switched and a white Tory MP had said this about black people, then he'd be out on his ear. That line of attack (citing the Public Order Act...) was echoed by Paul Goodman over at ConHome, though he went further than a call for an apology, and argued that she should be sacked.

The defences were fairly predictable as well - Abbot herself initially said it was all taken out of context, and was actually part of a discussion of 19th Century colonialism (which was flat out untrue incidentally, and a particularly dumb excuse when people could just go and read the exchanges for themselves on Twitter). The New Statesman went for the other old stand-by when ethnic minority people are accused of racism - this isn't real racism (a variant of the Polanksi defence "it's not rape-rape"). Samira Shackle's argument goes as follows (though it's something you ought to be familiar with by now):

1. It was all out of context; and
2. Black people can't be racist, because they're not the dominant group.

This latter argument being made most succinctly by Cameron Duodo back in the mists of time, when this blog was young, fresh and updated more than once a week. It is, obviously, balls. Tell Kriss Donald that he could not possibly have been a victim of racism because he was white.

Yet, for all the coverage of this very minor little storm in a teacup, only Toby Young seems to have looked beyond the crass racial generalisation to see what it was that Diane Abbott was actually trying to say. And it's, well it's worse than a crass racial generalisation. Abbott was responding to a comment by a young black journalist to the effect that talking about 'the black community' was unhelpful, because there was no such thing - there were instead many different communities: West Indian British have different goals and problems to West African British - their differences are as important as their similarities.

Abbott's response - that white people just love to divide and conquer - is remarkable, especially coming from a Member of Parliament. The immediate message is, obviously, to adhere to communal identity politics with solid reliable leadership (i.e. herself), but the subtext is the threat that, if you don't stick with this, the white people are just waiting for the opportunity to pounce, and play one group against the other. That is, that white people are the enemy, and all black people need to ally themselves against the common threat.

The better argument against Abbott is not that she used a lazy, racist generalisation but that what she actually meant by her lazy, racist generalisation was a pernicious stirring of inter-communal dislike.

Slightly unfair criticism

2012-01-04T12:02:00.000Z

2011 was a pretty tough year for Australian cricket (2012 is at least starting out a bit brighter). When Allan Border was appointed Australian captain in thr dark days of the mid 80s, he asked Ian Chappell for a bit of advice. "Whatever you do, don't lose to the Poms," was the succint advice. Not the best of years then. This sort of trauma can lead people to avert their eyes - which is the kindest explanation of this piece from Ben Dorries in the Australian Courier Mail. Because its subject - the relative failure of Test batsmen in 2011 - suffers from a bad case of elephant-missing:

More Test cricket is being played these days but in 2011 there were only two players (Indian veteran Rahul Dravid and Sri Lanka's Kumar Sangakarra) who amassed more than 1000 Test runs for the calendar year. And only three others scored more than 900.

Compare this to some of the huge hauls of past years like Pakistan's Mohammad Yousef (1788 runs in 2006), the great West Indian Viv Richards (1710 runs in 1976) and Ricky Ponting's 1544 runs in 2005.

The problem with this analysis is that Test cricket wasn't played more in 2011 than usual - the reverse in fact. The number 2 Test side, South Africa, played a mere 5 matches in 2011; the number 1 side, England, played 8. By way of reference, Yousuf played 11 Tests in 2006, averaging 99; Richards played 11 in 1976, averaging 90; and Ponting played a whopping 15 in 2005, averaging 67.

There is, luckily a good way to adjust for the disparity in number of matches played - averages. So, lets look at how a couple of the players that Dorries couldn't quite bring himself to mention fared in 2011:

Ian Bell: 8 matches, 950 runs @ 119
Alastair Cook: 8 matches, 924 runs @ 84

Aussie batsmen may have had a shocking 2011, but it wasn't really a global phenomenon now, was it?

I'm pretty sure this is wrong actually...

2011-12-15T13:19:00.001Z

Cheaper than a Big Mac...

As Tim says, I'm quite confident that Zoe Williams is talking out of her backside here:

I've lost count of the number of rows I've had about that, many in public, one live on telly, during which the broadcaster Jonathan Maitland said this was a problem of education: if she knew how to shop better she would have been able to afford a more balanced diet. This is total tripe (which, although famously cheap because it is famously disgusting, is still probably more expensive than a Big Mac); certainly, you could shop differently with the same money and win the approval of nutritionist Gillian McKeith, but if your aim is to avoid being hungry, you could not do that more cheaply.

Well, you can get enough tripe for 3 people for £3.50 so that particular argument doesn't stand up. But more generally, as the commenters to Tim's piece note, if you go for supermarket value ranges of things like pasta, bacon, onion and so on, you can get a solid healthy meal for 4 at very little more than 50p a person. But even if that gets boring, you can make really remarkably good meals for not much more money - certainly less than processed ready meals cost. For the sake of the argument, lets stick with the Big Mac Meal that Zoe refers to as the cheap calorie mecca. £4.59 gets you one Big Mac Meal.

So. £4.59 per serving. I'm a flash bastard, so I do my shopping at Waitrose, making this something of a handicap event as far as I'm concerned, but lets see if I can't beat that. My current favourite 'it's cold I want something comforting' meal is slow cooked ox cheek. How much is that? 500g of ox cheek sets you back about £3, and makes enough for 4. A pint of stock, since we're being frugal, comes from a stock cube, from a box of 6 for 75p. A red chilli, from a bag of four for 60p. Some garlic, at 52p for a whole one. A tablespoon of flour, from a bag costing 48p for 500g. (If we're pushing the boat out, we can add a slug of sherry, at £5 a bottle, but you don't need to). To go with it, some rice (£1.62 for a kilo), and some spring greens for 99p. Where does that leave us? £8 if we're being frugal, £13 if we're splasing out. In other words either £2 or £3.25 per serving - and we'll have lots of stock cubes, garlic, chilli, flour, sherry and rice left over for next time.

What makes the Big Mac Meal more attractive is not its price. It is its convenience. The meal set out above takes about half an hour to prepare, and about 3 hours to cook. That's fine by me, because I enjoy cooking and at weekends I will almost always have half an hour in the kitchen where I can concentrate. That's genuinely not fine for a lot of people, who have neither the knowledge to prepare the meal, nor the time to cook it. Zoe Williams is right that it's poverty that causes poor diet, but it's poverty of time and poverty of education in equal measures, and not poverty of money.

Coming to terms with defeat

2011-12-14T17:45:00.000Z

Sunny Hundal has an interesting piece up at the Guardian. Yes, I was surprised too. It's not immune, however, to a little bit of wishful thinking.

It took the Conservatives more than a decade after 1997 to seriously start asking why no one would re-elect them. Labourites, by contrast, aren't willing to wait that long.

The idea that the Tories weren't asking themselves why they were electorally unpopular until 2007 is a bit of a stretch - they did nothing but ask themselves that right from the moment they were turfed unceremoniously out of office. The problem was that having identified the problem quite early on (that people didn't like them, essentially), and that the solution was to 'modernise' the party's image and win it back a hearing, they weren't able to do it. Hague got cold feet when the polls refused to move and ended up trying to consolidate the party base. IDS tried too, but got swamped by his general uselessness. Howard only became leader as the next election loomed, so concentrated more or less entirely on making the party less of a shambles. It was only with Cameron in 2005 that the original answer to the original question was actually put into effect.

Labour's problem is slightly different to the Tories' old one. Basically, it's not that we don't like them, it's that we don't trust them. Sunny identifies the keystone of New Labour - high tax revenues from a fizzy property market and dominant financial sector could be used to pay for better public services - and notes that this equation doesn't work any more. The problem, as he sees it, is that Labour haven't yet come up with a bolder vision of the future.

Well, that's a problem to be sure. But there's a greater one. While the ideological heft of New Labour could be summed up by the equation above, its electability was based on a simpler one - economic competence and social empathy. With the Iron Chancellor demonstrating prudence in No.11, and Tony lavishing the fruits of that prudence on schools'n'hospitals, New Labour were fearsomely hard to beat. But Labour's lasting legacy will be the economic crash - even Iraq will be a footnote.

It is this that Labour need to address - last time they were in power they ruined the public finances, why should we give them another chance? That's a very straightforward question, and it needs a good answer. Until Labour have thought of one (and it's hard to see how they can with Ed Balls as part of the answer) they're going to stay in the wilderness.

200 years of foreign policy?

2011-12-13T10:46:00.000Z

One of the common responses (and not just of the Euro-philes) to the Brussels non-Treaty has been that Cameron has just broken with 200 years of British foreign policy. Jonathan Powell, not a man crippled with self-doubt, put it this way in the FT:

For 200 years since the battle of Waterloo we have expended enormous efforts to maintain a leadership role in Europe. It is a betrayal of that history to turn our backs on the continent.

While the Dude is rather more direct:

British foreign policy has been remarkably consistent towards Europe for the last 500 years, since the English monarchy abandoned its rightful claim to the French crown. It can be summed up by the simple observation that, seeing as the Hegemonic power of Europe cannot be England, no other hegemonic power should rise to dominate Europe.

Well, up to a point and all that. Powell may view the course of British history from 1815 to 1914 as one of British leadership in Europe - I have to say that history does not particularly support him in that. Throughout the Pax Britannica in fact, Britain made only three really substantial interventions in post-Napoleonic continental European politics - the Crimean War and the two Berlin Conferences of 1878 and 1884. And it's these exceptions that really prove the rule, because the driving force behind each of them for Britain lay outside Europe.

The Crimean War was fought to prevent Russia from carving up the Ottoman Empire. Britain's area of concern, however, was Central Asia - Persia and the 'Stans - because of the perceived threat of a Tsarist army poised to invade British India. The 1878 Berlin Congress was part of the fallout of the Crimean War, and Britain's involvement was principally to protect its interests in the Mediterranean from Russian encroachment. Why? Suez and the route to India.

The Berlin Conference in 1884 was supposed to prevent colonial expansion in Africa from triggering a Great Power war. Bismarck famously said at this conference that "here is Russia, here is France and we're in the middle - that's my map of Africa" - for Britain, the situation was the reverse - it's strategic concerns were East of Suez, and it's equivalent "map of Europe" would have been Suez and the Cape.

Historically, Britain has seen its role as a global power, and neglected continental politics for as long as it could get away with it. Far from being a confirmation of a long-standing policy, the Entente Cordiale was a dramatic change of direction. And why was it seen as necessary? The rise of Germany as a naval power to challenge the Royal Navy. And why was that such a threat? Because Britain's role as a global power depended more or less entirely on the Royal Navy. Even in World War Two, look at where Britain did most of her fighting - Egypt and Burma. Spot the connection?

The real dislocation in historic British foreign policy was the decision taken to try and become a European power (now rather an anachronistic term) at the expense of Britan's global role. At the time the decision was taken, this looked like a pretty safe bet - the coming economic powerhouses were West Germany, France and Italy, while Britain was mired with slow productivity growth, disastrous labour relations and a civil war in Northern Ireland that looked like the ongoing death throes of Empire. Now? Well, continental Europe doesn't look like such a good bet, and the exciting area of growth is East of Suez again (and in another old British stomping ground, South America).

In this context, moving to decouple ourselves from the continental European economy, and looking to new markets in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere, as well as consolidating our markets in the US doesn't look like a bad idea. It certainly doesn't look like a betrayal of half a millenium's foreign policy - it looks like a return to it.

Banging on some more about Europe

2011-12-12T11:29:00.001Z

It's all rather odd. Cameron's veto at Brussels last week has the usual suspects either furious, or depressed, or both. Look at Bagehot in the Economist for instance. Now, the Economist is a terrific newspaper, but it does have a decided position on European politics (I believe their editorial position is still in favour of the UK joining the Euro for instance) and this does tend to colour their reporting of the area. Anyway: a depressed Bagehot:

Oh yes, the banks. The City of London is very important, and the EU has some bad ideas for regulating it. But I find it hard to cheer the idea that Mr Cameron took an extraordinarily big decision last night about our relations with Europe because he was so convinced he could not win arguments in Brussels about those regulations.

And what was Cameron trying to do? What was it that Cameron went to the mattresses over? Bagehot again, but quoting the Financial Times:

Mr Cameron insisted that any agreement to tighten fiscal discipline in the 17-member eurozone should not distort the single market covering all 27 member states. He also wants a separate protocol to protect the City of London from excessive EU regulation, including an agreement to let Britain enforce bank capital requirements that are higher than the proposed European maximum.

Other demands include an agreement that the new European Banking Authority should remain in London and protection from EU regulation of London-based US financial institutions that do not trade with the rest of Europe.

Mr Cameron also wants a written guarantee – making explicit what is already the case – that unanimity should apply to any proposed “user charges” for financial groups, including any variant of the controversial European financial transactions tax.

As seen above, Bagehot thinks this was a pretty weak bit of positioning from Cameron. Who on earth has he been listening to? Well here's a thing. When I read up on what actually happened at Brussels it fired a neuron. 'I remember writing about this before, ages ago' I thought. Tory policy on Europe has always been muddled by an inability to work out what our actual bottom line is - what points of principle cannot be negotiated away. In the aftermath (or anticipation, I think) of the final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty various bloggers were casting around for something to pin a solid Tory European policy on. Someone had a pretty good idea:

The tough fight is on financial regulation. In their dreams, half our EU partners would like to impose martial law on the City of London, under some French general in a képi. In theory, lots of EU financial regulations could be decided by qualified majority vote. Sane countries like Sweden say they cannot imagine imposing regulations on the UK against our will, because the impact on us is too big. Get that in writing: a political pledge from the other leaders that Britain has a veto on financial regulation affecting the City.

Good advice that, and it's pretty much exactly what Cameron did in Brussels. Whose advice? Well, the thing is that it was Bagehot's, back in the days when Bagehot was Charlemagne. I wonder what changed?

Being horrid to women

2011-12-08T15:06:00.000Z

I sort of missed the great furore that erupted last month about the rampant misogyny that lurks in the bottom half of the internet. My initial reaction was that this was another illustration of Gabe and Tycho's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, that Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad, but on reflection I think it's pretty much uncontroversial to say that female commentators, both the proper grown-ups on the newspapers and the ones down in the blogging playpen like the rest of us, get both a greater degree of vituperation, and a nastier, sexualised variety of it.

So, how guilty of this am I? Well, I don't post threats to dismember or rape people (of either sex) so I think I can be excused of the greater sin here, but what about the lesser? Am I effectively sexist in the way I treat female commentators? It's a slightly tricky one this, because the case for the prosecution is a bit haphazard. Look at Nick Cohen in the Speccie, where he damns young Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph as being, (or at least encouraging others to be) a "hollow-eyed masturbator". This is a touch unfair on Daniel, (whose greatest sin is really that he's increasingly unsound) but Cohen's main point is really this one:

No male writer gets the kind of going overs Polly Toynbee, Laurie Penny and Melanie Phillips receive as a matter of routine.

I don't tend to mention La Phillips on this blog that often (basically because she strikes me more as the sort of person to back away slowly from than the sort to argue with or poke fun at), but I can add two more columnists to this list - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mary Riddell. All of these have at one time or another caught my attention and been subjected to my irrelevant savagings. But does that make me a woman-monsterer? Why concentrate on these women in particular?

Two things: the first is that these women make near-perfect blogging fodder. If you want to write an interesting post about a column (interesting to write that is, I don't flatter myself about them being interesting to read) then it needs to be either a genuinely new and fascinating point of view, or an infuriating and easily rebuttable argument. Lets just say that Toynbee, YA-B and Laurie are pretty reliable at fulfilling one of these requirements.

The second thing is that, as far as I'm concerned anyway, I have two far greater journalistic bug-bears, on whom I've wasted far more time and vitriol than any of the three above could ever aspire to - Simon Heffer and Johann Hari. And the reason is the same - they write things that infuriate me, and that I want to respond to. In that sense, the amount of vituperative reaction that these writers get is almost a good sign (again, obviously this excludes the deranged stuff) - it would be far worse, surely, to drop your words into the ether and receive absolutely no response.

So, let's distinguish between the acceptable and the unacceptable forms of abuse and, while acknowledging that women fall foul of far more than their share of both varieties, at least consider that the former may occasionally be more of a compliment than it might at first appear.

What's kinder here?

2011-12-07T12:29:00.000Z

I have a lot of instinctive sympathy for Stella Creasy's campaign against legal loan-sharking, which I first heard about back in February. It seems monstrous that it can be legal for money lenders to charge interest of 2,500% a.p.r.. It's all too easy for a small loan to transmogrify into an enormous unpayable burden by the wondrous power of compound interest. At a time when people are inevitably going to be feeling the pinch, and reports are that more and more are considering this sort of short-term, high-interest loan surely Something Must Be Done?

Um. Well. Quite. But, over and above this instinctive cri de coeur, something nags at me (and did from the first). Let's look at why interest rates on payday loans tend to be so high. Firstly, they are intended to be very short-term loans for relatively small sums. Poor old Joanna Bloggs has to pay £10 to borrow £100 for a week (figures being purely illustrative here). This works out as an a.p.r. of 521% - which seems very high. Arguably, though, a.p.r. isn't a terribly helpful way of measuring a weekly loan. If, instead of borrowing the cash from Honest Bob, Joanna had gone £100 over her overdraft limit (assuming she has one of course), the bank would have charged her £35 for the privilege, which works out as over 1800% a.p.r..

The other reason that charges for these loans is high, obviously, is default risk. Why can't Joanna just borrow the money from the bank? Because, by and large, she can't. The reason she can't is because she's too bad a risk for the bank to make - especially in these days of higher capital adequacy ratios. There are, in short, perfectly good reasons why payday loans are so extortionate, even beyond the fact that the lenders are bastards. Even so, the emotional response is clear - it's not fair that such rates should be charged, and they should be capped, even if the result is that payday loans effectively vanish.

