The Laws of politics

David Laws, the Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is not a man to whom you should send a personal letter. If he thinks that blabbing its contents to the press will help him politically, he will. His Labour predecessor Liam Byrne has discovered this, to his embarrassment. I wonder how his new Conservative colleagues will view him after this.

Steve Bell, who seems to be having quite a bit of fun with our new overlords, thinks Laws is a cross between Blair and Thatcher:

Turnout, unemployment, safe seats and marginals

Two things that everyone knows: poorer areas have lower voting turnouts than richer areas, and safer seats have lower turnouts than marginals.

I’ve looked at these effects in this general election: they both exist, but one is much bigger than the other. I used data on 2010 election turnout, 2005 election closeness and the April 2010 Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant count for each constituency in Britain.

The JSA numbers are hardly a perfect guide to unemployment, but they’re all I can find available on a constituency basis, and the result is striking:


The dots are mostly grouped pretty closely around a very clear line; the correlation between unemployment and turnout is -0.76. So some of those most affected by government policy are least likely to vote.

As for the safeness or marginality of a seat, here the correlation with turnout is still significant, but a much more modest -0.45:


There’s still a clear tendency, but the dots are mostly a lot farther from the line of best fit than they are in the unemployment chart. (The correlation between turnout and 2010 majority is a even feebler -0.13.)

So to all those electoral reformers who say that abolishing ultra-safe seats would boost turnout: on these figures, abolishing pockets of high unemployment would boost it even more. And it might even be a good thing in itself.

The new politics: unconventionally lording it

Under the Salisbury Convention, the House of Lords does not block government bills that were included in the manifesto.

How’s that going to work now? Will they apply it to policies that were in either party’s manifesto, or only to ones that were (in one form or another) included in both? What about a policy that’s a compromise between two manifesto pledges?

However, if Phil Cowley (via John Rentoul) is right, then the Tories and Lib Dems should have enough peers to get their way most of the time anyway.

(On Lords reform, the Lib Dem manifesto promised “a fully-elected second chamber” and the Tories’ said they would “work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber”. Their coalition pact commits them to “establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation”.)

Update: Gosh.

The 55% rule may not get 55% support

The government’s proposal that 55% of MPs would be required to vote to dissolve Parliament is fast becoming the controversy of the week, although there’s still uncertainty floating around. Following my quick thoughts yesterday, I’ve now made a transcript of Lib Dem Lord Rennard explaining the thinking behind the 55% proposal [about 8 mins in, available for another 6 days]:

It was a very brave decision for the Liberal Democrats to go into this arrangement, we think in the national interest, and of course we wanted to know the Conservatives couldn’t cut and run any time they thought they could win a general election. But the Conservatives also said they wanted the surety of knowing the Liberal Democrats couldn’t do the same thing either – cut and run, and try and force an early general election.

I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that he really has come out and openly said that they’re rewriting the constitution to suit their own interests based on the fact that they don’t trust one another. Power doesn’t usually create blind, shameless arrogance quite this quickly.

But here’s another thought: there may not be 55% support for this measure in the Commons, which would surely strip it of any moral credibility.

55% of MPs is 358 (actually 357.5, but I don’t think they allow half votes). Between them, the Tories and Lib Dems have 364. Take out two for the Speaker and a deputy, and they have 362. So only five rebels would be needed to take them below the 55% threshold. Already, there are three:

Three Conservative MPs - Richard Ottoway, Christopher Chope and Charles Walker have raised concerns about it, saying they believe it could be unconstitutional - as it would mean a government that did not have the support of a majority of MPs - 51% - would not fall.

Confidence trick?

Then:

‘Ayes, 311. Noes, 310.’ Even before the figures were announced by the tellers, we on the Opposition benches knew that Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government had lost its motion of confidence and would have to call a general election. … A great burst of cheering and laughter rose from the Tory benches, and our supporters in the spectators’ galleries roared with out-of-order enthusiasm.
– Margaret Thatcher, ‘The Downing Street Years’

Now:

MPs will not be able to throw out the government unless at least 55% of them vote to do so, under plans agreed by the Conservatives and Lib Dems. The move would protect David Cameron from losing power even if the coalition partners decided to split up.
…
The Conservatives currently have 306 out of 649 MPs - a 47% share.
…
All this means it would be impossible for opponents, even if fully united, to muster the 55% needed to oust the government

Update: According to Left Foot Forward, the BBC (and other media) may have over-interpreted this and confused a confidence motion with a dissolution resolution. Either way, the concept of a majority being defeated by a minority is a new one for Westminster.

And this does feel rather as if the constitution is being changed for the convenience of one particular government: this rule would mean the Lib Dems couldn't walk out and support a Labour-dominated government supported by the other parties, and the Tories couldn't just call a snap election at will if they thought they could get a better result. It stops either party ratting on the other, which I'm sure suits them in their agreement, but I'm not convinced that this is what legislation is supposed to be for.

Update 2: I've just seen Chris Rennard, a Lib Dem peer, explain the rationale for this on Newsnight. He was stunningly, shamelessly open about the fact that the government is buggering around with the constitution because it suits the two parties, as otherwise they'd not trust one another.

The big, bad society

What with IDS now resurrected as Secretary of State for Quiet Men, and his having previously run a think-tank called the Centre for Social Justice, and Cameron wanting ‘society’ to take over the functions of the state, an idle thought just struck me:

In the wrong hands, ‘social justice’ could sound very like a euphemism for lynch mobs.

The Thirsk man

I mean no disrespect to Howard Keal, who for all I know is a great guy possessed of myriad virtues, but he may now be the most pointless man in Britain.

The Thirsk and Malton election was postponed after the death of the UKIP candidate, and is now due on 27 May. It’s a new seat, but notionally it’s a pretty safe Tory one, with Labour in second. The Lib Dems, represented by Mr Keal, are third.

Now that the Tories and Lib Dems have a joint programme for government and have each jettisoned parts of their manifestos, I’m not sure what platform he’ll be standing on. A similar difficulty attaches to Anne McIntosh, the Tory candidate, but she has the advantage of being the favourite to win.

This is just the first oddity of coalition politics. There’ll be many more, large and small, to come.

Congratulations and commiserations

The Tory-Lib Dem government that will take shape over the next day or two isn’t something I’m happy about, but it’s certainly not the worst result there could have been. It’s also a perfectly legitimate and fair outcome of this election that so disappointed all three main parties.

So congratulations to David Cameron and Nick Clegg. And good luck to them – there might be a certain grim political satisfaction for me if they were a disaster, but many millions of people rely on government being done well, and they deserve better than anticipatory schadenfreude.

Commiserations, of course, to Gordon Brown and the rest of the Labour party, but also congratulations on avoiding the electoral meltdown that seemed so overwhelmingly likely for most of the past two years. The outgoing government leaves some rotten mistakes behind, but also some bloody good successes. As Cameron rightly and graciously said, “this country is more open at home and more compassionate abroad and that is something we should all be grateful for”.

Nobody has been more of a driving force than Gordon – although Tony Blair also deserves a lot of praise here – in the fight against poverty, here and abroad. It’s a measure of this achievement that the Tories feel obliged to ask us to judge their progress on the same counts. We will.

What’s more, Gordon and Alastair Darling were absolutely the right men in the right place at the right time when the financial crisis hit. Their response was far from perfect, but it was good enough – which is more than can be said for Bush and Paulson, or for Cameron and Osborne. When it really counted, Brown was a far better Prime Minister than he was a party leader.

And if I had two such stunningly adorable kids, I’d have the same priorities as him:

As I leave the second most important job I could ever hold, I cherish even more the first – as a husband and father. Thank you and goodbye.

