Keir Starmer was right: How Margaret Thatcher bankrolled a generation of left-wing entrepreneurs and artists

I don't subscribe to the Telegraph, so I may not have read everything Keir Starmer had to say about Margaret Thatcher earlier this week. But what I did see was wholly unobjectionable.

Starmer was quoted as saying Thatcher had "set loose our natural entrepreneurialism".

Well, that was what she dreamed of doing. Most Conservative measures to help small businesses turn out to help large businesses rather more, but in one area at least Thatcher's policies did have a positive effect. And it often involved young entrepreneurs with very unThatcherite views.

A Guardian article from this summer remembered the summer of 1983:

That same month, a new government initiative was rolled out nationwide. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was the brainchild of a Treasury civil servant called Peter Kemp and had been trialled over the previous two years. 

Despite its bland name, it was a daring concept. If citizens wanted to set up a small business, the government would guarantee an income of £40 a week for up to 12 months, and an escape from dole checkups. 

If your business plan and a savings test passed muster – and for three-quarters of applicants it did – you were good. For the decade or so that it ran, more than half a million people ended up using it. Many were under 25.

And the article continued:

There was one unlikely side-effect, almost certainly unplanned by Treasury mandarins – the birth of an entire generation of British creatives. Successful EAS alumni included Alan McGee of Creation Records, Laurence Bell of Domino, and Julian Dunkerton, who founded Superdry; musicians such as Jarvis Cocker and Shaun Ryder; artists including Tracey Emin, Jeremy Deller and Edmund de Waal.

Forty years after the scheme was rolled out, it’s a faintly astonishing thought: would Britpop and the YBAs have happened without a hardline Conservative government? Was Thatcherism, widely detested by the arts establishment, actually good for culture? When I put these questions to the artist Rachel Whiteread, she chuckles. “Yeah, it’s a little bit strange, the whole thing. I don’t think they had a clue what would happen.”

Well that's the good thing about markets: they can overturn the existing order. It's why we Liberals support them.

Labour was at pains to associate itself with the arts in the run up to its victory in 1997, but mutual the love affair didn't last. 

This report appeared in the Herald in March 1998:

Tony Blair has lost his cool. According to a band of leading figures in the music world, the Prime Minister has betrayed the principles on which he was elected and should no longer be regarded as an honorary member of the ''Cool Britannia'' movement.

The ''band'' is fronted by two Glaswegians, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, and the head of Creation Records, Alan McGee, who gave £50,000 to Labour's General Election fund.

And McGee's complaint?

Alan McGee said the Government was making it harder for musicians. Mr McGee serves on Government task-force committees - but refused to go to a meeting with Employment Minister Andrew Smith a fortnight ago in protest at Labour's Welfare to Work policy.

He said he wanted the Government to introduce a scheme to allow young artists to by-pass requirements to take the first job on offer so they could develop their musical skills.

The NME went so far as to produce the front page and report you see above. An account of Tony Blair's response to it says of the paper's original report:

Singled out for heaviest objection were Government policies on curfews for young people, the abolition of supplementary allowances for those without work, imposition of thousand-pound tuition fees for university students and a total rejection of any debate on repealing Britain’s outdated drugs laws.

This just suggests that someone at the paper had got round to reading Labour's 1997 manifesto.

My memories of Labour's polices on youth unemployment from this era are summed up by this BBC News story:

A pilot scheme in Coventry to remove unwanted tattoos from the unemployed has received a £2m government grant.

Many jobless people believe their colourful designs put off employers, but tattoo removal costs between £500 and £1,000.

The employment service in Coventry is considering removing tattoos for nothing as part of a broader programme to help jobseekers become more employable.

A generous policy in its way, but it was all about fitting people into existing employment opportunities. It was never going to give rise to new artistic movements or musical styles.

Under the Conservatives (and under the Lib Dems during the Coalition years) unemployment problem has been about using poverty to force people off benefits one way or another. And there are few signs that Labour will be much different after the next election.

There are many among the young employed who would benefit from a revival of Thatcherism.

Why I'm concerned the Lib Dem leadership election has been postponed until next May

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Last week the Liberal Democrats' Federal Board voted to postpone the party's leadership election until May 2021.

It's not clear what constitutional basis they had for doing so, and there had been much criticism of the decision. Some see it as a way of excluding the party's members from the choice of leader, at least for a year, to ensure the establishment's favourite son retains the post for as long as possible

I worry because the idea the public will be impressed that we have stepped back from the political fray and reward us at the ballot box in due course, which some use as an argument in support of the decision, reminds me of a strand in the party's thinking I have complained about before:

You often hear the criticism that we are too tribalist, but that is a libel. 

