Woolsacked

After the defeat of AV, expect the next epic battle (and the next poisoned wooden spoon Cameron hands the Lib Dems) to be House of Lords reform.  At this point I’d better declare an interest as having worked there (as an erstwhile Hansard reporter).  Despite knowing the institution more intimately than I do any other, I don’t think I’ve written much about it before; this is because I find it quite difficult to make up my mind about what to do about the damn place.

Walter Bagehot famously quipped that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it”.  Having sat through several postprandial hours of a debate on ‘the benefits of the Segway personal transporter’, it’s hard to disagree.  It’s also hard, on the other hand, to keep one’s rational faculties clear when in the building and not be seduced by the awful, artificial and amusing work of Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry and its supremely confident Gothic (that is, explicitly non-Roman) assertion of British exceptionalism.  I find it takes a great effort, and I can’t be alone in this, to disregard the indisputable aesthetic and technical accomplishments of the age of empire when weighing up its social, economic and moral pros and cons; too easy, in other words, to use beauty as a proxy for truth, justice, virtue.  The whole place is a spectacular triumph of Victorian propaganda: the Soviet Union had its stirring anthem and its heroic art, the US has its sexy movies, and we had the Tudor rose and the portcullis.  In the little reporters’ corner of the chamber, with some anonymous lifer suggesting to half a dozen of his fellows how to decide the makeup of a committee to determine the composition of a working group to investigate the regulation of the makeup of the committee, the eyes are inevitably drawn by the carved lions and unicorns, by the heraldic oak panels of the four patron saints, and eventually by the dazzling gilded ceiling whose ornaments and chandeliers seem to melt off it like stalactites, and your distracted reporter, overcome by a sort of reactionary Stendhal syndrome, finds himself transported to his own Burkean Ambrosia.  (The Commons is much less ornate and perhaps cosier for it, but the most profound sensation to be had in the estate is to be alone at night in Westminster Hall, gazing up at the hammerbeam angels still keeping watch nine centuries on, and only dimly aware of the restless metropolis beyond the buttressed walls: on such occasions I always find myself communing with Bede and his sparrow.)  So perhaps Bagehot would have been more accurate to say that the cure is to go and listen to it, while keeping your eyes shut.

I digress.  The question is: what use does the place serve now, and how could it be improved?  Here the traditionalist and the radical democrat in me clash (a problem Orwell had all the time).  A few perceptions about the noble and not-so-noble Lords persist that are no longer quite accurate.  Only 88 of the old hereditaries — Wilde’s old unspeakables — remain.  The vast majority of the rest are life peers, appointed by various prime ministers; a few bishops are left (and are we really about to see a Conservative prime minister eject them?), and the law Lords have moved across the road to the Supreme Court.  A lot of these are former or failed politicians, but a great many are also those who’ve excelled in various non-political fields: the arts, law, media, sport, business, academia, war.  In this sense, at least, they could be considered more diverse than the Commons, which with every election becomes more and more the preserve of PPE Oxonians in their mid-40s from north London who have only ever worked in politics.  The Lords, unlike the Commons, still has plenty of endearingly amateurish speakers (whom I always hope to avoid having to report on) and endearingly unsmooth operators.  And despite Cameron’s additions, Labour still has more peers than the Tories.

The balance that needs to be struck is to combine the resilient independence of the incumbent Lords (who stood up to the previous government on, among other things, the chilling effects of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act) with a greater (that is, any) popular mandate.

It seems inevitable, with the defeat of the AV referendum, that the Lords will become proportionately elected before the Commons ever does.  There is one serious objection to this: that, by picking who appears on the lists and in what order, the party managers would retain or even strengthen control over this occasionally rebellious House.  The Lords aren’t so easily whipped now, but their replacement senators (most of them presumably seeking re-election) could well be.  Might the coalition, then, use this opportunity to strengthen the executive relative to parliament?  That would surely be the opposite of what we should hope for.

So the extent to which we should welcome reform really depends on what sort of PR is on offer.  If Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have complete control over the party lists, then what comes next might if anything be worse than what we have now.  But if the government is actually willing to give power away — perhaps in the form of multi-member STV wards, or even open primaries, as are now used to pick some Commons candidates — then the public will have more say than the politicians, and the reformed chamber will have more legitimacy than the one it replaces.  There is a great opportunity for something better, but we will have to wait and see whether we are given another stitchup instead.

