Six of the Best 765

Replying to the Michael Meadowcroft article included in the last of these round ups, Paul Holmes says a good targeting strategy is essential for the Liberal Democrats.

"Mainstream society has laid down with dogs and we have now got up with fleas." Matthew Collins says we have become comfortable with hate.

Hadley Freeman asks why actors are suddenly lining up to condemn Woody Allen: "I get why people feel icky about Allen. Some of us were rolling our eyes at Manhattan, his film about a man’s relationship with a schoolgirl, before the leading lights of #MeToo were born. But this is not a case that should be tried by public opinion."

Torie Bosch is fascinated by the "List of people who disappeared mysteriously" page on Wikipedia.

"The love Crook has for these characters shines through, and part of the joy of the show is in how likeable they are. Perhaps that’s why it’s accumulated such a strikingly devoted audience over the last couple of years." Anna Leszkiewicz analyses the appeal of Detectorists.

Tim Holyoake has some great pictures of the Derwent dams taken during a drought in 1959.

Time for a Liberal Democrat core vote strategy?

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.

How will Nick Clegg's call for more tax cuts be received by his fellow Liberal Demcrats?

At the last election my party promised to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 for ordinary taxpayers. And I am extremely proud that the Coalition is on track to do so over the course of this Parliament. We’ll make sure that anyone earning £10,000 or less will pay no income tax at all and for those on middle incomes, the first £10,000 they earn will be tax free. 

For millions of basic rate taxpayers – ordinary, hardworking people – that means paying £700 less in income tax each year, around £60 a month. 

In the 2010 Budget we increased the tax allowance from £6,475 to £7,475. This year we have already announced a planned rise of an additional £630 - meaning that a total of 1.1 million more people will no longer pay income tax at all. 

But today I want to make clear that I want the Coalition to go further and faster in delivering the full £10,000. Because, bluntly, the pressure on family finances is reaching boiling point.

Nick Clegg's speech to the Resolution Foundation today has been well received by the press and Liberal Democrat bloggers.

"Nick Clegg's call for tax cuts may save the Lib Dems from annihilation" suggests Daniel Knowles on the Daily Telegraph site (a trifle melodramatically, but then - judging by his photograph - he is only 14). While Prateek Buch for the Social Liberal Forum is enthusiastic, seeing the proposed changes as part of the Liberal Democrats' fairness agenda.

For what it is worth, I am enthusiastic too. One of the problems Labour regularly runs into is that, despite its rhetoric, it is difficult to make the rich pay more. Of course, there are things you can do, such as taxing property rather than income, but the result is that increased public spending tends to increase the burden on lower earners until they become unwilling to bear it.

Certainly, I found this argument easy to make during one of my rare television appearances.

But not all my Liberal Democrats will agree with me. Because this is very much the debate we had at our Bournemouth autumn conference in 2008. There the party agreed to fight the following general election promising tax cuts, but as a Daily Telegraph report from the time shows, there was a significant minority in the party that did not agree with this strategy:

Opposition to the programme was led by Evan Harris, the party's science spokesman, and fellow MP Paul Holmes, who argued that those in most of need of help were too poor to receive any benefit from tax cuts. 

Their amendment sought to bind the party to tax cuts only after other priorities had been met, including tackling child poverty and climate change. 

Telling delegates about the plight of hard-up families in his constituencies, Mr Harris added: "Most are so poor that they will never pay taxes."

The vote in Bournemouth was clear enough - conference voted three to one to approve the new policy - but no debate can settle such a question for all time.

And it is notable that those in the party who have been less enthusiastic about the Coalition have emphasised their opposition to cuts in public spending.

If money has been found to cut tax, won't they (whether they have called themselves "Progressives", "Social Liberals" or use some other slightly vaguely defined category) now be calling for a reduction in those cuts?

Or will they keep their heads down because Nick Clegg's speech has gone down well and it is good to see the party pursuing a clear strategy at last?

Paul Holmes discovers Hell's Grannies

The Daily Telegraph reports:

A total of 181 people aged over 65 were successfully pursued through the courts for violent attacks in 2007, up from 101 ten years earlier.

