The murder of Jo Cox: I want my country back

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I wanted to write something about the murder of Jo Cox, but it is hard to say anything beyond how desperately sad it is.

For a good tribute from a slightly unexpected source, read Andrew Mitchell:

What was so striking about that was that here was a newly-elected Labour MP who had so little time for the petty aspects of party-political life of Westminster. 

At the time, her party leadership was against military intervention in Syria and mine was in favour, which meant the atmosphere around the issue was quite heated. But she was completely uninterested in any of that. She just wanted to do the right thing. 

A lot people in her situation would have been very reluctant to work with a wicked old Tory like me, but Jo never minded. During Commons debates about Syria, we would sit across the chamber exchanging text messages. 

When we set up the All Party Parliamentary Group on Syria, she and I chaired it together, taking evidence from military commanders, diplomats and officials from the region. She might have been new to Westminster, but she led the way.

Some have blamed her death on the poisonous political climate engendered by the referendum on Europe,

Given how little we know about her death so far, there is a danger that anything written today will look foolish in a few days.

But Alex Massie writes powerfully and I feel he is right:

So, no, Nigel Farage isn’t responsible for Jo Cox’s murder. And nor is the Leave campaign. But they are responsible for the manner in which they have pressed their argument. They weren’t to know something like this was going to happen, of course, and they will be just as shocked and horrified by it as anyone else. 

But, still. Look. When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.

As more than one person has tweeted tonight, I want my country back.

Andrew Mitchell warns on civil liberties

It seems we can welcome a new recruit to the civil libertarian cause.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival today, the former Conservative cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell said:

"I think you should all be very careful with a generation of politicians who play fast and loose with the ancient liberties of this country, which our forefathers fought for.

"The time of greatest shame in my Parliamentary career was when Parliament discussed whether people could be detained for 90 days.

"The idea that in Britain you can lock somebody up for 90 days without charging them is absolutely extraordinary.

"I remember not long ago on June 6 - the 70th anniversary of D-Day - where politicians were trumpeting what we fought for in World War Two, it was also the day that it was announced there would be a secret court in Britain."

Read the full report in, of course, the Shropshire Star.

Will there be a by-election in Sutton Coldfield?

At the end of its report about the Plebgate police officers being recalled to parliament to apologise for their original evidence, the Observer has this paragraph:

[Andrew] Mitchell is expected to be nominated by David Cameron as Britain's next European commissioner, replacing Lady Ashton. An announcement is expected before the end of the year.

If there is a by-election in Mitchell's by-election, remember you read it here first.

A Sutton Coldfield by-election?

Today's newspapers are full of stories that Andrew Mitchell is to be compensated for being traduced over plebgate (or "gategate", as I prefer to think of it) by being appointed as Britain's next European commissioner.

Our current commissioner, you will instantly recall, is Baroness Ashton. By my calculations, her term of office ends in December 2014. As the next general election will probably not take place until May 2015, that implies there will be a by-election in Mitchell's Sutton Coldfield constituency.

Sutton Coldfield, which contains some of Birmingham's most select suburbs, has always been a safe Tory seat. At one time it was a Liberal second place and there were a fair number of Liberal councillors too.

All that was lost, however, when the 'Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield' was amalgamated into Birmingham in 1974 - something that still rankled when I lived there in the early 1980s -  and in recent elections it has been Labour that has come second.

Andrew Mitchell faces the inevitable

Two days ago I sent this tweet:

Whatever the rights and wrongs of #gategate how can Andrew Mitchell stay in post? A chief whip has to be a figure of authority - he has none
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) October 17, 2012

This evening, in his resignation letter, Mitchell wrote:

Over the last two days it has become clear to me that whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter I will not be able to fulfil my duties as we would both wish.

I am not gloating over his fall - the Police Federation has not won my admiration over this affair - but he really was a fool.

A chief whip should be a largely anonymous figure, working behind the scenes. Francis Urquhart is a good role model.

The reshuffle made the Lib Dems feel less like a party of government

We know Nick Clegg's ambition is for the Liberal Democrats to become "not ... the third party, but ... one of three parties of government".

Yet one of the reasons I was depressed by the summer's reshuffle (as I blogged when discussing John Kampfner's more optimistic take on it) is that we now seem further from fulfilling this ambition.

I share Nick Harvey's disappointment that we no longer have ministers at Defence or the Foreign Office. And I am not convinced by the posts we have taken instead.

Lynne Featherstone will do a good job at Overseas Development if she is allowed. But it may well be that moving Andrew Mitchell away from the department was a prelude to a Cameron decision to drop his pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on overseas aid. There are no signs of it so far, but it would be in line with his strategy of moving right to please his back-benches and core voters.