Chuka Umunna joined the party and was made our Treasury spokesperson the same weekend, and I have not read a whisper of criticism of him or that promotion. 

Back in the 1980s the Liberal Party, which was supposed to be far more fractious than the modern-day Lib Dems, did David Steel's bidding and stood down in half the seats in the country to make room for the SDP. You can't  get much less tribal than that. 

A fairer criticism of Liberals and Liberal Democrats over the years would be that we have been too prone to the belief that the route to success lies in giving in. 

If only we give up enough of our beliefs and policies, runs the logic, if only we stand down in favour of someone else in enough seats, we will be swept to power. 

You sometimes get the idea we believe we are an obstacle to Liberal government and not its greatest hope.

These days a wholly online campaign would exclude few members, but it would be wrong to hold the election right away.

But let's hold it as soon as is decent and practicable. Otherwise, by the time the we get a new leader the public may have forgotten all about us.

A year of decision: Lord Bonkers in 2019

It is customary, or so he assures me, for Lord Bonkers to spend those lazy days between Christmas and the new year looking back on his adventures over the past year.

So here goes...


January

When you've had a hard day wandering around a library in a suit, you need refreshment. pic.twitter.com/Ayt7ro4ET5

— CFB Clips (@CFBClips) January 11, 2019

A reader alerted me to this Double Diamond television commercial from the 1960s, which was shot in the library of the National Liberal Club.

He suggested, surely correctly, that Lord Bonkers had arranged the filming to alleviate one of the club's regular financial crises.


February

His lordship paid tribute to Paddy Ashdown:

The obituaries will tell you how Sir Paddy Ashplant fused the community politics promoted by the Association of Liberal Councillors with his expertise in jungle warfare to win a string of by-elections and raise the Liberal Democrats from the ruins of Steel’s grand strategy. 

What they will not tell you is how my domestic staff loved his visits (Cook would frequently announced that he made her “come over all unnecessary”); how he stood his round in the Bonkers’ Arms and entertained the locals with his favourite joke; how he allowed the Well-Behaved Orphans to question him for hours about his time in the Special Boat Service (they were always particularly interested in the escape techniques he had been taught lest he be captured by the enemy).

He also met Nick Clegg:

He turns out to be full of his new job, telling me how Satan’s chief operating officer Mephistopheles called him while he was walking in the Alps last summer and invited him to fly to Hell to meet Satan himself. "I said to them, if you're prepared to let me into the inner circle, in the black box, and give me real authority, then I'm interested." 

Clegg describes Satan to me as "a shy guy" and "thoughtful", before adding: "The thing that persuaded me to do it is Satan and  Mephistopheles asking the right questions for the right reasons."

April

The old boy, who is far more trenchant than I would ever be, was not taken with our new recruit Chuka Umunna:

I curled up with a pamphlet he has just published. It soon transpired that he is one of these hearty public school types who want to send the nation’s youth off to camp. Sleeping under canvass; washing up in a bucket of cold water; doing PT with your shirt off… You know the type. 

By the time I had finished reading, it I was clear that the man is worse than that. He wants to haul in the country every teenager off to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness. Why in Gladstone’s name are our people delivering for him?

May

What is the reason for Lord Bonkers' longevity?

He always talks about his annual bathe the spring of eternal life that bursts from the hillside above the former HQ of the Association of Liberal Councillors and the cordial sold (at a steep price) by the Elves of Rockingham Forest.

But a reader suggested another explanation.


June

Milkshaking was the talk of the summer. As so often, Lord Bonkers was there first:

A journalist rings to ask what I think of this modern tactic of pouring milkshakes over far-right politicians. I reply that the milkshake is an American import we could well do without and that if one is going to dispose of it then tipping it over a passing Fascist seems as good a way as any. 

Warming to my theme, I recall that I was once obliged to sit next to Oswald Mosley at dinner. Things were distinctly frosty between us from the get-go and when he made a disobliging remark about Herbert Samuel I tipped my knickerbocker glory over his head.

September

Lord Bonkers played a prominent part in our victory in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election:

What a splendid night! It was touch and go at the start of the count, but when the boxes from Ystradgynlais were opened it became clear we had triumphed. We toasted our victory in the finest Welsh champagne and sang our Liberal anthems: ‘The Land’, ‘Woad’ and ‘Cwm Off It’. 

One pleasure of this contest has been rediscovering the delightful countryside of Mid Wales. More than once by memory has been jogged by places I saw in the last campaign I fought here – I went through Three Cocks in the 1985 by-election.