Our zeal for reform shouldn’t lead us to assume that what is done in its name will necessarily be more truly democratic, rather than a pale imitation of the deeply dysfunctional Commons; instead, we have to hold the coalition to account and insist that the upper House becomes as democratic as it possibly can, and that it gives power away from politicians, both elected and appointed: on this occasion, we have to keep our eyes wide open.

Read Full Post »

The king called up his jet fighters

A general consensus seems to have emerged in the middle ground of British politics in favour of the UN-approved coalition air attacks on Gaddafi’s forces.  Cameron, Clegg and Miliband took their positions on the frontbenches as moderates who wanted anything but another Iraq; events have turned them into multilateral hawks.  As a Young Turk I was sceptical of the idea that the thugs of Moscow, or the waxworks of Beijing, could confer legal or moral legitimacy on any military act; but the hatred the world felt towards the West for our bungled invasion of Iraq means that, if nothing else, it can no longer be in our national interest to act in the Arab world without Security Council approval.  Thankfully the new leaders of our warmongering political parties seem to have agreed.

There’s no need for me to repeat the arguments in favour of intervention: you’ll have read little else all week.  I’ll also leave aside Sarkozy’s Napoleonic motives, and the legitimate question of whether a US President is in breach of their Constitution by acting without Congressional approval (having dragged his heels for a fortnight, he can’t say he didn’t have enough time).  In this country (as, it seems, in the US) this is one of those issues that divide the centre-left and centre-right from the further left and further right.  On this position (unlike, say, the EU) I’m on the side of the centre, as it were.

On the left, we constantly hear the refrain: “What about Bahrain/Yemen/Saudi Arabia/Zimbabwe/North Korea/China?”  I would argue that just because it isn’t always practical to change the world doesn’t mean we never should.  Our policy should be one of liberal realism: deal with the world as it is but, without getting ahead of ourselves, try to make it more like what we would all like it to be when an obvious opportunity to do so presents itself (such as when a nearby dictator is hours away from completing a massacre).  But, of course, your leftist sees the world in binary terms, and rejects any possibility of incremental improvements: for him it must be all or nothing, and we must either use force against everyone or no-one.

Thinking he has thought of something very original that can’t possibly have occurred to you, he then retorts that the real reason we intervene in Libya, and not in the others, is to get our hands on its oil.  But why does it follow that just because a policy is in our national interest it must necessarily not be in the interests of the other party?  It doesn’t follow at all.  If we help the rebels to overthrow their dictators, thus helping them into power, one would hope that they would then return the favour in some way.  Everyone’s then happy, except the old regime and their pals in China/Russia/Germany/wherever.  What’s wrong with that?

On the right we see a different variant of this ‘splendid isolationism’.  Kelvin MacKenzie says on Question Time that “Libya is not worth one ounce of British blood”.  I would say that anyone joining our armed forces knows the risks perfectly well — and if they have a profound aversion to the idea of shedding their blood then perhaps they should consider an alternative career — and that preventing the torture and murder of large numbers of civilians is as good a use of their bravery and our resources as any.  Meanwhile Peter Hitchens writes that we should leave them to fight it out and make a deal with the winner.  For a man who argues that the Christian faith should be taught as truth in schools, this seems a pretty unchristian position (and, I am certain, not one that his, his brother’s and my hero Orwell would have taken).  He rightly admits his policy is “heartless”.

The left fall back on their two most feeble arguments; the right think compassion and the rule of law should stop at our borders.  Blair tried to draw Gaddafi in from the cold after he gave up his nuclear programme, but selling him the tools to brutalise Libyan citizens (I refuse to use the phrase ‘his own people’) was a step too far.  The SNP gave him back al-Megrahi while his appeal was pending; it may be that they did so for compassionate reasons, and it may well be that he was innocent, but thanks to Salmond and MacAskill we’ll never know.  So far, then, I prefer the new policy.