And, much as I like David Heath, I fear that becoming the public face of the badger cull will do him or his party no favours.

But then Nick came out in favour of a cull as long ago as June 2008. As I blogged at the time, I was puzzled by the politics of this:

I do not know if culling badgers to prevent bovine TB is good science, but I am sure that it is bad politics. It may play well go down well in a few rural constituencies, but it will go down very badly in many more urban and suburban seats. Like Sheffield Hallam, for instance. 

This feels very much like a return to the 1970s, when the old Liberal Party's fortunes depended on clinging on to a handful of seats where the farming interest was strong. I thought we had all moved on since then.

Given that the Liberal Party I joined in the late seventies combined that pragmatic defence of local farming interests with high-minded statements about poverty, the changes in the reshuffle feel very much like a case of back to the future.

The boy who was locked up for swearing at the police

A tweet from Labour MP Tom Watson alerts us to a post on the void:

An 18 year old boy was sentenced to four months in youth custody last year for an Andrew Mitchell style rant at police. 

A celebratory tweet by Greater Manchester Police shows that Ricky Gemmell, 18, was arrested and jailed after “ranting and swearing” at police during last year’s disturbances in the city. 

According to Manchester Mule the youngster had never been in trouble before.

Boris Johnson on Andrew Mitchell

Over to the Mayor of London:

"If people swear at the police, they must expect to be arrested. Not just because it's wrong to expect officers to endure profanities, but it's also because of the experience of the culprits. 

"If people feel there are no comebacks, no boundaries and no retribution for the small stuff, then I'm afraid they will go on to commit worse crimes."

In fact, this was Johnson speaking at last year's Conservative Conference, but the principle must still hold.

The Guardian report of that speech helpfully goes on to say:

Although no specific offence of swearing at a police officer exists, it is an offence under section five of the Public Order Act 1986 to "use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby".

Later. And here is BoJo being applauded for saying it...

Andrew Mitchell's Schooldays

Black Dog in the Mail on Sunday provides an insight into the character of Andrew Mitchell, the new Conservative chief, er, whip:

New Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell spent much of last week trying to live down his Rugby schooldays nickname of 'Thrasher'. 

It won't be easy. Fellow ex-pupils say that by the time Mitchell became head of house at Rugby in the Seventies, all the boarding houses had abolished beatings - except one, Tudor, where self-proclaimed disciplinarian Mitchell was in the all-powerful position. 

'The cool set had a spliff in one hand and a Hendrix LP in the other,' said a contemporary. 'Andrew had a big stick in one and a Tory manifesto in the other.'

Development and free media

Before I came over here I quoted from the new Liberal Democrat document Accountability to the Poor (which was subsequently approved as party policy at our Conference in Liverpool), applauding its emphasis on the importance of political reform in furthering development.

I have just been to a session here at the UN Week Digital Media Lounge at the 92Y which suggests that another central liberal belief - the importance of a free press - is relevant to development too.

The session was entitled "Media Development" and looked in particular at the Media Map Project and various attempts to measure how free a country's media (both the conventional press and the new web-based forms) is.

Media development is based upon the insight that the free exchange of information is central to the fostering of democratic government, a free market and accountability in both business and the political sphere.

Various telling statistics were quoted: in sub-Saharan Africa rates of economic development are closely correlated with how free a country's press is. The speakers argued that spending on media development is a very efficient way of promoting development more generally.

All this links back to what Andrew Mitchell was saying the other evening about the importance of strengthening civil society in the developing world - and in some Western nations too.

But at the heart of media development is the argument of Amartya Sen that there has never been a famine in a country with a free press.

Nick Clegg to tell UN summit Britain will halve malaria deaths in Africa

I may be in New York, but I have to read the website of the dear old Guardian to know what is going on:

Britain will lead the fight against malaria, one of the world's biggest killers of children, the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, will tell the UN summit in New York tomorrow. He will pledge to halve deaths from the disease in 10 African countries.

Clegg will announce an increase in UK funds for malaria from £150m a year to £500m by 2014 in his closing speech to world leaders discussing progress towards the millennium development goals.

The UK government is pushing for greater efforts in two areas: the health of women and babies, which will be the subject of a strategy launched by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, tomorrow, and malaria, which takes a big toll on both.

Certainly, Andrew Mitchell was keen to turn the debate on health to the subject of malaria yesterday evening. And this article confirms the view that the Guardian's Larry Elliott had been well briefed.

Andrew Mitchell, the great and the good, and me

Yesterday evening I was invited to a meeting between Andrew Mitchell, the British secretary of state for international development, and BOND - an overarching body for Britain's non-governmental organisations. The BOND was made up of senior people from many of Britain's most important health and development campaigns,

So there we were, in the boardroom of the United Nations Foundation in New York: the minister, the great and good of the British development world and, er, me.

