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Showing posts with label Danny Alexander. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Danny Alexander. Show all posts
Rachel Reeves is starting to make Danny Alexander look like a maverick economic expansionist, but maybe the reason they succumbed to orthodoxy lies in the Treasury rather within them.
Michael Gove, stay with me, spoke to Jo Timan of the Manchester Evening News, and the interview is discussed in today's Northern Agenda email from Rob Parsons:
Describing an issue that's all-too-familiar to Northern leaders, he criticised so-called “Treasury brain” in government ahead of a Budget due on October 30.
On the way in which civil servants review investments, he said: “The way it works unfortunately means that the nominal return, say, on improving train times between Guildford and London is weighted disproportionately in such a way that it looks much better in terms of bang for your buck than improving rail links between, say, Sheffield and Manchester.”
Mr Gove said the phrase “Treasury brain … speaks to two things”, and claimed officials would have raised concerns with the 1944 D-Day landings on the basis they were “novel and contentious”.
He said: “The Treasury is where the brightest brains are in government but it’s also the case that the Treasury brain – and it’s quite a small-c conservative thing – looks at different propositions and it takes the view: ‘Hmm, you sir are saying that if we invest now, we’ll secure all sorts of benefits later.
“‘I’ve heard that a hundred times. All I know is you’re calling on me to invest now, that means spending money. These benefits, they may never come.’
“So there’s a classic sort of Tory scepticism of utopianism within the Treasury, but the parallel to that is there’s also a scepticism of anything which is anything which is in Treasury phrase ‘novel and contentious’.”
It's well worth subscribing to Northern Agenda, which bills itself as
Read by policy-makers from the North's town halls to Whitehall, you'll get a bitesize guide to the stories that matter in our region from journalists outside the Westminster bubble.
David Cameron’s appointment as vice-chair of the £1bn China-UK investment fund and Sir Danny Alexander’s appointment as vice-president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB] were in part engineered by the Chinese state, parliament’s intelligence and security committee found.
Their appointment was to lend credibility to Chinese investment as well as the broader Chinese brand, according to confidential evidence given to the intelligence watchdog.
The report goes on to quote the evidence to the committee of Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong:
"I think they [China] probably think we are not entirely reliable useful idiots … I think they regard us as an economic opportunity and as an opportunity to, through elite capture, through the cultivation of useful idiots, through playing on things like the ‘golden age’ of British-China relations, getting us by and large corralled into doing the sort of things they would like us to do."
And it reminds us that, despite opposition from Washington, the UK played a big part in the creation of the AIIB. Good relations with China were seen as a particular enthusiasm of George Osborne.
Danny Alexander was appointed to a role with it after losing his seat at the 2015 general election.
At the time this was attributed to the influence of Osborne, whose number two Alexander had been at the Treasury under the Coalition. I was reminded of a younger son being sent out to the Empire to make his fortune.
The Guardian also mentions the dramatic resignation last month of the AIIB's global communications chief Bob Pickard. He said on Twitter at the time.
The bank is dominated by Communist party members and also has one of the most toxic cultures imaginable. I don’t believe that my country’s interests are served by its AIIB membership.
Happy to be gone from that cesspool. The Communist party hacks hold the cards at the bank. They deal with some board members as useful idiots. I believe that my government should not be a member of this PRC [Chinese] instrument. The reality of power in the bank is that it’s CCP from start to finish.
Danny Alexander was quoted by Reuters as saying Pickard's allegations that the Chinese Communist Party has undue influence on the bank "are without any foundation whatsoever".
You can read the intelligence and security committee press release about its new China report online, but the full report does not seem to be on its website yet.
Norman Lamb has been interviewed by the Institute for Government for its Ministers Reflect series.
You can see a short clip from it above and read the full transcript on the IfG website. (The interview took place in March 2020.)
As the Liberal Democrats could find themselves part of a coalition government after the next election, it's important that we learn from our unhappy experience between 2010 and 2015. So this interview makes useful reading.
But it may not make happy reading for Danny Alexander, who does not come out of it well.