Their offences ranged from murder and attempted murder to more minor crimes such as common assault.

Commenting on these figures, Paul Holmes says:

"It seems that the Government’s obsession with criminalising people does not stop at the elderly.

“Labour's target-driven, box-ticking approach to policing, where minor misdemeanours are treated the same as convictions for murder or rape, has led to mass criminalisation.

“I find it more likely that this increase is down to a government which has created a new crime for every day in office, rather than pensioners being twice as violent as ten years ago."

He may well be right, but could it be that, as with the furries, Monty Python was ahead of the game?



Thanks to Steve Beasant.

Why the Lib Dems should continue to oppose tuition fees

A couple of weeks ago there was a debate on tuition fees. Julian Astle said the Lib Dems should abandon their pledge to do away with tuition fees. Paul Holmes said we should keep it.

I am on Paul Holmes's side and a brilliant article by Jeffrey J. Williams in the American Dissent Magazine has helped crystallise my views. He draws a parallel between the burden of debt that is placed upon students from modest backgrounds and the system of indentured labour that existed in colonial America.

Read him:

One of the goals of the planners of the modern U.S. university system after the Second World War was to displace what they saw as an aristocracy that had become entrenched at elite schools; instead they promoted equal opportunity in order to build America through its best talent. The rising tide of student debt reinforces rather than dissolves the discriminations of class, counteracting the meritocracy.

And:

Although it seems as if it crept up on us, student-loan indebtedness is not an accident but a policy. It is a bad policy, corrupting the goals of higher education. The world we inhabit is a good one if you are in the fortunate third without debt, but not nearly so good if you live under its weight. Student debt produces inequality and overtaxes our talent for short-term, private gain. As a policy, we can and should change it.

Quote of the Week

We have a royal winner. The prize goes to Prince Harry for his:

I generally don't like England that much.

That is a shame when you are third in line to the throne of England. Perhaps we should find someone else?

There was another strong candidate this week. Paul Holmes was widely quoted as defending his signing of a Commons motion congratulating Fidel Castro in the following terms:

"It is true Cuba has political prisoners and no free elections, but it has very good dentistry."

But the source for the quote appears to be the Daily Mail. As the paper does not say where or when he is supposed to have said the words, the judges could not consider it.

Unless you can help, of course.

Paul Holmes praises Castro

Tim Worstall reprints the text of a Commons Early Day Motion in praise of Fidel Castro and the list of its signatories. I had a glance at the list to see which Labour dinosaurs had signed it, only to find an unexpected name among them: Paul Holmes, the Lib Dem MP for Chesterfield.

To be as fair as possible, the second half of the motion is unexceptionable. It welcomes the EU statement that constructive engagement with Cuba is the most responsible course of action. In fact, it was probably the US blockade that kept Castrol in power for so long. And an orderly transition to democracy must be preferable to a US-backed coup.

But it's the first half:

That this House commends the achievements of Fidel Castro in securing first-class free healthcare and education provision for the people of Cuba despite the 44 year illegal US embargo of the Cuban economy; notes the great strides Cuba has taken during this period in many fields such as biotechnology and sport in both of which Cuba is a world leader; acknowledges the esteem in which Castro is held by the people and leaders of Africa, Asia and Latin America for leading the calls for emancipation of the world’s poorest people from slavery, hunger and the denial of human rights such as the right to life, the right to shelter, the right to healthcare and basic medicines and the right to education.

How can a Liberal put his name to something that makes no mention of Castro's repression of his people or of Cuba's lack of democracy? It's like a Liberal in the 1930s signing a motion praising Mussolini for his management of the Italian railways.

The people who sign motions like this one believe that a lack of democracy can be compensated for by prosperity (not that Cuba is all that prosperous) or good public services.

Paul should read the words of Bryan Mageee, writing about Karl Popper in his Confessions of a Philosopher:

Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship.
Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies.
It is not - as, again, had been believed by most people before - because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.

Now read Danny Finkelstein's Top ten reasons why Castro isn't a hero of the left.

