COWARDS FLINCH and TRAITORS SNEER

Having laid a minefield, the Labour party seems doomed to march across it. Whatever the accuracy of opinion polls recording a potentially unassailable domination for Jeremy Corbyn in the contest for the party leadership, the result is clearly going to split the party. Corbynites will howl ‘foul’ if anyone but Corbyn wins. The danger that opinion polling entails is that people naturally set store by it. Corbynites understandably expect their man to win now. If he doesn’t, they will want to know why. I can’t imagine an answer that would satisfy them.

On the other side, there seems an increasing likelihood that the Anyone But Corbyn alliance – which is certainly predominant in the parliamentary party – will foreswear acceptance of democracy and dedicate itself to overturning the result of the vote. This is a rather more difficult position to argue rationally or logically. It is wholly dependent on the assertion that a Corbyn-led party could not win a general election. Nobody of course can prove such an assertion. Moreover, the evidence offered to support it is compromised by many other factors.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn are immediately offered as evidence. Well, there was no Footmania. Michael Foot was elected leader by a ballot only of MPs. There was no grassroots surge on his behalf. Indeed Denis Healey (98 at the end of this month) was so sure he would be elected leader that he refused to countenance any other result – I recall his smug face doing so on a television interview.

Foot and Healey

Foot had a slim victory over Healey. Great man though he was, he cut a remote, bookish and professorial figure. He didn’t play the best hand as leader. I found it hard to forgive him for announcing in the House that he was “an inveterate peacemonger” and then, just a fortnight later, committing the party to backing Thatcher on the Falklands. But the most damaging episode of Foot’s leadership was not something that Foot did. It was the defection of a number of MPs, led by the so-called Gang of Four, to form a new party, the Social Democrats. It was this fracturing of the anti-Tory force that kept Labour out of power for 18 years. The prediction that carries much more conviction than that of Corbyn’s unelectability is that a party riven by internal strife is unelectable.

As for Tony Benn, a rosy glow has settled over him since his death nearly eighteen months ago. His candour and courage and wisdom are now remembered with great affection. Of how many politicians do you hear the phrase “national treasure” used without irony or apology? That he was Corbyn’s mentor is benefiting both his own legend and Corbyn’s present reputation.

The Gang of Four

Look again at the argument that Corbyn would be unelectable at a general election. Whatever you argue, you cannot gainsay that he has enthused a lot of people. Many of them are young, the very constituency hitherto most alienated from mainstream politics. And many of them are long-suffering Labour supporters who consider that the party has gradually drifted away from core values. These are real assets for the Labour party. There is not much evidence that Burnham, Cooper and Kendall are bringing in new support.

That leads me to the vexed question of ‘entryism’. The distinction between entryism and recruitment is difficult to plot or to argue. If someone has left Labour in despair and joined a new grouping on the left or the LibDems, the Greens or the SNP, why would her return not be welcomed with open arms? Nobody in the PLP objects if someone who, at the previous general election, voted for the Tories or Ukip or the Monster Raving Loony Party now wants to vote Labour. Such a voter does not get her motives questioned, even though her previous vote might have been ‘tactical’ and hence perhaps suspect in the purists’ eyes. I voted LibDem in May because I didn’t want the Tories to take the seat from the LibDems. There was absolutely no chance of Labour taking it, even in a good year. That doesn’t mean I am not a Labour supporter. You do what you have to do.

Kendall and Corbyn; the knife is out of sight

Attempts to stymie Corbyn’s leadership are nothing but self-defeating. If he is replaced by Cooper or Burnham before the next election, the Tories will say that the new Labour leader couldn’t even get elected in the party so why would the country be impressed? If David Miliband is rushed in at a by-election simply in order to replace Corbyn with a supposedly electable alternative, the term ‘carpetbagger’ will be forever attached to him. As for the stabbing-in-the-back legend, that would be turned on its head. Moreover, the half-buried issue of extraordinary rendition, on which Miliband has yet to be fully candid, would come back with a vengeance.

All this may still be avoided, however. Remarkably, a poll released last night finds that Jeremy Corbyn easily leads among the candidates on the question “which leader would make you more likely to vote Labour in the next general election?”. He has 32% to the 25% of his nearest rival, Andy Burnham. Yvette Cooper, increasingly put forward as the best compromise candidate by the party’s mainstream, comes last with 20%. This is a poll not of Labour supporters but of the wider electorate. I always doubt opinion polls; this is not what the ABC crowd wants to hear, however.

Last night's poll

It’s unfortunate, but the success or otherwise of Corbyn’s leadership of the party rests largely in the hands of his enemies. His own democratic instincts mean that he will surrender choice of the shadow cabinet team back to the PLP; the chances are that they will heavily load the team with Blairites and other malcontents. Then he has said he will re-offer himself for confirmation before the 2015 general election. Will that be to the PLP or to the whole party?

However it falls out, the Blairites need to tread carefully. Unless they are to reveal themselves as mere opportunists, they will not join the Tories or the LibDem rump. Will they set up a new party? The danger is that they would fail to find a space to carve between the existing parties. The impact of the SDP, which anyway turned out to be shortlived, is unlikely to be replicable. In any case, the absence of Blairites in the Labour party would allow Corbyn to carry more of his policy positions. The more parties ranged against a Corbynite Labour party, the less impact each can have. But if they stay, the ABC-ers must be smart about rocking the boat. New leaders are entitled at least to a honeymoon period. Soon enough, Corbyn will get an opportunity to test his leadership at the ballot box, in the Holyrood elections next May and then the EU referendum across the UK, if not at a by-election. A premature party split would mean that the split itself would be the only aspect of Labour that voters judged.