Fine, so we abolish legal loan-sharking. Job done, and we can all feel that nice warm glow of a good job well done. But hang on a minute - all we've done is addressed the supply side of this problem. Joanna still needs that £100 - to fix her boiler, or get her car past its MOT or whatever. We've just ruled out a payday loan, and the bank's are still not going to lend to her. Where does she go now? Is illegal loan-sharking really so much better? Isn't 'You may lose your house' a qualitatively better sort of warning that 'You may lose your fingers'?

The problem I have with this proposal, therefore, is not that I disagree with its aims, but that I worry that it will fail to achieve those aims, and may even make the problem worse. After all, we do have some empirical data on what happens when Governments try to deal with a social problem by prohibiting supply and ignoring demand.

Contra the FTT

2011-11-17T11:15:00.000Z

We none of us like being told what to do by Germans. Volker Kauder's comments that it was outrageous that the UK should oppose an EU-wide tax on financial transactions because "it was defending its own interests" do, however, merit a little more analysis than the easy references to jackboots and what happened last time the UK defended its national interests against Germany - not least because as Dan Hannan says, the WW2 tropes are hackneyed, unfair and unhelpful.

First of all, lets look at what the FTT actually is. For one thing, and despite it being called it everywhere from the FT to the Guardian, it's not a Tobin Tax.

Very simply, James Tobin came up with an idea to prevent currency speculation from forcing countries off fixed exchange rates. A tax put on every currency transaction would act to prevent most such transactions and reduce, so he believed, volatility in exchange rates. 'Throwing sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient international money markets'. In order for this tax to work, obviously, it would have to be universally applied - otherwise the transactions would simply move to no-tax jurisdictions.

The proposed EU Financial Transaction Tax, on the other hand, is quite explicitly promoted as being a revenue raiser although, as George Osborne said, the putative revenues appear to have been spent four times over already. It would also specifically exclude currency transactions (the sole focus of the original Tobin tax) and instead attach to most other financial transactions, albeit slightly loosely defined.

So, that little bit of definition out of the way, lets see why the FTT is such a bad idea. Firstly lets look at it on its own avowed merits - as a revenue raiser. There are two problems here, one static and one dynamic. Static first: the UK already has a limited financial transactions tax - SDRT (or equity stamp duty, as distinguised from SDLT, which applies to sales of land). This raises some £4bn annually for the Exchequer and would be replaced by the FTT. So, how much money would the FTT raise? Central European Commission estimates stand at about EUR10bn - and these are supposed to be remitted to the EU. So the UK would lose a guaranteed £4bn revenue in exchange for a possible EUR1bn return from the EU. That's not a terrific deal.

Next, dynamically. The central EC forecast for the impact of the FTT on EU GDP (whenever we talk economics, we get cluttered with acronyms. Apologies) is a contraction of 1.76%. Obviously, a contraction of this size is going to impact in reduced general tax revenues and in increased social security payments - even at the higher end of revenue forecasts, this would be enough to counterbalance any increase in tax revenues from the FTT. In the words of Clifford Chance, "the FTT is therefore perhaps the first tax in history which is being proposed in the knowledge it will reduce tax revenues."

The FTT is a bad thing purely on its own terms. But that's not all. It's a bad thing for other reasons as well. A tax designed to hit financial transactions will obviously be felt most of all where the highest volume of transactions are located - and there are no prizes for guessing where that is. Now, for the French and the Germans, it is less a bug than a feature that the FTT would spell ruin and desolation for much of the UK financial sector. But when you appreciate that an estimated 80% of the revenue from the FTT is going to be taken from the UK, you start to realise quite why Boris is so animated about this. While banks are relatively static animals (except at the margins, obviously), hedge funds and smaller financial firms are anything but. An FTT restricted to the EU would undoubtedly see almost all of these leave London for other jurisdictions -Switzerland in the first instance, but New York, Hong Kong and Singapore too.

So it wouldn't raise revenue, and would be a severe setback for the UK's principal comparative advantage. You can see why the Government are opposed. And fortunately we don't have to worry too much about it. An EU-wide FTT would be, quite clearly, a new form of indirect taxation. And new forms of indirect taxation require unanimity across all EU Member States to introduce. Even if the UK were alone in opposition (which we're not) there would be no chance of its introduction. No sneaky backdoor routes look possible either.

It is, though, a pretty good shortcut - people who call for the introduction of the FTT are either opportunist politicians who know it can't happen, or haven't really thought about what it's for. Or both, obviously.

Those exciting 70s...

2011-11-14T15:54:00.000Z

In reaction to Smokin' Joe Frazier's death, Gideon Rachman muses that the 70s (with, inter alia, the boxing greats, and the apotheosis of Welsh rugby) may have been the greatest sporting decade of all.

Well, I'm probably a bit biased by my great preference for cricket above all else, but seriously? The 1970s? In the aftermath of England's superb Ashes series last year, the Times (not linked because I read it on my iPhone, and thus don't get pagelinks) interviewed Peter Lever, grumpy but useful quick bowler in Ray Illingworth's successful Ashes tour of 1970/71 and asked him how he would assemble a composite team from the two victorious sides. Lever noted, incidentally, that he wouldn't be considering either Pietersen or Trott for selection because "this is supposed to be an England team" (Basil d'Oliveria famously being from Basingstoke).

The point I wanted to make, however, was that Lever didn't think that his England's opening combination should be broken up, and suggested batting Alistair Cook at 3 to accommodate them. Which would have left a top 3 of Geoff Boycott, John Edrich and Alistair Cook. If those three were batting in your garden, you'd get up to close the curtains.

Um, Yasmin?

2011-11-14T12:49:00.000Z

A slightly weird piece this from Yasmin Alibhai Brown. Effectively, it complains about the role charisma plays in democracy, and compares Berlusconi to Boris (and, bizarrely, to Ayatollah Khomenie, who might be a touch uncomfortable in that company).

But what to make of this?

Increasingly, winning elections is for those who grasp populism and are able to deploy it to their advantage.

Breaking news from 5th century Athens!

Some of us are grim and humourless enough to believe the adulation of colourful figures corrupts democracy.

Some of us have read enough history to know that democracy is all about colourful figures, albeit tempered by sufficient institutional strength to deliver checks and balances: Disraeli, Palmerston, Lloyd George, Churchill, Thatcher.

We are a fast-dying species. The winners will take it all.

This column was delivered to you from a sandwich board on Oxford Street.

The next election

2011-11-01T17:44:00.000Z

Gideon Rachman has an interesting piece over at the FT about Obama's potential electoral woes:

Mr Obama could plausibly argue that a renewed crisis with its roots in Europe is hardly his fault. But such an argument would make him sound like he was weak, or searching for excuses. His Republican opponent could simply pose the old question – are you better off now, then you were four years ago? – and hoover up the votes of the majority of Americans who would reply, emphatically, No.

This raises two points that should be of interest and concern both to David Cameron and Ed Miliband. Cameron should bear in mind that, whatever advantage is bestowed on the Tories by Miliband's desperately weak leadership ratings, ultimately elections are more of a referendum on the incumbent than a choice between the contenders. Labour's weakness is a bonus for the Tories, but it isn't a clincher.

Miliband also has occasion to rue Cameron's luck. Obama won office just as the financial crisis crested - and will be standing for re-election while the aftermath still rumbles on. In the UK, the recession played itself out (in its first iteration at any rate) before the election, meaning that the hits to prosperity and income were largely suffered under the Labour Government. The Coalition, on the other hand, has presided over an uncertain recovery, rather than a full blown recession and can hope, by 2015, to be in full recovery. The question 'are you better off than in 2010' should be a much easier one for the electorate to answer positively in 2015 than 'are you better off than in 2008' will be in 2010.

Let the people speak!

2011-11-01T10:04:00.001Z

In the end, the best summary of the Greek crisis was given by Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister:

I can no longer look at polls where the majority is against the agreement, the majority is against the program, but a majority is also in favor of staying in the euro.

Greece (and the Eurozone more generally) is poised between two deeply unpleasant choices: accepting the deal, which won't solve the debt crisis and will lead to more punishing and deeply unpopular austerity measures; or refusing the deal and starting on the path of default, decouple and devalue. Neither are pretty. Neither are remotely desirable. But one of them must be done.

What the referendum is, essentially, is a requirement that the Greek people act like adults and take a bit of responsibility for the future of their own country. I don't imagine that this will be terribly popular.

Default, decouple, devalue

2011-10-27T12:40:00.001+01:00

Greece, as may have been mentioned once or twice, is pretty much screwed. Its debts are so monstrously disproportionate to its economy that it is not feasible that they can be repaid in full. It is, therefore, not a question of whether Greece will default, but in what circumstances it will do so.

There's growing support for the triple 'd' option of default, decoupling from the Euro and devaluation. There is, however, one point that should be raised in this regard. When Jeffrey Miron writes:

If Greece defaults, the country gets immediate relief from the crushing interest payments on its debt, leaving it with a relatively modest primary deficit which excludes the big interest payments Greece is faced with now.

In such a scenario, the pressure for austerity would therefore diminish. This would allow Greece to choose policies that encourage growth, rather than ones that shrink the deficit but retard growth by imposing higher taxes.

I think he might be missing something. As he acknowledges, Greece is running a primary deficit - i.e. even if you ignore interest payments on its debts. So while a default would free Greece from paying that interest, and thereby greatly reduce its budget deficit, it wouldn't eliminate it entirely. Greece would still be spending more than it earned. There are four ways of dealing with this. Spend less, earn more, borrow the difference or print money to make up the difference. Option 3 will definitely be out - Greece has just repudiated its debt, how keen would you be to lend it more? Options 1 & 2 are the austerity measures that Miron deplores.

That leaves option 4 - printing money. To be able to do this, of course, Greece needs to decouple its currency from the Euro - a task that is far from straightforward or painless. Assuming, however, that it can be done, there will inevitably be substantial downward pressure on the value of the new Drachma (that's rather the point, in fact - the third 'd' is for devaluation). Adding to that existing downward pressure by substantially increasing the money supply to pay for current spending really increases the risk of hyper-inflation which, when coupled with the fall in living standards that's going to happen in Greece over the next few years, would really be extremely unpleasant.

Conclusions? Greece is screwed. There are no neat solutions to this problem. I'm afraid that the time is coming when we're all just going to have to bite the bullet and take it.

Ignorance is strength

2011-10-21T12:38:00.001+01:00

Megan McArdle absolutely nails a phenomenon I've talked about before - the greater the certainty with which solutions to problems are put forward, the greater the ignorance of the speaker.

Then there are the tax nuts, which is nearly everyone. I have seen reporters, wonks, and innumerable blog readers repeat the administration's claim that oil companies were getting unconscionable tax breaks which need to be reformed to pay for urgent policy priorities. I have yet to encounter one who could describe any of these tax breaks; even if they knew the words "percentage depletion allowance" or "intangible drilling costs", they can't describe what those things are. Nor are they aware that many of these allowances are already disallowed for the large oil firms, who effectively almost have their own special tax code.

Don't get me wrong: I'm hardly a tax expert. And there are some wonks, readers and journalists who really are. These people frequently offer interesting takes on these issues, of which I am an avid consumer.

But the number of people who are outraged by these tax deductions, and think they should end, is in my experience clearly much larger than the number of people who have even the most minimal grasp of principles of tax accounting, or a theory of when and how the code should recognize a taxable event, much less a glancing familiarity with the provisions of the tax code to which they are quite indignantly opposed.

The whole thing is well worth a read.

Heir to Blair - ish

2011-10-18T17:14:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure that Steve Richards is right here. His basic argument is that the power of lobbyists is over-estimated because the power of ministers is also over-estimated. None of them stay in post long enough to become truly effective, and true executive power is centred in a very few individuals. By illustration, we have had seven Defence Secretaries in the past ten years (one of them on a job-share) and nine Transport Secretaries. If people aren't even in the job for more than a year at a time, how on earth are they going to be able to have any influence over policy?

This is true, as far as it goes, but what it really represents is a damning indictment of the management of Government by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. David Cameron long ago announced himself (recanting in public, though I suspect re-affirming in private) as the 'heir to Blair'. Yet it has always been the case that the Cameroons have sought to learn at least as much from Blair's weaknesses as from his strengths. Blair always regretted what he saw as his wasted first term in office, when public support was at its peak. Accordingly the Coalition have raced out of the blocks - possibly tripping over the feet as they've done so.

Equally perhaps the one thing that Blair was worst at was Cabinet management. He reshuffled his front bench frequently, and apparently at random. Things were often botched - most spectacularly when the post of Lord Chancellor was abolished for an hour or two. The wilfull failure of communications between PM and Chancellor also saw ministers sacked and then re-instated, or promised positions that never appeared. Cameron (and Osborne, whose power in the party grows by the day - a rare example of a Chancellor growing in political strength as the economic climate worsens) seem to have taken this lesson to heart. Ministers have been told to expect to occupy their positions for the entire first term at least. Reshuffles are out.

Steve Richards makes two predictions: that Phillip Hammond will not be Defence Secretary for more than a year, and Justine Greening won't be Transport Secretary 'for long'. On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised, barring a Rumsfeldian unknown unknown, if they were both in post at the time of the next election. Cameron seems to prize the value of stability within Government to the temporary blaze of attention that comes with a reshuffle. I hope so at least - it's one of the most encouraging things about this Government.

They also serve...

2011-10-18T11:24:00.000+01:00

As I have mentioned before, I have a great deal of time for Alex Massie - of all political commentators about at the moment, perhaps only Matthew Parris more regularly articulates precisely what I think about a subject. Even so, I'm not sure he's quite right about the implications of Phillip Hammond's appointment as Defence Secretary:

How important is the Ministry of Defence? Not, according to Fraser, important enough to this government to appoint a Secretary of State who has any great interest in Defence issues. This is fairly remarkable. You might have thought - and the MoD's particular problems might have persuaded you - that defence would be an issue demanding a specialist but that reckons without the managerial habits of modern politics.

Much as I would love to see the mighty Nicholas Soames (late of the 11th Hussars) returned to the Defence Office I'm not sure that military experience is a pre-requisite for the role. Obviously, post-war British politics was awash with military experience. Conscription and a World War will do that. But prior to that, arguably the two most influential Secretaries of State for War (none of that namby-pamby 'Defence' in those days) were entirely without military experience or even apparent interest in the military.

Edward Cardwell is probably forgotten now, but it was his Army Reforms that formed the foundation stone of the modern British Army, doing away with the purchasing of commissions and establishing a modern system of recruitment (incidentally, ignore the FOAK's claim that Cardwell was 'a former soldier' - he was a relentlessly civilian barrister and career politician).

Equally far-reaching changes were instituted at the beginning of the 20th century by Liberal politician, philosopher and lawyer Richard Haldane. An Expeditionary Force was established, the Territorial Army was founded, a separate General Staff was created for the first time and the entire system of training and tactics was overhauled.

Neither of these men had a military background. Would Alex suggest that the Duke of Cambridge - far more experienced and interested in the military than Cardwell - would have been a better Secretary of State than Cardwell, or that Field Marshall Kitchener was better than Haldane?

After all, Peter Tapsell was in the army - should we dust him off and give him the gig?

Boilerplate lizardry

2011-10-17T11:15:00.000+01:00

It's a shame really. I liked Charlie Brooker when he wrote about gaming and television - he was reasonably witty, moderately original and tolerably fluent. It's unfortunate that none of this has made it across to what I suppose we have to call his political columns. Because they word that most reliably describes these is lazy. Lazy in thought, lazy in language and lazy in execution.

Fine, he's a Guardian columnist, and originality of thought is evidently pretty strongly discouraged. But, and this week's effort is a pretty perfect illustration of this, what a waste of talent. To recap, briefly. In one of Brooker's hilarious columns, he was criticising the BBC. Obviously, since the BBC occupy one of the two great secular thrones in the Guardian's pantheon (the NHS sitting in the other), he had to bookend his incredibly mild critique of Auntie with some boilerplate anti-Conservatism (because, you know, Guardian). And so he thought about it for maybe a second or two and came up with the idea that David Cameron is a lizard who becomes sexually aroused by the pain of baby animals. I know, hilarious right?

Graeme Archer, who has either read a lot less of this sort of thing than I have or an awful lot more, made the point that:

People who look at other human beings, but see lizards hiding behind masks, are the sort of people from whom one normally backs away, carefully, trying to avoid stumbling over the chairs behind one’s legs.

And went on to say that, generally, the modern left's style of debate is to assume that all Conservatives are not just mistaken, but malign; Tories don't just disagree, they are a force of barely human evil. Maybe it's just a perspective thing, but I don't think this is a terribly controversial point to make. Even mainstream left wing journalists - the Toynbees and YABs of this world - seem to start from the conviction that the Conservatives are setting out deliberately to hurt the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Descend into the comment threads in the left-wing blogosphere and it's rather starker - Tories are Nazis. Simple as that.

To an extent, of course, this is a game that can be played by both sides. In the old pre-bowdlerised days the invective at the Devil's Kitchen was pretty unprintable, and the left certainly see the Daily Mail as a constant drip of hate (though I admit I haven't seen anything from them as unpleasant as the Brooker article). On this theme, Brooker used his Guardian column to write a response to Archer's piece, which he started by trying to prove that Archer was a hypocrite:

Archer has a point. It isn't fair to imply someone is "less than human". It would be unfair, for instance, to describe Geoff Hoon as "an overfed, self-satisfied cat, oozing smugness" or to describe Labour MPs en masse as a "legion of dead-eyed Brown spawn", as Archer did in his Conservative Home blog, presumably as part of some strange unconscious typing accident.

First of all, we should at least give some credit for the research involved here - both the pieces quoted date back to 2007. The google-fu is strong with this one. Of course, the actual merit of the argument is less impressive. Archer was saying that Geoff Hoon, did not receive his just deserts for his failings as Defence Secretary (we are reaching back into the Mesozoic Era for this one) but instead,

He was quietly refashioned and now sits as “Leader” of the House of Commons, like some overfed, self-satisfied cat, oozing smugness, ready to lecture us sternly about the importance of upholding democracy.