Here, for instance, is Norman Lamb talking about his role as Nick Clegg's parliamentary private secretary, which he took on after the offer of a ministerial role was clumsily withdrawn:
I found it to be a fairly hollow role. I was involved in central discussions and I became part of the core team around Nick, but I was also conscious that the power lay with Nick and Danny - Nick primarily went to Danny and not anyone else - which caused, I think, some frustration amongst many people. A lot of people felt that Danny wasn't necessarily the best influence on Nick, and I still feel that strongly.
And when asked by the interviewer to expand on this point, Lamb says:
I think that Danny was hopeless on the health reforms, he passed it all and didn’t really understand the issues, in my view. In my view, the great sadness was David Laws falling early as the chief secretary .... The caricature of David was as right wing, as a sort of Tory in disguise, but actually, internally, he wasn’t. He was the one who was fighting against ending the indexing of benefits, he was fighting for a real terms increase in education spend and a real value to the pupil premium.
His fall from the Treasury meant that we lost an intellectually coherent Liberal in the Treasury. We ended up with someone who was trying to convince Tories that he could be trusted doing this vital role of chief secretary to the Treasury. It was a case of overcompensating, which you quite often see.
That overcompensation was pretty much official Liberal Democrat strategy after 2010 - you can learn that from an article written by Nick Clegg's then political adviser, Richard Reeves, in 2012.
Reeves thought the Liberal Democrats had first to prove they were mature enough to be in government, but it is hard to imagine any other party burdening itself with this demand when it had just won a share of power through the ballot box.
A better model, Norman Lamb suggests, was that offered by Norman Baker as a transport minister. Lamb recalls that Philip Hammond (then the transport secretary) complaining to him that Baker was difficult to work with and did not comply with the protocols:
Norman, who I’ve got a lot of time for, was a press junkie who was just going off and actually doing what he ought to be doing, I think getting the message out there about what a Lib Dem minister was achieving.
Lamb goes on to add:
The interesting thing was that the two of them ended up getting on quite well in transport and having a degree of mutual respect, I think because they were both assiduous - I think the dynamic ended up working quite well.
So next time we Liberal Democrats find ourselves in coalition, we need to have more confidence in ourselves and in the approach to the country's problems that we have just fought an election on.
And we need to make sure we have someone at the treasury with the intellectual equipment and confidence to stand up for themselves.
In 2010 our front bench had as much expertise on economics, if not more, as those of the two larger parties. Think Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Steve Webb. We should have drawn on that pool of talent and used Danny Alexander's talents differently.
Putting my life back in order will be more of an undertaking, but I can at least start returning Liberal England to normality. So let's begin by looking at what Lord Bonkers got up to last year.
Congratulations to the Duke of Sussex for making it over the wall and quitting the Royal Family, together with his delightful wife and child.
In my experience his family are a ghastly crew – in my young day it was common knowledge that the Jack the Ripper murders had been committed by Queen Victoria – and he is well shot of them.
April
By now the coronavirus was affecting life on the Bonkers Hall Estate:
Meadowcroft has taken this damned virus badly, locking himself in his potting shed and morning, noon and night. You may very well feel he is Going A Bit Far, but he is determined not to pass the virus on to his beloved geraniums. As I gaze out of the window I see Cook pushing slices of cheese on toast under the door. What a fine woman she is!
June
This month saw some characteristically forthright comments on the leading lights of the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition years:
Whenever I questioned their actions, Clegg and Alexander assured me they were making Britain a better place to live. Yet now I find that the former has upped sticks to Seattle and the latter has fled to China.
Jamie Stone telephones, full of his plans for his new spaceport in Sutherland; no wonder they call him the Wernher von Braun of the Flow Country.
August
I made a personal donation to the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans after publishing an inaccurate post about Sir Nicholas Clegg.
September
Readers were treated to my employer's recollections of the the Stilton strike of 1919 when the miners came out demanding better pay and Lloyd George sent the troops in:
I recall telling LG at the time that this was Going A Bit Far, but by then he only had ears for his new Conservative friends and the trade with Japan never recovered. Really, I wonder what they teach in school History classes nowadays.
October
Most scholars now accept the theory that the model for Bonkers Hall is Nevill Holt Hall near Medbourne in Leicestershire.
So Liberal England was interested in the news that the 17-year-old son of the owner of Nevill Holt has received a garnt of £85,000 from the Culture Recovery Fund.