Read Full Post »

I like to say I told you so

In 1945, in ‘Notes on Nationalism’, the great George Orwell wrote: “For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of all the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”

So it is with our LibCon coalition today.  For astrologers, read commentators like Mehdi Hassan and Polly Toynbee, who has somehow survived more mistakes than anyone and still persists with headlines like ‘David Laws’s life goal was to cast people out of work’.  The left now seems divided into a couple of camps.  The first and more open-minded of these, mainly Lib Dems, accept that New Labour had run its course and welcome the coalition’s policies on raising the lowest income tax threshold (redressing Brown’s assault on the poor when he removed the 10p tax band) and on reform of the voting system and the Houses of Commons and Lords.  The second lot, mostly Labour drones but also quite a few anti-Tory tactical Lib Dem voters, regard the whole thing as an epic betrayal and bleat that the ConDem government will again “rape the country” etc – oblivious, of course, to the fact that it was Brown’s mismanagement of the economy and the public finances that made the coming cuts a necessity.

Most of those in the second camp are disappointed because they bought into Cleggmania after the first TV leaders’ debate, when his natty line in putting his hands in his pockets, looking at the camera and remembering the audiences’ names led a remarkable number of people to regard him as an Obama-like insurgent, despite sharing Cameron’s charmed upbringing and career and leading a party that was as old and almost as soiled as the other two.  I say to this lot: why haven’t you been paying attention for the last three years?

As the Orange Book suggested before he was even an MP, Clegg is as much of an anti-statist liberal as Cameron is a socially liberal conservative.  (Likewise the sadly defenestrated David Laws, though Vince Cable can’t seem to make his mind up about which side he’s on, and is now behaving like more of a human being than his devotees gave him credit for.)  I suppose the legions of students who in the end failed to turn out for Clegg hadn’t read this book either.  The rape camp have desperately peddled the line that “there is a progressive majority in this country”.  I suppose it depends what you mean by “progressive” (though I wonder what Orwell would have thought of the word being claimed by Brown, Blair, Balls or either Miliband) but it’s a dubious claim: it’s very lazy, and I think insulting, to assume that the bulk of Lib Dems would see their party as some sort of slightly more competent offshoot of Labour, rather than representing a wholly separate tradition of liberty that the past 13 years have undermined.  Indeed, of all parties they seem closest to rejecting the left/right bifurcation.  Perhaps the “progressive majority” was less of a logical stretch under Paddy Ashdown or Charles Kennedy, but Clegg has undoubtedly moved his party away from the social democrats and nearer its pre-SDP radical liberal traditions, just as Cameron has moved his party from the ideological hard right to the pragmatic centre-right – which the tribal left has also done its best to ignore, though the tribal right has not.  (The obvious rejoinder to them is: if you can’t win a majority after 13 years of Labour government, a useless Scottish prime minister and the worst economic crisis since the ’30s, you never will again.)

If all that wasn’t enough of a hint, Clegg said during the campaign that he would open negotiations with the party with the biggest mandate from the electorate, which was never going to be Labour.  Many of those claiming to support a ‘new politics’ were horrified when he stuck to his word.  So anyone who thought Clegg would defy the arithmetic of seats, and prop up the government he has spent his leadership reviling and intellectually dismantling, was fooling himself.

I said in my last post before the election, “the figleaf of a deal with the Lib Dems would probably be the best result – for [the Tories] and us.”  I stick by that (albeit with reservations about power grabs like changing the rules on the dissolution of parliament).  A Tory prime minister will implement the best bits of Lib Dem thinking, and the Lib Dems will keep a check on the worst excesses of the machine that is historically our natural party of government.  Labour should go away and examine why they became so arrogantly removed from public sentiment, so captured by vested interests and so scared of democratic reform.  Part of the problem is that, instead of putting it that way, they will doubtless pay consultants to answer the question: “how did we fail to communicate our message to the C2s?”

Read Full Post »

Philosophers and zombies

As usual, in true Iranian fashion, I begin by whipping myself for not having blogged much of late.  For once I’ve had a decent excuse – I’ve been finishing writing my debut novel, The Donkey in Winter, a black tragicomedy set in a dystopian near-future Britain.  The action follows the dying days of a despotic buffoon in a failed state in the north-east of England as he tries to ward off the radical-conservative theocracy that has swept the rest of the country, and the fate of two ordinary lads who get caught up in the violence that follows.  It’s fair to say it builds on a few of the themes I’ve explored in this blog.  Let me know if you’d like a copy.