STOP! Hold everything!

I’ve just discovered an obscure EU health and safety regulation that bans the forming of coalitions by people whose surnames both begin with C.

TELL THE QUEEN!!!

Sorry, but a Lib-Lab deal is a fantasy

What is this?

Mr Brown's decision to resign was designed to "unlock" a possible coalition deal between Labour and the Lib Dems, says the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson.

Clegg may well loathe Brown more than other possible Labour leaders, but does he really have the stomach for unending ‘Clegg props up another unelected PM’ headlines?

The timetable for Brown to be replaced goes up to autumn. A coalition decision is need this week. If Clegg does a deal with some caretaker leader, he’ll know that his partner risks losing the job within a few months. And very obviously Labour’s views on the coalition it would find itself in would be a key feature of the leadership election.

I guess there’s the idea that Clegg himself could be PM. That was an interesting fancy when his party was in second place in the polls a while back, but now it seems like a tasteless joke. And the Labour party would never wear it.

One reason Labour’s offer to the Lib Dems can’t in practice be as appealing as it might sound is that a good 10-20% of Labour MPs are utterly against proportional representation. With the best will in the world, any Labour leader would struggle to deliver a vote for anything more than a referendum on AV, which the Lib Dems regard as only slightly better than FPTP.

And regardless of who’s Labour leader, to have a majority in parliament, a Lib-Lab deal would need to involve at least another two minor parties. This would be hard to hold together and much likelier to collapse into a second election sooner, at which the Lib Dems would find their right-leaning supporters deserting them for the Tories.

If Clegg is, as reported, really stepping up his discussions with Labour, then either he’s out of his mind or it’s just a bluff to squeeze a better deal out of Cameron, or he’s just putting on a show for his left-leaning, Tory-hating members, so he can say that at least he looked into that option.

I hate to say it, but Cameron will be PM and he’ll get there with some sort of Lib Dem support. Very soon.

(NB My predictions are usually wrong.)

A modest proposal

Brown and Cameron should form a coalition. True, their parties would be mightily disconcerted, but once they realised how much it would piss the Lib Dems off, I’m sure they’d come round.

What’s more, they could charge tourists £5 a go to see the look on Nick Clegg’s face. That’d pay off the national debt in no time.

Mr 3.7%

Factoid of the day: the rise in the Tory vote share that David Cameron achieved across Britain, 3.7%, is exactly the same as the rise in the Labour vote that Neil Kinnock achieved in 1992. (Kinnock had previously increased Labour’s vote by 3.2% in 1987; Tony Blair then added another 9.1% in 1997.)

Yeah, do a deal, probably. Whatever. Whoever.

You know what I’ve missed? Opinion polls. It feels like a whole couple of days since we last had one, and quite frankly I’m getting withdrawal symptoms – how else are we going to know what government people want???

Populus for the Times obliges, finding that people are split very evenly on most of the conceivable options (except for a Tory-DUP deal, which is strongly disliked).

53% would support a Tory minority government that had the backing of the Lib Dems and 47% would oppose it. 46% would support a full Con-Lib coalition, with 52% opposed. A Labour government “in a formal agreement with the Lib Dems” would get 51% support and 45% against. Ambivalence reigns.

The Times report adds: “The public are evenly split — 43 to 45 per cent — on Gordon Brown remaining as Prime Minister.” It doesn’t say which number is for and which against, but that hardly matters.

Certainly, the common assumption that it would be a popular outrage for the Lib Dems to ‘prop up a decisively rejected Labour government’ appears to be rubbish.

(I still think a minority Tory government with limited Lib Dem support is likeliest.)

A clear result, but no clear outcome

Our current situation, unprecedented in modern times, in which the amount of self-serving hypocritical cant produced has actually increased following an election, has nothing to do with first-past-the-post versus proportional representation.

It’s because, as I keep saying, we think as though we vote for a party to be the government when we actually elect a parliament – whose members then form a government. Usually this mismatch between electoral psychology and constitutional reality goes unnoticed, because one party’s MPs have a majority and so the choice they make in forming a government is automatic, barely a choice at all.

The election result is utterly clear: 649 men and women have each won a mandate to be our MPs. Now they have to put together a government that can command majority support – or at least acquiescence – among them.

Under our system, popular vote share counts for nothing - but even under PR, once it had been used to determine who the MPs are, it would then count for nothing when those MPs were deciding how to align themselves. So all this talk of ‘legitimacy’ amounts only to popularity.

As a Tory friend of mine pointed out, Labour has got a lower vote share than the Tories did in 1997, and obviously then they had no right to govern, so Labour don’t now, either. But on the other hand, the Tories now have a lower vote share than Labour did in 1979, and obviously then… When you start treating vote share as meaning the moral legitimacy rather than merely the popularity of coalition options, you can tie yourself in all sorts of knots.

Yes, the Tories got the highest vote share with 36%. But that means most people voted against them. Labour and the Lib Dems between them got 52%, which is surely much more legitimate. But the Tories and Lib Dems between them got 59% - even better! But then the Tories and Labour together got 65%, so maybe they should get together? Although including the Lib Dems too would take that to a spankingly legitimate 88%! But then why do that when they could bring in the DUP, SNP and so on as well?

It’s just silly. Of course in a democracy popularity has to drive legitimacy, but the way it does that is in determining who gets elected, not what the elected representatives then do.

If we elected parliament and the government separately, this sort of nonsense wouldn’t arise. It’d create other complications, sure, but the separation of powers would mean we could be clear on what an election was for.

A caretaker, not a squatter

There are two constitutional conventions that are being (perhaps deliberately) confused at the moment, most prominently by the Sun’s ‘Squatter holed u in No 10’ headline:

1. If there’s a hung parliament, the sitting PM gets the first chance to see if he can assemble a majority.
2. If there’s a hung parliament, the sitting PM remains in post while some sort of arrangement is being made, whether or not that involves him and his party.

Gordon Brown has, very sensibly, waived the first of these. But not the second. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both said that they want to talk to each other and to others in their parties about what sort of deal they might do, so for Brown to have stepped down already would have undermined all this. It would have either forced Clegg to back Cameron immediately and uncritically, or created an unprecedented vacuum in Number 10.

In the next day or two Brown’s not going to sneakily introduce anything remotely resembling a policy. At the moment he’s just a caretaker.

Cameron will almost certainly be PM – if I had to guess, in an arrangement with the Lib Dems that falls short of a full coalition. They disagree on too much and I suspect Clegg knows that a coalition would risk eating his party alive, as well as giving Labour the chance to monopolise opposition.

Election result leaves cats still cute and funny

I am too tired to write. But not too tired to watch this:

Sun front page meets Guardian front page

(Oh, and it's been a good couple of days since I plugged my Gilbert and Sullivan Cameron spoof - and don't worry, you can peruse the lyrics without having to listen to any godawful 'singing'.)

A democracy is only as good as its voters

Vote.

Vote as if you cared. Vote as if your actions had consequences. Vote as if your country depended on it. Vote as if you could sketch the future with two strokes of that pencil. Vote as if it mattered.

Vote as if you mattered. Vote as if it was your birthright. Vote as if you were every bit as worthy as the person in the polling booth next to you. Vote as if you wanted to be part of something greater than yourself. Vote as if you had the courage to make a stand without knowing exactly where it would lead.

Vote as if you wanted to be able to look back on this day and know that you counted.

Vote with wisdom, and if you lack wisdom, vote with instinct.

A democracy is only as good as its voters, so be the best voter you can be.

Vote.

