Zack Polanski and Alistair Darling: Two soft rides from the Guardian

I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.

Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.

Zoe Williams¹ tells us that Polanksi:

started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...

But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats. 

Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.

And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.²

Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".

But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:

Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.

The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.

Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.

And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:

Later ... he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze.

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy.

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left.

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been.

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?

Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.

The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?

Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for footnotes in superscript.³

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
2. I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
3. See?

The risk Starmer runs by backing the two-child benefit cap

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Labour's self-elected sensible tendency has been busy today praising Keir Starmer's decision not to scrap the Conservatives' two-child benefit cap.

Leading it has been Polly Toynbee, who made her name as a journalist by revealing the reality of living in poverty.

The favourite tactic of Starmer's cheerleaders has been to accuse anyone who questions his decision of wanting to promise the voters that an incoming Labour government will reverse every cut the Tories have made.

This is a classic example of a false dilemma. In reality, there exists a vast territory between overturning everything the Tories have done and overturning nothing. And I suspect that somewhere within lies the best approach for Labour to take.

My worry is that Starmer and his supporters have overestimated his achievement. My impression is that he has failed to cut through with the public and is seen by them as 'just another lawyer'.

Labour's poll lead is less an achievement of Starmer's than of the last three Tory prime ministers. The government has been a shambles for three years and the voters have looked elsewhere because of it.

The real danger to Labour of Starmer's decision on the benefits cap is not the voters they may lose to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, though there will be some.

It's that the a growing sense that Labour are no better than the Tories would give the worldly 'they're all as bad as each other' type of Tory voter an excuse for drifting back to their old allegiance.

So far the Tories' flip-flop campaign against Starmer has failed to hurt him. It's too childish - maybe too American.

But it remains true that Starmer won the Labour leadership on a policy platform he appears not to have believed a word of.

Tony Blair used to rail against 'cynicism' when he generally meant scepticism, which is a healthy instinct. Keir Starmer needs to be careful that cynicism about his approach to politics does not become more widespread.

Ignore Polly Toynbee by all means, but what lessons should the Lib Dems learn from the Coalition years?

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Polly Toynbee has an article in today's Guardian whose headline tells you all you need to know:

Why I can’t forgive Nick Clegg and his party of useful idiots

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

she ignores the fact that Labour fought the 2010 general election promising spending cuts that would be "tougher and deeper" than those implemented by Margaret Thatcher.

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.

The shorter Polly Toynbee

We're all doomed.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Richard III, Twycross Zoo and Foxton Locks

The new issue of Liberator arrives, which means that it is time for another visit to Bonkers Hall.

His lordship's remarks here appear to have influenced my recent column in the Leicester Mercury.

Richard III, Twycross Zoo and Foxton Locks

What scenes we have enjoyed in Leicester this week! The eyes of the world have been upon us as we reintered Richard III – and I know for a fact that more than one envious city mayor has given instructions for all his city’s car parks to be dug up Just In Case. I won’t pretend to have agreed with every detail of the celebrations: whilst I agree it was a nice touch to give the old boy a ride round on the Sunday, I couldn't help feeling that taking him back to the battlefield at Bosworth was a trifle tactless. Couldn't he have gone to Twycross Zoo or Foxton locks instead?

The only sour note was that, on my way to the service, I came upon Polly Toynbee touring the streets of the city on a Fabian 'National Efficiency' Women’s Bicycle waving a megaphone. “Go home, you fools!” she bellowed. "We don’t want a monarchy. We want an elected President like Tony Blair or Gordon Brown or Doctor David Owen of the Continuing SDP." When she stopped and attempted to sell the crowd her latest book A Lot of Figures Showing I am Right About Everything and You Ought to Vote the Way I Tell You, she is pelted with out-of-code pork pies. The citizens of Leicester have much to be proud of.

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

Polly Toynbee vs Charles Masterman

I wrote this back in September 2009 as In dejection near Polly Toynbee.

Polly Toynbee had a column in the Guardian yesterday extolling Labour's bright new generation and the party's achievements in Lambeth:

all around us are good Labour legacies of money well spent: the new school sports hall, the new primary school on Brixton Hill, nine new children's centres, health clinics, squads of neighbourhood police, and a spectacular sixth-form college next door to my home.