You know, a simile. Unfortunately, the effort required to miss the point of a couple of blogs written four years ago (so long ago that Charlie Brooker was still funny) appears to have been an exhausting one. Luckily he was able to outsource the rest of the column to his equally amusing Twitter followers. Nice work if you can get it I suppose.

Archer's main point still stands though. Weighting your arguments on the basis that your opponents are wicked sub-human scum is intellectually sterile. Why bother assessing the actual merits of anything? We are right because we are good; you are wrong because you are bad. It's a standard of political analysis that would shame a three year old. Worse than that, it's a line of argument with seriously dodgy antecedents. Maybe Charlie should take a little look at the sort of people that label their political opponents cockroaches or rats and consider whether he thinks this is the sort of thing he's proud of doing.

The value of polls

2011-09-28T15:36:00.001+01:00

On the face of it, Labour can be reasonably pleased with their progress so far. Even discounting the oddly out-of-sync YouGov, the polls generally have them at between 36 and 39% - around 10 points up on their dismal election effort last year. Even taking into account the levelling effect of the reduction in and equalising of constituencies, Labour are far better placed to take advantage of the inherent imbalances in our electoral system than the Tories are - whereas the Tories will need a lead of between five and seven points (depending on how opimistic you are) to gain an overall majority, Labour probably only need three or four points clearance.

Economic indicators are generally dire. If everything goes well for the Coalition, 2015 should coincide with a reasonable return to trend growth, but various Damocletian swords look over their heads. The Eurozone can has been kicked about as far down the road as is possible, and a reckoning is coming - the most likely outcome must surely be that in 2015 Labour will be able to ask 'Are you better off than you were five years ago?' and get a mostly negative response. Elections are won and lost on the economy, and the prognosis is bleak.

And yet the smiling faces at the Labour conference tend to fall into two categories - what Dan Hodges called the Flat-Earth tendency, who are delighted to see that their party is finally back in their hands, and Coalitionistas, who see their electoral salvation in the wonky grin of the Leader of the Opposition.

Should we just ignore the headline polling figures then? Probably - at least for the next few years. The figures to watch are the relative leadership ratings of Cameron and Miliband, the lead in trust on the economy and, almost most important of all, the figures showing who the public blames for the spending cuts. That last, at the moment, is especially bad for Labour. 'Red Ed' may be back, but his future is anything but rosy.

In vino veritas

2011-09-19T14:37:00.000+01:00

This, in a nutshell, is why I don't drink much American wine.

Wine comes from grapes. I know you know, but stick with me. They're either red or white, and they have names. You got the staples, like Merlot, Chardonnay, and Zinfandel.

Match it with a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs!

Jack of Kent on abortion

2011-09-01T11:25:00.002+01:00

The internet is only rarely a conducive medium for rational, constructive debate. Free of the confines of normal behaviour, positions quickly become entrenched and participants rapidly become abusive. Even beyond this general condition, however, debating abortion on the internet is as close to a perfectly pointless pastime as it’s possible to get. Neither side is interested in hearing what the other has to say – neither side, in fact, appears capable of hearing what the other has to say.

Take, for instance, this post by Jack of Kent. Now, David is a thoroughly sane, rational chap (albeit suffering from the usual attendant handicaps of a life in the legal profession). And accordingly his views on abortion are presented as simply a straightforward medical matter:

For me, it is a matter for the woman, and her doctors: a private surgical procedure which is none of your (or my) business.

To get this far, however, he has to resort to misrepresenting the basis of the debate:

On one side there is the autonomy of the individual (in this case a pregnant woman) competent to decide what should happen in respect of their own body; and on the other side are those who seem to resent and deny the competence of that person to make their own decisions.

And that's not it at all. On the one side there is the belief that the mother has the unchallengeable right to terminate her pregnancy; and on the other side there is the belief that the rights of the mother must be balanced by the rights of the subject of that pregnancy. By ignoring this point, David fails to address the underlying point of the abortion debate: just what is that thing in the womb?

If it’s a person, then it has rights, and the most basic human right of all is the right not to be killed. If it isn’t a person, then it has no such rights – but it must become a person at some point. When? First breath taken independently? If so, partial birth abortion must be fine, because that’s not a person you’re killing.

I’m a very long way from being a fundamentalist Christian (can you even be a fundamentalist Anglican?), but I have two small daughters, and I saw them wriggling on ultrasound scans at 6 months (the 24 weeks at which abortion is apparently an entirely private surgical matter concerning the mother's body and nothing else). They sucked their thumbs, kicked and generally behaved in much the same way as they did when they were newborns (except quieter, obviously).

This isn't (as I said above) an argument that tends to get anywhere. But an argument on abortion that doesn’t even consider this question is barely an argument at all.

Dag Hammarskjöld

2011-08-30T17:01:00.002+01:00

The UN invasion of Katanga in 1961-2 was not one of the international community’s finest hours. The context of the Cold War and the era of decolonisation meant that every aspect of the crisis was charged with additional meaning. The chaos that had overwhelmed the Congo following independence from Belgium had terrified the remaining white-run territories in Central Africa. Convoys of refugees came down through Northern Rhodesia telling stories of mass rape, of murder and of the total breakdown of law and order.

The secession of Katanga province was genuinely seen by many at the time as little more than an attempt to salvage something from the ruin of the Congo. The industrial centre of the vast country, it was (and is) home to rich copper deposits, and a network of mines, factories and light industry. Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi) was a modern, developed city – somewhere that the rather more staid citizens of Northern Rhodesia viewed as a continental experience, with pavement cafés and goodtime girls.

The presence of a large mercenary contingent in the Katangese security forces (including such names as Bob Denard and ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare) contributed to the prevailing international view, however, that Katanga and its President, Moise Tshombe, were little more than imperialist stooges, and that the secession had to be defeated, by force of arms if necessary. The UN Secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, tried to resolve the situation without the use of force, but failed, and fighting broke out in 1961. Hammarskjöld flew to the spot in person to broker a cease fire, but was killed when his plane crashed just north of Ndola.

That crash led to a rash of conspiracy theories (in the same way that the death of Samora Machel led to a rash of conspiracy theories) that Hammarskjöld was killed by the usual suspects of MI6, the CIA, BOSS, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. These have been given a recent airing in the Guardian where it has been reported that a certain Göran Björkdahl has spent the last three years interviewing local witnesses of the crash and has decided that the crash was, well, a conspiracy between the British, the Americans and the South Africans. Without wishing to be unduly sceptical, when your star witnesses are “mostly charcoal-makers from the forest around Ndola, now in their 70s and 80s” describing events from 50 years ago you are going to be facing a struggle for credibility.

Brian Unwin, who was involved in the British diplomatic effort at the time, has effectively rebutted much of the “eye-witness” evidence in the Guardian, but there is one further point that occurred to me reading the original article. There was one survivor of the crash, who subsequently died in hospital in Ndola of his injuries. This is described by Björkdahl as “a poorly equipped local hospital”. I’m sure that’s true today. In 1961, however, Ndola, as the capital of the Copperbelt, was about the most prosperous and commercially vibrant town in Central Africa. Short of evacuation to the United States, there weren’t many better places to be.

Being wrong about cricket

2011-08-04T12:03:00.002+01:00

I have commented before on the difficulties political journalists can get themselves into writing about cricket – and for all his faults Simon Heffer does at least know about the game. This article, however, by the Guardian’s Peter Wilby stands alone in its worthlessness. It’s partly about how marvellous it is that second and third generation British Indians prefer to support the country of their great-grandfathers rather than the country of their birth. It’s also about how marvellous it is that world cricket is now dominated by India.

I’ll admit to disagreeing on both counts here. If I were to emigrate to Australia, I would continue to cheer for England until the day I died. But I would expect my children to aspire to the baggy green. I think it’s a shame that there isn’t greater assimilation in this country, and I also think it’s bad for what might be called communal relations. There are a few role models to follow – Nasser Hussain and Monty Panesar to name but two – and it would be nice to think that British Asians might come in the future to put the stress on the first half of that construction rather than the second. Equally, while I agree that it’s no bad thing for world cricket that the game is no longer dominated by the MCC, I’m not so sure that the BCCI is a particularly terrific replacement.

Reasonable people can reasonably disagree on all that, but there’s little point in looking for serious cricket analysis in a piece that contains lines like the following:

When the Australians were getting uppity in the 1930s, cheekily putting tariffs on British cricket balls and other goods, the English establishment concocted bodyline bowling to teach them a lesson.

Because, obviously, bodyline bowling was designed to punish Australia for its protectionist trade policy. Sheesh.

They hate it so much...

2011-07-28T12:56:00.004+01:00

Strong work this.

18 November 2010
Labour rallies against permanent RPI-CPI switch
Labour Shadow pensions minister Rachel Reeves says the opposition party will oppose a permanent switch in pensions indexation from RPI to CPI.

28 July 2011
Labour’s pension fund swings from red to black
The shift from red to black has been largely inspired by the government’s change last summer from RPI to CPI inflation on pension increases for public sector staff. Labour, although obviously a private organisation, has followed suit.

A ready-made rebuttal to Labour’s opposition on pensions.

A lot of miles on the clock

2011-07-28T12:39:00.002+01:00

A lot is being said right now both about how drastically undercooked India were for the first Test at Lords last week, and about how their record shows a remarkable ability to bounce back from bad results. In 2002, for example, they got thumped at Lords, held on at Trent Bridge and then won handsomely at Headingley. Well, the proof of that particular pudding will be in he eating of it over the next few weeks. What interested me, however, was looking at those games back in 2002.

Lets take the last Test at the Oval – which I remember chiefly for a dreamy 195 from Michael Vaughan. England’s batsman were Trescothick, Vaughan, Butcher, Crawley, Hussain and Stewart. Their bowlers were Cork, Tudor, Giles, Caddick and Hoggard. Apart from noting the far-off days of a five-man attack, it’s also worth pointing out that none of the above are still playing for England, and only three are even playing first class cricket. But then, it was 9 years ago.

Now lets look at India. Batting: Bangar, Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Laxman. Three of them played last week, and it would have been four if the selectors had their way. Even in the bowling attack Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan made the eleven a decade ago, and are still wearily ploughing a furrow up to the popping crease. This is an Indian team with a hell of a lot of miles on the clock.

There are three points to make about that. The first is that aging bodies injure easier – it was a biter blow for India when Zaheer hobbled off at Lords with a popped hamstring, but it wasn’t exactly the surprise of the century. The second is that a line-up of superstars can often get a bit too set in their ways. Duncan Fletcher really will have his work cut out persuading his batting galacticos to concentrate on ground fielding and basic fitness. And the third is that aging superstars have a nasty tendency to retire more or less at the same time – Australia in the early 80s, the West Indies in the early 90s, and Australia in the mid 2000s. When the triumvirate of Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman go – and they are all pushing 40 – it will leave one hell of a gap in the side. It could prove a pretty short stay at the top for India.

No time to go wobbly

2011-07-27T12:21:00.002+01:00

0.2% growth in Q2 is, while in line with predictions, really nothing terribly special. The chaps at FT Alphaville call it a ‘pass grade’ and I suspect that’s fair enough. The economy is, and will remain, the key political battleground of this Parliament. So far, indeed, the only really defining theme of the Coalition is its attempts to reduce the deficit. A word here on deficits. I have given up on being surprised at how few people really seem to understand the difference between debt and deficit. The always estimable Fleet Street Fox puts her finger perfectly on it here:

THE best analogy I've heard for our economy is that the national debt is like a bath filled with water, and the deficit is like leaving the taps on.

Quite. Debt is a stock, the deficit is a flow. But then, alas:

The spending cuts the Coalition has made - the warships scrapped, the coppers sacked, the day care centres closed - amount to trying to empty that bath with an egg cup.

Would that they did. We’re not even nearly at the point of emptying the bath. All the cuts (and in all truth, the cuts already implemented are very small potatoes indeed) are designed to try and shut off the faucets. We’re still running a substantial deficit – and are forecast to be doing so right the way through this Parliament.

What would kill this Government is if the cost of all this borrowing were to rise substantially – as it did in Greece and just has done in Italy. The Government’s fiscal policy can be interpreted more or less entirely as an attempt to demonstrate to the world that, although the UK finances are in a pretty ordinary state, there is at least a clear and credible plan to remedy matters, and the Government are strong enough and determined enough to see it through. In the medium term at least, nothing matters more than this. And how are they doing on this front?

The UK hasn’t been totally repriced over the past 15 months because the deficit has collapsed, it has been repriced because of the evident and absolute political commitment to get the deficit down which when compared with peers in the likes of US or France leaves the UK as a very obvious relative safe-haven. Is that political commitment diminishing? We think not.

Ed Balls is the equivalent of a Cornish wrecker holding a false light off Land’s End – reversing UK fiscal policy and increasing public spending would send catastrophic signals about the long-term viability of UK debt – signals that would act as a self-fulfilling prophecy as the cost of borrowing increased. This is no time to go wobbly George.

Motes & Beams

2011-07-21T13:27:00.002+01:00

This is pretty meta. Matthew Norman, in an article about chutzpah, and how Boris Johnson is its anthropomorphic representation, damns the tousled one in the following terms:

He was once, for example, a dodgy News International journo himself, being fired by The Times for manufacturing a quote.

And where is this article written? The Independent, which when it comes to quote manufacturing is the Chinese super-factory to Boris’s cottage industry. Now that’s chutzpah…

Preferring to forget

2011-07-18T10:14:00.002+01:00

I can understand it, I suppose, but there’s something missing in this summary of the First Test between India and England at Lords in 1990.

In the first Test of the 1990 series, we lost badly at Lord's after failing with the bat in the second innings.

Well, two things really. The first thing that it misses is the fact that Graham Gooch scored more runs in that Test match than anyone else ever has in the history of the game. 333 in the first innings, and 123 in the second. And the second is that, just 30 odd runs into his first innings marathon, the Indian keeper, Kiran More, dropped an absolute sitter behind the stumps. An odd omission. Who’s the writer?

Kiran More, a wicketkeeper, played 49 Tests for India from 1986 to 1993

Ah.

Is David Cameron still a lucky general?

2011-07-13T13:46:00.000+01:00

It hasn't been the greatest of weeks for David Cameron. He must be bitterly regretting the decision to hire Andy Coulson as his head of communications - if he hadn't, then the political angle to this week's story would have been Labour's historically close ties to Rupert Murdoch (or, conceivably, the story would never have got off the ground in the first place).

But is it terminal? Was this the week that Ed Miliband began his unstoppable climb to power? Apparently, nauseatingly enough, Labour staffers are now going around quoting the West Wing at each other. "Let Ed be Ed" they say. And Ed Miliband has finally started to look as though he enjoys opposition. Kicking Murdoch is something that true Labour believers have wanted their party to do ever since the move to Wapping. They still fume at the treatment that Neil Kinnock received. So the fact that Labour has declared open war on Murdoch is pure catnip to them.

It's the hell of a risk though. Murdoch is unquestionably damaged by this week's revelations, but he's not dead yet. When you go tiger shooting, you'd better be sure of your shot. Labour haven't got so many friends that they can afford to be quite so blase about making enemies. It's also a risk to assail your opponent with an attack based entirely on his judgement in hiring people when your own cupboards may just be rattling a touch.

Hacks, Hackery and Hacking

2011-07-07T14:44:00.000+01:00

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its fits of morality
Thomas Macaulay

There are more than a few hardy perennials in the borders of English public life. Most of them appear as journalistic staples: celebrity divorces, sensational murders, crooked politicians - all have been enlivening our newspapers for decades. But the press is itself a pretty shady conduit for all this public outrage. Recent press barons have included thieves, pornographers, tax dodgers, convicted felons and out-and-out weirdos. All the President's Men this isn't.

So what to think of the hacking scandal? The implications of this story fall roughly into two halves: direct and indirect fallout. Direct first, I think.

It's vanishingly hard to find anyone willing to put the Screws' side of the story, though Fleet Street Fox has a go here, and Toby Young is reassuringly contrarian here. Their defences both boil down to the same point: investigative journalism requires journalists to go to more or less any lengths for a story. You can explain that either by looking at the intense pressures of a newsroom, or by looking to the higher purpose that an intrusive press serves.

I suspect that they're both right that this sort of thing was standard practice on Red Top papers. Listening into mobile voicemails is morally identical to a whole raft of practises that most people would consider beyond the pale - opening mail, rifling through dustbins, doorstopping family members, stealing photographs, embellishing quotes, establishing 'working relationships' with coppers, firemen, paramedics etc. Are we supposed to be shocked that this was going on? It's been common knowledge for decades.

Equally, if the voicemails of celebrities and politicians were being listened to then it's hardly a cataclysmic shock that the other great staples of tabloid journalism - grisly murders and Our Boys - were too. So why the outrage?

Two reasons, I suspect. The first is that people didn't 'know' that these things were going on. All right, the information was public, and a raft of memoirs testify to what tabloid reporters get up to but it hadn't been made crystal clear that this was happening. And there's a definite squick factor to the idea of grubby PIs and hacks listening into the private voicemail of dead children. Justify that one if you can.

The second is that Rupert Murdoch is involved. Murdoch is catnip for some on the left, in the same way that 'the biased BBC' is catnip for some on the right. Plus, they've had over a decade where the purity of their hatred has been masked by the fact that Murdoch was, nominally at least, on their side. The current case is virtually the perfect storm - an unambiguously popular rallying point, a Labour leadership that is not only unsupported by the Murdoch press but also extremely unlikely to recover that support in the medium term, and last but not least the direct personal interest of the rest of the media.

Murdoch has deep pockets, and is prepared to cross-subsidise his loss-making newspapers with his profitable TV networks. The proposed BSkyB takeover (while it will make little practical difference to plurality, given that he already controls the company) might enable all his products to get bundled together in a way that spells real trouble for the tottering giants of Fleet Street. By an astonishing co-incidence, the Guardian has pulled out these stories just as approval for that deal is pending.