“There are far fewer children in poverty”

A timely letter in today’s Guardian explains why I’m voting Labour:

David Cameron has argued that "the evidence as well as our instincts" shows that "Britain is broken" and that our social problems are getting worse. He has also claimed that "the Conservatives, not Labour, are best placed to fight poverty". But voters should be clear that the evidence he cites on poverty, worklessness and social mobility is deeply misleading (Tories discover poverty, 5 May).

Comparing Britain now to Britain in 1997, there are fewer children living in relative poverty (and far fewer – less than half the number – in absolute poverty). Figures relating to the "very poorest", the bottom 3% of the income distribution, are statistically problematic, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies cautioning against their use. The percentage of children living in workless households is also lower than in 1997, despite the current recession. Widely cited negative trends in social mobility refer to the difference between those born in 1958 and those born in 1970, who grew up under Margaret Thatcher. The latest figures, relating to children born in 2000-01, suggests that this upward trend has now been stemmed.

Labour inherited extremely high levels of poverty, inequality and social exclusion. Their ambitious strategy to tackle these problems has had an impact; that the impact was not greater does not indicate a failed strategy, but that more of the same was needed. Conservative plans to cut back on successful government programmes such as child tax credits and Sure Start (while simultaneously lowering inheritance tax for the wealthy) will damage precisely those whom Cameron purports to help.

Dr Kitty Stewart, Dr Ruth Lupton
Professor Anne Power
Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE

And then there's this article in today's (Tory-backing) Financial Times:

Life in Britain’s most deprived neighbourhoods has improved during Labour’s time in power, a Financial Times analysis has revealed, casting fresh doubt over David Cameron’s claims that society is “broken”.

The Conservative leader has been forced to tone down his rhetoric about “broken Britain” in the run-up to Thursday’s vote after he was accused of painting a false picture of a crime-ridden country beset by social ills.

Instead, the Tory high command has trained its fire on the poorest towns, arguing that they are a potent symbol of the government’s failure to create a fairer country. In a speech last week, Mr Cameron said “the evidence – as well as our instincts – shows that our social problems are getting worse, not better”.

FT research shows that even the most deprived local authorities have shown signs of improvement over recent years when looking at figures ranging from crime and truancy to teenage pregnancies and children living in unemployed households.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Westminster to be born?

Heeeeeeeeere’s Davey!

This monstrous picture first made me think of Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’, but then it made me think of WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Westminster to be born?

The Very Model of a Modern New Conservative

This is a bit more ambitious that what I usually do here –in fact, it’s several hundred miles outside my comfort zone – but once I had the idea I couldn’t resist trying. Hopefully, the poor recording quality helps to conceal the lack of tunefulness. [Update: as the consensus is, correctly, that the recording is the worst thing ever, I've taken it down. The lyrics will do.] (With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, whose Major-General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance I have of course ripped off, using music from here.)

I am the very model of a modern new Conservative
Of Thatcherism’s image I’m a necessary purgative
Of middle England’s prejudices, I’m still quite affirmative
I’m sure those immigrants can find somewhere that they prefer to live.
I like to ride a bicycle for photo-opportunities
If you doubt I’m a real Tory I can put you soon at ease
I want to spend your money saying marriage is superior
And not (well hardly ever) getting rid of my wisteria.

Our public spending plans are years of jolly, harsh austerity
If anyone survives, there’ll be a furious posterity
For lesser men may find my fiscal policy perturbative
But not this very model of a modern new Conservative.

My modern Tory party is a model of plurality
For rich people of any age or race or sexuality
We have reformed ourselves with an impressive singularity
To look as nice as we need to to win more popularity.
My policies and principles have seasonal variety
My Bullingdon and PR background give me notoriety
I wish I could deny it but they’ve got me bang to rights, you see
And yes, I know precisely what is meant by ‘Big Society’.

I’m silver-tongued and shiny-faced and empathise most cheesily
I charm the lords of Fleet Street quite embarrassingly easily
I am the very model of a modern new Conservative
And adding ‘new’ to ‘modern’s not redundant but superlative.

I’ve Osborne, Clarke and Hague (who sadly wasn’t quite electable)
I’ve Ashcroft, Fox and May (who wears those kitten-heels delectable)
I’ve Hammond, Hunt and Herbert, and I’ve Gove and Grieve and Grayling
I’ve Duncan Smith and Neville-Jones – I just can’t see us failing.
We aim to be the model of a modern Tory government
We’ll hack away at benefits and say we’re ending smotherment
Of paupers who, without handouts, will dance themselves a merry dance
And then we’ll use the proceeds to cut taxes on inheritance.

In my desire for power I’m increasingly hyperactive
You say you want a leader but I think you just deserve a spiv
And so I’ll give you all the bullshit that I’ve got the nerve to give
For I’m the very model of a modern new Conservative!

I’d like to apologise to any notes that I may have accidentally hit during the recording of this song.
(Also: this take-off of Common People is a far, far more professional David Cameron satire song. And if you want to see Gilbert and Sullivan done properly – indeed, superbly – I recommend seeing The Pirates of Penzance at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London, showing until 16 May.)

Three pinheads dancing on an angel

I’d like to echo David Smith’s comment:

The most recent winner in the election campaign was not the Liberal Democrats but the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and its director, Robert Chote. Chotemania has not yet replaced Cleggmania but, by upbraiding all three main parties for their dishonesty over the pain that lies ahead, the IFS has seized the moral high ground.

The IFS has produced a series of papers on election issues, valiantly number-crunching the parties’ proposals. Most notably, they calculate that all three parties have left between three-quarters and nine-tenths of the spending cuts needed for their deficit-reduction plans unexplained.

Clegg, Brown and Cameron bickering about a few billion here and there when they share a mass of (partly inevitable) uncertainty is pathetic. Chote and his IFS colleagues are the angels of our better nature, whispering in our ear that we should concentrate on the vast numbers that will shape our government for the next decade rather than a stupid remark about a pensioner in Rochdale.

Fat chance. With the indulgence of a public that doesn’t want to think about difficult things, our pinheaded leaders are dancing all over such angelic counsel.

I want to fight poverty. I want Labour.

There’s a popular argument that goes something like this:

Blah blah economy schools hospitals deficit crime jobs poverty blah blah. These are all vital issues. What Britain needs above all is proportional representation, so that in the future we can get governments that would do uncertain but wonderful things in all of these areas and others.

I caricature, but there’s a strong flavour of this to the Observer’s endorsement of the Lib Dems:

Nick Clegg's party offers the prospect of political renewal… There is a moral imperative to consider in this election, distinct from the old Labour-Tory contest. Opinion polls throughout the campaign suggest that the country wants the Lib Dems to take a place of equal standing alongside the other main parties. A grossly unfair voting system has historically deprived them of that right. It is vital this time that they win a mandate for real change expressed in the overall share of the vote, not just in the discredited distribution of seats in parliament.
There is only one party on the ballot paper that, by its record in the old parliament, its manifesto for the new one and its leader's performance in the campaign, can claim to represent an agenda for radical, positive change in politics. That party is the Liberal Democrats. There is only one way clearly to endorse that message and that is to vote Liberal Democrat.

Well, I’m not buying it. I’m sympathetic to constitutional reform, but this attitude skates too close to writing off this election, and the coming parliament, in favour of being able to have better ones in the future. But there’s a lot that needs doing now, in the key areas of blah, blah and blah.

This attitude seems akin to that in some Labour circles, of ‘Let’s take some time in opposition to sort ourselves out, let the Tories take the blame for all the cuts’. Bollocks. Yes, governing over the next few years will be pretty tough. But that means the decisions that would be made by the different parties matter all the more.