LOSS of POWER

The faintly ludicrous figure of Norman Lamont, these days known as Baron Lamont of Lerwick, does not swim into my consciousness very often. When he does, it is as likely as not in the context of Julian Clary’s notorious and outrageous joke at his expense. Otherwise, there was the debonair dismissal of political misfortune – “je ne regrette rien” – and the somewhat enigmatic story of his letting a flat to a Miss Whiplash. Oh, and there was Black Wednesday.

It’s another quote from John Mayor’s Chancellor that occurs to me now, the most quoted line from his resignation speech to the Commons after he had been offered a demotion that he found insulting. Lamont described Major as “giving the impression of being in office but not in power”. It was one of those “ouch” moments that the House relishes forever afterwards.

Lamont and Major back in the day

The coalition is having a lamentable – or, if you prefer, a lamontable – year that just seems to get worse. And some of the damage begins to look irreparable, particularly that self-inflicted by David Cameron himself. He is being increasingly seen – in his own party quite as much as outside it – as inept. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Ed Miliband has found how to get under his skin and – what Cameron maybe does not realise – it shows in the PM’s heightened colour, barely concealed anger and tendency to bluster. Moreover, Cameron’s notorious impatience with detail and procedure is dangerously prompting him to make policy on the hoof, as in his remarks about energy that were news to the department charged with that rather important subject.

The PM of the red face

The Andrew Mitchell debacle – inevitably dubbed Plebgate – has done far-reaching damage, not least in allowing Tory backbenchers a month largely free of being kept in line by the whips. Cameron ought to have been able to see at once that Mitchell’s authority – the only quality that a chief whip really needs – had been fatally undermined by the man’s inability to mount a coherent and convincing account of the exchange with the Downing Street police officer. When a party leader’s instincts – in this case to tough it out – leave him stuck in a corner, the followers inevitably begin to wonder if the game is up.

What with Boris Johnson capering merrily in the wings and the certainty that the coalition parties will be brushed aside in the imminent by-election in Tory marginal Corby, Cameron indeed starts to give the impression of being in office but not in power. I suspect that it is many weeks since Downing Street discounted the potential appeal of Ed Miliband under the scrutiny of a general election; even Fleet Street has reluctantly begun to acknowledge that Miliband has been playing it very long and very shrewd.

Ed Miliband projects

But my sense of it is that, although his backbenchers are palpably growing more critical if not openly mutinous, encouraged by such insider savagery as Lord Tebbitt directed at the government this weekend, Cameron’s main worry for the prospects both before and after the election concerns the Liberal Democrats.

Consider the bind in which Nick Clegg finds himself. What can he and his party offer at the 2015 general election? That they ameliorated the grosser effects of the Tories? Who will swallow that? That they achieved some of their cherished long-term aims? Which were those? That they surrendered their independence in the national interest and made common cause with the hated Tories to save the economy? Figures to be released this week may suggest that the longest double-dip recession Britain has ever experienced – which, moreover, only began on the coalition’s watch – is coming to an end, but who can believe that any but the richest voters will go to the polls next time with a good feeling about their own finances?

The reality is that, even if the statistics can be massaged to look promising, the broad mass of the electorate will still be hurting and will still not believe that “we are all in it together” in the risibly untrue phrase that the fare-diddling Chancellor had the gall to dredge up again in conference. What’s more, the Tories will be fighting the Lib Dems for every vote. Tory backbenchers will heap all perceived unpopularity onto the coalition’s “weak sister”.

Andrew Mitchell leaves office

Of the Lib Dems’ 57 seats, 28 (virtually half) are held with majorities below 5,000 votes, all of which must be feeling vulnerable. Don’t expect Sarah Teather, John Hemming, Jo Swinson, Chris Huhne or even that old warhorse Sir Alan Beith to return at the next election.

Nine Lib Dems have majorities above 10,000, which might be thought to be relatively safe. Interestingly, all the past leaders still in the Commons number among those nine – Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell – along with the present leader, Nick Clegg, and the mooted future leader, Vince Cable. But you wouldn’t want to put folding money on Clegg retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat, especially as students have long been moving into the area in order to punish him over tuition fees.

But the support for the Lib Dems as measured by opinion polls is so low and so half-hearted that they will be lucky even to retain eight of the nine purportedly “safest”. I habitually discount the “evidence” of those pseudo-scientists the pollsters, but I confidently predict (based simply on what my waters tell me) that the Lib Dem candidate in Corby will be beaten by both the Green and the UKIP candidates and consequently will lose her deposit. She may even be overtaken by the anti-wind-farms independent (the journalist and prize ass James Delingpole) and by the Monster Raving Loony Party representative, a Mr Toby Jug.

Nick Clegg: things can only get ... um ...

Contemplating annihilation, the Lib Dems surely must be considering their options. A number of statements lately by Clegg and others – statements, mind; not actions – tend to suggest that the Lib Dems are beginning to see the need to let light become visible between them and their coalition partners. But surely something more dramatic and far-reaching is required.