This deal will still probably go through - not least because there is really no legal reason why it shouldn't, and this is a legal decision. But the implications for the newspapers are potentially more serious. This is a big can of worms - no newspaper would like the details of its newsgathering operations laid open for all to see, tabloids least of all. An awful lot of skeletons are rattling around in closets at the moment, and their exhumation will not make attractive viewing.

Mad about Hari

2011-07-04T13:29:00.000+01:00

A remarkable number of people are standing shoulder to shoulder behind Johann Hari in the wake of the recent (and pretty well-evidenced) allegations of plagiarism. Their defences fall into two basic categories: i) it's not a great crime in the grand scheme of things; and ii) his heart's in the right place so that's all right then. To get to this point, these charitable souls also have to take the least damning view of what he's supposed to have done: all he's done, they say is "interpolated passages from interviewees' books in passages presented as conversation."

Well, he's certainly done that. But what's more damning is that he has also lifted quotations from other journalists' interviews and passed them off as responses to his own. That is, as Norm says, cut and dried plagiarism. Now, Hari hasn't admitted this, as he has for the cut-and-pasting from books, but the evidence is pretty irrefutable. And it undermines his right to be believed. Look at this article from a few years back, where he took a hatchet to the National Review cruise. Hari was hardly a neutral observer - he had a piece to write about how the American right are barking after all - and some of the quotes he pulls were, well, a bit of a stretch. I mean, these people are nuts!

"Is he your only child?" I ask. "Yes," she says. "Do you have a child back in England?" she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

...I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change"...

A Filipino waiter offers him a top-up of his wine, and he mock-whispers to me, "They all look the same! Can you tell them apart?"

All un-named sources, all saying the sort of things that Hari needs them to say for his article to work. It's a bit convenient really. But when I read the piece, four years ago, I didn't doubt that they'd really been said. Now? Not so much.

Cameron and Bercow

2011-07-04T12:08:00.001+01:00

It is patently obvious that David Cameron has very little time for John Bercow, as was clearly shown in last week's PMQs. There was a piece in the Observer that tried to get to the bottom of quite why this is, under the headline:

Trouble in the House: is a bitter class divide fuelling David Cameron's dislike of Commons Speaker John Bercow?

The implication being, basically, that it is the fact that John Bercow is a jumped-up little oik that has earned him Cameron's enmity. But there are two very good reasons why Cameron should dislike Bercow. The first is the party loyalty one: Bercow was an exceptionally uncollegiate Tory. Even before he began his campaign to become Speaker, he had been assiduously cultivating Labour ministers while simultaneously being remarkably rude to fellow Tory MPs in and out of the House. He was definitionally unsound. As Paul Goodman saw it from the backbenches:

Afternoon after afternoon, there was Bercow, shaking his head doubtfully while Conservative spokesman asked, nodding approvingly when Labour Ministers answered, rising time after time to blast, belittle or belabour his Party's official position - perched strategically all the while in a camera-friendly place a couple of rows or behind the Opposition Despatch Box. It was hostile; worse still, from the Whips' point of view, it was uncollegiate - unprecedentedly so.

That in itself would be enough to explain a degree of froideur from Tory High Command. Couple it to Labour's mischievous installation of Bercow as Speaker (with, perhaps, 2 Tory supporters) and you have a perfectly good explanation of tensions between the Speaker (who is, after all, meant to be impartial) and No. 10. But there's a personal side to this as well. In 2005 Bercow, as a prominent Ken Clarke supporter said the following

"In the modern world, the combination of Eton, hunting, shooting and lunch at [the exclusive club] White's is not helpful when you are trying to appeal to millions of ordinary people."

Even in the context of a leadership election, this sort of thing is pretty below the belt.

Personal animosity aside, what's going to happen? A Prime Minister and a Speaker at loggerheads is not a common event - is it tenable in the long term? There's a good discussion here about the betting implications of the problem. Mike Smithson contemplates the Tories running a candidate against Bercow in Buckingham at the next election. I think that's pretty far-fetched. Much more likely (though still not certain) is that the role of Speaker is reformed such that the Speaker faces re-election, by secret ballot, at the start of each Parliament. Either way, it's not a great state of affairs, for there to be such mutual antipathy between Speaker and Government.

Johann Hari redux

2011-06-29T12:03:00.002+01:00

The strange thing about the Johann Hari business is that it is an almost perfectly unsurprising scandal. In case you have somehow missed this little storm, Hari is accused of lifting entire quotations from other sources into his interviews, and passing them off as if they had been said to him. This technique has been beautifully mocked on Twitter under the hashtag #interviewsbyhari including such gems as:

He sensed my malaise. "Young man", he murmured, fingering his leather jacket ruminatively, "there's no need to feel down" @MrEugenides

After discussing my evidence with him. he stroked his thick beard, looked up, and then loudly exclaimed 'GORDON'S ALIVE'? @Simon_Pegg

And so on and so on.

He’s responded with a remarkably brazen non-apology apology in today’s Independent where he claims that, really, all he was doing was a little tidying up. (For whatever reason, this article isn’t on the Independent’s website. Guido has, um, cut-and-pasted it onto his site, although at least he doesn’t pretend that he wrote it following an interview with Johann).

This is, obviously, not a desperately serious matter in the grand scheme of things. But it is indicative of Hari’s general modus operandi. The actual quotes he got in the interview (assuming he got any) weren’t good enough to stand up or illustrate the story he wanted to write, so he got other quotations and pretended that they were made to him. He manipulated the truth to write a better article.

This should hardly come as a surprise. I’ve written about Hari’s somewhat misleading attitude to quotations before, when he used a line from an article by Boris Johnson to suggest that he was a panting enthusiast for stag hunting, when the article in question (sadly not online) was actually about how traumatic he found the whole thing, and why he would never go stag hunting again. The same article, incidentally, stated as a fact that the 2007 foot and mouth outbreak was leaked out of an American pharmaceutical lab, a statement of fact that was at that point unconfirmed, and turned out not to be true. In fact, hell, lets just reprise what I wrote last year:

How does he get away with it? How does Johann Hari hold down a job as a columnist in a broadsheet newspaper when he is so often so flagrantly in breach of the truth? Whether it’s stating that British GDP fell after abolishing slavery, which it didn’t, claiming that the coalition intends to cut public spending by 20%, when that figure’s actually 4%, asserting that the foot and mouth leak in 2007 came from a US-owned private laboratory, when it was actually from a Government-owned one, or even claiming that the Japanese Prime Minister was attacked and nearly killed by a robot, when, um, he wasn’t, Hari manages to make such blinding (and simple) factual errors in his columns, that it’s hard to knew if he’s just stupid, or if he’s a liar.

Hari, basically, isn’t a journalist. He’s a polemicist. Facts aren’t there to be reported, they’re there to be used to support the argument he wanted to make. If they’re inconvenient, they can be ignored (as when, in supporting protectionism, he wrote the medieval English textile industry out of existence and ignored the entirety of Britain’s free trade period). This is fine (well, ish. It’s what our Polly has been doing for years) for an opinion writer. It’s much less fine for someone claiming to write factual pieces as well. Who, for instance, now believes his claims to have seduced all those butch Islamists and neo-Nazis?

Chesterton Beasts

2011-06-10T10:27:00.002+01:00

As on so many things, I agree with David Cameron. The Archbishop of Canterbury has every right to express his opinions on topical matters of the day. If the ABC has no right to a pulpit, who does? Equally, however, it is disappointing that someone widely regarded as the most cerebral occupant of Lambeth Palace for many years should have written such an intellectually childish polemic. Take this, just for a start:

Incidentally, this casts some light on the bafflement and indignation that the present government is facing over its proposals for reform in health and education. With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted. At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context.

If Rowan Williams is perplexed by the meaning of a representative democracy, in which he has lived all his life, then clearly reports of his intellect have been grotesquely over-stated. 11 million people voted for the Conservatives, 17 million voted for the constituent parties of the Coalition. This is a new and bewildering definition of no-one.

But, for example, the comprehensive reworking of the Education Act 1944 that is now going forward might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing in the context of election debates.

Education is a perfectly imbecilic example to use here. The extension of academies and free schools were trailed by the Tories years before the last election and featured prominently in their manifesto. For which 11 million people voted. But even beyond that, has Dr Williams really not noticed that Butler’s Education Act was gutted by Tony Crosland in 1965?

As others have noticed, the clarion call descends rather into a neo-post-modern whimper. Alex’s prize for parsing the meaning of this will, I suspect, go unclaimed:

A democracy going beyond populism or majoritarianism but also beyond a Balkanised focus on the local that fixed in stone a variety of postcode lotteries; a democracy capable of real argument about shared needs and hopes and real generosity: any takers?

But there is a final point to be made. It is entirely right and proper for the ABC to advertise his political views. But the ABC speaks for the Church of England. It would be much less right and proper, therefore, were he to advertise his party political views. And by running Labour party talking points, in the in-house magazine of the Labour party Dr Williams, to say the least, runs the risk of being misinterpreted.

Contender for stupidest Labour MP

2011-06-10T10:06:00.002+01:00

There are many good arguments why Tony Blair should not be President of Europe. None of them, it is true, are terribly interesting, because I am more likely to achieve that title than he is. Is anybody surprised, though, that Diane Abbott has hit upon the worst possible?

Blair is proposing an elected president for 350 million people. How could anyone possibly identify with such a figure?

Um, I don’t know. What do you think Barack?

England Cricket's Golden Age

2011-06-01T10:44:00.002+01:00

The thing about Cardiff Test matches, is that you can safely ignore the first four days and tune in only for the final hour or so on the fifth day. That said, it was a breath-taking, unbelievable hour of cricket on Monday. England are playing with an aura around them at the moment, the batting based on solid, unspectacular, reliable and efficient run-scoring from Strauss, Cook, Trott and Bell and the bowling on pace, bounce, swing and spin from four of the best bowlers in world cricket.

I’m with Tanya Aldred though – what sort of lesson is this for the kids? My first real cricketing memory was the score from Headingley being announced over the tannoy at sports day, and a great groan arising from the watching fathers. “Australia have declared at 601 for 7, in reply England are 35 for 1”. That was my childhood. Gooch lbw bowled Alderman 0.

What do we have today? 5 out of the last 7 test matches have resulted in an innings victory. We have the world’s no.2 bowler (and the no.3). We have the world’s no.3 batsman (and the no.5). We’re the world’s no.3 Test side, and a whisker away from the no.2 slot. If we beat India, we will be the world’s no.1. If you’d told all this to my ten year old self, he’d have laughed.

I’m at Lords on Friday, and I’ll be sure to make the most of it while it lasts. Summers like this don’t last forever.

Work work work

2011-06-01T09:59:00.002+01:00

Being a City solicitor is hard work. Having an energetic (albeit lovely) 2 year old daughter is hard work. Having a demanding (albeit desperately cute) newborn daughter is also hard work. Moving house is hard work.

Being a City solicitor with an energetic 2 year old and a newborn while also moving house is, how shall I put this?

Posting has been non-existent for, ooh, ages. And that's been most of the reason for it - I'm shattered. There's also a real problem with blogging that I've noticed before: stop for a time, even a short time, and you soon build up a backlog of posts that you really ought to write. The prospect of catching up with this backlog gets ever less tempting - and so the radio silence continues.

I still have the job, and my two perfect, noisy, tiring daughters. But I have at least moved house now. Normal service to be resumed? Lets wait and see.

Brown to the IMF?

2011-04-20T12:14:00.003+01:00

Should Gordon Brown be appointed as head of the IMF? This should really be a question that answers itself. Sean O’Grady has a good run down of some of the reasons why he shouldn’t be here and Chris Giles explains why he won’t be in any event here.

The first problem is that it simply doesn’t pass the laugh test: Brown invented the tri-partite regulatory system that proved such a disaster; he presided over the largest peace-time deficit in British history; he failed to put into place even the most basic plans for the reduction of that deficit and, further, advocated increasing it still further. He was, perhaps, the least emotionally intelligent Prime Minister of modern times (Heath might run him close here) and was notoriously bad at working outside a small group of hangers-on.

He was also a tribalist to the very core of his being, every plan and policy being chiefly designed to screw the Tories. The idea that David Cameron should now expend international political capital in an almost certainly doomed attempt to install Brown in a comfortable retirement job is laughable.

It is also a testimony to the remarkable insularity of the British press and political classes. There was never a chance that the IMF job would go to a Brit, least of all one with as much baggage as Brown. Cameron was right to dismiss it, and if he couldn’t resist taking one last slap at the political corpse of his old rival well, who’s to blame him?

#MehtoAV

2011-04-14T11:08:00.002+01:00

Christ but the AV referendum is depressing. Every time I think that I’ve decided on voting one way or the other, the sheer limitless crassness of their campaign turns me straight off.

Temperamentally I’m probably in favour of keeping First Past the Post. It’s straightforward, easy to administer and it’s what we do already. But one look at those sodding posters of a newborn child needing an incubator or a battle-weary veteran needing body armour and my Vote No tendency melted away. How sodding disingenuous can you be?

So. Yes it is then. Except, aaargh, no it isn’t. Not only do they have the brain-destroying tactic of persuading me to vote Yes on the grounds that Stephen Fry and Benjamin bloody Zephaniah will (I’m a Londoner so was spared the ghastly Tony Robinson) but they put all this crap in a letter marked P&C and ‘Important Documents Enclosed’.

More fundamental than all this froth, however, is the fact that almost no claim made by either side stacks up. Lets have a run through them, No first.

1. AV means that people get more than one vote

Superficially appealing this one, together with the old Churchillian line about the most worthless votes for the most worthless candidates. But it’s more a semantic point than a great point of principle. AV is an instant run-off, and in the final round of voting no-one has more than one vote.

2. AV will help the BNP

Funnily enough, I think that this argument is probably right, but for none of the reasons that people like Baroness Warsi are saying. In terms of winning seats, AV would be disastrous for the BNP – because they are, lets face it, pretty unlikely to make many peoples’ second preferences. How could it help them? By allowing people to make a token first preference vote for an unelectable candidate as a protest. Will it happen? Not to any great extent, but there it is. Partly right, but mostly wrong.

3. AV will be expensive/complicated

AV is certainly more expensive than FPTP – but that’s only because the counting process is that much longer. It doesn’t necessarily need electronic counting (Australia doesn’t), and it needn’t end the drama of election night (Australia again). It is, once again, a minor complaint masquerading as an issue of principle.

4. ‘Winners’ will lose

Well, that’s rather the point isn’t it? That someone who has ‘won’ an election with only 32% of the vote (Alan Reid up in Argyll & Bute) might actually have lost a run-off with his closest rival. This is less a criticism than a statement of the difference between the systems.

And that’s been more or less it. There have been no really positive reasons to vote No, other than the ‘it’s simpler’ one discussed above. So, it looks like a nailed on vote for Yes right? No.

1. FPTP is not proportional, and thus not fair.

Maybe not, but it’s an odd argument for an AV campaigner to make, given that AV is even less proportional.

2. An end to safe seats

You see this one a lot – but a truly safe seat is one where the MP regularly gets more than 50% of the vote. That’ll still be a safe seat under AV. For a ‘safe seat’ to be challengeable under AV the incumbent must be getting below 50% of the vote but still be comfortably ahead of any challengers. In those cases, it’s extremely unlikely that he’d fail to pick up enough second preferences from somewhere to get over the line. AV doesn’t affect safe seats, it just changes the dynamics of marginals.

3. MPs will work harder

This is linked to the safe seats point above, and is equally tendentious. The temptation for lazy MPs is in ultra safe constituencies – and they are unaffected. As a further point, I’d like to think that MPs should be kept pretty busy by Parliamentary duties – the extra work envisaged here is of the constituency social worker variety.

4. AV is an “overdue upgrade to our 19th century political system”

Well, the UK only implemented a universal FPTP system in 1950. AV was introduced in Australia in 1919. Incidentally, and in another spasm of annoyance with the No campaign, whoever persuaded Niall Ferguson and David Starkey to sign a letter saying that the UK has never in six centuries given “one person’s casting ballot greater weight than another” should be given a slap.

I actually have to stop doing this. It’s just too depressing. We have, essentially, an Iran-Iraq War scenario on our hands. I always vote, I’m too much of a geek not to, but I honestly have no idea which way I’ll go this time. If they want my vote, I’d recommend both campaigns to shut the hell up, because I suspect I’ll end up voting against whichever the last campaign I heard from.

Apologia pro Imperia nostra

2011-04-06T14:09:00.002+01:00

There’s been something of a kerfuffle about David Cameron’s remarks in Pakistan regarding Kashmir. From the Mail we have The 650m apology; from the Telegraph Peter Oborne issues the ringing rebuke that No apology required; from the International Business Times we have the pretty blunt Britain to blame for Kashmir strife, other global conflicts: PM Cameron.

So, David Cameron went to Pakistan, accepted the blame for the Kashmir dispute on Britain’s behalf and apologised? Um, no. Here’s what the PM actually said in response to a question on Kashmir.

"I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place,”

The issue of Kashmir is a running-sore for Indo-Pakistani relations. It has also previously soured diplomatic relations between the UK and India notably, as Wintour & Watt pointed out, under the last Labour Government with both Robin Cook and David Miliband coming a diplomatic cropper on the subject. (That article is interesting in another way, referring as it does to Cameron’s visit to India last summer. There is clearly a Govt policy not to intervene on Kashmir, either in India or in Pakistan.)

Why, then, does Cameron apologise for Britain’s role? Answer: he doesn’t. He acknowledges responsibility for it, a very different thing. Britain was not, of course, solely responsible for the chaos of partition as a whole, nor the eventual position of Kashmir afterwards. Indian and Pakistani politicians (and the Maharajah of Kashmir too) played their parting the story. For maximum historical accuracy, it would have been better if Cameron had said ‘partly responsible’. But his statement remains historically accurate and politically relevant. Britain is uniquely poorly placed to intervene in the Kashmir dispute precisely because of its historical role in it.