Chariots of Ming

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Not very sporting

The Liberal Democrats should have come out against London bidding for the 2012 Olympics. It would have taken courage: in those days Tony Blair still had a little gloss left on him and we did not want to sound like killjoys. So at our Brighton Conference last year we trooped in to listen to Sebastian Coe and watched the Chariots of Ming video.

But it’s becoming clear that London 2012 is the Millennium Dome crossed with the NHS computer fiasco and the national identity card scheme with several more noughts after it and a cherry on top.

Back in 2003 consultants put the cost of the games at £1.796bn. By 2005 this had become a “prudent” £2.4bn. Now it is estimated that the cost is will be £9.35bn and everyone believes that the final figure will be a long way north of that.

All this is having a serious effect on public spending elsewhere, as two of our MPs pointed out at culture, media and sport questions on Monday.

Don Foster said the total cut in arts funding across the UK to pay for the Olympics will be well over £200 million. Paul Holmes said that Heritage Link, the Arts Council of England, the Voluntary Arts Network, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and the Central Council of Physical Recreation were all concerned about the impact of the Olympics’ smash-and-grab raid. “How,” he asked, “can there be a cultural Olympics and a growth in grass-roots sport if the funding is taken away?”

What are the arguments in favour of the London Olympics? Some say it will regenerate a run-down quarter of East London. But the evidence from other cities is mixed, and there must be cheaper ways of doing it.

Will it inspire a generation to take up sport? That would be great, but if watching sport on television were the answer then our children today would be the fittest ever.

Here’s an idea: instead of backing the Games, the Lib Dems should have proposed giving away that original £1.796bn to organisations like local sports clubs. It would have done far more for grassroots sport than the Olympics will ever do, and made clear our rejection of Labour’s top-down style of politics.

"A breath can make them"

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. The Oliver Goldsmith lines are from The Deserted Village.

Auntie's elite

Sunday’s World Cup Final was watched by 17 million people on BBC1 and only 3.5 million on ITV. When you take John Motson into account, there can be no clearer sign of the central place Auntie occupies in the life of the nation.

Yet the following day the Commons debate on the BBC’s new Charter was tinged with sadness, because it may not be so central in the future. Will the licence fee survive when it becomes impossible to say where television ends and the Internet begins? As Paul Holmes said, we will be in a different world.

Back in this one, there are two words that sum up the BBC’s current difficulties: Jonathan Ross.

Their problem is not his crass question to David Cameron, which still exercised several Tory MPs, but the dilemma he symbolises.

For the BBC is funded by the nearest thing we have to a poll tax. This clearly needs to be justified, but does it justify it through quality or through winning a mass audience? It is tempting to say that it cannot do both, except that the BBC has managed precisely that many times over the years.

Yet the huge payments that Ross and lesser figures like Chris Moyles receive suggest BBC managers are in thrall to people they think will deliver a large youth audience. Ross is not without talent, though the best thing he does – his Saturday morning radio show – owes much to the musical tastes of his producer.

But it is hard even to begin making the case for paying him £6 million a year when most BBC staff are suffering a pay squeeze. Their managers defend huge salaries for performers (and themselves) by appealing to the market. If we don’t pay them this sort of money, someone else will.

The answer to that is simple. Let them go. The backwaters of British broadcasting are teeming with people who thought that life would be better away from the BBC. Just ask Des Lynam. “I’ll have another consonant please, Carol.”

Or as Oliver Goldsmith put it:

Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade:
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.

We are not Old Labour in exile

There is a strange asymmetry in the average Liberal Democrat's attitude to the two other parties.

We positively glory in upsetting Conservatives. If someone got up during a debate at a Lib Dem Conference and said we should not support civil liberties in case the Daily Mail and the Tory Party attacked us, he would be howled down. And rightly so.

But our attitude to Labour is very different. Here is Paul Holmes, chair of the Lib Dem parliamentary party, writing in today's Liberal Democrat News:

Those who talk of "breaking up the NHS" need to explain in detail what they mean, although the damage is already done in terms of Labour leaflet writers. Decentralisation and local accountability would be in tune with Liberal Democrat core values. But the headline writers seized upon hints of cut-throat competition and USA style personal insurance (whatever other title it is dressed up in).