What would they each do differently? To be honest, it’s hard to say in much detail. The debates were interesting but not really enlightening (other than to people who didn’t know Nick Clegg existed). The manifestos contain some useful pointers but very often they’re written too vaguely to tell how any given policy would work in practice; and even at their best they’re only a limited guide to what a party would end up doing with several years in power.

I rely, as I suspect many do, on a judgement of the parties’ instincts. The Tories still really don’t like the state, and would cut public spending faster and deeper than Labour, with the Lib Dems somewhere in between. And what priorities will they have in deciding who bears the most pain and who gets whatever extra help is available? Here I do agree with the Observer:

Labour's historic instinct is to protect those most vulnerable in a harsh economic climate. Many voters will want to reward that instinct even if it has been poorly expressed by the party's high command.

And I agree with this from the Guardian’s own endorsement of Clegg:

The Liberal Democrats… remain in some respects a party of the middle and lower middle classes. Labour's record on poverty remains unmatched, and its link to the poor remains umbilical.

And the Tories?

I want to give David Cameron, whom I loathe, some honest credit. He has made more than merely presentational changes to his party. On several issues, the Tories are more to my liking than they were five years ago. But their movement towards where I’d a government to be is probably akin to ‘Essex man’s view of Labour in the late 1980s: closer, but still not very warm yet.

There are many things, not least of which is Gordon Brown, that madden me about this Labour government. But I still don’t doubt that it would, in its faltering and timid and way, continue to fight poverty harder and more effectively than the other parties. And while I’m not quite a single-issue nut, that’s the biggest factor for me.

The idea of a Lib-Lab coalition has some appeal; on the environment, civil liberties and the constitution, the Lib Dems are often more to my liking than Labour. And a coalition could be a way to breathe fresh energy into a fairly stale government. It might also be a way to have political reform and egalitarian redistribution.

But the mere sentiment that it’s ‘time for a change’ is empty, so while I can’t say with wild enthusiasm that Brown deserves to win, I am sure that we don’t deserve even a semi-reformed Tory government.

New look

Been meaning to do this for a while. Think this is much cleaner than that yellowy-green colour scheme I used to have.

The internet never lies

Yes, but which substance, Brown?

Bigotgate: the morning after

Fifteen years ago today, Labour approved its new Clause Four, and the party soared to even greater heights of popularity. The following week, Labour scored a massive victory in the local elections. How things change.

So, here’s one response to bigotgate – which, I have no doubt, will top the lists of election gaffes for decades to come:

Gordon Brown probably read more than he should have into Gillian Duffy’s comment: “You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're... all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?”

This remark, made amid a series of other complaints to Brown, was dumb: of course many people - and many newspapers - can and do express views hostile to immigration all the time. (And where does she think Eastern Europeans are going to be coming from – South America? West Africa?)

I don’t think it’s hard to construe this as ignorant and intolerant. But, in what Mrs Duffy went on to say today, she seemed more reasonable and didn’t even make the connection between her immigrants remark and the possibility of bigotry. So who knows what significance she meant to attach to it? I certainly don’t. Maybe Brown just leapt too far to his conclusion.

And of course most of us can think of plenty of times when we’ve come out of a frustrating meeting and mouthed off about a disagreeable person – to whom we’ve just had to be all sweetness and light – in theatrically extreme terms. Brown just had the grotesque carelessness to get caught. I note that Cameron and Clegg have been pretty minimalist in their comments on this – there but for the grace of God go they?

And here’s another response:

If Cameron had been caught in a similar mess, and then followed it up with a series of painfully flailing attempts to apologise and explain, what sort of blog post would I be writing?

Bigotgate

So: is this going to be like the time John Prescott punched the guy with the mullet in 2001? I remember thinking that he’d surely have to resign within the day, but that shows you how bad my instincts are.

Likewise the bullying allegations from earlier in the year: I thought they looked terribly damaging but they did Brown no harm in the polls.

That said, this looks to me more like the time* in 1987 when Neil Kinnock smeared excrement in the Queen Mother’s face and then kicked her until all her ribs were broken. That didn’t go down at all well in the marginals.

* Fictional

It’d be a funny turn of events for Brown to be ultimately destroyed by saying something that may well have been justified, given the woman’s remarks.

Mr David Cameron opines upon the British electoral system

I had the good fortune to find in the street this lunchtime a draft of Cameron’s opening statement for this week’s debate:

I want to keep our first-past-the-post system. It produces strong majority governments, which is what the country needs. That’s incredibly important. Unless you mean a strong majority Labour government. That would be a constitutional outrage.

But our system does produce clearly legitimate results. Unless it gives us a hung parliament, as all the polls suggest. But that would be a terrible con trick by cynics who refuse to vote the right way, and in those circumstances I’m sure we would be able to rely on our brave Armed Forces to deal with such an awful threat to our democracy.

You see, what I love about our great nation is that it’s usually been run by my party. And I want that proud tradition to continue. That’s why I propose real political reforms that will, by curious coincidence, shaft the Labour party. But I wouldn’t want you to think I was being partisan, as if I were some sort of politician or something. Heavens, no. My reforms will even-handedly shaft any party that has lots of MPs in Scotland, Wales and poorer parts of England, and any party that gets funding from any membership-based organisation set up to promote workers’ rights. What could be fairer than that?

At the end of the day, I believe in trusting people. But trust has to go both ways. So you have to trust me as well. If you don’t – well, it’s funny how accidents can happen, isn’t it? Oops, your society seems to have been broken there. What a shame.

My manifesto was titled ‘Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’. Alas, such is the state of the Royal Mail under Labour that the only acceptance letters I’ve received back have been via the Conservative Central Office internal mail. So it’ll have to be me, George, Ken and the rest of the gang. But maybe that’s for the best. I want to bring our whole nation together, and I can only do that by shutting everyone else out of power completely.

We’re all in this together. And that means you do exactly what I say.

Subbing blog

Cathy Relf has a great blog on sub-editing. I particularly recommend her post on spatial awareness training for editorial staff.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of People Being Crap With Language, the other day I was editing something that contained the phrase “female parents”. I’ll never know how I managed it but I was, eventually, able to trim this down to a single word.

And, just as I typed the above, my colleague C came across this gem: “The venue also offers baby-hanging facilities.”

Update 15/7/10: I've closed comments on this post owing to a plague of spambots.

What Brown should say: we’ll take whatever result you give us

Gordon Brown is right to say that politicians should “not take the people of this country for granted” and not “be arrogant enough to assume that you can start talking about after an election”. But he should go further.

Last year, it became obvious that we in parliament had been letting you down. Too many individual MPs had been playing the system when they should have been working for you. And collectively, by tolerating this system for too long, parliament was guilty of thinking it knew best, and not respecting you.

I’m sorry. We have to do better and we will do better.

But some politicians still think that they know best. There’s been a lot of talk about how post-election deals might work and how certain sort of results would be unacceptable.

Well, this just won’t do. You’re the voters and this is your election – not mine, not David Cameron’s, not Nick Clegg’s. We’ll make our case, but in the end we have to accept that you know best and you will vote whichever way you want to. And then we, the politicians, will have to accept whatever result you give us, whether we like it or not.

I know what result I want to achieve. I’ve been going around the country, talking to people about what we need to do to protect our schools and hospitals, to nurture the economic recovery and create jobs, to fight crime and reduce poverty. Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. That’s your call.

So here’s my post-election deal. It’s a pact I’m making, in public, with you, the voters.