What else might he be thinking of when he refers to ‘so many of the world’s problems’? I can think of two such examples immediately. Israel and Zimbabwe. Britain was responsible (although again, obviously, not solely) for the creation of the state of Israel, both through the Balfour declaration and through the administration of the Palestine mandate. This acknowledgement of responsibility though hardly equates to an apology. Equally, Britain has a degree of responsibility for the current state of Zimbabwe, though as with Kashmir its historical role makes any current intervention hugely problematic.

The problem, I suspect, is that we prefer our politicians not to speak obvious truths. We then, of course, complain when all they say is anodyne and inoffensive.

Bare-faced idiocy

2011-03-14T14:03:00.002Z

I knew it was a mistake to start with the Guardian. On the other hand, at least it offers a target rich environment. Here’s Bidisha, who forms part of a worrying trend within the Guardian – that the columnists with the most tenuous grip on reality tend to have been either at my school (I’m looking at you Mr Milne) or my college. As an Aularian, Bidisha really ought to know better (this is, after all, an institution whose JCR President was once His Holiness Maharaj Akaash) but there we are.

Bidisha’s off on one about the fashion for female deforestation. Porn aesthetic is an odd thing and (as a man with two daughters…) the mainstreaming of pornography does have some worrying implications. This, however, is offensive, simplistic claptrap.

A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children.

This is an argument that you see again and again – that men who find shaven ladygardens attractive are really paedophiles who fancy little girls. And there’s a very simple rejoinder to it – if finding the removal of body hair attractive is a mark of a paedophile, where does that leave women who don’t like beards? If the female heart beats faster at the sight of, say, Jude Law than it does at Sebastian Chabal does that mean that said female despises adult men and wants them to resemble children?

It’s a junk argument. Some people like body hair, some don’t. Ain’t life a rich tapestry?

The Guardian distilled into 42 words

2011-03-14T13:29:00.001Z

And where better to start than with a new iteration of the Guardian distilled… series?

I have been visiting the square on and off for 13 years to see my friends Ralf and Jessamy and their children, one of whom, Alabama, is now a 15-year-old vegetarian (seven years without meat) and the other, Jonah, a 10-year-old gourmand.

Worth pointing out too that, in an article looking at the impact of class on eating habits Ralf and Jessamy (who spend nearly £200 a week on organic food) are described as working class. Someone’s working to different definitions.

Return of the Reptile

2011-03-14T13:18:00.002Z

Well, I’m back. Did you miss me?

Thought not. For those that didn’t know, at least part of this absence was caused by an extremely welcome addition to the Reptile establishment. Being outnumbered three to one by girls in my household is something I will just have to get used to, and I’m sure that they’ll enjoy Scalextric and Lego just as much anyway…

But anyway I have returned refreshed (or sleep-deprived, strung-out and emotional depending on your point of view) and ready to blog. I’ve missed an awful lot while I’ve been away…

Not really back...

2011-01-27T10:04:00.003Z

Popping out briefly from self-imposed exile to note that John Rentoul may have been precipitate in classifying this from Will Straw as number 496 in his series of Questions To Which The Answer Is No.

Will Ed Balls be the recession’s Churchill?

Because while at first glance this does indeed look ridiculous, Will Straw doesn’t specify which Churchill he’s talking about. OK, it’s obvious that the Lion of Empire 1939-45 variety can be ruled out of court straight away – but what about the Chancellor who disastrously re-introduced the Gold Standard in 1924? Or the one who was so spectacularly wrong about India? Or the one who ballsed up the Gallipolli campaign? Or the one who was so wrong about the Abdication Crisis? Maybe Will Straw’s not being quite so ridiculous after all…

Hiatus

2011-01-26T11:44:00.002Z

Fascinating as all this politics stuff is at the minute, a more than usually vicious concatenation of circumstances has struck, leaving me with neither the time nor, to be honest, the inclination to post just at the minute. Normal service will be resumed shortly, I hope.

The plus side to incompetence

2011-01-13T12:45:00.003Z

People seem to be waking up to the fact that the Shadow Chancellor needs to have L and R written on his shoes. Concerned lefties are starting to say (as really ought to have been obvious right from the beginning) that if Labour want to look even vaguely like an alternative in Government, then the Shadow Chancellor ought to be someone who can read without needing to use his index finger. But it’s not actually an entirely bad thing for Labour that their lead economic spokesman is so hopeless.

Since about 1994, the economic principle that drove the New Labour project was to encourage the boom in the financial and property markets, and to use the increased tax revenues from that to finance a substantial expansion in the state. Fears that these booms were just cyclical, and ought either to be reined in or at least regarded as temporary were dismissed – boom and bust had been abolished after all.

One of the more coherent responses from the left to the financial crisis has been that the financial sector was essentially too profitable during the boom years (a refinement on that being that the ‘profits’ being made and taxed were basically illusionary) and that reforms need to be made that reflect that fact. That is, of course, all well and good but getting rid of the sort of massive profits that so rile the left also means getting rid of the bumper tax revenues that go with them.

One half of the equation has collapsed. What does that imply for the other half? Well, Labour could try and maintain increased public spending by substantially raising general taxation. But we’re talking very substantial sums here. Labour say they want to eliminate the structural deficit by 2016 – if this is all to be done through tax rises that’s £90bn they’re going to have to find – 2/3 of the total income tax take. I don’t see this being an electorally successful position.

So cuts of some form are going to have to be made – but cuts are, as we are seeing, unpopular. Why take the hit on suggesting cuts if you don’t have to? Surely it’s better to gain political capital by opposing each individual nasty cut, without having to sacrifice it by proposing your own? Alternatively, deny the validity of the question. There’s no such thing as a structural deficit: growth will take care of it. We can make up what we need by taxing ‘the rich’, ‘the bankers’, ‘the fat cats who got us into this mess in the first place’ etc. None of this is especially credible – but who cares? Economics is complicated, and most people don’t understand it. Give them a tune to hum (‘they say cut back, we say fight back)’ is a good one), and let the messy policy bit go hang for the next few years.

From that perspective, having a genial rather slapdash shadow chancellor is quite a good idea – if it were Ed Balls the media would expect him to have coherent policies, and would pick at any gaps remorselessly. With Alan Johnson there’s likely to be a lot more eye-rolling laxity. Given that there won’t be an election for four years, and that AJ is pretty unlikely to be shadow chancellor when there is, I don’t actually think it’s such a bad thing leaving him in place. That fuzzy incompetence could actually be something of a plus.

Edward Woollard

2011-01-13T12:35:00.002Z

The young idiot who threw a heavy metal fire extinguisher off the roof of Millbank Tower towards a group of policeman has been sentenced to 32 months in a Young Offenders Institution. Or, more accurately since he will only serve half this sentence, 16 months. Given that he pleaded guilty to violent disorder I don’t see that he can have much cause for complaint – indeed he’s extremely lucky that the extinguisher didn’t hit anybody, as the sentences for GBH or manslaughter are generally a touch stiffer.

One can, however, always rely on the Guardian to find an opposing argument – that sending people to prison for violent disorder is just, well, unfair. The reasons for this are fabulous.

He clearly had no awareness that the media would be filming the "trouble", and that identifying him as a culprit would therefore be easy. Woollard had no idea that within a couple of months the judiciary would be "making an example of him", and nor did his mother, Tania Garwood, who, after the event, drove her son to a police station so that he could make a statement at the earliest opportunity.

Well, quite. If he had known that he’d be caught and jailed he probably wouldn’t have done it. That seems to me to be rather the point of the whole affair.

Again, only the sincerely peaceful are going to be discouraged by this sentence, and the scenes at Millbank which spawned it.

I suspect the sincerely peaceful aren’t the ones throwing fire extinguishers off roofs.

Legislating for lunatics

2011-01-10T17:10:00.002Z

As long as there has been electoral politics, there has been violent political rhetoric. This should be a statement so obviously true as to be trivial. The whole language of politics – campaigns, battlegrounds, victories and defeats – is taken from that of warfare. Opponent’s arguments are shot down, vulnerable members of the opposition are targeted and the Prime Minister enters the bearpit for the gladiatorial contest of PMQs.

At the same time, there have always been and will always be a few straight-up lunatics in the world who want to kill a politician. A quick run down of the last few decades of attempts in the West, successful and unsuccessful, doesn’t really reveal any sort of pattern – Pim Fortuyn, Anna Lindh, Olof Palme, Jacques Chirac, Zoran Dindic and Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands. It’s hard to discern any theme in that list of victims – and you’d be daft to try. The only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated, Spencer Perceval, was killed by a lunatic (whose direct descendant is currently MP for North West Norfolk) because of a grievance over unjust imprisonment in Russia.

I am instinctively distrustful of the argument that violent rhetoric causes violence – just as I am distrustful of the argument that violent computer games cause violence. The attempted murder of Gabrielle Giffords was no more the fault of Sarah Palin, than the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan was the fault of Robert de Niro. You cannot, and should not, moderate your speech and desist from using metaphors for fear that a madman in Arizona might take you seriously.

Aren't they suffering enough?

2011-01-06T14:25:00.000Z

Poor bloody Australians. As if it weren't miserable enough watching their second-rate side sink abjectly beneath the waves at the SCG there's this to contend with:

In between overs Channel Nine is advertising Ben Elton Live, one of its trump shows for 2011.

The horror.

Ashes fever

2011-01-06T14:08:00.000Z

Is it that England are really very good, or that Australia are really appallingly bad? Between October 1988 and November 2010, Australia lost only three Test matches by an innings. Barring meteorological miracles, by some time tomorrow they will have lost three more in the space of six weeks. We're seeing something remarkable here. With the exception of Perth, on which subject more in a minute, England haven't just been the better side, they've been overwhelmingly better. Specifically, Eng;and have been streets ahead in three areas - top order batting, swing bowling, and spin. Win the battle of the new ball and you're a long way towards winning the game.

Australia have been woeful in this series - the only top order batsman that looks like making runs has the worst conversion rate of fifties to hundreds of any Australian batsman ever, plus an attitude towards running that's reminiscent of the great Sir Geoffrey himself. Ponting was dire, out of touch with bat and in the field, Clarke has been gunshy and stiff, Hughes isn't a Test match batsman, Smith is batting too high at 7 (and since he was only brought on to bowl in the 102nd over, you do rather question what he's doing in the side at all) and Khawaja, though a good prospect, made two pretty 20s and 30s and then got himself out. Only Hussey has looked good this series, and he's knocking on 35.

But this shouldn't detract from England's performance here. Len Hutton famously said that in order to beat Australia at home, you need to perform 25% better than them. England have managed that and to spare. Almost every doubt expressed prior to the series (would Cook be able to cope with the bounce, would Anderson be able to bowl with a Kookaburra ball, would Swann be able to make an impact) have not just been countered, but stomped on. Cook has scored more runs in this series than any Englishman since Wally Hammond, Anderson has taken more wickets than any Englishman since Frank Tyson, Swann bowled England to victory at Adelaide just in time to beat the rain. The only weak link in the side has been Collingwood - who has now nobly done the right thing.

A good way of measuring dominance in a series is to make up a composite team. In the 2010/1 Ashes series, you get 10 Englishmen and only one Australian, Hussey. The only difficulty in choosing the team is in deciding between Finn and Tremlett. Roll on India

Bloody January Again

2011-01-05T16:23:00.001Z

Happy New Year everyone! I'm still not back properly, but one of my resolutions is to get back properly into the swing of things. My five year anniversary is coming up, so there's really no excuse.

Numbers...

2010-12-21T17:17:00.002Z

It’s a minor gripe really, and pulled out because I can’t be bothered addressing the glaring faults that bedevil the rest of the article, but really why are opinion journalists so staggeringly innumerate? Take this from Polly Toynbee (who else?)

Incidentally, Cameron said cutting 50 MPs' seats would save £12m; but redrawing boundaries will cost £11m.

The first of these figures is an annual reduction, the second is a one-off cost. It’s a totally meaningless juxtaposition. Does she really not know any better?

'Tis the Season

2010-12-20T12:25:00.003Z

There’s still something ineffably irritating about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, even if we’re not allowed to call for her to be stoned.

We mark the birth of a baby in the desert, sent by God to an impecunious and dispossessed couple, wanderers seeking refuge and finding it in a stable.

Impecunious and dispossessed eh? It’s Christmas, so lets go back to the text:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

Rather than being impoverished and homeless, Joseph and Mary were the victims of Big Government.

Carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

2010-12-20T11:22:00.002Z

I think this was one of those concepts that sounded great to a commissioning editor, but didn’t quite stack up when the word processor was fired up and the page was empty.

Chairman Cameron's regime is not a million miles from Mao

Um, really?

To be fair to the coalition, it is not their ambition to replicate the body count heaped up by the Communist party of China during Mao's lethal reign. Nor does this government share many of the late tyrant's political ends. Yet in its methods, I am increasingly struck by the strange similarities between the regime of Chairman Mao and that of Chairman Cameron.

Now, to back this up Andrew Rawnsley has someone who mentioned a ‘Cultural Revolution’ in the public services, and someone else who said ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’. But he presumably doesn’t feel that two throwaway comments are quite sufficient to justify a comparison between the greatest murderer of the twentieth century and the current Prime Minister, so he delves into what might be called the political meat. And these are the examples he uses:

The MP for Grantham [Nick Boles] celebrates as "a good thing" the "chaos" that will ensue from ripping up central planning…Ken Clarke challenges two decades of orthodoxy about the criminal justice system. Michael Gove battles the educational establishment to create his "free schools". Iain Duncan Smith has ambitions to be the man who definitively reformed welfare. Chris Huhne is dramatically recasting energy pricing. Nick Clegg wants to rewrite large parts of the constitution. Over at health, Andrew Lansley proposes the greatest upheaval in the NHS since its foundation.

There is a theme running through all these policies (except for energy pricing) and that is the decentralisation of power – the diminution of state control. Further, they are all very much the creatures of their ministers – another aspect of Cameron’s Government is that he is not an omnipresent leader, seeking to cast his imprint on every feature of it. Rawnsley’s article paints an interesting picture of a Government determined to devolve power away from the centre wherever possible, and of a Government that is far less dependent on the form of its leader than either of its predecessors.

And so, in the most surprising discovery about this coalition, we find we are governed by Maoists.

Rawnsley has managed to write a proposition and a rebuttal of this argument within the same article.

The next Kim Hughes?

2010-12-06T15:13:00.002Z

This, I suspect, is something of a hostage to fortune.

The point is this: that Australia, however feeble its stock of cricketers, no matter how bad things get – and things right now are pretty darn unambiguously shabby – will never plumb the pathetic and humiliating lows that the woebegone English sides of 1989 to 2003 did. It won’t happen. Not in the friendly, lucky country. Not here.

Christian Ryan, whose excellent book on Kim Hughes shows that he does at least remember the last time Australian cricket plumbed similar depths, probably just means that the good old Aussie larrikin tendency will keep them from being the lowest ranked team in cricket (as England briefly were in 1999). Well he’s probably right, although it’s not exactly the hardest hurdle to clear. But he might just be underestimating the risk that Australia will follow England’s basic trajectory over that period – basically average, with one or two good players occasionally pushing the side over the top.

Look at the problem they’re in: the current series, poorly as it’s going for them, is actually understating the extent of their problems. OK, we know that their bowling attack is now thoroughly mediocre. A roster of Harris, Bollinger, Siddle, Hilfenhaus, and Johnson contains three third seamers, one second-string quick (Harris, when he’s not injured) and one mysterious quantity who veers from the sublime to the ridiculous. Since we’re doing mid-90s England comparisons, how does a line-up of Gough, Mullaly, Caddick, Cork and Malcolm compare? If you were Australia, would you swap? Let’s not even go into the spinners, other than to note that their ninth choice, Xavier Doherty, looks like he’d be out of his depth in a good club match.

But we know their bowling’s a problem. What should be really worrying is their batting. Mike Hussey has held it together so far in this series, Ricky Ponting and Simon Katich did the job in India. All are 35 and over. In a year or so (or possible even at the end of this series) Australia are going to have to replace half their batting – and on the evidence of the new blood on display in the Australia A game, there isn’t exactly a stream of qualified replacements. If there were, do you really think Marcus North would still be playing? And when they go, Australia really have no choice but to give the captain's stripes to Michael Clarke.

Settled sides carry with them a momentum. Replacements can be made gradually, settling newcomers into a winning side. But that can tip over into a side that becomes too settled, where the next in line go rotten on the tree. Where the most obvious batting replacement is David Hussey – 33 years old. When that happens, and a generation retires together, it can take a decade or more to recover. It happened to the West Indies in the early 90s, and they have still not recovered. I wonder if Clarke, another gloriously talented golden boy of Australian cricket, will prove as lachrymose on the way out?

Opposition is fun!

2010-12-03T15:32:00.002Z

Well, it is isn’t it? It’s far more fun to jump up and down and scream than it is, say, to offer a reasoned critique of a strategy – just ask my daughter. It’s no co-incidence that one of the first words toddlers learn is ‘no’ – shouting it when Daddy tries to dress you, or offers you an apple is a great way for little children to pretend to be in control.

The same thing really applies to opposition politics in general, and blogging in particular. It shouldn’t really be a surprise that the three blogs that, in their different ways, best harnessed the impotent rage of opposition have decided, since Labour’s ejection in May, that the rage just isn’t there anymore, and without it, the polemic just doesn’t come. Blogging properly is hard (which is why I don’t bother), and you need a good motive to keep doing it. Being furious about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was as good a motive as any.

There is, of course, a problem with anger as a motive: when you’re shouting that loudly, you can’t hear yourself think. Inchoate shouts of rage may be cathartic, but they aren’t very productive. Laurie Penny (who generally has the air of someone more or less perpetually furious about something) has caught a bad case of lack of self-awareness with regard to the student protests. Now, another good rule of thumb is that students protest because they can, because they don’t really have anything urgent they need to do instead, and, as above, because it’s fun.