I was struck by her celebration of buildings rather than the life that goes on in them. The sixth-form college may be "spectacular", but does it provide its students with a good education?

And It has always seemed to me that one of Toynbee's weaknesses is that her writing fails to convey any sense that she is aware of the pleasures of family life. It is children's centres, children's centres, children's centres all the way.

More than this, I was strongly reminded of another piece of writing about South London. I knew it was by my hero Charles Masterman, but did not know where I had read it. Thanks to the wonders of the net, I was able to find what it was and share it with you.

It comes from the essay "In dejection near Tooting", which was collected in Masterman's 1905 book In Peril of Change. In it he describes that suburb as follows:

On every high hill towered a monstrous building of that particular blend of austerity and dignity dear to the municipal mind. Each was planned of vast spreading dimension, with innumerable blank windows, surrounded by high polished walls.
Down below in the valley, conveniently adjacent to the cemetery, was the immense fever hospital, a huddle of buildings of corrugated iron. In front was a gigantic workhouse; behind, a gigantic lunatic asylum; to the right, a gigantic barrack school; to the left, a gigantic prison.

And that, I think, is one of the differences between a liberal like Masterman, who celebrates life, and a social democrat like Toynbee, who celebrates institutions.

Polly Toynbee on measuring happiness

Last month, while noting that Rutland has been found to be the happiest place in England by an Office of National Statistics report, I gave a limited defence of the idea of measuring the nation's happiness. But there are more extreme positions you could take on the idea.

You could be strongly in favour:

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them … Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified.

Or you could be a convinced sceptic:

Visitors may puzzle over the ONS report on national happiness, where 80% of people score seven or more out of 10. But these figures will only become significant as they shift in future years: most people, unless suffering intensely, say "Fine, thanks" if asked how they feel by a stranger.

These two quotations, as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) points out, come from the same person. Step forward, Polly Toynbee.

The first quote comes from 2006 and the second from this year. But as the IEA goes on to point out, Toynbee's change of mind must have come recently:

During the preparation phase of the report, Toynbee still called it ‘an excellent step’. Back then, she was still convinced that ‘most answers to the happiness conundrum point leftwards’, and since the coalition was not currently pursuing a far-left agenda, a happiness index logically had to produce a damning indictment: ‘[T]he ONS measurements will chart the unhappiness path he [Cameron] chose.’ 

People’s refusal to be miserable appears to have angered Toynbee for quite some time now. Both during the Diamond Jubileeand the Olympics festivities, her message was: stop celebrating! Can’t you see what’s going on? Spending cuts, free schools, welfare reform, bankers’ bonuses, private sector outsourcing, workfare – you’re supposed to feel wretched, how dare you not to?

Anyway, if both Toynbee and the IEA are now opposed to the idea of measuring happiness, I now feel happier about my lukewarm enthusiasm for the idea.

On preferring Ludlow to Zoe Williams

 

And so they came to Ludlow, which some say is the fairest country town in England. In the twelfth century its wall were pierced with seven gates of which only one now remains, but everything else about it today is overshadowed by its magnificent castle, a memorial to the days when its courtyards echoed to the ring of steel and armoured knights rode over the drawbridge to fight the marauding Welsh.

Below the castle walls, at the foot of the cliffs, the lovely River Teme half circles the town before tumbling under two bridges on its way to add its clear waters to those of the muddy Severn.

Malcolm Saville, The Secret of the Gorge (1958)

To see Ludlow as Malcolm Saville saw it you have to visit it out of the tourist season. Autumn is best, when the leaves of the woods on the other side of the Teme are turning. In high summer it can seem crowded and a little too pleased with itself.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the first Town with Nichloas Crane last night. Crane is an amiable and intelligence presence - his book Great British Journeys is worth seeking out - and for me pictures of Shropshire's hills and ancient buildings are a form of pornography. Commendably, the programme also looked at a part of the town that the tourists never visit.

Not everyone enjoyed it though. Step forward Zoe Williams, who now turns up in the Guardian in all sorts of capacities. In today's issue she was pretending to be a television critic:

The market is "its beating heart, where people have been shopping for bargains for nearly 1,000 years". Unfortunately for them, all they'll be able to buy now is some novelty mustard for a fiver and an assortment of peg bags, but there's always Tesco. Sorry, that was unnecessary and disrespectful. They also have very good cheese. In the "Cathedral of the Marches" (to be precise, it is just a very large parish church), Crane looks as if he might break into a jig. It was built on the back of sheep, apparently. It is large. You've got to give it that.

