It's all an act

Tweet I doubt that there’s anyone who really believes Cameron’s line about not wanting to take part in leaders’ debates because the Green Party has been excluded, even himself.  He’s simply calculated the potential risks and benefits and decided that the downsides of participation are greater than the upsides.  The line about the Green Party isn’t entirely the fig-leaf as which it’s been painted though.  Part of his calculation will have been that having Farage present as a perceived alternative to the Tories might at least partly be countered by having Natalie Bennett there as a perceived alternative to Labour.

The others are just as calculating.  Farage probably calculates that the status accorded to him and his party as a serious player, coupled with his ability to play the outsider, can only be a plus.  Miliband should be very wary of going head to head with Cameron if he has any sense at all, but is milking Cameron’s refusal to take part for all it’s worth.  I can certainly see why he’d calculate that going ahead with the debates without Cameron might help him.  As for Clegg – well who knows what goes on in the mind of a Liberal Democrat?  Probably that nothing he can do can make things much worse, so any chance at all of redeeming his party's position is better than nothing.

The way that they and their advisors are calculating the risks and rewards of these debates isn’t the only similarity between them of course.  When it comes to policy there isn’t that much to choose between them either.  And four middle-aged male millionaires from the South East of England, saying and believing much the same, aren’t exactly a representative or exciting prospect.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea of leaders’ debates anyway.  Partly that’s because of the exclusion of any serious alternative viewpoint, and partly it’s because the election is about electing a parliament not a president.  (Although I wouldn’t have a major objection to separating the election of the executive from the election of the legislature, as it happens – indeed, I can see a number of advantages to doing that.  But while we're still electing a parliament rather than an executive, treating the votes of all the citizens of the UK as votes for one or other of the ‘leaders’ is to treat local MPs as nothing more than lobby fodder.  That may well be what they are much of the time, but that’s another problem which needs to be addressed not reinforced.)

However, neither of those objections are really what concerns me.  My biggest objection of all is that they’re not even proper debates.  They’re staged to suit the broadcasters’ wish for good television. 

The participants have all been coached and rehearsed and we’re encouraged to distinguish between them on the basis of their performance.  It’s all an act where the ‘winner’ is the one who has the best coaches and the best memory.  Remembering to look sincere in the right places, to display the right degree of outrage at others, to deliver the scripted sound bites and even the scripted jokes – all of these are more important than the substance of policy.

Would it be any different if Nicola Sturgeon, Leanne Wood, or Natalie Bennett (or even all three) were included?  It would certainly look different, but how certain could we really be that they too wouldn’t have been coached and rehearsed to perform well?  And how well would the format really suit the presentation of a serious alternative viewpoint?

I’m not at all confident on either score, much as I’d like to believe otherwise.  Unintentionally, perhaps Cameron is doing us all a favour by finding an excuse to block the debates.  For sure, the broadcasters will complain about the impact on democracy, but in reality it’s no such thing.  And believing that the broadcasters are interested in democracy rather than ratings would be as silly as believing that Cameron really cares about excluding the Green Party.

Political sincerity

Tweet Nick Clegg’s response to the decision of his pary’s membership to contuinue to oppose airport expansion was certainly forthright.  Ultimately, it boils down to saying that because he didn’t get the answer he wanted, his party will have to continue discussing it until he does.  I’m not sure that he’d apply the same rule in other circumstances, such as a certain recent referendum.  In that case, I rather suspect that he’d argue that the decision, once taken, is final; but then poltiicians tend to like rules that only apply when they want them to.

I was particularly interested in the way he drew parallels with other party decisions, such as that on tuition fees.  This passage in particular made me wonder: “…how can I put it – I’ve seen the perils of the past of putting something which you know in your heart of hearts is not necessarily deliverable”. Is he, in effect, telling us that he knew the pledge was undeliverable when he made it? 

He solemnly signed that enormous card, and looked directly into camera and told us all that a vote for the Lib Dems was a vote against tuition fees, but he’s now telling us that he knew all along in his ‘heart of hearts’ that he could not and would not deliver it.  That comes as a bit of a shock even to an old cynic like me.  And given that he’s already telling us that he can’t and won’t deliver the Lib Dem pledge on airport expansion if he gets into government again, how can anyone believe anything that they put in their manifesto?

More like the sheriff of Nottingham...