He also contributed his customary foreword to the Liberator Songbook:

Welcome to all our new members! I hope you enjoy your first Glee Club and, a word of reassurance, please don’t worry: It’s Meant To Be Like This. 

I have already met many of you when you attended one of my basic training camps on the shores of Rutland Water. The party has signed up so many new recruits recently that I had to send out for extra tents. 

After a week of training in committee room theory and practice, Focus delivery and guerrilla warfare – all conducted under the beady eye of Sergeant Major Carmichael – new members need fear nothing they will encounter as a Liberal Democrat activist.

November

Defections to the Liberal Democrats were all the rage, so the old monster did his best to encourage them:

When Jo ‘Gloria’ Swanson tipped me the wink that we would be parading newly converted Conservative MPs to the Liberal Democrat Conference, I naturally decided to join the fun. I hired a van from Oakham’s leading Chinese laundry and bade a brace of gamekeepers join me; we motored up to Town and lay in wait outside the Carlton Club. 

In the middle of the afternoon a red-faced character sporting an Eton tie stumbled down the steps. I thumbed through Jane’s Conservative MPs and identified him as fair quarry. The gamekeepers moved in, and when he proved resistant to their orders a tap on the napper with an orchard doughty rendered him more pliable. He was bundled into the van and buckled inside the large wicker hamper with which it had come equipped.

The Lib Dems have not been tribalist enough

Back in February, when Change UK was launched, I wrote:

Remembering the endless hours expended on seat negotiations by the Liberal Party and the SDP, I would be tempted to pursue a selfish strategy if I were in charge of TIG and it had grown into a national party. 

I would give the Lib Dems a clear run in the seats they hold and in another dozen where they had realistic chances of winning. After that, I would stand a candidate in every seat in the country and let the Lib Dems stand against me if they dared. 

So low is the present Lib Dem support across much of the country, I would reason, that if we can’t supplant then we TIGgers have no future as a party anyway.

Now things have turned around - and that post is a reminder of how quickly it happened - that has become good advice for us Liberal Democrats.

You often hear the criticism that we are too tribalist, but that is a libel.

Chuka Umunna joined the party and was made our Treasury spokesperson the same weekend, and I have not read a whisper of criticism of him or that promotion.

Back in the 1980s the Liberal Party, which was supposed to be far more fractious than the modern-day Lib Dems, did David Steel's bidding and stood down in half the seats in the country to make room for the SDP. You can't  get much less tribal than that.

A fairer criticism of Liberals and Liberal Democrats over the years would be that we have been too prone to the belief that the route to success lies in giving in.

If only we give up enough of our beliefs and policies, runs the logic, if only we stand down in favour of someone else in enough seats, we will be swept to power.

You sometimes get the idea we believe we are an obstacle to Liberal government and not its greatest hope.

So I will now apply my advice from February to my own party.

I would not have a problem with our standing down in favour of the Greens in constituencies where they have a realistic hope of winning and we have none. But there are not many seats like that.

Nor would I have a problem with standing down in favour of Change UK, though I can think of only one seat - Heidi Allen's South Cambridgeshire - where that would be worth doing.

But we should stand candidates in the huge majority of seats and let other parties decide whether or not to put up against us.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A bicyclist arrives from Kettering

The only downside of the appearance of a new issue of Liberator is that it signals another trip to Bonkers Hall.

As his lordship explains, we join him at his European election results party. Things are moving quickly in politics at the moment, so we are journeying back to a time when Liberal Democrats still poked fun at Chuka Ummuna.

Monday

The bells of St Asquith’s long ago chimed midnight, but no one shows any sign of going home. I am writing these lines in the Green Ballroom here at the Hall as my European elections celebration party takes place around me.

A cheer goes up. Chris Davies and Jane Brophy are returned in the North West. Another cheer. Caroline Voaden and Martin Horwood are home in the South West. Then a bicyclist arises from Kettering, where the East Midlands account is being conducted, with the welcome news that Joan Hunter Dunn is back in the European Parliament.

Freddie and Fiona are here, wrapped in blankets with their feet in mustard baths. Even so, I fear they have each caught a cold after their soaking in church yesterday morning.

“I have been talking to Chukka, and he is very interested in a pact with the Liberal Democrats,” says Fiona. “Obviously, we’d be the senior party.”

“Chuka?” I ask.

“Umunna!”

“Bless you,” I reply.

Of course, you now want to know how the two of them came to be soaked at Holy Communion yesterday…

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Chuka Umunna can be heard singing the theme tune of Mr Bean

Photo: Gerhard Heeke

Anxious to know more about Chuka Umunna, widely touted today as a future convert to the Liberal Democrats, I read a Financial Times profile of him from 2013.