I have to ask again the question that I asked on 17 July 2011:

Why does a 37-year-old educated at Godolphin & Latymer School and Lincoln College, Oxford, feel the need to write like that?

This pretence of adolescent anti-intellectualism has become no less irritating over the past year. I start to wonder why her parents spent all that money on school fees if this is how she was going to turn out. At least Polly Toynbee writes like a grown up.

And, incidentally, by my calculation ZoeWilliams is now 38.

These days Williams is just as likely writing what are supposed to be hard-edged political pieces about cuts in public services. Yet remembering her trying to be the ditzy but loveable woman columnist who cheerfully admitted to going private herself, I just can't take them seriously.

The Educational Maintenance Allowance and trusting teenagers

Yesterday I wrote about the way the left does not parents. I am not sure they trust teenagers that much either.

Take this Polly Toynbee article from last November, defending the Educational Maintenance Allowance:

EMA ought to sit comfortably with Conservative thinking. Pupils who miss a class, are late or don't do homework lose EMA for the whole week.

This might sit comfortably with Conservative thinking, but it ought to worry anyone who is not a Conservative. It seems extraordinary to boast that the policy you are defending imposes severe sanctions on teenagers from less affluent homes and those teenagers alone.

You could say it is better to receive an allowance with those conditions than not to receive one at all. But that is not the choice that less affluent teenagers should be faced with.

I hope that a more reasonable approach will be taken when the more tightly focused replacement for the EMA is unveiled.

Life expectancy: A history lesson for Madeleine Bunting

Commenting on Barbara Strauch's new book The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain in the Guardian the other day, Madeleine Bunting wrote:

Middle age is a modern phenomenon – a hundred years ago, life expectancy was 47.

As a letter to the paper pointed out, this is nonsense. Dr Robert Pearce wrote:

Madeleine Bunting (Magic of the midlife mind, 11 April) is incorrect to say middle age is a modern phenomenon because life expectancy was much lower in the past. Life expectancy figures from the past are skewed downwards due to high infant mortality. If 10 children die at age five while 10 people die at 70, the average life expectancy is 37.5. But for those who survive childhood it is 70.

So, taking Bunting's example of 100 years ago, adult life expectancy then was probably not dissimilar to today's figures. For example, Gladstone was 88 when he died, and Disraeli 76.

This is obviously right. Has Madeleine Bunting never read the Bible or Shakespeare or one of the great Victorian novelists? Has she never looked at the stones in cemetery or churchyard?

When you find out that a commentator has gone through life holding such a strange view, it tends to undermine you faith in their work as a whole. I am thinking of the Independent arts correspondent who believed the Victorians used to cover piano legs for the sake of decency and of Polly Toynbee's support for the continuing SDP.

Public funding of the arts: Leicester shows big is not always beautiful

I spent part of Friday at the Creative Garden event at Phoenix Square in Leicester. I met some old friends, made some useful new contacts and listened to some of the formal presentations.

One woman - I walked in halfway through her talk - seemed to be telling us exactly which boxes a work of art should tick. (Says who?) It is strange to invoke "diversity" to justify trying to make everyone work in the same way.

And Ross Grant, leader of the city council's Conservative Group and the party's mayoral candidate, spoke on arts policy. His talk was meant to be entitled "People not Palaces", but whoever did his PowerPoint slides had rendered it as "People not Places".

His point was that the age of big capital projects like the Phoenix Centre and the new Curve theatre in Leicester is over. The city council even spent another £400,000 on an abortive new art gallery. (Everyone hated the proposed design, at least for the proposed site on New Walk, and by the time it had been looked at again times had changed.)

Grant was interested in getting artists and craftsmen into empty shops in the city centre. Just putting up two large buildings and declaring that you have created a "Cultural Quarter" will not do. And, as someone from the audience said, if you disperse the culture more, people are more likely to spend money in local shops/

My own experience of Leicester's Cultural Quarter is through my writing group. We are not wholly satisfied with our current premises, so the committee decided to look into using some of the new facilities in the new quarter. We would like to be there, they would like to have us, but it turns out that a self-funded group like ours cannot afford the rates they charge for a room.