Another endearing quality of students (and the young in general) is their total absence of a sense of the ridiculous. So running aimlessly around London shouting things becomes an act of rebellion – no, not rebellion war! Smash the state (um…while getting it to pay for our education obviously)! It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to sound cool.

"They want to marketise our education," says Ben, 21, his breath clouding in the bitter air. "So we're going to educate their market."

I’ll educate his market. No, you shut up.

Fun as it all is (and it is fun – protests and demonstrations and marches are great. If I didn’t, you know, have a job and a mortgage and a baby and all that I’d definitely be out there demonstrating against something. Rugby scrums perhaps – “what do we want?” “proper binding in the front row!” “when do we want it?” “after a crouch, a touch and a pause!”) it really is ultimately pointless. Grown ups, after all, know how to deal with temper tantrums. Ignore them.

Are you England in disguise?

2010-12-03T14:49:00.002Z

What on earth has happened to Australia? Brutal experience has taught me that it’s never wise to make predictions at Adelaide. However, in Adelaide Australia have: dropped two fast bowlers and replaced them with an injury-prone speedster and an honest left-arm tryer with disastrous hair; suffered a farcical top-order run out; lost their captain and vice-captain for 2 runs between them; picked a team with 4 number 11s; and complained about how the nasty opposition fast bowler was calling their players horrid names.

It’s like watching England in the mid 1990s.

The Gabbatoir

2010-12-01T11:44:00.002Z

517-1. That’s a hard scoreboard to come to terms with. It suggests two things really – the first as Alex Massie says is that the Gabba pitch really wasn’t fit for Test match cricket. On the last two days, two wickets fell and 600 runs were scored. Cricket simply has to be a contest between bat and ball, or else it becomes stultifying, so lets hope for some slightly spicier wickets for the rest of the series. The omens aren’t necessarily good though, the next game is at Adelaide and as Martin Crowe said, only three things in life are certain: death taxes and a century at Adelaide.

Are there any other lessons we can take from Brisbane though? I think so. Australia first.

- Mitch. How do you solve a problem like Mitchell Johnson? When he’s on form he’s properly quick, gets nasty bounce and can swing the ball back into the right hander. That’s a brutal combination, and can run through sides. But when he’s not on form, his arm drops so low that the only people in danger are short leg, second slip and the umpire. Worse – his head drops at the same rate as his arm. Fast bowlers need a bit of nasty in them, but they also need to keep their chins up even when they’re going round the park. If they drop him, Australia would be getting rid of their most potent bowler. But then, they’d also be getting rid of an embarrassing liability. Bye Mitch.

- Spin. I don’t think that Strauss & co are losing any sleep over the X-man. Doherty looked like a competent club spinner, bowling pretty flat left-armers without any real bite or turn. Tidy enough, but 2 for 70 tidy, not the 5-80 that wins games on flat pitches. The search for a new Shane continues. Australia have now tried 9 spinners since the great man retired – perhaps they should accept that once-in-a-generation bowlers are called that for a reason?

- Batting. Hurrah! Some good news. Mike Hussey pulled one out of the bag (and illustrated the role chance has in sporting lives. If his first ball had travelled a further foot, he’d probably just have played his last Test). He hit Swann off a length, and looked supremely comfortable. Mr Cricket survives. On the other hand though, Michael Clarke played with all the freedom of Michael Atherton – and that’s today’s Athers at that. When his back plays up, he’s virtually a sitting duck for the short ball, and England have enough bowlers good at bowling them, that he’s pretty exposed. As for Marcus North, well he looked like a useful bowler. If he works on his batting, he’d make a reasonable tail-ender.

That’s pretty much all you can usefully derive from the game. Ponting’s captaincy was uninspired for sure, but on a pitch like that, with an attack like that, I’m not sure what else he could have done. Anyway – what can England take out if it? Negatives first, just to be fair.

- Swanny. Off spinners have a hard time Down Under. Swanny was going to be different though – he’s the second ranked bowler in the world and he makes things happen. Well, he didn’t really. He bowled a fraction short on a pitch where the bounce just made the ball sit up. He didn’t get much turn, and he couldn’t keep Hussey quiet. He’s a central part of the side – his success is what makes a four man attack possible. If he doesn’t get better for Adelaide, England will have something of a problem. On the other hand, he really is pretty good – given a little more assistance from the pitch I’d back him to get in among the wickets.

- Kookaburra. We all heard heaps before the series about how the Aussie ball doesn’t swing and, after a dozen overs, has the consistency of a damp rag. Well, Anderson, Broad and Finn all bowled pretty well with it – Anderson in particular was outstanding at times. There’s talk of Finn making way for Shahzad in Adelaide – a beanpole making way for a skidder. I don’t see it happening, but it would be a change from strength, not out of desperation. England will be far less worried than Australia about their pace attack.

- Batting. If there was one lesson from the first innings, it was that when you get in you have to make it count. 40s and 60s are all very well, but it’s centuries than win games. The second innings would seem to show that England are, to say the least aware of this…

On we roll to Adelaide all square. But the after-effects of 150 wicketless overs for Australia’s main attack will surely linger. If England win the toss, bat first and put on a strong start, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few green and gold caps starting to droop. The worst feeling in cricket – and it’s self-fulfilling – is ‘here we go again’. Here’s hoping.

Look behind you!

2010-12-01T11:01:00.001Z

While the ramifications of tuition fee policy for the stability of the Coalition, and the very existence of the Lib Dems are all very interesting, they are starting to seem a touch parochial. Really seriously interesting things are happening in the Eurozone.

A good basic rule of politics is that nothing much changes most of the time. Reforms and policies are trailed, events are breathlessly foretold - all with the potential to uproot life as we know it. Most of the time, it’s hard to spot the difference afterwards. This time though?

As stark analyses go, it’s hard to better Willem Buiter’s view on Eurozone economies:

Ireland, Greece And Portugal Are Insolvent, Spain Will Be Soon, Italy And Belgium Are Threatened

The markets are taking the view that the Portuguese are just weeks away from needing a bailout, the Spanish maybe only a few months. Is the Euro really going to be sustainable with half its members on life support? Germany is now growing pretty strongly – they’ll be wanting an increase in interest rates before too long. But with the whole Eurozone periphery in the deep freeze?

It may be, of course, that this is another case where despite apocalyptic headlines everyone just sort of muddles through and nothing much really changes. But I’m not sure I’d be betting that way.

Essence of Guardian

2010-11-30T15:11:00.002Z

Another in the occasional Guardian distilled category.

Twelve years ago, when we named our daughter Merrily, it didn't occur to us that she might grow up not liking what she was called.

Seriously?

So that's why the Indy hired him...

2010-11-23T16:12:00.003Z

Since I seem to spend so much time pointing out when he’s being an idiot, it would be extremely churlish not to point you all towards Johann Hari’s latest:

I weighed 14 stone and was 30 per cent body fat. If I were a sandwich, nobody would eat me except me.

Cracking stuff…

Infelicitous truths

2010-11-19T10:29:00.002Z

The definition of a Kinsley gaffe is someone telling the truth by accident – inadvertently saying something in public that they believe in private. Since most of us exert very little in the form of internal censorship, its’ surprising that these don’t happen more often – but then politicians aren’t normal in that way. Except Lord Young of Graffham, obviously.

“For the vast majority of people in the country today they have never had it so good ever since this recession — this so-called recession — started, because anybody, most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax.”

Lord Young also indicated that the Coalition had deliberately overstated the impact of spending cuts to “protect the pound”.

He said that there had been a danger of the value of the pound collapsing after the general election. “The fact that we seemed to be going through such big cuts really meant that the pound was saved, so far,” he said. “If you actually look at the cuts after four years we will be back with government spend[ing] the same as it was in ’07.”

He added: “I have a feeling and a hope that when this goes through, people will wonder what all the fuss was about.”

You have there, by my reckoning, three separate statements, all of which are true, and none of which should ever be said in public. If you’re employed and a borrower (like, um, me for one) then this recession has been more good than bad. OK, we’ve had a pay freeze, but mortgages are at rock bottom. Discounting the fear of unemployment, for most of us it’s been great. Of course, if you’re unemployed it’s been grim (as we all know, the definition of a recession is when your neighbour loses his job; when you lose your job it’s a depression). It’s not been pretty either if you’re living on savings – and a lot of these will be pensioners not a demographic the Tories will be keen to annoy.

The next truth is that, for all the hyperbolic bluster from both sides of the biggest cuts in human history, the reality is far less dramatic. But it suits the Tories for the moment to pretend that the fiscal tightening is even more stringent than it is, for the very reason that Young highlights: to persuade the markets that serious action is being taken. And, more or less, it’s worked. But having the sleight of hand pointed out is unhelpful, to say the least. There’s more too:

He described the loss of about 100,000 public-sector jobs a year as being within “the margin of error” in the context of the 30 million-strong job market as a whole.

Which, of course, it is. Half a million new jobs have been created so far this year alone. It’s not stretching a point to suggest that the loss of 100,000 public sector jobs a year (many through retirement) will be less visible than the raw numbers suggest. Equally, it’s the far side of stupid to dismiss them out of hand. People will be losing their jobs. Real people, who matter. It may be for the best, all things considered, but it’s politic at least to pretend that you care.

He has, of course, apologised (after David Cameron gave him a public dressing down) saying that the words he used “were both inaccurate and insensitive”. But that’s only half right. They were accurate and insensitive. The truth usually is, which is why we prefer our politicians to have such a flexible attitude towards it. Iain Martin, as so often, has it right here – Lord Young is a lousy politician.

Ashes countdown

2010-11-15T17:39:00.002Z

The run-up to the Ashes (and we’re nearly there!) is usually dominated by England’s woes of fitness and form. The last time England won the opening match of the tour was 1962, and recent years have been particularly grim. In 2006/7, England were humiliated in the tour opener, and promptly lost their senior batsman. In 2003/4 they conceded 582 against Queensland. So, the results so far – a straightforward win against Western Australia and much the best of a draw against South Australia – are pretty encouraging. The batsmen have got runs, the bowlers have taken wickets, and, touch wood, there have been no injury scares.

Unusually, it has been Australia that has been all over the place in the build-up. As bids to steady the nerves go, the announcement of the squad for the first Test left a bit to be desired. A squad of 17 would be on the large side for a full overseas tour; for a home Test it is just bizarre. But it reflects the two big problems for Aussie cricket just now. The first is the question of whether to stick or twist. Australia’s batting is dominated by the over 30s. Three (Ponting, Katich and Hussey) are over 35 – antediluvian in Test match terms. When to move on to the next generation (batsmen like Callum Ferguson or Usman Khawaja) will be the question that hangs over the Ashes. And yet, by naming both young and old together in this squad, Australia have acknowledged the problem without answering it.

It’s the second problem, however, that gives me most hope for the Ashes. Australia have named three spinners in this mega-squad – Nathan Hauritz, Steven Smith and Xavier Doherty. When we were here last, Australia only needed the one. Shane’s Test average was a parsimonious 25, and his economy a miserly 2.65 an over. Nathan Hauritz averages 35 in Tests and is considered the senior spinner. Smith and Doherty’s first class averages are atrocious: they both average 49. Graeme Swann’s Test average is 26. For the first time since 1986/7 England have the upper hand in the spin bowling department.

Australia are always a tough team to beat at home, but they have surely never been more beatable than this.

Short answers to stupid questions

2010-11-12T14:24:00.001Z

David Cameron very accurately pointed out the shortcomings of Twitter. I suspect that Gareth Compton and Paul Chambers might privately agree with the thrust of DC’s comment that too many tweets might make a twat, although in both cases they probably feel that it’s the law that’s being the twat here. I can, however, make a reasonable stab (I hope that’s not going to get me arrested) at answering the ineffably awful Yasmin Alibhai-Brown here.

If I had said, "It would be a blessing if this man was stoned to death," what would happen to me as a Muslim woman in this country?

Nothing. And I’m not sure what you think would happen to you ‘as a Muslim woman’ that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

Some sort of perspective needs to be taken here. I remember sending a text message during the Old Trafford test of 2005 saying ‘someone please shoot Ricky Ponting’. Should I have been arrested for incitement to murder? C’mon. The history of prosecuting people for telling jokes is not a happy one.

Simpler = lower?

2010-11-12T09:27:00.002Z

This is almost unambiguously good news. Britain’s tax code has become almost impenetrably complex over the years, and a decade of Gordon Brown – who liked nothing better than to try and tweak incentives through allowances, exemptions, differing rates and other assorted fiddling – made the situation much worse. So this news is pretty welcome:

George Osborne, the Chancellor, is expected to order the closing of dozens, or possibly even hundreds, of tax loopholes in an attempt to boost revenues for the exchequer.

The Treasury estimate is that £42bn is ‘lost’ each year by the application of these loopholes. Now, obviously, many of these are there for a reason – R&D exemptions for example – and I’d be very surprised indeed if there were a blanket removal. But a lot will either be archaic or else so complicated that they are really only used by accountants seeking to lower an overall corporate tax burden.

Of course, tax simplification is only half the deal. Once these loopholes have been filled, the obvious corollary is that tax rates can be lowered. Politically this actually poses a risk for the Chancellor. Given the background of fiscal tightening and the undercurrent of unrest, how feasible is it for the Chancellor to start lowering business taxes? We have already seen, with the 50% top rate, that in this Government when politics and economics collide, it is politics that wins.

Maybe the best solution here, given that corporation tax rates are already scheduled to fall, is to use the bulk of whatever tax revenues are gained by this simplification either to raise the income tax threshold still further, or to cut the basic rate. In the medium term, and only on the basis of OBR analysis on what its actual revenue benefit is, the 50% rate should be abolished. That’s a plan for 2014 though…

Fact-checking Johann Hari. Again.

2010-11-10T13:05:00.003Z

Oh look, it’s Johann Hari again. This turn reminding us that his propensity for being somewhat slapdash with facts is not limited to matters legal, but merrily embraces the historical. Now, he’s certainly correct that Winston Churchill’s record is forever blemished by an attitude to racial politics that was outdated by 1920, and was archaic by post-war standards. Churchill was as completely, utterly wrong about India and Africa as he was right about Germany. But being (admittedly not exactly ground-breakingly) correct in the thrust of your argument does not excuse you from basic research.

George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire…

Mau Mau was certainly a particularly painful episode in British imperial history – although Hari relies, again, entirely on Catherine Elkins’ book that provides, at best, one angle from which to view the conflict. But comments are free and facts are sacred, as they say. So let’s look at the facts shall we?

Was Hussein Onyango Obama connected with this [pre-Mau Mau] radical ginger group? It is impossible for us to know for sure, and it is doubtful that even his family would have been aware of the political machinations within the KAU at the time, but it does seem the most plausible reason for his arrest and trial in 1949.

Arrested in 1949, tried, convicted and sentenced to two years in prison (presumably for membership of a banned political group). I’m sure that even Hari can work out that this is incompatible with “imprisoned without trial” but it might be necessary to spell out why it is also incompatible with “on Churchill’s watch, for Churchill’s empire.” In 1949, as even a Cambridge graduate ought to be aware, Labour were in power.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill's victims only in one respect

Presumably by actually being among Clement Atlee’s victims.

Omnia Vanitas

2010-11-09T09:22:00.001Z

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. So Cameron appoints a photographer, a web-designer, a brand-management specialist and a diary-spad for Sam to the Civil Service: 26 appointments in all - and all this at a time of public sector cutbacks and Civil Service redundancies. Tsk eh? Why can’t the Government use Civil Servants already there?

Personally, I blame the West Wing. That sentimental load of lefty wishful-thinking has so successfully infected the British political classes that they all see themselves as operating in a Washington-type system, and one of the things that characterises the American way of doing things is that the new administration brings in a new team. People who ran elements of the campaign (like photography or website-management) get brought in to do the same job in Government. And why not? It’s a very strange rule that being successful in doing your job means that you should automatically lose it.

In part this is also a function of the (historically unusual) pattern of long periods of opposition. Labour were out of power for 18 years, the Tories for 13 years. You get used to appointing your own staff over that sort of time frame, and that is of course what Short Money is for. On the actual merits of the appointments, I really don’t see it as particularly scandalous that the Government is finding ways for people to continue to do the same job in Government as they did in opposition.

Which means, ironically, that the biggest problem in appointing people to handle aspects of PR for the Government has been that it looks so bad. Is this an indication that these people are desperately needed, or that they clearly aren’t as good at their job as they think they are?

Old and Sad

2010-11-05T16:07:00.001Z

I doubt that there will be many tears shed for Phil Woolas. He was an odious tick at the best of times, and the ruling that his deeply unpleasant campaign in Oldham East and Saddleworth breached the Representation of the People Act 1983, and that as a consequence the election will be void and Woolas will be barred from standing for any elected office for three years should probably be filed under ‘comeuppance’.

But the prospect of a by election won’t be one that exactly fills Coalition hearts with glee. Old and Sad was a three-way marginal at the election. Woolas won it by 106 votes over the Lib Dem candidate, with the Tories really not that far behind. Ordinarily, one would say that it was an exciting prospect for all three parties to show where public opinion really is in the aftermath of the CSR. But that’s rather the problem – the polls are pretty bleak for the Lib Dems (the Tories on the other hand can be a bit happier with the fact that they still lead most of them), and there must be a real chance that Old and Sad suffers a sort of Winchester effect.

But if the news isn’t great for the Coalition, it’s a sight worse for Labour. Not only is it humiliating in and of itself for a former minister (and immigration minister at that) to have run a campaign run on such unpleasant, and borderline racist lines. But to make matters far worse, Ed Miliband, in another stunning selection, appointed him as a shadow home office minister. Given that this court case was ongoing at the time, you do have to wonder what on earth Miliband thought he was doing – it would have been easy, and much more sensible, to delay any such appointment until after the case was resolved.