If I were Clegg, I would be looking as a matter of urgency for the issue on which I could credibly and creditably lead my party out of power. To do so would certainly bring down the government. Cameron would have no choice but to try and soldier on with a minority administration. Labour, promptly unveiling its hitherto mysterious plan for government, would take the first opportunity to seek a vote of confidence, which the Tories would lose. Then Clegg could fight a general election not as the ineffectual junior partner of a reviled and blundering coalition but as the leader who had the “courage” to bring down the coalition on “a point of principle”. Believe me, it’s the only scenario that will save his party from electoral annihilation.

Elsewhere in the wild wood that is coalition government, some of the forest creatures lollop along as if without a care in the world. Here’s a story that reveals more about the Tory hegemony than might appear on the surface. That egregious twit Jeremy Hunt was recently present at a Buckingham Palace reception, clearly still basking in the Olympic glow that he erroneously believes may redeem his disgraceful stint as Secretary of State for Media, Culture & Sport. When he and the monarch duly came to face to face, little Hunt was ready with his anecdote, delivered, we may be certain, with all the toe-curling brightness of a shiny-faced Vth-former.

Jeremy Hunt: please like me

He related how a Japanese diplomat had assured him that the Emperor would never have been so game and public-spirited as to (pretend to) leap from a helicopter for the entertainment of the viewers of the Olympiad ceremony. The Queen, who obviously would have immediately tuned him out on the words “Japanese diplomat”, shrugged and moved on (the authenticity of this story is underlined by how absolutely convincing the account of the monarch’s demeanour contrives to be).

Hunt had barely begun to choke back his gush when the Duke loomed over him and barked “who are you?” How we all wish we had been eye-witnesses to this double whammy of vertiginous rebuffs. But really: if the public school millionaires in the cabinet don’t know how to make small talk with royalty, what earthly use are they?

GO BACK to YOUR CONSTITUENCIES and PREPARE for ANNIHILATION

That whistling sound you hear emanates from Birmingham. It is in England’s self-styled second city that the Liberal Democrats are holding their annual party conference this year. The whistling indicates that all of them are desperately trying to keep their spirits up. For the realpolitik is utterly dire, not to say terminal.

Understandably, Nick Clegg and his fellow ministers in the coalition government tell us that their participation represents realism, that they exercise a benign influence on the more reactionary instincts of the Tories, that without their skilful playing of the hand that they have been dealt the electorate would presently be groaning under a far more painful burden.

For their part, the electorate appear to have none of it. I set no great store by opinion polls, as my regular readers will testify, but YouGov’s daily temperature reading has had Lib Dem support consistently below ten percent for so many weeks that it can hardly be gainsaid. This is as against the 23 percent the party took at the general election when, it is apt to be forgotten, they actually suffered a net loss of five seats on the 2005 result.

Of the 57 seats the party now holds, all but eight enjoy majorities below 10,000 and four of them are perilously marginal, which is to say they have majorities below 1,000. What is more, the new constituencies proposed for the next election by the Boundaries Commission would, by all calculations, deprive the party of more of the seats it holds – and hence a far bigger proportion of its total – than either of the other main parties. Given that the Lib Dems humiliatingly failed to secure voting reform in the May referendum, they are certain to emerge from their adventure in coalition electorally weakened, even before one starts to anticipate the actual judgment of the electorate.

Looking at the way the votes fall, it seems most likely that, whatever the outcome of the redrawing of the constituency map, the best hope of the Lib Dems winning any seats at all at the next election lies in a strong swing against the Conservatives. Lib Dem seats are concentrated, as they have been for many elections, in Scotland, the south west of England and London. Of their 43 seats in England, the Tories came second in 32. Any swing from the Lib Dems to the Tories is likely to cost the junior coalition partners dear.

And therein lies the paradox. Both Cameron and Clegg are pledged to fight the next election as separate parties, not to sink or swim together. The Tories can, with some conviction, argue that the Lib Dems have acted as a brake on their attempts to balance the books, an argument that will seem to be emphasised by the line that Clegg must and will take, that the Lib Dems have provided a degree of civilising restraint on the Tories’ more barbaric instincts. But unless the two parties of the coalition are to go before the electorate implying or even stating that the coalition has been a failure, they are both going to have to stand by their joint record.

The coalition has had some success in daily arguing that the measures they have introduced were made necessary by the “mess” left by Labour. Indeed, the greatest failure of Ed Miliband’s leadership, to my mind, has been his seeming unwillingness to nail this canard. I may be wrong; he may be playing a shrewd long game on that matter, as he clearly is doing on other issues. Be that as it may, though, Cameron and Clegg can hardly take their main stand in the election of 2015 solely on the record of Gordon Brown up to 2010. They will have to offer a persuasive narrative of their own time in government. “If it hadn’t been for our measures, it would have been worse” will not sound like a very catchy tune.

In a piece on the Lib Dem mood in today’s Guardian, Jackie Ashley buried this intriguing nugget: “there is a strong feeling among Lib Dems that Labour has lost its way and is failing to offer an alternative. They don’t feel under pressure from the left. As to the right, there are clearly deals being discussed that would help protect them from a stronger Tory performance”. Now, what ‘deals’ are those, pray tell? Frankly, I don’t believe it. There are more than enough Tory backbenchers who loathe being in coalition with a party they still consider to be sandal-wearing, bearded freaks for the Tory leadership to be completely unable to guarantee to “protect” the Lib Dems in the fight-to-the-death of an election.