Grant said this is rather like what happens with council-run premises for new businesses. People who do not know much about business decide what facilities a new start up will require and produce facilities that only an established company could afford to rent.

The moral, as ever, is that the level of public spending is not the most important factor. It is quite possible that if a lesser sum could have done more good for the arts in Leicester if it had been spent in a more sensible way. Shiny new buildings are not always the answer.

This morning's Guardian quoted an Arts Council spokesman as saying that the £52m it somehow managed to lose on The Public in West Bromwich was "old news". This rather suggests an unhealthy sense of entitlement among the publicly funded arts sector and is another sign of the silly money that was thrown at the public sector in the later Blair and Brown years.

And tomorrow's Guardian has an article on arts funding by Polly Toynbee. You will not be surprised to learn that she regards the level of spending as the only thing that matters.

Polly Toynbee: Quick, everyone agree with me

I know I plugged my article about Larry, but I didn't go this far.

Yesterday evening Polly Toynbee sent this tweet, which rather smacks of desperation. Still, her assumption that the world can be divided into trolls and people who agree with P. Toynbee is rather sweet.

At the time of writing her article has 1200 comments. Unfortunately, I do not have time to read through them to see how successful her tweet was.

A refusal to mourn the death of Building Schools for the Future

Michael Gove made an awful mess of the announcement that some the construction of some new schools under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) scheme would not go ahead, but I find it hard to get indignant about the substance of his decision.

And the fact that some of the less bright Tory MPs are up in arms does nothing to convince me I am wrong.

Private Eye has long been a convincing critic of this programme. Its current issue says that Gove's department

has finally acknowledged what the Eye has been saying for several years: that BSF is far too complicated and costly for its own good.

Deals signed under the programme since 2005, along with other PFI schools, already cost the education budget more than £700m a year (enough to run 70 large secondary schools), and that's without the tens of millions in fees charged by consultants.

The Eye goes on to say that this "£700m annual millstone" will mean that thousands of schools will forgo crucial maintenance while the few to have benefited from BSF "enjoy their shiny overpriced facilities".

In a sane world decisions about new schools would be taken by city and county councils. That it is now a matter for central government is a symptom of the vast overcentralisation of Britain.

BSF also serves as a symbol for Gordon Brown's love of overcomplicated and apparently ingenious (but actually rather stupid) methods of financing public works.

Add into this Labour's tendency to value buildings over human values (step forward Polly Toynbee) and it is no wonder that BSF has produced such a toxic brew.

Polly Toynbee's Elementary Mistake of the Day

Polly Toynbee writes in today's Guardian:

Rebalancing £2bn in child tax credits will help redress the worst effects of the VAT rise for the poorest and lifting the lowest-paid out of income tax will help all on the basic rate, but it does nothing for the 62% of adults who earn too little to pay tax.

Sixty-two per cent of adults don't earn enough to pay tax? It doesn't sound very likely.

A little investigation suggests that Toynbee has been reading the Institute for Fiscal Studies Election Briefing Note 13 "Taxes and Benefits: The Parties' Plans". Turn to page 34 of this and you will find the sentence:

"In 2009–10, only 62% of the adult population had a high enough income to pay income tax."

So it's not that 62 per cent of people don't pay tax, it's that 62 per cent do pay tax.
How out of touch with the lives of ordinary people do you have to be to make a mistake like that and not spot it? It hardly encourages you to have faith in Toynbee's judgement as a columnist.
You think someone at the Guardian would have spotted it though.

Six of the Best 42

In vintage form, Quaequam Blog! tells Polly Toynbee what she can do with her clothes peg.

Why did Nick Clegg do less well in the YouGuv poll conducted for Sky News after the second leaders' debate? Easy, says Craig Murray. It was taken before Nick had made his closing statement.

PoliticalHackUK considers the Conservatives' smearing of their general election opponents.

Labour candidate Gloria de Piero is refusing to appear at any hustings in the Ashfield constituency she is trying to win, including one arranged for the regional slot of the Daily Politics. Alex Foster has the story on Liberal Democrat Voice.