You vote the way you want to. And in return, whether Labour comes first, or second, or third, or fourth, or fifth, we will do everything we can to move towards a fairer, stronger Britain. I can tell you we won’t always succeed. And I can tell you the other parties won’t, either. But whatever result you give us, you’ll have a parliament full of fallible human beings, and a government run by fallible human beings. We’ll do our best to achieve as much as we can.

Now, I’d rather spend the rest of the campaign talking about policies, not polls – about jobs in the economy, not jobs in the cabinet. Let’s get on with it.

(OK, the wording’s not great. But then, nor are most of his speeches.)

Clegg tells Lib Dems: vote Labour to stop Cameron

Nick Clegg now says he won’t deal with Labour if the party comes third in the popular vote, as several polls have suggested. This means that Lib Dems who don’t want to prop up David Cameron now have reason to switch to Labour, pushing the party up into second – and the Lib Dems down into third.

According to ComRes and YouGov polls, far more Lib Dem voters would be happy (and far fewer unhappy) with a Lib-Lab arrangement in a hung parliament than with a Lib-Con arrangement.

So, in giving a bit more clarity about what he’d do in a certain type of hung parliament, Clegg has also given many of his own supporters a bizarre but real incentive not to vote for him. He told the BBC yesterday:

It is just preposterous the idea that if a party comes third in terms of the number of votes, it still has somehow the right to carry on squatting in No 10 and continuing to lay claim to having the prime minister.
…
A party which has come third… cannot then lay claim to providing the prime minister of this country.

And many recent polls do put Labour third in terms of votes. So, if that happens, Clegg will make sure Cameron becomes PM. Lib Dem voters who don’t want that thus have reason to stop Labour coming third. If they want to do that, their course of action will depend on the constituency they live in.

If it’s a competitive Lib Dem vs Tory race, then of course they should still vote Lib Dem. If it’s a competitive Labour-Tory race, they should vote Labour. Standard tactical voting drill so far.

But Clegg’s refusal to deal with a third-placed Labour changes everything else. Those who prefer a Lib-Lab government will need to push Labour’s vote up into second – and the Lib Dem vote down into third. Perverse, but that’s the situation Clegg has created.

In a safe seat – held by any party, with any other party a distant second – they should vote to boost Labour’s overall vote share.

And even in a competitive Lib-Lab seat, they now have reason to switch to Labour: one fewer Lib Dem MP would hardly alter the balance of power in whatever coalition, but fewer Labour votes will guarantee Cameron in power.

(Of course, Labour coming second in votes wouldn’t mean a Lib-Lab deal was certain; it would just create the possibility.)

So there we are. I doubt Clegg meant for this to happen, but this is the logic of what he’s said. Now you know why he’d been so keen to keep it vague. Luckily for him, this is hardly a line Labour can use in its campaign: ‘Vote for us so that you don’t push us into third place and then there’s a chance you can do a deal with us rather than the first-placed Tories’? Can’t quite see it…

The fantasy of immaculate legislation

I’m not a violent man by nature, but woe betide the next person who suggests that there’s any possible election result that would not lead to government jobs being filled, and decisions being agreed, by politicians.

And that goes double for the next politician to imply this.

Orange prose

The Lib Dem surge has brought us, this weekend, the best and the worst opening paragraphs to newspaper columns that I’ve read in a long time. I hope it’s clear which is which.

Polly Toynbee:

Get real. Keep your head screwed on. What result do you want? I will assume, dear Guardian reader, that like me you have two prime purposes. One is to prevent Cameron walking into Downing Street on 7 May. Equal first is to secure electoral reform so that we are never again presented with such a disgraceful voting choice. If that's not your view, you can save time, stop reading here and push off to some Murdoch organ that will amply satisfy your needs.

Nick Cohen:

It says much about the tastes of Conservative politicians that, at the suggestion of Oliver Letwin, they have taken to comparing the struggle for power in Britain to the fight for control of Middle Earth. Rather than mock their addiction to sword-and-sorcery epics, I will gently remind them that in the final battle of the Lord of the Rings the Dark Lord Sauron realises that he has been looking the wrong way. Hobbits so small he has failed to notice them are preparing to drop the ring of power into Mount Doom. Sauron's giant red eye swings towards the new danger as "the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril".

He got rhythm

Jon Bernstein says, of the new Tory posters, “Time to boot up Photoshop?” Thanks to a template from Tim Ireland, I am happy to oblige with another spoof:


(Thanks also to Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis for the line.)

If we want ‘elected prime ministers’, let’s just have them

This is stupid:

Unelected prime ministers would be forced to hold a general election within six months of taking office, under proposals being announced by David Cameron today.

Let me reply with a précis of something I wrote a couple of years ago:

There are two-and-a-half interacting quirks to the British political system's psychology…
First, we think as though we vote for parties when we actually elect individuals…
Second, we think as though we vote for a government when we actually elect a parliament…
[And] while we think of parties over individuals and governments over parliaments, one of the major factors in choosing which party to vote for is the identity of its leader…
The effect of all this is that we often think as though we’ve got an executive-focused electoral system

But we don’t. The UK has never, never, not once, had an elected prime minister. We have elected MPs, and the balance of power in the Commons determines which party leader becomes PM. Yes, even in a hung parliament.

If the governing party changes leader, why is the personal mandate of every MP from every party suddenly rendered null? Why a forced election if the PM changes but sticks to the same programme as their predecessor, but not if the sitting PM replaces their whole cabinet and rips up all their manifesto pledges?

Cameron, always a fan of building media-powered populism into the constitution, is trying to create a pseudo-presidential system. Well, why not just go the whole hog?

I increasingly think – and the barely coherent frothing about ‘wasted votes’ and ‘vote X, get Y’ reinforces this – that electing MPs and the PM separately would save us from a lot of pointless bullshit.

A quick thought on turnout

Mike Smithson says:

Clearly a combination of the TV debates and the hard-to-predict outcome is adding to public interest - all of which point to a high turnout. On top of this we have the news of a big late rush of applications to get on the electoral register.

That’s plausible. But think about this:

A late rush to get on the electoral register will mostly consist of people not usually interested in voting. If the various novelty factors in this campaign have worn out come polling day, these are the people most likely to stay at home. So a rise in registration could be setting us up for a fall in turnout.

(Although, of course, I mean turnout relative to the number of people registered, not the absolute number of people voting.)

Indecision, drift and weakness

David Cameron is right to warn about coalition governments, in which politicians stitch up deals behind closed doors rather than letting the public have their say.

Pictured is the last time such a thing happened. And what the hell did they achieve?

The power of a vote

Completely contrary to received wisdom, people are wildly optimistic about how much voting power they personally have.

In truth, it’s vanishingly unlikely that your vote will make a difference between a candidate winning or losing. Only 14 constituency results since 1918 have been majorities of under ten votes; just one of these was in the last 35 years (Winchester in 1997, by two votes). There are no single-vote wins on record.

But an unnoticed finding in an ICM poll this week was that a really quite huge 48% of people think that their vote will make a difference to which candidate wins in their constituency. This figure is pretty consistent across different demographic groups.

Delusional, but heart-warmingly so. And good for turnout. Let’s not tell them.

Going down the Tubes

I got one of the new Victoria Line trains this morning. I hadn’t even heard about these. My first impressions:

Good:

• Cleanliness. Obviously, they will always stay this clean.
• They announce which side the doors will open when you get to the next station. Handy.
• Engine sound is more high-tech. Good for creating a sense of progress.