Lunch with the High King of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who tells me of their plans to help during the new lockdown: "We like to think of ourselves as putting the 'elf' into 'welfare'." ...
In the afternoon I call on the Wise Woman of Wing and purchase some of her herbal remedies as a precaution against the virus. "I’m much cheaper than those elves, dearie" she tells me, "and what’s more my shit works."
December
At the end of the year I took to reprinting Lord Bonkers' thoughts from 30 years ago, as his diaries have been appearing there that long.
I presented myself bright and early at the committee rooms and was asked to drive some pensioners to the polls. A menial task for a man of my experience, you might think, but we Liberals are nothing if not democratic and I went about it with a will.
Fortunately, I had brought with me my collapsible travelling horsewhip and this eased matters considerably. the elderly voters made a terrible fuss and were constantly tripping over each other's Zimmer frames, but I got them all into the booths eventually.
Today Lord Bonkers turns to the Coalition, which is younger readers may remember. Incidentally, he met Clegg last year just before he began his new job in the US.
Tuesday
Do you remember the Coalition? I have memories of it, though it might be more accurate to speak of "flashbacks".
Whenever I questioned their actions, Clegg and Alexander assured me they were making Britain a better place to live. Yet now I find that the former has upped sticks to Seattle and the latter has fled to China.
You may feel that rather gives the game away.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
With the polling stations having been closed for almost 24 hours, I think it is safe to call Sir Daniel Grian Alexander a plonker.
You plonker, Danny.
We will debate the rights and wrong of going into coalition in 2010 as long as there are Liberal Democrats.
For my own part, I would say the electoral arithmetic, Labour's unwillingness to talk and our own wariness about a second election made some sort of deal with the Tories inevitable. And I said so at the time.
There does seem to be a consensus now that we were too anxious to show how responsible we were and that a confidence and supply arrangement would have served us better.
And I would suggest that our arrival in government showed that we lacked a core of Liberal Democrat policies that we all wanted to see implemented. We have tended of late to be stronger on values than policy.
But all that said, in a week when we had lifelong Labour voters seriously considering voting for us, Danny's tweet was not helpful.
Hang out with old friends by all means, but you needn't tell everyone about it until after the polls have closed.
After he lost his seat at the last election, Danny Alexander - Sir Daniel Alexander - was found a new job by his old boss George Osborne.
He was appointed vice president of China's new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and went out to Beijing to work - much in the way we used to send teenagers out to the furthest outposts of the Empire to make men of them.
But is Danny happy out there?
Take a look at the tweet above, which he retweeted a couple of days ago. Could it be that Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey are calling to him?
As Andy Stewart put it:
Because these green hills
Are not Highland hills
Or the island hills
They're not my land's hills And fair as these
Green foreign hills may be
They are not the hills of home
The infamous letter which Liam Byrne left for his successor as chief secretary to the Treasury is in the news. (You can read it in the photograph above.)
David Laws, who made it public after coming to office in 2010, is receiving demands that he hand it over from both the Treasury and the National Archives.
I am all for preserving our national heritage, but I can't help feeling it would have been better if Laws had burnt it when he first saw it.
First, there is an established tradition of ministers leaving joking notes for their successors. For instance, in 1964 Reginald Maudling left a note for Jim Callaghan (his replacement as chancellor) saying "Good luck, old cock.... Sorry to leave it in such a mess."
In the light of this, the decision to publish Liam Byrne's note is not an easy one to support.
Second, the publicity given to the note encouraged Liberal Democrat parliamentarians to hammer away with the message that Labour had maxed out the nation's credit card, Once Danny Alexander had replaced Laws, we seemed to have little more to say on economic policy.
This helped produce a political climate that was favourable to the Conservative message and made it harder to suggest an alternative approach.
Third, it came back to haunt us - and David Laws in particular.
Hover over the photograph and you will see that Byrne's letter is being waved by David Cameron and he is doing so in an election meeting at Norton Sub Hamdon - a village in Laws' Yeovil constituency.
There were plenty of seats we lost in 2015 where the splintering of the Lib Dem vote was more a factor than any swing to the Conservatives, but in Yeovil the Tories gained more than 5000 votes between 2010 and 2015.
So there are three good reasons why David Laws should have burnt that blasted letter.