Confessions of a Laundry Faerie discuss Mistress Masham's Repose, a neglected masterpiece by T.H. White: "It's the story of a girl named Maria who finds a colony of Lilliputians in exile on the property of her family estate, and how she and they manage to get along. Not only is it a good story, but it brings up some worthwhile philosophical questions."

And English Buildings visits Blandford Forum, discovering two clever Bastards.

House Points: In the green room at Ask the Chancellors

My House Points column from the current Liberal Democrat News. I liveblogged the debate while I was there.

Tough at the top

They have fierce security at television studios these days. It’s not just hard to get in: I saw Lord Bragg having trouble getting a turnstile to allow him and his swipe card to leave the building. Still, he is a Labour peer and no doubt it was all for security or health and safety, so welcome to the world you made, Melv.

I was there in the green room to report Channel 4’s Ask the Chancellors on my blog. I could, of course, have done that just as well watching television at home, but you don’t get to hang out with the stars that way. Isn’t that Polly Toynbee over there? Simon Carr? Quentin Letts’ rear view?

The good news is that the general expectations before the event were fulfilled. Alistair Darling was worthy, likeable but dull. It’s hard to believe he was once Red Ally, the firebrand leader of Lothian Regional Council. Then he was so extreme that the Scottish Labour establishment sent George Galloway to reason with him.

George Osborne came over as a bright schoolboy, which must be a worry for a man of 38. Has Osborne, as William Hague did before him, reached the top too early in his career? Patience is one of the political virtues. It was noticeable that when he tried to patronise someone – it wasn’t clear whether the target was Vince Cable or the whole audience – the effect was merely ridiculous.

And then there was Vince. Before the debate began I wrote on Liberal England that he had the most to lose because his reputation stands so high. I need not have worried: he lived up to his billing. In particular, he went down the best of the three with the studio audience and showed his priceless ability to put the boot in very effectively whilst appearing to be above the fray.

Some Conservative commentators were so disappointed were with the way the evening went that they suggested that Vince had got most applause because the audience was packed with Liberal Democrats.

Not so. It was rigorously balanced. If a Tory did not turn up then a Labour and Lib Dem supporter were denied entry. I know: I talked to the people in charge of doing it.

Liveblogging Ask the Chancellors

Hello from the green room at Channel 4 studios on London's prestigious South Bank.

Channel 4 kindly asked if I would like to come and blog from the green room at this mildly historic event. So I said yes.

Already I have seen Quentin Letts, Polly Toynbee... and Lord Bragg struggling to get out of the building with his swipe card.

Still, I expect it is Security or Health and Safety or something, and he is a Labour peer. So welcome to the world you made, Melv.

So what are the prospects for tonight's event?

In a strange way, Vince Cable has the most to lose. So high is his reputation, that anything less than a display of extraordinary erudition will leave his fans disappointed.

But I have every faith in him. He is as the ability to appear above the fray whilst putting the boot in nicely. He will be fine.

Conversely, George Osborne has the most to gain. He is 38, yet I still find it natural to make jokes about hoping that someone has made sure he has washed his knees and pulled his socks up. is there more to him than the bright schoolboy? We may see tonight.

[Journalists gossiping next to me: There are stories in circulation about Tony Blair receiving hundreds of pounds worth of gifts and not declaring them.]

And Alistair Darling? He is slowly winning over the press as a great survivor. Given that he is the minister who introduced pension the 75p pension increase back in 2000, you can see their point.

Gordon Brown's announcement, albeit through gritted teeth, that he will continue as Chancellor, should Labour win the election, will have strengthened his hand.

Of course, I could have done this from home watching the TV - which is all I am doing here - but they do give you free coffee.

Polly Toynbee, for it is she, is being asked on TV how far this debate will set the scene for the leaders' debates in the general election proper. I suspect the dynamics will be different here. Nick Clegg may struggle to get into the debate: Vince, I suspect, will have no such problems here.

@channel4news has just tweeted:

EXCLUSIVE: Key themes on #askthechancellors agenda are 1) public finances, spending cuts, tax rises, 2) banks, bonuses & regulation, 3) jobs.

Channel 4 News now reporting that no oil has been found off the Falklands.

That's my suggested economic policy buggered.