It will be a miracle if the two parties can get through a three-week election campaign without damagingly bitter words being uttered, words that, for differing reasons, both Labour and the media will be only too delighted to repeat, magnify and analyse ad nauseam. Steve Webb, Lib Dem Minister of State for Pensions, told The Daily Telegraph on Saturday: “Different political parties will emphasise different aspects of a programme differently. We are not the same party, we have different … emphases”. The three dots do not indicate a cut in the quote but rather were meant by the reporter to illustrate a hesitation in choosing le mot juste. What Webb was demonstrating, ever so carefully, was the potential chasm between the two parties. If neither Labour nor the media can prise open this chasm in an election, neither will have done its job.

Were the Lib Dems “wrong” to go into partnership with Cameron’s Tories? It depends where you’re coming from. I didn’t want a Tory government, so Clegg’s making a Tory government possible was for me a capital offence. I suspect that view is shared by many who voted as an alternative to Labour – and indeed many who have always voted Lib Dem – as well as significant numbers of the party membership. These latter are in an excruciating position. The coalition is a fait accompli. To complain about it would be to undermine it. The party broadly understands that Clegg has a very narrow path along which to manoeuvre. To urge him to deviate from the path or to tax him for not doing so is, as politicians are apt to say, “unhelpful”. But what can a party member do if she firmly believes that this is a disastrous path? Resign or hold her tongue: these would seem to be the only options.

Some Lib Dems will be holding on to a notion that they might feel will save the party: that having (to coin a phrase) “broken the mould” by going into coalition with the Tories, they can happily show their … um … liberality by getting into bed with Labour after the next election, a union that would appeal to far more of the party activists than does the current affaire.

Polly Toynbee’s revisionist Guardian column on Saturday, pretending that she played no role in the electoral defeat of Brown, reckoned that “the last Labour government would have been improved by coalition with [the Lib Dems]: no Iraq; no imprisonment without trial; civil liberties upheld”. Well, that’s what’s called “a big if”. What’s more, it compresses successive Labour governments into a single entity. But one could equally imagine that, had the Tories been in power during those years, Toynbee might as easily now be writing that the same policies would not have been pursued if Labour had been in power. One should never underestimate how illiberal any party can be once in government. Has Barack Obama delivered the programme upon which he was elected? Does he practice as liberal as he preached?

In the YouGov polls, Labour has maintained a fluctuating lead for months. If successive by-election results be a guide, Labour is polling much better – and the Tories significantly worse – than the opinion polls record. The pain of the government’s austerity measures will get worse before it gets better. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the coalition is in fact redressing the deficit balance far more slowly than it claimed was necessary. And there is clearly a strong danger that the economy will go into double dip.

By disassociating Labour from the planned industrial action this autumn and winter, Miliband has ensured that the coalition cannot use the strikes against Labour. On the other hand, Labour will certainly pay a price among its own historic electoral base. If he can convince the electorate at large that, under Labour, such strikes would be avoided, he may make up that ground. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether the unions themselves can persuade the wider public that such issues as pension levels draw sympathy.

What is certain is that Cameron and Osborne will be unable to find any argument to justify cutting tax rates for top earners at a time when everyone else is under the cosh. If Vince Cable can head that one off, as he likes to pretend that he can, there might be some credit for the Lib Dems. If he can’t, will he stay in government? There must be quite a few Tories hoping that he will lead sufficient Lib Dems out of the coalition to precipitate an early general election, on the argument that Labour isn’t ready and the Lib Dems will be wiped out. Such a possibility is what keeps Cable and co on board. Truly, as Cable’s wife Rachel Smith put it in a World at One interview today, they are between Scylla and Charybdis. And as Cable himself spelt out today, things can only get worse.

SPLITS and SPATS

Thursday’s multifarious elections changed the UK’s political map in various ways, some of them unexpected. One hesitates to use a phrase like “seismic shift” but the reverberations will go on for months and may yet have further, unimagined consequences. Already three party leaders in Scotland have said they will step down. The balance of the coalition in Westminster and Whitehall has been significantly altered. Something may have been set in train that leads to departures from the government, perhaps the collapse of the coalition, maybe even an early general election, certainly now (anyway, sooner or later but within five years) a referendum on the dissolution of the Union.

Let’s begin with Scotland. Not in its wildest dreams did the SNP – or at least anyone except its permanently chipper leader Alex Salmond – expect to emerge with an overall majority of nine in the Holyrood parliament. Proverbially, the complex voting system set up by Labour for Scottish elections was designed to obviate just such an eventuality. But opinion polls just before the ballot suggested that the SNP had overhauled Labour’s earlier projected lead so, given that polls are always a few days behind the momentum, we all ought to have read the signs better.

Alex Salmond, the cat who got the cream

The data is interesting, however, and as always tells a more complex story than do media headlines. What it shows is that the two parties opposed to the government in London both did well. It was the coalition partners, the Conservatives and – disastrously – the Liberal Democrats, who saw their support haemorrhage.