Anyway, it has all rather blown up in Miliband’s face, and he needs to sort it out quickly. I’ve not seen anything yet, but as Ben Brogan says, he needs to cut Woolas adrift pronto. Ed Miliband was dangerously (although perfectly rationally) spineless over Ken Livingstone’s flagrant breaches of Labour rules over the Tower Hamlet election. If he’s as supine this time round, something of a precedent will have been set.

Wanted: new slogan

2010-11-03T16:44:00.002Z

The US mid-terms look like they’ve been every bit the thumping that was predicted, much to the despair of Curtis Sittenfeld in Slate in a piece entitled I Still Love Obama. Love. Love. Love. Am I the last person in America who still adores President Obama?

Now, this might seem like the naïve enthusiasm of a political neophyte (or, just conceivably, a monumental parody), but he does actually touch on something important and relevant when wondering why support for Obama has plummeted since 2008.

Honestly, though, I'm surprised that so many people have turned against the president. Obviously, if you've lost your job, life is tough, but did voters really believe the country was going to quickly and dramatically reverse course once he was elected?

Well that’s the thing isn’t it? I suspect a lot of people did, thanks to campaign rhetoric like this:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.

When you ramp up expectations to that level (and are, into the bargain, a bit creepy and weird) you are just setting yourself up for failure. Obama-mania was always a bit of a ridiculous phenomenon. Maybe now that he’s been given such a resounding slap, Obama will concentrate a bit less on lowering sea-levels and healing the sick, and a bit more on the basic fundamentals of good government. Because although ‘Yes we can’ is a good campaign slogan, in Government you quickly discover that ‘Well, it depends’ is more accurate.

Ooooh-kay...

2010-10-29T17:41:00.002+01:00

I’d thought that Janet Street-Porter was only obnoxious, self-obsessed and incredibly annoying. I hadn’t realised that she is also bat-shit fucking insane.

When one female columnist decided to take me to task for appearing on I'm A Celebrity ...Get Me Out Of Here! she made a huge issue out of the fact I apparently have cellulite. Get a life, love! I had a large picture of her printed, tore it into tiny pieces and mailed it to her home address, with a note saying I was concerned, as she clearly needed psychiatric help…

In the end, though, God has a neat way of dealing with revenge - it's called natural death.

So I was spared the need to deal with Kenny Everett (his horrible impersonation of me really rankled over the years and was frequently repeated, just to rub salt in the wound).

Unlike his fans, I did a little dance of joy around the kitchen when he finally departed.

So… mad as a box of frogs, and thoroughly unpleasant to boot. Who’d have thought it?

Johann Hari's unconventional attitude to facts

2010-10-29T11:36:00.006+01:00

How does he get away with it? How does Johann Hari hold down a job as a columnist in a broadsheet newspaper when he is so often so flagrantly in breach of the truth? Whether it’s stating that British GDP fell after abolishing slavery, which it didn’t, claiming that the coalition intends to cut public spending by 20%, when that figure’s actually 4%, asserting that the foot and mouth leak in 2007 came from a US-owned private laboratory, when it was actually from a Government-owned one, or even claiming that the Japanese Prime Minister was attacked and nearly killed by a robot, when, um, he wasn’t, Hari manages to make such blinding (and simple) factual errors in his columns, that it’s hard to knew if he’s just stupid, or if he’s a liar.

And he’s at it again today. Now, when he first mentioned the Vodafone tax dispute a few days ago, I commented that things often look straightforward to the ill-informed, and assumed that Hari’s confusion on the subject was just a symptom of that ignorance. But since he’s so much more specific here, I’m not sure that holds.

In my column last week, I mentioned in passing something remarkable and almost unnoticed. For years now, Vodafone has been refusing to pay billions of pounds of taxes to the British people that are outstanding. The company – which has doubled its profits during this recession – engaged in all kinds of accounting twists and turns, but it was eventually ruled this refusal breached anti-tax avoidance rules. They looked set to pay a sum Private Eye calculates to be more than £6bn.

Then, suddenly, the exchequer – run by George Osborne – cancelled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in Revenues and Customs says is “an unbelievable cave-in.”

Starting at the beginning, the tax dispute relates to an overseas subsidiary of Vodafone based in Luxemburg. Under the Controlled Foreign Companies tax provisions, HMRC (although since this was in 2000, it would have been the Revenue that would have started all this) claimed tax on this transaction in full – that’s where the £6bn figure comes from. Vodafone argued that the CFC tax regime was incompatible with EU law on freedom of establishment – and there was an ECJ case (Cadbury-Schweppes if you’re interested) that ruled that CFC rules are in principle a restriction on the freedom of establishment and that they should apply only to wholly artificial arrangements where the CFC in question was not carrying on genuine economic activities in the non-UK EU member state.

Far from it having been "ruled that this refusal breached anti-tax avoidance rules" Vodafone won their case with HMRC’s Special Commissioners, and won again at first instance when HMRC appealed – the court ruling that the CFC code was in basic conflict with EU law, and should be disapplied. HMRC won the right to appeal this decision further, but elected to settle it out of court instead. The tax bill wasn’t outstanding, it had been ruled invalid both by HMRC’s own internal commission and subsequently by the High Court. Now, it’s possible (hell, it’s more or less certain) that Johann is as ignorant of the law as he is of history and economics. But that’s why newspaper columnists are supposed to have editors.

The dangers of Labour's approach

2010-10-26T12:41:00.000+01:00

The problem with casting your primary political message as being that the Coalition Government's economic policies will lead to a double dip recession, vastly increased unemployment and basically the end of the world as we know it is that it leaves a gigantic hostage to fortune. What, to put it at its most basic, happens if there is no recession, if unemployment doesn't soar - if the UK goes into recovery? Labour will be left looking rather silly, and fundamentally economically wrongheaded. You got us into this mess, the Tories will say, and then you opposed our efforts to get us out of it into the bargain!

So Labour will be understandably conflicted about the latest, better than expected economic data. On the one hand, I don't think even Labour politicians really want to see the UK go back into a full-blown recession. On the other, it must be a trifle embarrassing to have spent the entire summer calling Coalition plans reckless, uneconomic and counter-productive and then to see the strongest third quarter growth in a decade.

That's the problem with opposition, since all you do is talk there's a strong temptation to talk yourself into awkward corners. You can certainly expect David Cameron to play on the GDP figures quite strongly - until next quarter's figures come out anyway.

No Polly, seriously

2010-10-26T10:29:00.001+01:00

This is not so much jumping the shark as leaping joyfully over the entire cast of Jaws and Jaws II. Housing benefit is being cut to a maximum of £400 per week. That is, of course, still more than most non-benefit receiving people will be spending on their accommodation, but still. And how is this described by Polly?

At last the Tories have a final solution for the poor

Because, obviously, reducing housing benefit is just like rounding up 6 million Jews and gassing them. Sheesh.

UPDATE: This article currently appears directly below a piece by Tim Montgomerie politely asking Labour supporters not to accuse Tories of being a cross between Fagin and Goebbels. Nice touch.

Um, really?

2010-10-26T10:24:00.000+01:00

From a piece in the Guardian saying, apparently, that public sector workers are whinging, workshy layabouts who need to be molly-coddled by the great feather bed of the state as employer.

As if this is not enough, many of the public sector workers released will not have the skills the private sector businesses will need. Many will not have the attitude required for jobs in the cold outside world. There are many more suitable people seeking work, and public sector workers may be too much of a risk to hire.

I can only assume he's trying to be nice - it is in the Guardian after all - but if right-wingers say this sort of thing they get pilloried by, well, the Guardian. Peculiar.

Peej on the midterms

2010-10-25T17:39:00.000+01:00

I've not really been paying much attention to US politics, other than to note that Americans in general do seem now to have realised that their President really is just another politician with a nice line in speeches. But it's starting to look as though the midterms next week are going to be something of a thumping. Partly this is because there's nothing more an electorate likes than to be angry and disappointed, and partly because although Obama ran as a post-partisan centrist, he's actually presided over an even more bitterly divided polity than before. Be that as it may, lets have a little pre-election punditry from the might P.J. O'Rourke:

This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling.

That's the spirit.

Sodding bloody hell

2010-10-25T12:01:00.000+01:00

Well, I've finally been able to spend enough time monkeying around in the bowels of my template to work out what it was that was causing the sidebar to drop off. On the upside, this means that the sidebar no longer drops off. On the downside, I only worked out what it was (font size in the posts on the vanishingly small chance anyone cares) after deleting more or less everything in that sidebar.

At least this gives me no choice but to update my links...

It's the end of the world (as we know it)

2010-10-21T15:45:00.003+01:00

One of the depressing things I found about researching a doctorate is that the clear, simple, broadbrush messages and patterns that you can discern when you start begin to blur, dissipate and smudge as you dig deeper into the evidence. The person who can give you a simple, straightforward and lucid description of pretty much anything is either a towering genius or, far more likely, mostly ignorant of what he’s talking about. As a prime example of the latter, lets turn (once again) to Johann Hari. Hari has, of course, decided that the cuts announced in the CSR yesterday are the end of civilisation as we know it, and is not to be swayed by the inconvenience of facts.

When was the last time Britain's public spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent? Not in my mother's lifetime. Not even in my grandmother's lifetime.

Anyone spot the blinder in this line? Yes – it’s that public spending, far from being slashed by 20%, is actually being cut by the rather more modest 4% over 4 years.

No, it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country's debts. The result? Unemployment soared from 6 per cent to 19 per cent…

Who thinks that the demobilisation of 3 million men might have had an impact on unemployment? In fact, Hari has all this arse about tit. Public spending diminished dramatically after the end of the First World War because, um, the First World War had ended. When by far the largest single component of public spending ceases to be, the effect is likely to be a diminution of that spending. If Hari wasn’t such an arsehead about numbers, he’d know that public spending fell even more sharply after the Second World War – by 35% from 1945 to 1949. In the style of Johnny Cochrane, if 35% is bigger than 4%, then Johann Hari is an idiot.

That's why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers –

I would love to know what regulation, specifically, Hari believes was removed from the financial sector, that caused the Credit Crunch. Because my guess, based on reading Hari for a while, is that his knowledge of the financial sector is rather less profound than his knowledge of history.

To pluck a random example, one of the richest corporations in Britain, Vodafone, had an outstanding tax bill of £6bn – but Osborne simply cancelled it this year. If he had made them pay, he could have prevented nearly all the cuts to all the welfare recipients in Britain.

And this is what I meant earlier about the best and most powerful arguments being based on ignorance. The Vodafone case has been rumbling on in the courts for over a decade now and relates to a technical dispute over a Luxembourgeois subsidiary and the Controlled Foreign Companies tax system that the late and unlamented Labour Government made such a monumental horlicks of during their time in office. Rather than continue to pursue a legal case with no guarantee of any recovery at all in the long term, and no possibility of any recovery in the short term, HMRC has decided to settle this and similar long-standing disputes now (Vodafone settled for £1.25bn), and clarify the law so that there are fewer such disputes in the future.

Which all means that in that first sentence, both major elements are incorrect. It wasn’t an outstanding tax bill, and Osborne didn’t cancel it. If he (or any previous Chancellor) could have made them pay, then he undoubtedly would have done so – unfortunately there’s this pesky thing called the rule of law.

You can’t fault Hari’s emotional engagement, but I do wish he’d read a little more.

Tom Harris and Lady Thatcher

2010-10-15T11:48:00.007+01:00

It’s easy to see why Tom Harris failed to win a place in the Shadow Cabinet. He is, after all, amusing, thoughtful and intelligent. If political parties were run on the basis of doing what their opponents least wanted there is surely no question that people like Harris, John McTernan and Alistair Darling would be playing prominent roles in the opposition. But then, if political parties were run on the basis of doing what their opponents least wanted, David Miliband would be Leader of the Opposition.

It’s something of a dilemma for partisan spectators like me: should we be pleased that Labour is so ostentatiously handicapping itself in opposition, or disappointed that the best Labour MPs are on the backbenches?

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a paean of praise to some unwashed Glaswegian socialist. It was supposed to be a reflection on Tom’s latest post: Considering the Iron Lady.

Last night I ReTweeted a message from Peter Watt, wishing Margaret Thatcher a heavily caveated happy 85th birthday. The response from some party members, particularly on my Facebook site, has been pretty extreme: “evil” and “hate” were used in abundance by my detractors.

Thatcher is a totemic hate-figure for the left. The mere mention of her name is enough to drive many of them into a frothing lunatic rage. Which made me think: who is the equivalent hate figure for the right? You’d think it would be Blair, after all he trounced the right for a decade, and had the same sort of contempt for his opponents as Lady Thatcher. But the real source of Blair Derangement Syndrome is on the left – often among the same people who suffer from Thatcher Derangement Syndrome. Gordon Brown? Well, that’s probably closer, but I really don’t see the name of Gordon Brown raising anything more than a shudder in 20 years time.

Are the right just worse at resentment than the left? To me, as to Tony Greig, a grudge is nothing more than a place to park your car – is this representative?

Dennis Macshane reported to police; loses whip

2010-10-14T12:33:00.002+01:00

Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap. The picture of the office that required £20,000 per year to be spent on it is really quite eye-opening. And there is, of course, the obligatory Mandy Rice-Davis moment.

He has been one of the most high-profile critics of the new expenses system.

Well, quite.

The chill of opposition

2010-10-14T11:53:00.001+01:00

An extremely good post by Hopi Sen on the difficulties and contradictions of opposition. As he says, there is a continual tension between tactical opposition and strategic positioning – there are countless examples of parties that were good oppositions, but failed to convince as an alternative Government. He has good advice too for Ed Miliband:

One the one side, resisting the urge to jump at easy tactical victories at the price of strategic defeats which will prevent us becoming the next government.

On the other, resisting the urge to destroy the village in order to save it, accepting that oppositions must campaign and oppose with vigour and energy to show progress and growth. That sometimes it is right to jump on the passing bandwagon, if it’s going in the right direction.

He’s also right that Labour are having difficulty adjusting to the reality of not being in power. When Ed Miliband became leader, Polly Toynbee wrote a bizarre ‘open letter’ to him containing priceless advice like the following:

Do be brave, at least sometimes: governments are also judged on policies they enact when public opinion is out of kilter with the facts.

Don't panic on crime. Don't respond to every passing horror with a hundred new Criminal Justice Acts. Don't overflow prisons with the non-violent. Understand the public need for tough punishment but know your only measure of success is reduced re-offending.

Don't be afraid to back winners, whatever neo-liberal textbooks say (conveniently forgetting China, Singapore and the US): support manufacturing, invest in British-built wind farms, in home insulation and carbon capture.

Don't allow another housing bubble. If prices take off again, impose a land value tax and use the proceeds to kick-start building private and social homes, an engine for growth.

Do reform voting so elections no longer rely on winning a handful of middle Englanders in marginals. Make every vote count. Reform the Lords.

Don't go to war without wholehearted national support backed by solid international law.

The merits or otherwise of this advice is beside the point – none of it is relevant to a Leader of the Opposition. Can anyone reading this remember what was in the 2001 Tory manifesto? Something about saving the pound – and that’s literally all I can remember. 90% of the time, no-one cares what oppositions say or do. Nobody knows who is in the Shadow Cabinet – they barely know who is in the Cabinet. Prime Ministers wake up wondering what to do; Leaders of the Opposition wake up wondering what to say.

Ashes Fever

2010-10-13T14:43:00.002+01:00

Ashes tours are funny things. While I tend to watch all of a home series, and remember them to the very smallest details (Graham Thorpe dropping Matthew Elliot on 29 when he went on to (jolly nearly) a double hundred; Robin Smith being the first batsman given out stumped by the third umpire; Peter Such’s batting making Brian Johnston giggle) away tours only stick in my head via little snapshots of despair – snippets I very often never see. I’ve still never seen footage of David Gower slapping Merv Hughes to deep long leg, but it’s there in my memory, just like Phil Defreitas getting pummelled by Michael Slater, or Warren Hegg playing for England. In fact, the only tour I have no memories of whatsoever is the 2006/7 tour. Funny that.

But the upcoming tour is a strange one for a number of reasons. The first is that, as of today and for the first time, England perch one place higher in the world rankings than Australia. The unprecedented nature of such superiority is only slightly dented by the fact that the ranking process only dates back to 2003 – the last time England toured Australia as anything other than rank outsiders was 1986/7, and even then they were considered definite second-favourites. The last time England toured as favourites was 1978/9.

England also, at present, aren’t encumbered by injuries. Vaughan, Trescothick and Jones missed the 2006/7 series; Thorpe, Flintoff, Gough and Jones missed the 2002/3 series. England are used to putting out sides missing their best batsmen and best bowlers for Ashes series. So far, and touching wood, there’s nobody but Trescothick that the selectors would like to pick but can’t.

Australia are looking fragile too – three straight defeats for the first time since 1988. The middle order looks shaky, the back-up pace attack doesn’t yet look test class, and they don’t have a spinner worth his place. This isn’t to say England don’t have vulnerabilities: Alistair Cook and Paul Collingwood are still fighting flawed techniques, and Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen are fighting perceptions of a flawed temperament. Morgan and Finn are unproven, Anderson has been poor overseas, Bresnan isn’t test class, and a lot depends on Graeme Swann. Still, for the first time since I can remember, it’s Australia who look to be the side in more trouble.

All we need now is for Mitchell Johnson to deliver the first ball of the series to second slip…

Alan Johnson? Really?

2010-10-08T17:01:00.001+01:00

It was, as I said, always going to be a tricky decision over who should be Shadow Chancellor. The most obviously qualified candidate, Ed Balls was scuppered by three terminal disadvantages: his stated economic policy was very different to his new leader’s; Shadow Chancellor would have given the most powerful position in the party to a disappointed leadership hopeful with an unmatched reputation for plotting and disloyalty; finally, he’s Ed Balls – the man’s about as popular as cayenne pepper in a jar of lube.