Someone has just reached Liberal England by searching for "big cats in Ratlinghope". Hello Shropshire!

Channel 4 Ask the Chancellors page.

Here we go!

The set makes it look like a rather dull quiz show.

First George Osborne. Deal with debt. Cut waste. In favour of enterprise and hard-working people.

Vince Cable. We warned about the bubble. There have to be cuts. The banks must lend to good British companies. Hard work, thrift, fewer prima donnas. Tax cuts for lower earners paid for by taxes on rich.

Alistair Darling. We can get through this provided we continue to support people. Get borrowing down to cut deficit, but protect front-line services. Secure jobs in the future.

That more or less confirmed what we already think of them.

What personal qualities do you have that will make you the best Chancellor?

Vince Cable: A lot of experience. I warned about the boom. When the crisis came, I advocated policies that the government, to its credit, did adopt.

Alistair Darling. Tenacity. Had to deal with unimagined problems to ensure the banks could open the doors the next day. My judgement has been right. His sense of fairness drives everything he does in politics.

George Osborne. Shadow Chancellor five five years. Part of a team. His values are support for people who work hard and save hard. it is not my money.

And he keeps his desk tidy.

Why don't you come clean on cuts?

Darling: I will at the next spending review.

Osborne: "We are all in this together." That never caught on, did it? I was the first to call for cuts. We cannot afford benefits to the rich. "This is our national debt." That certainly won't catch on.

Cable: We have set out £15bn of spending cuts, only party to do that. Defence cuts, including Trident. Swathes of bureaucracy overrunning local government. Surveillance state.

Now they are being allowed to debate this between them. Osborne saying we need cuts and everyone agrees with him. Oh no they don't, says Darling. You have been calling for spending cuts, but instead (muffed this a bit) you use the first spare money you find for tax cuts.

Vince gets first applause from the audience for talking about Osborne's "fictional savings".

Osborne getting snotty already. Not coming over well.

Vince now making Darling answer questions like an examiner. Class.

Will cuts be deeper than Thatcher's?

Yes, yes and yes.

Can you guarantee that NHS services will not be harmed by cuts?

Osborne. David Cameron asked me to ensure that we spend more every year.

Darling. We have doubled expenditure on the NHS. We will keep to the standards we have established.

Cable. None of us can give a guarantee like that. If we save money on NHS admin it should first go to neglected areas like mental health. But you cannot ring fence health or you will have massive cuts elsewhere.

Osborne name checks David Cameron again on NHS spending. A sign of his strength or weakness on the subject?

Will you cut pensions?

Darling people must be treated fairly.

Osborne. A cap on big public sector pensions. Audit how much public sector pensions are costing within week.

Cable. It is outrageous that highly paid public sector employees (including MPs) have such large pensions. This needs cross-party agreement.

Nice Darling dig at Osborne over lack of consensus on social care.

Vince calls for cross-party approach to whole crisis. (Can I be Chancellor please?)

Osborne having second go against "death tax". So how will you pay for it, posh boy?

Osborne still doing it. Trying to patronise the Chancellor. Failing.

Will you increase income tax or VAT?

Vince: We will cut income tax for lower earners. About £700 a year for average earner. Fully costed package.

Osborne: There will be some tax rises, but we will stop National Insurance increases.

Darling: No one wants to increase taxes, but... If I promise to cut taxes you will ask how I can afford to do it.

Osborne scores point against Darling, but it is Darling who gets the applause with a smart reply.

Vince says we are going to have a difficult decade. We have to keep society together and be fair. The rich must pay a bit more.

Cable asks Osborne if he supports a tax on banks to pay for public support. A little beside the point.

Can they rule out VAT increase? Darling, no. Cable, no but it would be dodging the question if we did.

Missed a question there, but Osborne using a Blairite "many and few" construction. Had to mentally check himself that he was getting it right.

Cable we are being held to ransom by super-rich. "Pin-striped Scargills." Clap, you buggers.

Darling. People can move around more these days, but there is no sign we are scaring them away.

Is it the Chancellor's job to make us more equal?

Cable: Yes.

Darling: Yes.

Both talk about "fairness".

Osborne: Sort of says yes. Interesting.

Darling defends tax credits to wealthier families. Hard to see how they help the poor.

Vince has a dig on inheritance tax and gets applause.