Members of the Scottish parliament come in two kinds. More than half emerge as winners of a First-Past-the-Post system as used at Westminster (and confirmed last Thursday in the nationwide referendum). The rest prevail through a Proportional Representation scheme operated on a regional basis. These are informally referred to as List MSPs. Retiring Tory leader in Scotland Annabel Goldie stands as one of these List MSPs, perhaps because it gives her a better chance of retaining her seat.

The Conservatives lost a quarter of their Holyrood seats and, in the constituencies, are almost entirely confined to the Borders. They shed one-and-a-half percent of their regional support but getting on for three percent among the more critical FPTP constituency MPs. The Lib Dem vote fell by six percent among List MSPs and more than eight percent in the constituencies. They lost more than two-thirds of their MSPs and were pushed back to the constituencies of Orkney and Shetland.

Labour lost much the same among List MSPs as the Tories in the constituencies, but only 0.45 percent in the FPTP vote. Indeed, Labour took more Scottish seats from the Tories than did the SNP and as many from the SNP as from the Tories. But the way the maths panned out, the SNP had a net gain from Labour of 21 seats, even though the most significant transfer of votes was from the other parties to the Nationalists. In that sense the result flattered to deceive.

Goldie woman with golden boy

Nonetheless, Salmond’s Cheshire Cat grin will remain long after the astonishment of the election has faded. Most of the cards appear to be in his hands. As I argued in a letter to The Guardian today, the Nationalists have a distinct natural advantage. All their leading lights want to sit at Holyrood. The most accomplished Scots in all the other parties seek to make their careers at Westminster. Consequently, since the estimable Donald Dewar, the Scottish Labour Party has been led by nonentities and time-servers who attract few votes. Indeed, two of Dewar’s successors were obliged to stand down because of dubious practice.

If Gordon Brown had led Scottish Labour instead, he might now be on his fourth term as first minister in Edinburgh and David Miliband might be on his second as prime minister in London. But unless Ed Miliband can persuade the brightest and best of Labour politicians – Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy, Anne Begg, Tom Harris, Alistair Darling – to go home and stand for Holyrood, the SNP will surely continue to win overall majorities.

As to the referendum on Scottish independence, Salmond is playing it long and cautiously. Conventional wisdom says that support for the SNP does not transfer wholesale into support for UDI. In any case, referendums are what is called indicative only; that is to say that they put no obligation under law on the governments that call them. They are weaker than a plebiscite, weaker still than a direct election, the results of which are binding. Salmond could summon the Scots to a referendum and still follow a course opposite to that preferred by his people. But for someone who evidently hugely relishes being much the largest fish in a relatively small pond, he is not likely to want to risk his Holyrood majority by alienating his electorate.

The late and much loved Donald Dewar

For the Tories in London, the calculations are very different. David Cameron’s immediate reaction to the SNP’s success and the prospect of a Scottish referendum was to say that Holyrood could of course have its vote but that he would fight for the Union “with every fibre of my being”. Well, he’s got to say that. Many Tory MPs, on the contrary, would be perfectly happy to kiss goodbye to Scotland. After all, the country delivered just one Tory MP to Westminster last year, as against 41 for Labour. They picture a House of Commons without members from the independent nation of Scotland – or indeed from Wales where Labour also dominates – but with a big advantage for the Tories in the remaining English seats, especially after the shake-up of boundaries being proposed by the government that – would you credit it? – favours Conservatives still further.

Such a development at Westminster would finally lay to rest Tam Dalyell’s legendary West Lothian Question, wherein the then Labour backbencher asked how it could be proper for the MP for West Lothian (himself) to be permitted to vote on an issue peculiar to the citizens of Blackburn, Lancashire but not on an issue peculiar to the burghers of Blackburn, West Lothian; under the terms of the devolution bill then going through the house, Westminster MPs would lose executive jurisdiction over domestic Scottish affairs. Meanwhile, the formal agreement that launched the Westminster coalition includes an undertaking to have a commission examine the West Lothian Question.

Tam Dalyell, the West Lothian questioner

Another school of Tory thought argues that a referendum on Scottish independence ought to be put before the whole of the UK because unionists in each constituent country have a view on the matter, whether they be Scottish or no. This notion might appeal to Cameron but of course would be rejected outright by Salmond.

Cheerleader for the Thatcherite wing of the Tories, Siphon Effluent of The Daily Telegraph, repeats a familiar cry: “why [should] the English taxpayer … send £23billion a year to Scotland to pay for it to have free prescriptions, free tuition and frozen council tax?” The answer of course is that Holyrood has not been granted tax-raising powers and if it were obliged to disburse the funds it receives from Westminster as the coalition dictates, its very existence would be negated. The same applies to local councils across Britain. It suits the government to have devolved authorities being blamed for the cuts they perforce have to impose. That the SNP is smart enough to disburse its funds in a way that attracts voters sticks in the craw of Tories.

Effluent is also one of the loudest voices telling the PM to call a snap election: “there simply won’t be a better chance of a Conservative victory than now”. It’s easy to see why Tory backbenchers and commentators fume at the notion that the Lib Dems should be somehow “rewarded” for their catastrophic showing in the election and the comprehensive rejection of the voting method referendum that seemed to many to be their raison d’être, rewarded by having their role in government bolstered and, as Tories would see it, being offered concessions over such matters as the selling off of the NHS. Doesn’t electoral rejection weaken rather than strengthen the grip that politicians exert on power and policy?