Bad:

• Smell of burning rubber. Hmm. Will have to look at the wheels next time I get on one.
• Piercing, stressful warning signals when doors open (ambulance-type siren) and close (hellish shriek).
• New robotic announcer woman unbearably smug and exuding far too much phoney cheeriness, which just intensifies the resentment and pissed-offness felt by actual passengers. Really, it’s not worth trying to create a sense of occasion about approaching Highbury & Islington.
• Shape of internal walls makes it awkward to stand pressed up against them; had to tilt my head forwards or sideways.

People don’t want a government

For months, David Cameron has been telling the public to “vote for change”. Oops.

One reason the Lib Dems are doing so well is that a lot of people don’t really want a government.

Normally, although we in fact elect (half) a parliament, but we think as though we’re electing a government – at least, Labour and Tory supporters generally vote with this in mind. Lib Dem and minor party voters know that their lot won’t take power, so many more of them vote to promote a pressure group, or endorse an idea, or make a statement about their political identity.

But what are the prospects for government now? We’re regularly told that there are years of nasty tax and spending decisions ahead, whoever’s in charge, and it’s understandable if a lot of us prefer not to think about the details.

And the two normal contenders for government have borne most of the anger at the expenses scandal. What’s more, this affair has made people take a keener interest in the Commons as a group of representatives rather than as the body that produces a government.

So there’s less interest than usual in who forms the government, and for voters who take this view, the only way to get something meaningful from the election is to vote on other grounds. With Nick Clegg’s attention-grabbing debate performance as a pretext, people have rushed to an option that seems to let them do something different.

It looks as though this general election, for more people than ever before, will be – call it what you will – a protest vote, a demand for something else, a frustrated cry of ‘not in my name’.

If this is true, then attacking the Lib Dems as not credible to govern will miss the point. And arguing that in these tough times we do need a government with a clear plan will just make people suspect more pain to come. The best way to clear the air of this orange ash – from an eruption that, although unexpected, had been building up for some time* – is to convince people that Clegg and his party are just ordinary politicians.

* I am now the millionth commentator to use a volcano metaphor for Lib Dem poll ratings, and as such am required to commit ritual suicide.

Sticking to what I’m good at

You know that feeling when you have a bright idea and jot it down, then come back to it a while later and try to work it up something coherent, and you go over it again and again but it just doesn’t come together?

I seem to be getting that a lot lately. So here’s where I stand today:

What I don’t know:

• What the bloody hell’s going on with this election.

What I do know:

• It’s sunny outside.

See you later.

Update 21/4: Septicisle valiantly tackles the question, and oh, what the hell, I've had a go now too.

Is YouGov push-polling? No

Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy asks: “Is YouGov ‘push-polling’ for the Tories?”

I came across this story a couple of hours ago via Craig Murray, who believes the answer to be yes – specifically, that YouGov is conspiring with the Murdoch press against the Lib Dems. He quotes a comment made on a post at PoliticalBetting:

Just done a YouGov, Mostly about Clegg & LD
Here was one of the question
“Nick Cleggs says the other parties are to blame for the MP scandals, he has taken money from a criminal on the run, many of his MPs have been found guilty of breaking the rules and his own party issued guidance on how to fiddle the expenses system?”
I’d say that was fairly direct!
There were some 17 other questions re the LD

Murray goes on to conclude:

The proposition above is, obviously to anyone, not really a question but a set of dubious propaganda statements designed to influence the interviewee.
Plainly this is a deliberate attempt to produce a poll which shows the Lib Dem surge as a blip, and thus discourages potential Lib Dems voters.

He also reports:

Anthony Wells of YouGov (known henceforth as YouGove) admits YouGov asking these "questions, but claims the voting intention question ought to have been asked first. He also points out that the antiLib Dem questions were "Not for publication".
I bet they bloody weren't.

Hmm. The Anthony Wells comment that Murray sort-of quotes seems to be this one:

Firstly, neither those VI or those question were anything to do with polling for newspapers or publication. Secondly I’ve brought the poll up on the system now to double check, and voting intention was the first question as it should have been. The other questions were right at the end of the political section of the poll, as they should have been.

It appears that Murray has utterly butchered part of that comment and ignored the rest.

I think that this is one for John Rentoul’s collection.

(Oh, and ‘push-polling’ is not attempting to skew a poll by asking leading questions; it’s a dirty campaign trick in which you call up swing voters and ask them ‘If you had heard that [opposing candidate] had done [utterly fictional scandal], would you be more or less inclined to support him?’ This creates a deniable rumour, smearing your opponent.)

Update: Anthony Wells has commented further, although rather obliquely, on the survey asking lots of questions on the Lib Dems. Somebody - not News International - is clearly testing some attack lines, but there's nothing scandalous about that.

The parties have drawn their battle-lines

I can exclusively reveal to you the key messages that the party leaders will be pushing over the next few days, in this strange new post-debate atmosphere:

Cameron: “If you vote for Nick Clegg then I might not win, and it’s MY TURN. Plus it was MY IDEA to copy Tony Blair’s style. It’s NOT FAIR.”

Brown: “I think people already accept that I have made the tough decision to be less engaging than David Cameron. But now it’s important to show that I also have the determination, strength and courage to be less engaging than Nick Clegg too.”

Clegg: “What, you mean I have to follow it up with something?”

Meet David Cameron – new poster

I do like the Cameron Anecdote Generator, where you can find out which probably fictional yes-men and –women the great man has met recently.

I’m a couple of days behind the curve on this, but even so, another (yes, another) spoof poster has leapt to mind:


(I promise that I will stop doing these. Just as soon as the election is over. Probably.)

‘Did the earth move for you, darling (you foul temptress)?’

Iranian Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi has been doing his bit to make the Vatican look sane:

Many women who dress inappropriately... cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes.

(Hat tip: NWW)

Clegg effect pushes Labour into third (and first) place

Well, we didn’t have to wait long. YouGov tonight gives us (changes from yesterday):

Con 33% (-4), Lib Dem 30% (+8), Lab 28% (-3)

Astonishing. If we imagine a 65% turnout, this poll implies nearly two and a half million people switching to the Lib Dems overnight. All based on the discovery that a man they’d not paid much attention to actually comes across as a bit more reasonable than the two men they already knew pretty well.

It’s at times like these that I wonder whether ‘voting intention’ polls really do measure actually existing voting intentions and not just which party has made the best impression lately. We’ll have to see whether this can be sustained – I doubt it, but either way, it’s the most fascinating poll shift that I can recall during an election campaign.

The curious thing, though, is what this means for the outcome for seats in Parliament (using Electoral Calculus and assuming a uniform national swing).

The previous day’s poll (C37, L 31, LD22) would have given the Tories 287 seats, Labour 271 and the Lib Dems 60 (Tories 39 short of a majority). But this new poll – because the Tory lead over Labour has narrowed, and because there aren’t that many seats where the Lib Dems have much of a shot – would actually put Labour in front with 263 seats, the Tories 254 and the Lib Dems 101.

And you wonder why they want electoral reform...

Sorry, the new ComRes poll is still worthless

I don’t mean the limited poll of debate viewers, which recorded an implausibly massive swing to the Lib Dems. Obviously that’s worthless outside its own very narrow context. I mean the national figures that they’ve produced this lunchtime: Con 35% (unchanged from Wednesday), Lab 28% (down 1), Lid Dem 24% (up 3).

These numbers look a lot more credible – you’d expect a Lib Dem boost after Clegg’s performance – but they’re still not valid.

The methodology (via John Rentoul) was not that of a standard poll. ComRes did not survey non-viewers of the debate. Rather, they took their poll of 4000 pre-recruited debate viewers and extrapolated it to all 10 million viewers, and then combined this with the data from their normal poll from Wednesday to cover people who didn’t watch the debate.