Question on bankers' bonuses

Vince good reply on splitting investment banking from high street banking.

Darling: Bonuses should be for good performance not taken for granted. But defends big banks. That's socialism for you.

Osborne: Bank tax now, even without international agreement. Attacks head of Barclay's.

Battery getting low

Vince: Banks must lend more to businesses.

Osborne: Bank regulation must change.

Both painting Darling as weak on this.

Question: None of you predicted banking collapse. Why should we trust you now?

Darling talks about future.

Osborne: The Tories did worry about debt.

Cable: Some of did want - and he applauded for it. Every demutalised building society has collapsed. But it was worse - "such greed and incompetence" - than he imagined.

Student scared of future. Will I get a job and be able to buy a house?

Osborne: More student places (eh?) Better help for unemployed. "A work programme." Diverting the rivers of Central Asia to water the Uzbek cotton fields?

Darling: There is some good news - offshore wind technology. If government works in partnership, there will be jobs in future.

Cable: Government cannot create jobs but we can make sure that the banks lend to the companies that do. Some public works on renovating old properties. But some of the cuts we are going to make will affect jobs.

Osborne says much the same thing now.

Closing statements

Darling: We have made the right judgement calls over the past two years. We will work with private sector to create jobs. Trust us.

Cable: Financial discipline, make banks lend. Who do you trust? Labour got us into this mess. Remember the Tories. Dig at rich backers gets applause. We are not beholden to super-rich or unions. We want change - but it has to be a change for better not the worst.

Osborne: There will be a Conservative government or a Labour government. We have the ideas and energy. It is your choice.

And that is it.

No big winners or losers, which meant that it was good for the Lib Dems as Vince's reputation will remain high.

Interesting that it was the left-wing points that got applause. The audience was very carefully politically balanced, so that may be significant.

Just met Chris Huhne: "a clear win for Vince."

Now for the train home...

Much later. Home again in Market Harborough.

Several days later. This became the raw material for a House Points column in Liberal Democrat News.

The Liberal England Year: Part 2

Part 1 was posted yesterday. We continue with...

July

I helpfully explained why parents cheat over school admissions and marked the death of John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash. (Those stories about rude names are not true, you know.)

Noel Symington, Market Harborough's Mosleyite soup magnate, turned out to be Whipplesnaith, the night climber of Cambridge.

And I recalled getting lost on Frog Island.

August

A full month.

Much to my readers' delight I took up what proved to be the lost cause of saving Leicester's Bowstring Bridge. I also discovered that there is curse attached to Lib Dem Voice's Lib Dem Blog of the Year Award. (Prophetically so. The following month I was not shortlisted in any category and their Blog of the Year promptly gave up.)

I discovered an unusual village cricket ground and suggested that Top Gear is really another programme in disguise.

As well as offering eight sceptical theses on moral rights I looked at the life of Petra, the Blue Peter dog.

Best of all, England won the Ashes at Sutton Bridge.

September

These were exciting times in Market Harborough. There was Arts Fresco, Hoards and History Day and a concert by Spencer Davis and the Animals. You can see why I had no time to come to the Lib Dem Conference.

I also found myself in dejection near Polly Toynbee.

October

I met a cool cat at Oakham station and explored the parallels between Tracey Emin and Tony Hancock.

In a bit of a scoop for this blog, I had a unique video giving Gordon Brown's views on Tony Blair. I argued that the BBC and his fellow Question Time panelists should have given Nick Griffin more rope.

November

The Tory leader of Harborough District Council dramatically resigned his seat. Meanwhile, I continued to be puzzled by the contradictions of Mark Oaten.

I took the Caledonian Sleeper to attend the Lib Dem bloggers' unconference in Edinburgh and Lord Bonkers gave an inside view of the party's attack unit.

December

Coming up to date, this month I have:

• complained of the insolence of the lambs;
• explained why privatised railways treat their customers like criminals;
• revealed the new Lib Dem election poster.

In dejection near Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee had a column in the Guardian yesterday extolling Labour's bright new generation and the party's achievements in Lambeth:

all around us are good Labour legacies of money well spent: the new school sports hall, the new primary school on Brixton Hill, nine new children's centres, health clinics, squads of neighbourhood police, and a spectacular sixth-form college next door to my home.