Liberal Democrats love to describe themselves as "radical", but for many there seems to be an unstated assumption that to be radical means to be like the pre-Blair Labour Party.

Why is this? In my Liberator review of the Orange Book I suggested that:

for most of the twentieth century liberalism was in decline and socialism was seen as the ideology of the future. It was not surprising that some liberals concluded that the way to prove that liberalism was still relevant was to show that it had anticipated socialism or was really a form of socialism too.

We need to be more confident in liberalism and to enjoy outraging socialists as much as we enjoy outraging the Tories. Our policies should emphasise individual liberty and local democracy to an extent that scandalises the Labour Party.

Perhaps the philosophical differences between liberalism and socialism are harder to appreciate if you do not remember Labour before Blair. And these days Liberal Democrat policy is closest to New Labour on precisely those issues which are central to New Labour's view of the world. I am thinking of childcare and antisocial behaviour.

But ultimately, what is the point of having a separate Liberal Democrat party if our policies do not annoy Labour politicians and journalists?

Paul Holmes 36 Matthew Taylor 23

Paul Holmes, the East Midlands' only Lib Dem MP, has been elected as the new chairman of the Parliamentary party, reports The Scotsman. He beat the previous chair Matthew Taylor by 36 votes to 23.

Holmes was one of the founders of the Beveridge Group within the party, which was set up to "promote Beveridge's message of civic responsibility and public accountability in public services". In practice this means that they want more spending on public services but are not so keen on structural reforms. Which makes the group rather conservative, though its members probably see themselves as radicals.

The Beveridge Group has a website but has not otherwise not been noticeably active. Nevertheless, there are some Liberal Democrat Kremlinologists who will see Holmes' victory as a snub to the Orange Book tendency, even though Matthew Taylor was not one of the contributors to the book.

Matthew Taylor's response was to say:

"The Parliamentary party had a clear choice to make. They have decided to follow the route of the Conservative and Labour parties in choosing a backbench representative to chair their meetings."

I am sure it was kindly meant, as an Alan Bennett character might say, but that quotation becomes a little more patronising and self-aggrandising every time you read them.

Thanks to Will Howells for the tip.

Liberal Democrat News

Sometimes reading Liberal Democrat News depresses me. Even the bits I write.

Come to think of it, especially the bits I write.

Three examples from Friday's issue (10 September).

First, in his back page column Jim Wallace tells us that in our negotiations with the labour Party and during the passage of the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill at Hollyrood we were concerned to "strike a proper balance with the rights of the individual".

It happens (for various philosophical reasons that I ought to go into one day) I am not the greatest believer in the usefulness of talk about human rights. But surely, if you do believe in such rights, the essence of them is that they are not something you strike a balance with but absolute?

Second, in an article about The Orange Book Paul Holmes complains that some of the ideas it contains were looked at by Chris Huhne's commission on public services. "It is this careful, deliberative process that makes Liberal Democrat policy - not the private thoughts of any individual."

Yes, it the party has a formal process for making its policy, and I am assure that David Laws is just as aware of this as Paul is. Nowhere do the writers of The Orange Book claim that there ideas are party policy - though it is hard to see how their thoughts can be called "private" when they have just written a book about them.

But I do hope that Paul Holmes is not implying that people should not advance ideas unless they are in accord with existing party policy. If that were the case, we would still be banging on about Chinese Labour.

Finally, a letter from Gerald Vernon-Jackson, who is now the leader of Portsmouth City Council. He suggests that, rather than being the party of choice, we should be the party of high quality services.

It sounds appealing, but none of those who put forward views like this ever stop to wonder what incentive public authorities will have to provide high quality services if people have no choice but to use them?

Gerald also reports meeting a lady who was "one of the 37 per cent of Britons who want to emigrate":

"She told me that she wanted to go somewhere where things were simple. One gas company, one electricity company, one phone company. She just wanted not to have to think or worry about choice."

Now the Berlin Wall has come down she is a bit limited in where she can move to. Off the top of my head I can suggest Cuba or North Korea.