Again, Cameron says publicly what he has to, that the coalition is the thing and must go on and that the Lib Dems still have a central role. “No crowing” he has told those party workers who enjoyed watching Lib Dem councillors tumble, quite a few of them to Tories. But equally he may not feel as triumphal as do those who long for a Tory administration governing alone.

There was a single parliamentary by-election last Thursday, at Leicester South. You can argue that, given the nature of the poll, this was perhaps the purest and most accurate gauge of opinion about the national government taken on the day. It has been little reported but the result was striking. After all, it was an “unnecessary” election in that the sitting MP decided instead to run as local mayor. Historically, the electorate has generally punished parties that call elections purely for the benefit of the sitting party. But here the Labour majority rose by over 3,000 votes and by 12 percent of the total. The Tory candidate’s vote was halved and fell by more than that of the Lib Dem (who came second).

Analysis of the voting figures in the council elections reveals little to support the theory that the Tory vote “held up” and that, because many more Lib Dem seats are vulnerable to a Tory swing than to a Labour one, Cameron’s crew would do well at a general election.

I am not privy to how the voting is projected but those who reckon to know how to do it say that a UK-wide general election that replicated the voting patterns in the local elections would give Labour 318 seats (up 60), Tories 270 (down 37). Lib Dems 26 (down 31) and others 36 (up eight). So Labour would be the largest party and could govern by concluding what Ed Miliband put forward some weeks ago, a deal with the Lib Dems. And this is before the full impact of the cuts is felt. Effluent is right, from the Tories’ point of view, to urge Cameron not to wait. For Labour, things can only get better.

ALL VERY …

There are elections in the UK on May 5th. As usual, some (but not all) local councils in England will be contested but this year there are other far-reaching ballots: for the whole of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, plus a referendum across the UK on the voting system for the Westminster parliament, to which members are elected from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland as well as England.

The referendum issue concerns whether to change from the present First Past the Post system (FPTP) to an Alternative Vote system (AV). FPTP is beguilingly simple. The candidate with the largest total of votes in the constituency is declared the winner. It makes no never mind if that candidate’s majority over the runner-up is just one vote, or if the percentage of the total votes cast that is gained by the winner is lower than – even, considerably lower than – 50 percent.



There are several possible alternative ways of awarding and counting the votes on the ballot paper but the one the electorate is being offered as an alternative to FPTP works like this. If the voter wishes to do so – and it wouldn’t be compulsory as it is, for instance, in Australia – she may write a number 1 (instead of the traditional X) against the candidate she most favours to be the MP, a 2 against the candidate among the rest whom she least abominates and so on for as far down the ballot paper as she can stomach.

When the ballot papers are checked, all the number 1 scores (plus the Xs) are added up. If one candidate has scored more than 50 percent, that is the result. In the – more usual – event of no candidate reaching half of the vote, the candidate with the lowest first preference votes is eliminated but the second preference votes on the ballots that put him first are added to the other candidates’ totals as if they were also first preference votes. In other words, from the second count onwards, second, third and so on votes on the eliminated papers have the same weight as first preference. When the result of this topping-up of votes pushes one of the candidates over 50 percent, that candidate is declared the winner. As will be apparent, this might not be the candidate who led the field at the first count.

Movie director Agnès Varda

This referendum is the Liberal Democrats’ main – some would say only – fig leaf with which to cover their shame at propping up a coalition government implementing policies almost all of which the Lib Dems opposed at the general election last year. The party has been complaining for decades that FPTP is “unfair”, that it denies them representation in the Commons commensurate with the level of votes that they receive in the ballot boxes. What they have long proposed is a more elaborate version of AV – known as AV-plus – which weights the transferred votes rather than simply counting them as equal with first preference votes.

In the dying days of his government, Gordon Brown suddenly became a convert to electoral reform, seeing it as a carrot for the Lib Dems in the event of a hung parliament, whereby the two supposedly left-of-centre parties might find an accommodation. What he proposed was AV.

Television actor Anthony Valentine

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who personally had a famously good election campaign (how long ago the mantra “I agree with Nick” now seems), was scathing. Just a fortnight before the general election, he told The Independent: “AV is a baby step in the right direction – only because nothing can be worse than the status quo. If we want to change British politics once and for all, we have got to have a quite simple system in which everyone's votes count. We think AV-plus is a feasible way to proceed. At least it is proportional – and it retains a constituency link. The Labour Party assumes that changes to the electoral system are like crumbs for the Liberal Democrats from the Labour table. I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour Party”.

Instead, of course, he has settled for the same miserable little compromise but thrashed out by the Conservative Party. He has had to go with a referendum on AV, not AV-plus, and if he loses it his party will be on what might prove to be a terminal warpath.

Cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov

Both the coalition and the opposition have agreed to allow the campaign to be a matter of conscience for individual MPs. David Cameron is opposed to AV as are William Hague, Ken Clarke, John Redwood, Margaret Beckett, Malcolm Rifkind, Keith Vaz, Caroline Flint, Michael Fallon, Dennis Skinner and the BNP among others. Ed Miliband is in favour, as are Douglas Alexander, Sadiq Khan, Hilary Benn, John Denham, Jon Cruddas, Alex Salmond and UKIP. It is pretty hard to find a high profile Tory in favour. That very fact might boost the vote for AV.