There are two problems here: it doesn’t allow for the possibility of non-viewers being influenced by coverage of the debate, or indeed by anything else since the previous poll; and it assumes that all viewers of the debate will have responded in the same way as the small minority who watched it knowing that they were due to receive a call from a pollster afterwards.

ComRes appear to have been completely honest and open about their methods here, but what this means is that we can’t compare these numbers with other polls. We’ll have to wait a little longer to find out the impact of the debate.

Leaders’ debate: the real winner

If just one person has learnt where to put the apostrophe on a plural possessive, it will all have been worthwhile.

Leaders’ debate: the real loser

Moderation comment:


“Ha ha, yes, I did make the three of you look good in comparison, didn’t I?”

Labour vs Tories on ‘parent power’

Here are two education policies (or the rough outlines, at least):

Tory manifesto:
Drawing on the experience of the Swedish school reforms and the charter school movement in the United States, we will break down barriers to entry so that any good education provider can set up a new Academy school.

Labour manifesto:
Where parents are dissatisfied with the choice of secondary schools in an area, local authorities will be required to act, securing take-overs of poor schools, the expansion of good schools, or in some cases, entirely new provision. Where parents at an individual school want change, they will be able to trigger a ballot on whether to bring in a new leadership team from a proven and trusted accredited provider.

These are both attempts to give parents who aren’t happy with their local secondary schools the power to do something about it, rather than just hoping that the government or council will take notice and get something done. The Tory policy has been around for a while; the Labour proposal, as far as I know, is new.

Three things have always troubled me about the Tory plan (even if we assume that parents in areas with poor schools will be up to the task of organising a new one). First, creating a new school from scratch to compete with one that already exists is going to cost a lot: the initial costs will be huge and then the resulting overcapacity will need to be funded unless and until the old school closes down.

Second, it takes time to establish a new school, and while this is happening, the failing school is not just going to be left alone to fester. If the latter can be improved in time, the efforts that have gone into setting up the new one will have been needless.

Third, if the new school does turn out to be much better than the old, then the process of shifting kids out of one and into the other will be slow and sporadic – disruptive in the short-term for the children whose parents switch them and demoralising for those that remain where they are in an increasingly unpopular sink school.

The Labour plan, while still letting local parents set the ball rolling, avoids these flaws. Replacing the leadership of a school, or making it part of a federation, can be done less expensively and more quickly than creating a new, rival school, and the benefits will be felt by all the children of the once-failing school without their parents having to decide when and whether to jump ship.

And so it’s a better plan. It may not be a sneaky way of undermining LEAs (which the Tories have long been in the business of), but it’s a better, faster, cheaper, more efficient way of overhauling the local choice of schools when parents think this is urgently needed.

Tories tell Labour’s success stories

Two great cities that have thrived under a Labour government and Labour councils:

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland, and home to 13,000 businesses, including some of Britain’s most successful firms. For example, eight of the ten largest insurance companies in the UK have an office in Glasgow, and the city is also home to leading technology, energy and creative businesses. Glasgow is the hub of an important entrepreneurial sector, which includes innovative start-ups in fields such as mobile telephony and computer games. Glasgow’s commercial strength also extends to manufacturing, and the city continues to be a global leader in hi-tech ship building.
…
Manchester was the epicentre of the industrial revolution, and the first industrialised city in the world. Today, the city is a national symbol of successful urban regeneration. Over the past three decades, Manchester has undergone extensive urban renewal, transforming the city’s canals, mills and warehouses into vibrant new commercial, residential, and cultural spaces – including the creation of the Imperial War Museum North. As a result of this regeneration, Manchester is one of Britain’s most dynamic cities, and has been voted amongst the best places in the country to locate a business.

At least, that’s what the Conservative Party manifesto says. So it must be true.

Guffwatch

I like Sophie Elmhirst’s attitude:

First, society is "broken". Then it's "big". Then, there "is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state". So is society big and broken? Shouldn't we mend it before we make it big? Or will it only be fixed once it's big? And if society is broken, but not the same as the state, does that mean the state isn't broken? So why don't we stick with the state? Why do you want us - society (are we society? I'm not sure any more) - to do everything if we're so bust and malfunctioning? Apparently under the Tories there are going to be "community organisers" to build the "big society". I hope they know how to fix giant abstract things whose meaning changes all the time.

Her splendid Election Guffwatch service also advises Gordon Brown not to mix his metaphors.

Personally, I was delighted to see the Tories finally give some detail in their manifesto launch. For weeks, I’ve been seeing this ‘vote for change’ slogan and wondering exactly what change they were proposing. Finally, we have the answer, and I think you’ll agree that it’s a radical and quite unexpected idea:


(Although, to be fair, it is impressive that the manifesto itself is going to make things better, without them actually having to get into government and do stuff.)

Hell is other people

The Conservative Party is inviting me to “join the government of Britain”.

Here are some of the other people they’ve sent invitations to:

• My boss
• My boss’s boss
• Kerry Katona
• Piers Morgan
• Cab drivers
• Estate agents
• Bankers
• Disgraced former MPs
• Nick Griffin
• My weird neighbour
• That kid I hated at school
• Those bastards who still haven’t been convicted of Stephen Lawrence’s murder
• People who find the ITV early evening news too complicated to follow
• People who apply for all those incomprehensibly-titled public sector jobs in the Guardian but get turned down because they’re too petty-minded
• The tenor in the Gocompare ads
• In fact, everyone involved in producing any insurance ad
• Jan Moir
• Simon Cowell
• People who feel that they really understand what it’s like to be poor because they’ve had to give up the gîte
• People whose prejudices are as 1950s as the radioactive sunset on Labour’s manifesto cover

What could possibly go wrong?

Ask a silly question

The opposition parties are, or claim to be, very worried about whether Labour’s cancer leaflets were sent out to people selected using personal NHS records to which a political party could not possibly have access:

shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said he had written to Gordon Brown to ask him to confirm that no confidential information had been used to select the recipients. He said the leaflets raised "a number of serious questions about who authorised the potential misuse of personal data and who was involved in the production of the cards".
Lib Dem treasury spokesman Vincent Cable said there needed to be an investigation to see if there had been any abuse of data protection laws.

When in doubt, raise bogus possibilities and call for an inquiry.

Me, I’m far more concerned about the Tory campaign leaflet showing a photo of a bloody machete. Never mind that the UK Statistics Authority has comprehensively smacked the Tories down over their use of these dodgy crime numbers before – what about the picture? How did the Tories get this photo of a bloody machete? Are they fraternising with criminal gangs while out on stabbing sprees? Or did they even stab someone themselves and then capture it on a cameraphone (‘happy stabbing’, as I believe it’s called)?

I think we need a full public inquiry. Perhaps even a police investigation.

Ukip: as the poster, so the party

John Rentoul tackles the question of whether Ukip’s latest effort is the most effective poster yet. The answer, it turns out, is no.

However, I think that it’s actually a pretty good spoof poster. Just as Ukip is a pretty good spoof party.

Looking for an article on voting rationality

I read an article – possibly from an American magazine – a couple of years ago, arguing against the idea that it’s irrational to vote because there’s only a tiny chance that your vote will make the difference between winning and losing. It was saying something vaguely like: you don’t know what number of votes your candidate will need to win nor how many they’ll get other than your own, so you don’t know which individual vote will push them over the winning line, and so it makes sense to stockpile as many as possible, including yours. Only more coherent and substantial than that.

I remember thinking it was interesting but not whether I was convinced. I’ve tried Googling some likely terms but with no luck. Does anyone know what this article was?