To be honest, it left me little clearer about a politician whose appeal and motivations are something of a mystery to me. He was once billed as the British Obama, yet he went to an expensive private school.

But it did yield our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Umunna's treble, recorded while he was a chorister at Southwark Cathedral, can be head singing the theme tune of Mr Bean.

So Tiggers can change their stripes - at least in Scotland

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David Macdonald, an entrepreneur and independent councillor in East Renfrewshire, was at the top of Change UK's list for Scotland in next week's European elections.

Today, standing alongside the Scottish Liberal Democrats' leader Willie Rennie, he urged Scots to vote Lib Dem instead to avoid splitting the Remain vote.

Change UK,or The Tiggers as I shall always think of them, have already lost their top candidate for Scotland once after someone looked at the tweets Joseph Russo had been sending.

It all adds to the impression that this new party is proving a flop. But I did enjoy Chuka Umunna's headmasterly disapproval of someone changing parties:

“He has let down his fellow candidates and activists."

In which the Tiggers unbounce themselves

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"In fact," said Rabbit, coming to the end of it at last, "Tigger's getting so Bouncy nowadays that it's time we taught him a lesson. Don't you think so, Piglet?" 

Piglet said that Tigger was very Bouncy, and that if they could think of a way of unbouncing him, it would be a Very Good Idea. "Just what I feel," said Rabbit.

It was expected that the Independent Group would be very pleased with itself. You must get quite an adrenaline rush from launching a new party.

But it soon began to grate and I wondered would could be done to unbounce them..

Here's Rabbit's solution:

"Well, I've got an idea," said Rabbit, "and here it is. We take Tigger for a long explore, somewhere where he's never been, and we lose him there, and next morning we find him again, and-mark my words-he'll be a different Tigger altogether." 

"Why?" said Pooh. 

"Because he'll be a Humble Tigger. Because he'll be a Sad Tigger, a Melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger, an Oh-Rabbit-I-am-glad-to-see-you Tigger. That's why."

If you had a well-spent childhood you will know that Rabbit's plan did not work quite as he hoped.

So it is just as well that the Tiggers have spent the week unbouncing themselves.

When the Independent Group was launched I wrote:

I have no idea what will happen next, but I have a feeling it will be more fun than the last few years have been,

But it has been getting less fun ever since. 

There has been their refusal to contemplate any sort of alliance for the European parliament. If you read my blog post about their launch you will see that has not surprised me, but it has certainly put off a lot of people and diminished any sense that the Tigger MPs are not like other politicians.

There has been the problems with their candidate selection for those elections. Did they not foresee there might be problems over social media activity and do some vetting?

Then there has been the policy vacuum beyond a notable vapid initial statement and a notably silly pamphlet from Chuka Umunna. Does he really think bringing back national service is the way to win over the young voters the new party must attact?

And now there is the party's acting leader Heidi Allen announcing she has sympathy for the view that a the option of no deal should be offered in any referendum because to some people it represents a "clean Brexit".

The overwhelming impression the Tiggers give is one of amateurism. Everything had been done in a hurry and nothing has been done very well. 

But then I suppose if you are parachuted into a safe seat, as so many Tigger MPs were, you are likely to acquire an exaggerated sense of your own skill as a politician.

By contrast, Liberal Democrat MP have to work hard - ridiculously hard - and be good politicians to get elected to the Commons.

The feeling that the Indpendent Group may be a bubble with a short life is growing stronger by the day.

Chuka Umunna reminds us that Centrism is not Liberalism

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Chuka Umunna wish to bring in compulsory national service for 16-year-olds is a reminder that proclaiming you are in the centre does not make you a Liberal.

This combination of muscular Christianity and middle-class impatience with the lower orders was typical of Labour under Blair.

It was also found among the people who joined the SDP, though less so among the politicians who formed it.

I am all in favour of giving young people volunteering opportunities. Come to that, I am in favour of giving older people such opportunities too.

But I am not attracted by the idea of compulsion. Not only does it offend my Liberal sensibilities: I suspect it would make the service hugely unpopular with young people, defeating the hopes Umunna has for it.

Besides, the whole thing is a cop out.

Umunna wants compulsory national service because, as quoted by Metro:

Under his proposal for a ‘citizens’ service’, Mr Umunna acknowledged that ‘it might seem strong medicine’ but was necessary to tackle ‘social apartheid’ in modern Britain. 

He said national service, which ended in the early 1960s, ‘brought people from an array of different backgrounds and different parts of the country together in a way like no other.’

We have social apartheid in Britain because of the class system and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

The idea that having young people work side by side for a couple of years will overturn all that is hopelessly wet.