Ed Miliband’s support for AV is understandable. Last summer’s Labour leadership election was conducted under an AV-plus system. Second preference votes were successively transferred until one candidate topped 50 percent. That candidate was Miliband. His brother David led every round of voting until the last one that clinched it for Ed. What’s more, the votes were divided into three “colleges” – MPs, party members organised by constituency and unions. It was the vote of the unions that made the difference for Ed in his narrow victory. Many Labour members believe that a truer measure of party sentiment would have elected David rather than Ed. Happily for Ed – and indeed for Labour – those members have largely suppressed that belief though it will undoubtedly resurface if Ed’s leadership hits trouble. Still, it may not be entirely surprising that the largest concentration of pro-AV sentiment in the Commons resides in the shadow cabinet.

Arthur Vickers VC

The Electoral Reform Society has put out several leaflets and set out the case for AV on its website. Having read the material, I find that it has propelled me pretty firmly into the No camp, which is not at all what the ERS wanted. But so many of its arguments are bankrupt or plain stupid. “All too often” it says “the ‘winners’ in our FPTP elections are opposed by a majority of voters. AV addresses that fundamental problem ensuring that an election winner has genuine support”.

It’s absurd to suggest that FPTP winners don’t enjoy “genuine” support. How else would they manage to amass more votes than any other single candidate in the first place? And it’s no less ridiculous to propose that AV “addresses” the “problem” that such winners “are opposed by a majority of voters”. AV is only a different method of reading the result of the vote. It still produces a winner. If I want Labour to win the seat where I vote and Labour comes last (as it traditionally does in our constituency), how have I gained anything under AV? I still don’t get the MP I want. So the ERS is fantasising when it declares that “AV would remove the frustration many voters feel that they currently have no vote at all”.

Movie star Alida Valli

AV might provide more data from which its apologists could argue that the winner in some mysterious way enjoys “majority” support but as FPTP doesn’t furnish such data about voters it cannot be assumed that every vote not cast would have been a vote registering more or less support. (The ERS claims that FPTP is “taken as a statement of equal contempt for all the other [candidates]” to which I would reply “only by you is it taken that way”.)

What’s more, the proportion of the ballot papers still eligible to be counted might well be considerably below 50 percent by the time of the final run-off between the two surviving candidates so to characterise the eventual winner as recording more than 50 percent of the vote would be utterly misleading because the size of the vote still being counted will have shrunk. At the same time, the winner under AV will win on a figure consisting of many votes that have been counted several times. The voter who happens to have voted in an order of preference precisely the reverse of the majority will find each one of her votes being added to a candidate’s total.

The ERS claims that AV removes the need for “tactical voting” which traditionally means, for example (as I have done in the past) voting Lib Dem because, though I would most like Labour to win, I would least like the Tories to win. But bestowing second and third (and maybe more) preference votes is also tactical voting – indeed, it is more complex, ticklish and unpredictable tactical voting.

This Derbyshire constituency can sell the AV campaign: it's Amber Valley

The No campaign has used some water-muddying arguments of its own, claiming for instance that voting under AV requires “higher maths”. Mind you, this is less far-fetched than this ERS proposal, that “the logic’s familiar enough to anyone who’s ever asked a friend to pop down to the shops for a coke and said ‘if they’re out of that I’ll have a lemonade’.” In fact an AV ballot paper would, by that sort of analogy, require the instruction to continue “ … or a Tizer or an Irn-bru – though don’t get a lemonade if they’ve got an Irn-bru, but I’d rather have a lemonade than a Tizer, although thinking about I’d rather have an Irn-bru than a coke unless they’ve got Pepsi. But what I really want is a pork pie. Perhaps I’d better come with you”.

The one thing the ERS can hope that no one will dispute is its asseveration that “voters are tired of Punch and Judy politics”. Fair enough. But who imagines for a single second that AV will consign such ding-dongs to history? Get real.

I have studied the ERS FAQs leaflet but can find no answer to this question. Let’s say that there are five candidates in my constituency at the next general election. I’ll call them Bevan, Grimond, Pankhurst, Stalin and Thatcher. And let’s say that I number my votes in the same order in which they appear alphabetically on the ballot, so Bevan gets my ‘1’ and Thatcher gets my ‘5’. Now, suppose Bevan comes bottom of the poll and is eliminated. In the next count, my vote will be transferred to Grimond. But suppose Grimond goes out in the second count. Will my third vote he given to Pankhurst or is my ballot paper now exhausted? And say instead Grimond goes out in the first round and then Bevan in the second. Does my third place Pankhurst vote still count then too and is it the equal of someone else’s first vote for Pankhurst? If I award only two votes, first for Bevan and second for Thatcher and Bevan goes out on the first count and Thatcher survives to the run off with Stalin, will my Thatcher vote count in the second, the third and the final counts, so counting three times whereas my Bevan vote only counted once, even though he was my favourite? How is this a more just system?