So to the election.  Here, then, are my thoughts on the various parties on offer…

Labour – I must be fair to them (for once) and try to put their record in the context of what Britain was like in 1997.  It wasn’t all bad, at first – the minimum wage, freedom of information, a more tolerant view of gay folk, a more peaceful Northern Ireland and even the Scottish Parliament turned out to be better policies than many people thought (less so the Millennium Dome).  The good people of Sierra Leone will be eternally grateful for Blair’s intervention there – but the bombs we dropped so liberally on Serbia were a dark presage of things to come.  In the second half of Blair’s decade, hugely increased public spending (much of it still not paid for, because of hazy PFI deals) plus very little in return equalled a bloated state; and mass immigration plus multiculturalism plus the war on Iraq equalled 7/7 – the day that, for me, will always define New Labour’s term in office.  Typically, Teflon Tony escaped just in time to let Gordon handle the credit crunch.  It’s easy to say the Tories would have done the same – perhaps, but the tripartite failure that was the Bank of England / Treasury / FSA was Brown’s doing, and the whole system was set up to ignore both the level of debt in the economy and the house price bubble that drove real inflation.  We will live with the consequences of Brown’s idiocy for a long time to come, and he’s not the man to get us out of the mess he made.

As you know, Brown’s only notable appearance in this election has been during the hilarious Bigotgate (hilarious at his expense, naturally).  The instant reaction on Twitter falls into three types: the ‘how dare he’ sort, the ‘we should stick up for immigrants’ sort, and the ‘but she IS a bigot’ sort.  The last of these shows that there is still a remarkably widespread kneejerk response that equates criticism of immigration with racism – particularly when it comes in an unsophisticated form from an uneducated pensioner, which ought to be precisely the criticism we should tolerate most.  Smearing those who disagree with you is bad enough; doing it to someone who fits that description is particularly shoddy: and the mindset is not encouraging for those of us who want to see a healthier, more cohesive society, to say the least.  The same mindset insults anyone raising fears about crime by suggesting that, if only they didn’t read the Daily Mail, they would realise crime is falling.

Peter Hitchens is fond of quoting Peter Mandelson on his blog: “round about the time you’re utterly sick of saying something is when you’re beginning to get your message across”.  So I will say again: above a certain level, racism will go up as immigration goes up.  When the woman on the Rochdale omnibus thinks immigration is unsustainably high, we’re faced with two solutions: deal with the issue, or deal with the woman.  Brown has shown which he prefers, though his hotheaded behaviour’s more excusable than that of his supporters, coolly trying to justify it.  When did it become so fashionable to sneer at the poor and uneducated, and what is tolerant or liberal about belittling someone who expresses an opinion you might dislike, in words you might not yourself have chosen?  The Labour Party stopped doing this (in public) a couple of years ago, belatedly grasping that excluding dissenting voices on immigration only helped the far right – but, as we’ve seen, many of their supporters still feel this way.  Those of us who worry about racism, and the possibility of its getting worse, should be troubled by that.  But perhaps this will be the election when the Gillian Duffies realise that the more they vote Labour, the less Labour care about them.

One misguided explanation for the rise of the BNP is that Labour haven’t done enough to explain the benefits of immigration to their traditional supporters (as is the conclusion of this otherwise very reasonable article).  But this presupposes that immigration has benefited them – it clearly hasn’t.  Not only has it undercut the wages of those at the bottom (and it’s easy to say ‘you can’t undercut the minimum wage’, but how many of the 1m+ illegal immigrants in Britain are on the minimum wage?), but, by giving them a permanent source of very cheap labour, it’s allowed the upper middle classes to sweep our 5m+ indigenous, permanently unemployed underclass under the carpet and keep them there.

So if, like me, you come from a middle class, liberal family, work in the public sector and have benefited from mass immigration, globalisation and neoliberalism, by all means vote for them – they’ll protect as many of our vested interests as they can get away with.  If you’re actually working class – forget it.  They clearly despise you.

Conservatives – for all that, I don’t blame anyone for being troubled by the idea of another Tory government: their past conduct always acts as a heavy warning against getting overexcited by Cameron’s One Nation talk.  Having said that, I still think he has the potential (backed by some first-rate One Nation thinkers like Michael Gove and David Willetts) to be a decent PM, in spite of colossal stupidity over Ashcroftgate – but this is not the best election to win.  None of the parties are being honest about the scale of the cuts to come – and I don’t blame them, because if any of them break the silence their popularity will plummet (as Clegg discovered when he spoke, in a flash of honesty, of “savage cuts”, and as Osborne did when he mentioned the “austerity” to come).  Voters this year claim to want to be told the truth – but, in truth, we can’t handle the truth.  For this reason, the figleaf of a deal with the Lib Dems would probably be the best result – for them and us.