Tweet Giving Wales the right to vary income tax is something of a double-edged sword.  It’s a power that is unlikely to be much used, I suspect.  The package of other tax measures likely to be devolved as part of the announcement made last week by Cameron and Clegg is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  On top of all of that, it seems likely that given borrowing powers, the Welsh Government is likely to blow the lot on one hugely expensive and environmentally damaging road scheme in the south east corner of Wales for which the rest of the country will end up paying for decades, if not generations.

None of that, however, is a reason to oppose the proposals, and if referendum there will be, then as a nationalist, I cannot vote other than ‘yes’ to the next step along the tortuous path.  Having the powers, and what we do with them, are two entirely separate issues, and separate they should remain.  I may not feel any huge enthusiasm for what the Welsh Government will do with the powers, but I’ll vote for the proposal, although somehow I can't see them rushing into calling a referendum.

The joint statement by Cameron and Clegg tells us something about the sort of society they both believe in.  It’s not a surprise coming from the Tories, but I suppose there are still some people out there who don’t understand that the Lib Dems have signed up to a very similar agenda.  One sentence in particular caught my eye: “one of the best ways to raise living standards is to cut people’s taxes”.

From the point of view of those whose taxes are cut, this may well be true, or at least feel as if it’s true.  More money in the pocket always pleases people.  But there are two sides to the ‘lower taxes’ coin, and the other side is ‘lower government expenditure’.  That in turn affects the services and benefits which people receive, and those most dependant on those services and benefits are likely to experience lower taxes as something which lowers rather than raises their living standards.

What the Tories and Lib Dems are both, in effect, saying is that they support improving the living standards of the most well-off whilst reducing the living standards of the least well-off.  Maybe children from their social background were fed a rather different version of the Robin Hood stories than the one that I read.

Women, catholics, and the crown

Tweet Given a choice between changing the laws of succession and abolishing the hereditary monarchy completely, I’d choose the latter, obviously.  For the time being that seems to put me in a minority; although that's not a position with which I’m entirely unfamiliar.  Change it is then at this stage – but surely we can do a better job of changing it than seems to be being proposed by Nick Clegg at present?

Abolishing the prohibition on women is one thing, but what about the prohibition on Catholics, atheists, Muslims, and lunatics?  (Actually I made part of that up: there is no ban on lunatics acceding to the throne.  They are however banned from the House of Commons as I recall – along with peers and prisoners.  Whether the ban is effectively enforced is a matter of opinion.)

The current proposals only do part of the job.  Catholics will still be banned, for instance, although I suppose that Catholic women will only be banned once under the new rules, as opposed to being doubly banned at present.  That's progress, of a sort, I suppose.

More important - and more directly relevant to we mere mortals - than the theoretical possiblity that some future Windsor will convert to Rome is the financial question. Because he’s only changing the rules for the monarchy itself, the rules for inheritance of other titles and the lands and properties that go with them will remain unchanged.   Specifically, that means that a female heir apparent will not be allowed to inherit the Duchy of Cornwall.  That will go to her oldest younger brother, – which means that he’ll cop the income and we, the taxpayers, will have to pay the heir the £18,000,000+ each year which the current incumbent of that title spends on – well whatever he manages to spend it on.

If Clegg wanted to do a proper job, he’d also have to deal with thorny questions like the relationship between church and state, and the inheritance of titles and land.  About time too, and better to do a proper job than a half baked one which will end up costing us in financial terms, just so that the current government can give an appearance of being reformers.

Failure to change the rules on religion also makes a very clear statement that discrimination against those who are in the wrong sect of the same religion - never mind those who adhere to a different religion completely or no religion at all - will continue, with the full approval of the current government.

Tantrums and principles

Tweet The one common factor to emerge from the bust up in Westminster over reform of the House of Lords and changes to constituency boundaries is the utter cynicism of some politicians.  None of the three UK parties emerges with much credit.

Those in the Conservative party who seem to think that they can sign up to an agreement with another party and then pick and choose which elements of the agreement they support have displayed a certain amount of arrogance as well.  I even saw one of them suggesting that the response by Nick Clegg was immature.  It didn’t look to me as though the immaturity was entirely one-sided.

Then we have the Labour Party, who claim to support reform of the House of Lords but decided to vote against it largely to put the Liberal Democrats on the spot.  And then we have the Lib Dems themselves who've responded to an act of bad faith with what looks like petty petulance.

Clearly, Clegg found himself in a position where simply rolling over and accepting that the Conservatives were not going to deliver on one of their coalition pledges would have left him looking weak - or perhaps that should be ‘even weaker’.  However, given his commitment to the continuation of the coalition, he needed to find a form of retaliation which was nonlethal. 