The new Doctor: OK, but not really the point

Watching Matt Smith Geronimo-ing around the sinister Starship UK on yesterday’s episode, I suddenly realised something: I like the programme Doctor Who much more than I like the character of the Doctor. And that’s always been true. The programme, the settings, the mysteries, the baddies – that’s why I watch it. The Doctor, as much as the TARDIS, is a plot device for bringing us these glimpses of other worlds and dark secrets.

I’ve never quite understood why a lot of people are so scornful of Sylvester McCoy and/or Colin Baker and/or Peter Davison. Sure, they were hardly Tom Baker (whom I barely even remember other than from repeats), but I was perfectly happy with the programme when they were in it. And the reason, all of a sudden, is clear to me: the Doctor – for me, at least – isn’t the point of the programme.

Restraint

Office friends talking about the election just on the edge of my earshot. Trying to resist getting involved.

(Me + political discussions = not good)

Of course their bloody sums don’t add up

The parties are arguing, with desperate earnestness and pitiful fury, about whether each other’s ‘sums add up’. And they’re conducting this argument while all standing on a huge cloud made out of guesswork, evasiveness, ignorance, wishful thinking, secrecy and fiction.

There are two reasons for this miserable predicament.

First of all, Labour’s published plans (such as they are) contain a colossal amount of vagueness. However, because they’re in government, and can publish their numbers on Treasury headed notepaper, these count as ‘official’ and get treated as the baseline against which everyone else gets measured.

Look at this chart from the IFS, showing the government’s proposals for fiscal consolidation:


The green sections in the final two years represent ‘unknown’ changes to tax or spending to reduce the deficit. But there’s more doubt than that: Labour have not done much to explain in detail how the rest of the reduction will be done, other than to say what will be tax rises and what will be spending cuts (although they’ve been clearer on the former).

Then there are the Tories and Lib Dems. If they want to reduce the deficit faster than Labour, they thereby inherit all the uncertainty in Labour’s plans plus any extra uncertainty about the further work to be done. So they’d have even more to explain. They have given some details here and there, and indeed the recent bickering about Tory efficiency savings and National Insurance is to do with the moderate extra vagueness that’s been piled on top of the big underlying vagueness.

So we don’t really know how any of them would do this. Do they?

And none of them can attack the others for ignoring the scale of what’s needed, because of the Fart Principle: whoever raises this problem will be saddled with the burden of explaining their – painful – solutions first (or, in playground parlance, whoever smelt it dealt it).

The second reason that the ‘sums add up’ debate is a mutually convenient charade is that, as Helmuth von Moltke didn’t quite say, no fiscal plan survives contact with the economy.

Economic predictions rank somewhere between meteorology and astrology for their accuracy. As Chris tells us, even in economic good times, Treasury deficit forecasts for the year ahead are out by over £6 billion half the time (and by over £12bn a quarter of the time). For comparison, this week’s spat is about the Tories wanting to use £6bn of extra efficiency savings this year to cut the deficit.

For the year after, forecasts are out by over £15bn half the time and over £21bn a quarter of the time. And three years away? Four? Don’t ask.

So even if all the parties had reams of precise tax and spending plans, audited by the IFS and Stephen Hawking, they’d still be largely hypothetical. And, of course, no party wants to be the one to say they only have the dimmest idea of how their proposals would really work out. They need to project an image of certainty, and the media enjoy judging them harshly for failure – while mostly ignoring the impossibility of the whole enterprise.

Introducing our election coverage

We at Freemania are proud to unveil our programme of 60/60/24/7 rolling coverage of what promises to be the most important, closely fought and thrilling 2010 general election the UK has ever seen.

Our campaign pledge to you is that we will cover the election with a thousand types of shiny sheen, each more ephemeral than the last, and then liquidise it and use the latest in hosepipe metaphor technology to cover you with the election. You won’t know what’s hit you!

• Dayjob Tumbleweed, our top political correspondent, will bring you the very latest developments as they’re reported to have happened. Whether it’s a press conference with Bob Ainsworth, a photo-op in a Luton supermarket car park by Chris Huhne, or the executive summary of a policy document that has a digital scan of Theresa May’s signature at the bottom, you can be sure that Dayjob will hear about it somewhere and pass it on.


• Our panel of pundits – Harpy Bloodshot, Bumptious Hasbeen and Drone Otherhand – stand ready to provide pre-instant analysis of each other’s commentary. They will explain why their own parties’ margin-of-error ups and downs in the polls are due to adhering to/departing from what they’ve been saying all along.


• Speaking of polls, we’ll have regular updates from expert psephologist Professor Blip Hornrimmed, renowned for his eight-dimensional hyperswingometer and his lucid explanations of not only what’s going to happen next week but also why what he said last week didn’t really count.


• Creative guru Pony Onetrick – founder of edgy brand consultancy cutPaste-newFont – will be producing witty and insightful spoofs of all the latest campaign tweets, and roving reporter Shortstraw Cliché will spend the campaign on the trail of the elusive swing voter, who is believed to be holed up in a basement somewhere in the West Midlands with five weeks’ worth of tinned food and bottled water.


• Finally, our resident blogger, Glint O’Selfawareness, will be trying to fill space and urging those fools in all the rest of the media to focus more on issues than personalities, without actually having to know very much himself.

Stick with us and we’ll make sure that, come election day, your yearning for death is matched only by your inability to remember which end of the kitchen knife is the stabby bit!

Frank Blunt
Star columnist and Acting Editor-in-Chief, Freemania

Tory recovery plan poster

(I can’t stop myself any more...)


I don’t like it nearly as much as my last one, but it’s the best spoof of this real Tory ad that I could think of.

Cameron and Osborne’s spin cycle

Congratulations to Jacob Quagliozzi for winning Labour’s ‘design a poster’ contest.

Here’s my own effort:

(Click for larger image.)

Too wordy to work on a billboard, methinks (and technically not that great), but the quote is rather the whole point of it. And I do love that quote. And yes, he really did say that.

Real proverbs

• He who laughs last is slowest to get the joke.
• Absence makes the heart unable to pump blood around the rest of the body.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, unless the beholder has an oozing stye.
• Easier said than done, especially for vows of silence.
• Familiarity breeds web-footed children.
• Many hands make giant horse.
• Honey catches more flies than vinegar, though fewer than a big net.
• In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is going to have real trouble finding someone who takes care of their appearance.
• The Isle of Man is an island.
• Rome wasn’t built under a Private Finance Initiative.
• You can lead a horse to water, so build your glue factory next to a lake.
• A bad workman gets more commissions because he’s cheap, and that’s why so many things are crap.
• If wishes were horses, then horses would be Christmas every day, when the kids start singing and the band begins to plaa-aayy.
• A journey of a thousand miles? Fuck that.

Any more, anyone?

Most of my life

By xkcd:

The Provisional Neighbourhood Army

I agree with Norm that the Tory slogan “the Big Society” doesn’t really come across the way they want it to. They’re also proposing a “Big Society Bank”, which involves the ingenious use of the words “Big” and “Bank” to name an institution that people are supposed to trust.

Another dud, to my ears at least, is “neighbourhood army”. It’s meant to describe a group of professional community organisers, but it sounds just a bit too IRA for my liking.

Condoms: 0.0000003% more mass murder

It’s the turn of Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, to try to say something about condoms that’s consistent with dogma but not obviously atrocious. Never an easy task, and another reminder that organised religion has more in common with party politics than it likes to admit.

Just to be helpful, I thought I’d make a chart showing how very much damage condoms cause to potential human lives:


And now, those of you familiar with my sense of humour may be able to guess which song is on the other end of this link.