Lib Dems – the surprise package of the election.  Nick Clegg – memorably dismissed by a fellow commentator before the debates as “making Wendy Alexander look like Cicero” – has managed to speak the fiery old Labour language of fairness, before it all got perverted by bureaucracy and statism.  Using ideas like localism for progressive ends – Brown’s aims through Cameron’s methods, if we’re being charitable – is an appealing thesis.  We need a decent, honest, social democratic centre left in Britain, but for 13 years have had a vicious, corrupt gang who, among many other things, lied us into an illegal war that debased our democracy and cost a million lives, bought every one of the City’s self-serving lies, and whose last act has reduced us to within an inch of national bankruptcy.  If you believe in liberal or social democratic politics you should want the party that has in times gone by been its main vehicle either to fail completely, or to devise a wiser philosophy in opposition.  Either way, you should vote Lib Dem instead of Labour.

There are still plenty of contradictions in the Lib Dem platform, and plenty to belie their line that they are not of “the old politics”.  For all their inspiring talk of local democracy, and giving power away from Whitehall, they’ve shown their own fear of democracy.  Their last manifesto promised a referendum on the European Constitution, which became a shameful abstention on a referendum on the almost identical Lisbon Treaty.  They reneged on this on the grounds that they would support a in/out referendum on our membership of the whole thing – then, when this was proposed in the House of Lords by a UKIP peer, quietly voted against it.  So, beware of their claims to be so different from the other two.

I mentioned immigration and its effect on our underclass, which I think are both the symptom and the cause of many of modern Britain’s problems.  The Lib Dem policy of taking everyone on up to £10k out of tax altogether is the best policy in the whole election, and by far the best way of incentivising work for those currently at the bottom of the heap.  Whether or not the effect would be cancelled out by an amnesty for illegal immigrants, as they also seem to want, is hard to say.

SNP – I actually think they’re doing a reasonable job of running Scotland (which, largely thanks to Annabel Goldie, who rather undermines her boss’s scaremongering, has become a good advert for hung parliaments), particularly on education, but find it hard not to be put off by Salmond’s Caesarian egomania.  His target of 20 seats seems as hyperbolic as ever.  If the Tories win, expect our canny FM to drive multiple wedges between us and them.  Whether or not you approve of this ultimately comes down to whether or not you want to break up the UK, but any argument in favour of unionism is massively outweighed by all the arguments against Labour.

UKIP – some appealing populist policies, and not just on the EU, but unfortunately they’ve thrown their lot in with the climate change denial lobby – and by that I don’t just mean a few dissenting engineers and geologists, but genuine headcases like Christopher Monckton.  Their yeomen base might not be too happy to discover the libertarian small print about drugs, the BBC and the NHS either.  Nigel Farage – who, ironically, is precisely how I picture a low-grade bank clerk if and when I think of one – could provide some of the best drama of the night if he beats the Brownnosing Speaker, but I wouldn’t want more than one MP dragging a Cameron government off to the unworkable right.

Greens – likeable people, uncorrupt and more intellectually coherent (though still socialist) than they used to be, and very good locally.  I still think they’re wrong about nuclear power, but I must apologise for smearing them in the past when I suggested they were on the EU gravy train – it seems that, like some of the more noble Lib Dems and unlike Labour, they have an idealistic view of Europe which doesn’t allow them to accept the institution as it currently stands.  It wouldn’t be a bad thing if one or two of them get in – especially as it might make more Labour support go in their direction in future.

BNP – see above.  If they do well, it won’t be Gillian Duffy’s fault – it’ll be Gordon Brown’s.

Assorted Communists, Trotskyites, Gallowayists, etc – a bit like the BNP, but with anti-Semitism instead of white racism.

In conclusion, my advice would be: anyone but Labour, except their offshoot party the BNP.  My constituency (Glasgow North) is Labour held, but 33rd on the Lib Dems’ target list, requiring a swing of 6%.  Albeit with the reservations listed above, they’ll be getting my tactical vote on Thursday.

Read Full Post »