Protecting MPs from a cull may achieve that aim, but it isn't exactly the most populist issue he could have chosen to start drawing lines in the sand.  Worse still from his perspective, it might even secretly please more Tories than it upsets, given the worries many were facing over their own seats.  Heads they win, tails the Lib Dems lose.

"The man's deluded"

Tweet The utterer of the words, Prof. Minford, is not a source that I would always quote with approbation, but in this case, the description seems to be highly appropriate.  Clegg’s analysis is badly flawed in several respects.

He argues that the City of London has been a “golden egg-laying goose that produced this great wealth”.  I’m not convinced; it may have produced wealth for some individuals (including, of course, a number of members of the cabinet), but it also produced a crippling level of liabilities which have been passed on to the taxpayers. 

He goes on to suggest that “this great wealth … was shunted northwards and to other parts of the country by governments”.  That would presumably be a reference to the extended period during which the gap in GVA between the South East and much of the rest of the UK – and especially Wales – actually increased?

He’s right of course that government economic policy for so long effectively depended on using the taxes raised in the South East to pay public sector employees elsewhere, and that that represented a degree of transfer, but that isn’t the same as saying that this wealth was shunted northwards etc.  It was more a case of mitigating part of the growth in inequality than of trying to address the inequality.

But it’s his ‘solution’ which should concern us most – or rather his lack of a solution.  Replacing “dollops of public subsidy”  (his words – not a description that I’d use) with proper jobs in research and manufacturing sounds like a good idea – but what does it actually mean?  In terms of actual proposals, we know that the government is planning to stop the ‘subsidies’, but where are the specific proposals which will provide the replacement economic activity which he is proposing?

He appears to be relying, yet again, on the assumption that the private sector will miraculously create these jobs to mop up the unemployment after it has been created, despite the complete lack of any indication that that is happening.  It's a one-sided approach to a two-sided problem.

To return to the words of Prof. Minford – “It’s nonsense.  The man’s deluded”.

PS – What on earth does ‘re-wiring the economy’ mean anyway?  Perhaps he just needs a new speech-writer.

To infinity and beyond

Tweet It looks like Nick Clegg got a bit carried away with his own rhetoric during his launch of the campaign for a 'yes' to the AV system yesterday. Considering that it's a system that the Lib Dems have never argued for, I suppose he was always in for a tough time convincing his own troops, but this quote is a classic.

"I know AV may not be the favourite voting system of everyone here, but ... we all agree that AV is infinitely fairer than what we have at the moment."

How much fairer than 'infinitely fairer' does he think STV can be, I wonder?

TV debates

Tweet As I have said before, one of the problems of a "head to head" debate between party leaders - which now seems pretty much inevitable - is that a UK general election isn't primarily (constitutionally, anyway) about electing a government; it is about electing a legislature. The government is then formed from within the legislature. That is a key difference between the UK system and, say, the US system where head-to-head debates are a natural part of the campaign.

It is, of course, entirely natural for any member of a party which has no chance of forming the next government of the UK to worry about being excluded from the debate about the selection of members of the legislature. But that is not my only concern about the proposed debates which now seem extremely likely to occur.

In reality only a tiny minority of the UK electorate can vote for Brown, Cameron, or Clegg. Only in three constituencies can electors vote for any of them, and there is no single constituency where individual electors can choose between the three. I'm sure that the broadcasters would argue that by limiting the debate to those three individuals, they are including only those who could conceivably be Prime Minister of the UK. In the case of Clegg in particular I'm sure I'm not the only one to doubt the rationale of that argument.

It could be argued that, in constitutional terms, they are in any event wrong to limit the debate to those who they think could be the next Prime Minister. According to the (unwritten) constitution of the UK, the Queen chooses the next prime minister. And there is nothing in law, as I understand it, which limits her choice to the leader of the largest party, or indeed the leader of any party, or indeed a member of the House of Commons. It is only political convention that limits the choice to two.

Holding direct debates involving only those with at least an outside chance of becoming the next prime minister of the UK excludes the views of other parties who stand a realistic chance of becoming members of the legislature, which is what is actually being elected. It is another step towards a presidential style of government rather than a Parliamentary style of government. I actually think that there may well be arguments in favour of holding separate elections for the legislature and the government; but that should be the subject of political discussion and decision. It should not be forced upon us by a commercial broadcaster holding a gun to the Prime Minister's head.

Brown has been given very little choice in this instance, but it is a sad day for democracy when the nature of UK politics can be changed by a commercial company acting largely in their own rather than the country's interests.