Umunna, judging by the Metro report, would dismiss my views as "cynicism", which is precisely what Tony Blair would have called it 25 years ago.

I have seen this style of politics before, and it's not Liberalism.

Start Again? Lib Dems in talks about new party with moderate Labour and Tory MPs

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From today's Sunday Times (behind its paywall):

Senior Labour MPs appalled by Jeremy Corbyn’s performance over the Salisbury poisoning have been in secret talks with the Liberal Democrats and at least one Conservative MP about forming a new political party called Start Again. 

Plans for a new pro-European centre party have been openly discussed as part of cross-party discussions on Brexit, according to sources present. 

One of those involved in the plotting — a former member of the shadow cabinet — told The Sunday Times that Corbyn’s refusal to blame Russia for the attack would cause MPs to abandon Labour. “This is a watershed moment,” the MP said. “It has caused a number of people to question why we are in this party.”

There are not many names named, but Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie and Anna Soubry all get a mention.

There would be an irony in calling a new party Start Again unless it turned out to be devoted to something more than maintaining the status quo.

Why did Open Britain bother supporting Liz Kendall?

Remember Jack Hickey, the Conservative candidate in Leicester West?

He was the Spartan turned snowflake who complained that Open Britain were trying to "skew the vote" by campaigning in that constituency on behalf of Labour's Liz Kendall.

And the Open Britain site does indeed boast:

In this snap General Election, we campaigned for 29 current MPs to be returned to Parliament as a strong voice to stand up to a hard and destructive Brexit.

They must wonder if it was worth it.

Last night Liz Kendall followed Jeremy Corbyn's ordered and abstained on Chuka Umunna's amendment backing the continuance of Britain's membership of the single market.

Thanks to Alicia Butteriss on Twitter.

Should Vince Cable have been chief secretary to the Treasury?

Vince Cable has sprung back into life these past few days.

He has a website to promote his new book After the Storm and its associated speaking tour.

And he has written an article with Labour's Chuka Umunna for the Independent: The deafening silence on the Government's industrial strategy is ominous.

For many years Vince has been the Liberal Democrats' preeminent voice on economics, yet you have to ask if we made the best use of his talents in government.

One of the party's weaknesses in government was that we never developed a distinctive Lib Dem position on the economy.

Danny Alexander was catapulted into the Treasury following the rapid resignation of David Laws. Because he had no particular knowledge of economics he was at first able to do little more than mouth slogans about "clearing up the mess left by Labour".

Later he became quite an assured performer, but by then it would have been too late even if he did have something interesting to say.

David Laws could have been that distinctive voice - his first Commons appearance at the dispatch box was immensely impressive. But given that his contribution to the Orange Box called for the National Health Service to be replaced by a private insurance system, how far his views on the economy differed from those of the Osbornite orthodoxy is open to question.

So should Vince Cable have been chief secretary to the Treasury?

Someone of Vince's seniority having his own department to run seemed fitting when the Coalition cabinet was appointed, and it was understandable that the reshuffle following David Laws' resignation was made as limited as possible.

But there is an important message here.

If we Liberal Democrats ever find ourselves in power again then our most powerful voice on economics, if he or she is not the party leader, must be in the Treasury.

Later. There is an enlightening interview with Vince Cable in the Guardian.

The strange inability of Chuka Umunna to pronounce 'Worcester'

From an interview on BBC Radio Hereford and Wichita Worcester this week. More evidence of how radically out of touch the political class is?

Six of the Best 341

Cllr James Baker is speaking against the 'snoopers' charter' at an Open Rights Group meeting in Manchester on Saturday.

Chuka Umunna does not impress Mark Pack: "Someone with real leadership ability, and not just a Wikipedia entry talking about it, would have behaved very differently."

David Hencke argues the Association of Chief Police Officers' proposed ban on announcing arrests will be an own goal for justice.

"Vets from the British Veterinary Zoological Society who work with wild and exotic animals have publicly questioned the government's badger culling policy and the British Veterinary Association's support for badger culling," reports Farming Online.

Brick Fetish outlines the history of interlocking building bricks for children.

"Located in the sunny (That's a lie) south UK, and hidden in the precision manicured grounds of lakes and gardens in Cricket St Thomas is a forgotten childhood relic being left to crumble. All those familiar with the Noel Edmonds Houseparty show running in the 1990's will remember Mr Blobby as the shows ridiculous mascot. Mr Blobby's house was an attraction some children may have been lucky enough to visit in the short time it was open. The park closed in 1999 and since then has been left to the elements." 28 Days Later has photos of the ruins -  "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"