Those of us who remember Polly Toynbee from the SDP - and even from David Owen's Continuing SDP - find it hard to take her entirely seriously in Tribune-of-the-People mode. We Liberals called them "the Soggies" for a reason.
And there is a dishonesty at the heart of her argument. When she writes:
The Lib Dems swallowed the story that the country needed a boiling down of every function of the state to its bare bones. They were useful idiots for what was always an ideological project
In other words, most of the cuts made by the Coalition would have been made by a Labour government too.
But I don't suppose you would make yourself popular with Guardian readers if you reminded them of that.
Even if we can set Toynbee's article to one side, we Liberal Democrats do need to decide the lessons we should learn from the Coalition years. Because I liked seeing us in power and I want to see it again.
So let me suggest three lessons - no doubt there are many others.
First we need to be more politically astute. Even if we are in coalition with another party, its members are not our friends and do not wish to see us prosper.
And I think Nick Clegg now recognises this. As he said in Saturday's major interview with Simon Hattenstone: "I did not cater for the Tories' brazen ruthlessness."
Second, we need a distinct Liberal Democrat approach to economics. One of the problems with the Coalition was that we had four considerable economists - Cable, Huhne, Laws and Webb - on our front bench, yet we ended up with Danny Alexander at the Treasury.
David Laws might have had the intellectual heft to challenge George Osborne (whether he would have wanted to is a separate), but with Danny as chief secretary that was never likely to happen.
We fell too easily into saying that Labour had "overspent on its credit card" - or rather, we said that but had little interesting to add to it.
Third, we need a clearer idea of who the voters we want to appeal to are. The problem with imposing tuition fees was not just that we broke a pledge we should never have signed: it was that we let down the group that should be part of the core vote for a Liberal party: the educated young.
David Howarth's thoughts on this - and the lessons of coalition in general - are worth studying.
One thing I would say in Nick Clegg's defence is that these problems - a certain naivety about power; a lack of economic identity; a failure to decide who we are trying to appeal to - existed in the Liberal Democrats long before he joined.
A breeze stirs the May blossom, inspiring me to prop open the French windows in the Library. I settle down to review David Laws’ memoir of his time in government for the High Leicestershire Radical and am embarrassed by my inability to find the volume. Only after I have led my staff in a systematic search do I find it propping open those windows.
I find the book has three heroes: Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and, above all, Laws himself. (Poor Huhne and High-Voltage Cable, who must be admitted to know how many beans make five, do not get a look in.)
Still, one has to admire the mordant wit of Jonny Oates, as quoted by Laws: “Your constituents will be mad if they do not re-elect you, Danny. And if they don’t, we should ask for all that money back that has been sprayed around your area – the extra ski lifts and the gold-lined roads.” Except that, if you have been to Badenoch lately, you will know that Oates was speaking no more than the truth.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Danny Alexander, the former U.K. Chief Secretary to the Treasury who lost his job and his parliamentary seat in May’s general election, is in the running to join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, according to two people familiar with the appointment process.
The British government is considering putting forward Alexander, 43, for one of a small number of non-Asian seats on the development bank’s board, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the deliberations are still under way.
An appointment to the Beijing-based institution would be a further reward for Alexander, a Liberal Democrat who worked closely with Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in the coalition government that ran Britain from 2010 until 2015.
He received a knighthood in August, three months after losing his Highland electoral district in the tidal wave of Scottish National Party victories.
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 Sun can reveal they will include at least two ex-MPs thrown out by voters at the general election three months ago, Lorely Burt and Lynn Featherstone.
Three long-serving Lib Dem grandees who stood down as MPs in May – Sir Alan Beith, Sir Menzies Campbell, and Sir Malcolm Bruce – are also being enobled, alongside defeated ex-MEP Sharon Bowles and Mr Clegg’s former chief of staff Jonny Oates.
The report also says that Danny Alexander and Vince Cable will be knighted. Later. The full list of Lib Dem peers is here.
Newspaper speculation about forthcoming honours lists is often wide of the mark, but here is the Mirror website this evening:
Ousted Lib Dems Vince Cable and Danny Alexander are due to get knighthoods in a move that will spark a fresh honours row.
The two former Coalition Cabinet ministers are believed to have rejected offers of peerages from ex-Deputy PM Nick Clegg in the dissolution honours list. ...