Ruling him out, the next most obvious candidate would have been Ed Balls’s wife Yvette Cooper. But presumably Ed Miliband takes the view that he’s broken up enough family relationships this month, although why she’s landed up at shadow Foreign is a mystery to me. In opposition this is almost a non-job; she’d have been far better employed at Business, or Work & Pensions.

But if it isn’t Balls or Cooper, who is there as a credible candidate? Well, nobody really. John Healey is too low-profile, Jim Murphy too Scottish and too low-profile, Andy Burnham too lightweight, Liam Byrne destroyed by a jokey letter. Who else? Alan Johnson. No economic experience, a reputation for laziness and inattention to detail, but on the other hand, a good presentational politician and, by Labour’s reduced standards, a heavyweight, albeit an aging one. The Tories’ initial reaction, via Philip Hammond, that this looks like a caretaker appointment rings true. The stage looks to be set for somebody to ride back into town in a year or so, rehabilitated and ready for the big league again.

The real question now is just how loyal Ed Balls decides to be as Shadow Home Secretary. The idea that this is a perfect springboard for an opposition politician to reach the big time should be challenged though – who, without looking it up, can remember who William Hague’s first two Shadow Home Secretaries were? Brian Mawhinney and Norman Fowler.

Balls and more balls.

2010-10-07T10:09:00.001+01:00

Slightly odd this, from Michael Crick. In Cameron’s speech yesterday he referred to Ed Balls’s comment to Toby Young on Newsnight that “The danger is that there will be winners” and then riffed on that subject:

Winners? We can't have that. The danger that your child might go to school and turn out to be a winner. Anti-aspiration. Anti-success. Anti-parents who just want the best for their children.

What an unbelievable attitude from this Labour generation.

Michael Crick thinks that this is a distortion of what Balls said, which was different. Well, here’s what Balls said, in full:

The danger is that there will be winners, but it is dishonest to suggest that there will not be losers as well.

Which is, as John Rentoul says, precisely what Cameron said that he said. Labour seem to believe, in these post-Blair days, that no-one should be allowed to do well, on the grounds that not everyone will. Or, as John Prescott said “If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that’s the place they want to go to.” Ed Balls has become the thinking man’s John Prescott.

Some thoughts on child benefit

2010-10-05T16:36:00.002+01:00

1. The sting in it is going to be less about higher-rate taxpayers losing their child benefit payments, and more about families with two just-not-higher-rate taxpayers managing to keep theirs.

2. Something will probably done to mitigate the impression that stay-at-home wives are being specially disadvantaged – probably some form of transferrable allowance.

3. The Government will wheel this out repeatedly as their primary example of us all being in this together.

4. Labour will find it hard to go beyond a generic criticism about how this cut is being implemented.

5. Jeeze, this cuts malarkey is going to be unpopular…

Labour in the lead

2010-10-01T11:08:00.000+01:00

So Labour get a small polling lead from ICM. The importance of this shouldn’t be over-stated: it’s conference season, they have a new leader, and most importantly it’s still four and a half years before the next General Election. If the Tories are stretching for positives they should also note that the Labour share hasn’t in fact shifted (when traditionally they have enjoyed substantial boosts during conference), and that David Cameron still has a substantial lead on who makes the best Prime Minister.

But I think there’s no question that the Coalition has a bit of a problem getting its message out at the moment. John Redwood identifies the problem with characteristic acuity here:

For the last few months the main message coming out of the Coalition is the message of “deep cuts”. The long rambling spending review has allowed Labour politicians to get on the airwaves and excite concern about a long list of possible cuts. It has allowed all sorts of special interest groups free rein to parade the importance of their public spending and imply it is about to be cut in clumsy ways. It has allowed Ed Balls to confidently predict a double dip recession based on the cuts he expects. It has damaged public confidence, and even led to a Monetary Policy Committee member demanding more money printing…

They [the Government] just make the task a whole lot harder if they allow the impression to gain hold that they are in it for the cuts. That will unite the Union hotheads with Labour to fight harder. It might even make firebrands of some moderates within the public services. We are all in this together. Temperate language about public spending which reflects the truth of how much money is available will serve them better than the harsh language of cuts.

It’s a good point – the debate on cuts has reached the point where a substantial number of people think that the cuts have gone too far when they haven’t even started yet. But the Coalition have two audiences to play for. They first have to convince the markets that their deficit reduction measures are stringent and substantial, before trying to reassure the electorate that it’s not as bad as all that. The first half of this strategy seems to be working – witness the IMF report on Britain’s economy:

The government’s strong and credible multi-year fiscal deficit reduction plan is essential to ensure debt sustainability. The plan greatly reduces the risk of a costly loss of confidence in public finances and supports a balanced recovery.

But that success does make it harder for the second half to kick in just yet. The Government seems to have taken the decision that they can ride out the unpopularity for a couple of years, and then try and run a line that the cuts have ‘worked’ and thanks to the responsible policies of the Coalition etc etc.

So the surprise shouldn’t be that Labour have a 2 point lead in their conference week. It should be that they only have a 2 point lead in their conference week. I’d be surprised if Labour weren't polling a good 10 points clear of the Tories by the spring, and it wouldn’t be a great shock if they’re outpolling Tories and the Lib Dems combined. But it’s not what happens next year that matters, it’s what happens in 2015. Buckle up chaps, bumpy road ahead.

One way of putting it...

2010-09-29T16:08:00.000+01:00

The new Labour Chief Whip?

But Rosie [Winterton] is no political virgin. She ran John Prescott’s office from 1994-1997, became MP for Doncaster in 1997 and held several ministerial posts.

One ministerial post in particular, if rumours are to be believed.

Ballsing it up

2010-09-29T15:08:00.001+01:00

Since it seems all but inevitable that David Miliband will not stand for Shadow Cabinet, his brother is left with even more of a dilemma as to who to make Shadow Chancellor. The problem is that the stand-out candidate, Ed Balls, is a risk. He’s a risk for two reasons. The first is that he comes complete with a pretty thorough economic policy of his own – essentially ‘no cuts until recovery is established’. If Ed Miliband agrees with this, then fair enough – it’s if he prefers the Alistair Darling approach that formed, after all, the centrepiece of the manifesto that Miliband wrote that this is a difficulty. The second problem is the nature of Balls himself.

Ed Balls was Gordon Brown’s consigliere for the entire lifespan of New Labour. He was fundamental in plotting the downfall of Blair, and the rise of Brown. He’s a dangerous man to hug too closely. But then, he’s a dangerous man to leave in the cold as well.

And if it isn’t Balls, then who is it to be? The other obvious choice would be Yvette Cooper – but would she really connive in the supplanting of her husband? If Balls wants Shadow Chancellor – and he was desperate for the real job a year ago – I don’t think Cooper would stand in his way. Burnham and Byrne are just too lightweight (and crippled, in Byrne’s case, by his infamous letter to David Laws), Alan Johnson has no economic background and, well, who else is there?

The solution I would try to work, were I Ed Miliband, would be to persuade Balls that he was best suited, for now, for the Home Office and that his wife should take Shadow Chancellor. But I rather suspect that won’t fly, and we’ll be seeing a duopoly of Ed’s in control.

So who liked him before he won?

2010-09-29T10:39:00.001+01:00

In case anyone was wondering whether Ed Miliband wasn’t such a bad choice after all, all things considered, lets have a quick look at who the pundits were who originally supported him over his brother. First up, and from my old alma mater, there’s tribune of the people Seumas Milne.

By contrast, his brother has at least begun to absorb the lessons of New Labour's failure and rejected its triangulation, social authoritarianism, embrace of flexible labour markets and support for tuition fees. He has also taken the essential step of denouncing the Iraq war, which he opposed at the time.

Next on the list comes long-time Reptile favourite Johann Hari.

Ed Miliband's agenda – to appeal to Britain's true middle and the lost low-income workers by arguing that they should have a greater share of the wealth they generate, while not killing a million people abroad – polls well.

And finally (yes, there really were only three of them), comes Jackie Ashley, although she does leave herself plenty of wriggle room. In fact, if ever there were a case of damning with faint praise…

Ed's problems would be, in some ways, deeper still. He would not have the big names from the past, or the money. That means he could look dangerously reliant on the unions and unreconstructed leftists among the membership. He could become the "public sector leader" or the "northern leader" rather than, as he wants, the leader of the "squeezed middle". By concentrating his policies so much on pay and not enough (though he's moving) on economic growth and modernisation, he's playing into his critics' hands…That is a formidable to-do list and frankly, Ed may not be up to it.

That Milne, Hari and Ashley are the only supporters who always supported you is not, in my mind, much to cheer about…

The perils of predictive text?

2010-09-28T11:51:00.001+01:00

While journalists should always strive for accuracy in reporting, I think we can let Dave Weigel off for this particular infringement.

In a Sept. 15 "Politics," David Weigel misspelled the names of former Colorado gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis, former Illinois gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski, Michigan congressional candidate Dan Benishek, and New York congressional candidate Nan Hayworth.

Reminds me of the (antique) story about the Pole going to the opticians for an eye-test.

“Can you read me the bottom line of the chart please sir?”

“Read it? He’s my best friend!”

Applause! Applause!

2010-09-28T10:27:00.001+01:00

I think we’ve amply demonstrated that I don’t understand the Labour Party. I do, however, entirely agree with Hopi Sen here that Ed Miliband will receive a rousing reception from the Party, keen to show how unified they are in support of their new leader. How much should we read into this? Well, IDS got 20 standing ovations for his conference speech in 2003, and he was toppled three weeks later.

IMF Approval

2010-09-27T16:46:00.000+01:00

One further thought on the difficult choices facing Ed Miliband. In the absence of a permanent leader this summer, Labour has defaulted to an oppositionist ‘all cuts are bad’ stance. Where this has been impossible to maintain, they have reverted, as Ed did on Andrew Marr’s show yesterday, to ‘of course we need to make cuts – just none of the ones the Tories are doing’.

In doing so, they are dangerously close to nailing their colour’s to Ed Ball’s mast (and there’s a mental image I apologise for), that the Government’s cuts are unnecessary and counter-productive and will tip the economy into a double-dip recession. What’s needed instead is more expansionary fiscal policy, paid for by more borrowing, to return the country to economic growth, at which point there’ll be no need for cuts, because we’re growing again.

Attractive as this ‘no nasty medicine today’ policy looks – not least because it allows Labour free reign to oppose all cuts, a position they’re much happier with – it carries with it a significant hostage to fortune: what if George Osborne is right, and what if there is no double-dip recession? Bearing that in mind, have a look at the IMF’s latest statement on the UK economy:

The UK economy is on the mend. Economic recovery is underway, unemployment has stabilized, and financial sector health has improved. The government’s strong and credible multi-year fiscal deficit reduction plan is essential to ensure debt sustainability. The plan greatly reduces the risk of a costly loss of confidence in public finances and supports a balanced recovery. Fiscal tightening will dampen short-term growth but not stop it as other sectors of the economy emerge as drivers of recovery, supported by continued monetary stimulus. Upside and downside risks around this central scenario of moderate growth and gradually falling inflation are balanced. Monetary policy will need to be nimble if risks materialize, and fiscal automatic stabilizers should operate freely. Meanwhile, the UK authorities should continue to provide leadership and build support for ambitious global reform of financial regulation. Ensuring a smooth transition to a new supervisory architecture at home will also be important to secure a safer post-crisis environment.

That could have been drafted by George Osborne himself – it provides authoritative backing for the Coalition’s economic policy, and handily rebuts a lot of Labour attack lines. Whoever the Shadow Chancellor is, he’d better be ready.

Cabinet makers

2010-09-27T15:21:00.000+01:00

The manner of his victory isn’t going to be the only problem facing Ed Miliband in the next few weeks. The construction of his shadow cabinet also has the potential to throw a few banana skins in his path. Appropriately enough, his brother is wielding the slipperiest of all.

From David’s perspective, this must all seem like a nightmare. He resisted sticking the knife into Gordon Brown before the election because he couldn’t see a way of winning the election afterwards – much better to pick up the crown later, and let Brown take the blame. He also refused a dead cert job as EU Representative for Foreign Affairs, again pinning his hopes on the leadership. He was the runaway favourite for almost the entire campaign, so much so that he wasn’t prepared to offer the sort of sops to the Unions that might have turned them his way. And, surely most difficult of all, he won. He won the MPs, he won the party, he won virtually every constituency party. He won everything except the Unions, but that wasn’t enough. Beaten at the post by his younger brother, that’s really going to sting.

He has three options ahead of him: to sign up as a Shadow Cabinet member; to return to the backbenches; or to walk away from British politics altogether. Labour, and especially Ed, must be desperate that he opts for the first: rumours are flying around that he has been offered Shadow Chancellor. But how attractive would serving in a subordinate position to his brother be – especially when you consider that economics was probably the biggest difference in their campaign positions? Equally, does he really want to retire to a sort of ‘King over the water’ position on the back benches? For all the bitterness he must be feeling, Ed is his brother, and David’s presence as a backbencher couldn’t help but be a destabilising influence. Walking away altogether must be tempting, but there probably aren’t nearly so many lucrative and imposing international jobs as people seem to think.

I’m not going to try and predict what he’ll do – this all seems more like an emotional choice than a wholly rational one – but in his position I might be tempted to exploit the fact that his brother now needs him far more than he needs his brother.

If Ed can’t persuade David to stay on in cabinet (or if he can, but only in the semi-detached role of Shadow Foreign Secretary), Ed will need to find a Chancellor. The ‘obvious’ choice would be Ed Balls, who has heavyweight economic credentials (albeit in the ‘persuasive but wrong’ category). That really would be nailing Labour’s colours to the Brownite ‘Labour investment vs. Tory cuts’ approach, and would mean repudiating Labour’s election position, and alienating moderate Darling-ite MPs – who overwhelmingly voted for David as leader. Maybe Balls would be better shadowing the Home Office: he’s an effective opposition politicians, and the Home Office is rarely short of targets. Who for Chancellor then? His wife perhaps? She’s certainly competent enough, although she needs to work on her television manner, but there’s another problem (worse is Mili-D is shadowing the Foreign Office). The four great offices of state would be shadowed by two brothers and two spouses. That’s quite a shallow gene pool.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that Ed Miliband looked quite so miserable while he waited for the results to be read out on Saturday. He’d realised quite what a pickle he’s in.

IDS with hair?

2010-09-27T12:05:00.000+01:00

Who can fathom the workings of the Labour machine? Not me, that’s for sure, although on a closer inspection perhaps I identified a part of the problem.

Miliband D seems to have based his campaign on the David Davis/Hillary Clinton model of inevitability. It’s actually a good technique, so long as there are no unexpected hiccups along the way, but he hasn’t been desperately visible so far.

Anyone spot what Davis, Clinton and Miliband D have in common? Quite.

I think I can be forgiven though for assuming that David would be the choice of the party – not least because he was the choice of the party. The intricacies of AV and the Union votes handed victory to his brother by the slimmest of margins and on the final round of voting. Which, one would think, should be the mother of a political problem for the new leader – not the choice of his MPs, not the choice of his party, scraping home thanks only to the votes of Trade Unionists. That’s a pretty hefty handicap at the beginning of your leadership. What were my thoughts about Ed back in the summer?

My problem with Ed Miliband is that, basically, I don’t get him. His brother is a wonk. Ed Balls is a thug. Diane Abbott is a loon. Andy Burnham is… Anyway, I can’t seem to place Ed Miliband; he hasn’t stamped his identity on the media. This can be a good as well as a bad thing – it is the baggage carried by Balls in particular that is hamstringing his run – but it carries with it the risk, as with William Hague, that his identity gets fashioned for him by an unfriendly media.

Well, ‘Red Ed’ hasn’t got off to the best of starts on that front, although it’s early days. But looking at the reactions of the left to this news, I’m pretty happy. People who I respect as being on the sensible, electable wing of the Labour party – Tom Harris, John McTernan, John Rentoul and so on – are unhappy and are worried both about the fact and the nature of Ed’s victory. On the other hand, Charlie Whelan, Tony Robinson and Sunny Hundal are delighted. That tells me pretty much all I need to know right now.

The Coalition are probably quietly satisfied as well – the ‘wrong’ Miliband won, and only because the Union vote trumped the wishes of the Party. On the basis of his acceptance speech it’s also hard to see Ed triumphing often at PMQs. On the other hand, Labour were cock-a-hoop in 1975 after the victory of that shrill, extreme and unelectable woman, so it’s best not to count any chickens just yet.

Leadership credentials

2010-09-08T17:29:00.000+01:00

It’s a feature of closed systems that affairs and arguments that seem all-consuming and massively important to their members will often appear extremely trivial to those not in the loop. Think office politics – or selection arguments for a local cricket team. The ongoing rows about Andy Coulson and the News of the World voicemail accessing seem to me to fall into this category. From the outside you see a scandal from five years ago, concerning vague skulduggery by tabloid journalists that resulted in the resignation of the editor, but never any proof that he was involved. Tabloid editor in ‘does anything for a story’ shocker. As far as dramatic exposes that shake your understanding of the world as you thought you knew it, this ranks right up there with ‘Pope believes in God’ and ‘the lavatorial habits of bears: revealed!’.

From the inside, or at least on the Opposition benches, this is a scandal fit to rank alongside Watergate (seriously) and easily worth spending all your questions at PMQs on (a tactic only slightly undermined by the news that the first person to call Coulson after his resignation was Gordon Brown…). Disproportionate this all may be, but the winner for most crazily unhinged comparison goes to David Miliband, who demonstrated his moral seriousness and fitness for office in the following tweet – written during PMQs, presumably not a habit he’ll be continuing for long.

Clegg says govt "acted wrongly" in 1972 in not investigating Father Chesney case. So why no investigation into Coulson?

Because, obviously, the moral equivalence between terrorist murders and possible editorial oversight of voicemail messages is plain for all to see. Someone needs to pull their head out of their arse and get a sense of perspective.