I was struck by her celebration of buildings rather than the life that goes on in them. The sixth-form college may be "spectacular", but does it provide its students with a good education?

And It has always seemed to me that one of Toynbee's weaknesses is that her writing fails to convey any sense that she is aware of the pleasures of family life. It is children's centres, children's centres, children's centres all the way.

More than this, I was strongly reminded of another piece of writing about South London. I knew it was by my hero Charles Masterman, but did not know where I had read it. Thanks to the wonders of the net, I was able to find what it was and share it with you.

It comes from the essay "In dejection near Tooting", which was collected in Masterman's 1905 book In Peril of Change. In it he describes that suburb as follows:

On every high hill towered a monstrous building of that particular blend of austerity and dignity dear to the municipal mind. Each was planned of vast spreading dimension, with innumerable blank windows, surrounded by high polished walls.

Down below in the valley, conveniently adjacent to the cemetery, was the immense fever hospital, a huddle of buildings of corrugated iron. In front was a gigantic workhouse; behind, a gigantic lunatic asylum; to the right, a gigantic barrack school; to the left, a gigantic prison.

And that, I think, is one of the differences between a liberal like Masterman, who celebrates life, and a social democrat like Toynbee, who celebrates institutions.

Looking at chapter 2 of Nick Clegg's The Liberal Moment, I discussed Peter Clarke's book Liberals and Social Democrats. In it Clarke draws a distinction between the liberal idea of moral reform and the social democrat or Fabian idea of mechanical reform - again suggesting a divide between life and institutions.

It is for that reason I believe that Clarke was drawing a distinction between liberal and social democrats, rather than arguing they were at root the same thing. This distinction is also one of the reasons why I am a liberal rather than a social democrat.

Professional and family models of public childcare

Channel 4's season on children in the care system is an honourable attempt to shed light on a forgotten group, even if its centrepiece "Find me a Family" is infected with some of the cliches of modern television (the money shot of someone crying, the wait for the judges' decision on whether the person will be allowed to adopt).

Writing in the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown drew this moral from the series:

We need fabulous, high tech new care homes with professionalism of a standard we have not had hitherto.

This is the instinctive reaction of the liberal-left when they come across the awfulness of the public care system for children. We need more professionals and more professionalism.

But listen to the experiences of David Akinsanya, the presenter of "Find me a Family" who grew up in the care system himself:

came into the care of Essex social services when I was 14 months old because my private foster-care bills were no longer being paid. I moved to a small family group home in Basildon with 10 kids – where I spent nine ­fantastic years, thanks to Aunty Betty and her ­dedicated, untrained team. We were well cared for, and I felt loved and at home.

When I was nine, a change in childcare practice meant that social services closed many of the family group homes in favour of larger homes staffed by trained and qualified workers. The effect on me personally was catastrophic. I became uncontrollable and was excluded from school at 10.

I was considered institutionalised, and the five attempts to foster me failed. I was sent to a boarding school for maladjusted children, and it was here that I lost my innocence and learned how to bully, steal and fight.

Because Akinsanya, born in 1965, lived through the transition from a family paradigm of public care to a professional one. And he did not benefit from that change.

In a paper I gave to a meeting of the British Psychological Society's Psychotherapy Section in 2004 (which evolved into a chapter in the book Making and Breaking Children's Lives) I quoted Christian Wolmar's Forgotten Children:

As late as 1967, the service was very female dominated and the staff largely lived in the homes. The Williams Committee, reporting on the staffing of residential homes that year, noted “two thirds of people at present employed in residential homes are single women and one third of all staff are over 50 years of age”. All but 7 per cent of workers in the survey lived on the premises, which provided an important but hardly noticed safeguard for the children.

Researching that paper and chapter I learned that it was not adequate to see a straightforward opposition between the family model and the professional model. In the immediate post-war period lay campaigners and advanced psychotherapy made common cause against the charities who had hitherto seen themselves as the experts in institutional childcare.

Nevertheless, I think that the left's unthinking call for more professionalism needs to be questioned.

Perhaps the real problem today is that we lack a clear picture of a happy family life. So it is that Polly Toynbee writes in favour of the SureStart scheme on a weekly basis, but never mentions the joys of looking after your children yourself.