It is a tribute to the mystique that attaches to blogging - and more to the work and contacts of my new friends in Oxfam - that I was there. As the chair of the meeting said (in a friendly way), "I'm not sure why we have a blogger here, but that's the modern world."

There was time before Mitchell arrived for a pre-meeting among the BOND people. As it turned out, Mitchell was delayed at an earlier event ("there were four speeches, and mine was by far the shortest"), so there was plenty of time for a pre-meeting.

The danger with this sort of coalition is that the individual members want to be able to go back to their home organisations and report that they raised the point that most concerns that organisation. The result is a staccato question-and-answer session with no real debate or overall coherence.

So we went round the table to find out what those important points were - I decided I had nothing to contribute at this point - then grouped them together under four headings and decided on the order in which they would be raised.

Mitchell arrived late and full of apologies. He has the full head of prematurely grey hair that seems fashionable at the moment (ask for an Assange cut). He was also wearing a charity wristband - something, say, Willie Whitelaw would never have done. But in a nice traditional Tory touch, it matched his tie.

He held the development brief for five years before the Conservatives came to power so he knows it well, despite his opening remark that he was just "the new kid on the block".

It is significant that David Cameron has always promised to maintain spending on overseas development, despite the pressures on spending elsewhere. In part this is a sign that he recognises the depth pf the problems involved. But it also had a lot to do with convincing people that the Conservatives were no longer the nasty party and attracting back the liberally minded voters who have not supported his party for 20 years.

Anyway, I shall take you through the discussion that took place under the four headings, though, wittingly or not, Mitchell rather subverted this by trying to go around the table for comments when the BOND people had already decided who would ask about what.

The first topic was the BOND members' concern that there should be a clear programme of activities resulting from the MDG summit, not just windy rhetoric. Mitchell said that he shared this view entirely but discussions between governments were still continuing.

I was later told that the best guide to the British government's thinking on this point and much else to do with the summit is a recent Guardian article by Larry Elliott. He was very well briefed before he wrote it.

An interesting point raised by Mitchell himself was the importance of civil society holding governments to account both in the West and the Third World. He said that up to 5 per cent of the aid budget would be give to NGOs in the developing countries to help them scrutinise how the rest was spent by governments.

This was news to me and sounds a very good idea. Mitchell said it had also been in Labour's last manifesto but that it had originated with the Conservatives.

Mitchell said that greater transparency by the British government would help the Third World. He had seen children pressed up against the fence with their laptops at an airport in Malawi to use the free broadband. Information published in Britain could be read all around the world.

He also asked why the NGO sector was so much more effective at holding government to account in Britain than it was in many other developed countries (it would be invidious to mention France and Italy in this context). Perhaps this was flattery, but I don't think so.

We then moved on to the second point, which was the Robin Hood Tax or FTT - Financial Transactions Tax. Mitchell said that this was a matter for George Osborne not him, but that Osborne was not dismissive of it.

After the meeting I asked David Hillman from Stamp Out Poverty for some good resources on this tax. He suggested the organisation's own website and also The Robin Hood Tax.

The third subject was global warming. Mitchell said that government departments were learning to work more closely on this - I still get a little frisson of joy when I hear Conservative ministers say things like "I talk often to Chris Huhne on climate change".

And finally there was health, where his answers left some people around the table disappointed. Far from my presence being resented, I had people coming up to me saying "I hope you are going to blog that fact that he didn't respond to the question on the health workforce."

Well, I will, because it is estimated that another 3.5m health workers of various kinds are needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals and without them it is not going to happen.

So that was Andrew Mitchell and BOND. It was an education for me in the Sir Humphrey level of the NGO world.

Nick Clegg is meeting BOND tomorrow. I will get to that meeting too if I can.

More on the Global Campaign for Education meeting

As I heard Andrew Mitchell, the British development secretary (more about him later), say yesterday, this Millennium Development Goals summit resembles an upmarket political conference.

My first event of yesterday was organised by the Global Campaign for Education at a hotel near the United Nations Building. Among the speakers were Queen Rania of Jordan and a notably relaxed Gordon Brown. Clearly, not being prime minister does wonders for your state of mind.

There were lots of speakers and limited time, so it was a very soundbitey event. Rather than try to report it in full I shall just send you to the Global Campaign for Education website, which will tell you all about the campaign to make primary education available to every child.

The star of the show was the 12-year-old South African girl Nthabiseng Tshabalala. Not so much for her address to the meeting as for what happened afterwards.

A crowd of us were waiting for the lifts to come to take us down from the second floor after the meeting, but none came for ages. "Are there any stairs?" she asked and the whole crowd went down that way instead.

You can't beat a good education.