Two more of Mr Clegg's allies, former MP Annette Brooke and film producer Pippa Harris – a friend since his university days – will be given damehoods.
Mr Clegg also nominated Lib Dem donor Anthony Ullmann for a knighthood, sources claim.
Veteran politicians Sir Menzies Campbell and Sir Alan Beith are also tipped to be among up to 10 Lib Dems in line for peerages.
There was a good contribution to the debate on the future of the Liberal Democrats, and I don't mean Danny Alexander's effort in the New Statesman:
Neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats should envisage a future as a sort of soggy Syriza in sandals. I don’t like some of the welfare reforms in the Budget, but to make it the political dividing line is to fail to recognise the views of most people.
I am thinking of the article by Martin Kettle in the Guardian.
He writes:
In a recent pamphlet David Howarth, a former MP, and Mark Pack, a prominent online activist, argued that their party should have a strategy of building a values-based centre-left core vote from the current single figure up to about 20%. They identify their target voters as: disproportionately female, young, educated to above degree level, inhabitants of London, on moderately higher than average incomes, serious newspaper readers, not religious and not white.
Some of the HowarthPack argument stretches belief. Their core vote approach is essentially an appeal to a minority. Under the first-past-the-post system, it may win the party one or two student-heavy seats, but it may not do much for the Lib Dems in the seats they are left with, never mind in places like the south-west where they were so strong until recently. But they are surely correct that the right place for a liberal party to pitch its tent is among liberal-minded voters,
Simon Titley, who died last year, was fond of calling for a core-vote strategy. He argued that the fact that the Liberal Democrats worked harder than the other parties, like the belief that we could win anywhere, should be seen as a weakness rather than a strength. Why did we have to put so much effort into reminding people that they voted for us last time?
On the East Midlands segment of the Sunday Politics a few days ago, Paul Homes expressed scepticism at a Lib Dem core vote strategy. Hadn't it held both the Conservatives and Labour back in recent history.
What both those parties found was that appealing to their core vote kept them stuck at around 30 per cent of the vote. And that is a figure that the Liberal Democrats hardly dare dream about at the moment.
If you want to know what is really going on in the party, the first place to turn is the Radical Bulletin pages at the front of each issue of Liberator.
Here are a few nuggets from the current issue:
"The announcement of the front page of the Liberal Democrat manifesto in February created a minor news story. Unfortunately its content was also news to the Federal Policy Committee ... which is supposedly in charge of the manifesto."
"Liberator has received persistent complaints, the truth of which is a matter of conjecture, that huge sums were diverted into holding Nick Clegg's seat in Sheffield Hallam, into a doomed attempt to save his closest political associate Danny Alexander... and into [Jasper] Gerrard's campaign in consideration of his having written an admiring book about Clegg.
"The continuing Liberal party some years ago morphed into a rabidly anti-EU group, a stance quite at odds with that of the pre-merger Liberal Party. This spring the party's Cornish branch withdrew its candidates in favour of Ukip, a move that led to the withdrawal of its nomination rights but not yet to any further action.
You may also enjoy the late Standards Board for England's verdict when blink-and-you'll-miss-it Labour leadership candidate Mary Creagh gave evidence before it in 2006:
"Councillor Creagh was not an impressive witness. The Tribunal agrees with the Respondents' assessment of her as an insensitive witness, lacking in balanced judgement and one who prepared to make assumptions about the honesty and integrity of others without any proper basis."
"When I started at Lochaber High School, the prizes he had won as a school debater adorned the walls; as pupils knew, at university he had gone on to win the national championship for Glasgow. It was clear that he was a phenomenon." Danny Alexander pays tribute to Charles Kennedy.
Affordable housing quotas get waived and the interests of residents trampled as toothless authorities bow to the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East, says Oliver Wainwright.
Scottish Nationalists and English Tories obsess about the BBC because they want it to be more not less biased, argues Nick Cohen.
David Boyle discussed local economics and inter-party collaboration with Andrew Simms and Caroline Lucas at the Hay Festival.
"Until well into the 20th century, the horse played an important role in the running of Britain’s railways." RailwayManiacs Blog tells a forgotten story.
The Downstairs Lounge explains how an album recorded in a small Welsh rugby club created a star of 1970s comedy.