In narrow party political terms, it looks as though the referendum result will be bad for the coalition whichever it is. A No win will cut off at the knees Lib Dem support for continuing the coalition. This was the prize for which they agreed to share power and they haven’t won it. A Yes win will hugely irritate the Tory backbenches, many of whom fear that they are in danger of losing their seats under AV – the Lib Dems still come second in far more Tory-held seats than in Labour-held ones. They will grumble that Cameron didn’t do enough to ensure a No victory and that the Yes win implies that Ed Miliband is making big inroads into Cameron’s wavering personal popularity. So either way, the referendum can be an own-goal for the government. Maybe on my referendum ballot paper I shall put a 1 by No and a 2 by Yes.

OLD and SAD

I offer a few thoughts on the Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election, which Labour held with 14,718 votes (42.1%) against the Lib Dems with 11,160 (31.9%) and the Tories on 4,481 (12.8%). Phil Woolas’ narrow win at the general election – by 103 votes – was nullified by the court to which defeated Liberal Democrat Elwyn Watkins appealed, alleging that a Labour leaflet libelled him. Many were surprised at the court’s finding but an appeal by Woolas was denied so he faced the inevitable and stepped down.

The by-election was therefore precipitated by the Lib Dems to whom it fell to move the writ, They cannot complain if the actual timing of the vote – in the week that VAT went up – did them no favour. Elwyn Watkins, who told everyone prepared to listen that he funded his action against Woolas himself, has nothing to show for it.

Elwyn Watkins, no more an MP than is Phil Woolas

Labour have enjoyed their win but resisted the temptation to big it up. Andy Burnham’s cautiousness – “it would be wrong to read too much into it” – has been echoed generally. This is wise. Like Barack Obama, Ed Miliband has elected to play a long game and to ride out squalls and party impatience along the way. That The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail have both steadily ratcheted up their criticism of Miliband until it has fallen little short of vitriol demonstrates that their proprietors take him seriously and fear that he will indeed be Prime Minister in, at worst, four and a half years.

Miliband’s cool evidently comes naturally to him. Douglas Alexander (who ran the leadership campaign of Miliband’s brother David) has said that equanimity is Ed’s great quality, that after a (for Labour) triumphant Prime Minister’s Questions Ed is the least excited person in the room and after a rough ride at PMQs Ed is the least disheartened. It seems to me that this is a great strength.

Debbie Abrahams, Labour's new Oldham MP – or is it Lily Tomlin?

As always with by-elections, the losing parties are putting out as constructive an account of it as they can. Lib Dems loudly point out that their vote was actually higher than at the general election (by less than one per cent) on a rather smaller turnout and that predictions of meltdown (evidence for such predictions being thin on the ground) were wide of the mark. It’s clearly the case that Watkins was boosted by tactical voting among regular Tory voters. But it’s also evident that hitherto soft voters for both the Tories and the Lib Dems moved right over to Labour, which had a higher vote than at the 1997 general election (within a slightly different constituency boundary).

It has been widely alleged that the Conservative campaign was deliberately low-key in order to help the Lib Dem. Tory spokespeople uniformly refute this. That must mean, then, that the combative and ambitious campaign that they say they conducted was an arrant failure. They can hardly have it both ways. Tories rationalise it by pointing out that they were “always” third in this seat and that by-elections characteristically squeeze third parties. If so, they would be better to argue that they soft-pedalled the election because they expected to be squeezed, thereby more credibly acknowledging what so many asseverate, that for all the cabinet member visits to the constituency (not least that of David Cameron) they were not exactly fighting to win.

Miliband: something to chortle about

Both sides of the coalition also blame the result on the policies that they are obliged to pursue because, as they aver every day, Labour left the country’s finances in such a mess. The argument that it is all Labour’s fault has evidently had some traction and Labour have not countered it as angrily and persuasively as they might. But if the electorate were persuaded that the government is indeed following the best policies for dealing with the national deficit, they would not be voting against the coalition. If the government’s theory that the populace must bear some “pain” for the economy to be brought round were accepted by the populace, the coalition would not be lagging in the opinion polls. In reality, Miliband’s pressure on the issue of city bonuses is touching a nerve in the electorate, who begin to remember phrases like “the Tories’ friends in the city” and see no evidence that George Osborne’s mantra that “we are all in this together” bears any resemblance to actual government policies which, they perceive, hit the most vulnerable and the least Tory-supporting the hardest. My prediction is that Labour will keep their opinion poll lead for a very long time, perhaps through the next general election.

By the by, the next by-election will be at Barnsley Central where Eric Illsley has stepped down after admitting illegality in his expenses claims. Labour will certainly retain the seat but it will be fascinating to see how the Tories and the Lib Dems play that contest. At the general election, the Lib Dems came second, the Tories third. The margin between them was just six votes ...

STUDY in DEBT

My own university studies, taken up in the late 1960s, were not wholly a gift from the nation. My generation received student grants but these were means-tested and my father, being relatively comfortable, was obliged to contribute financially to the cost of my further education. Bless him, he never troubled me with knowing at what level he continued to subsidise me even as, for a while, it ominously appeared that I might be turning into what was known as “an eternal student”.

Another tag that attached itself to our generation was that we were “the children of Robbins”. The 1963 report delivered to the government by the committee chaired by Lord Robbins recommended an extensive expansion of higher education and enunciated the principal that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment”. The then government embraced the Robbins Report in its entirety. This was, incidentally, a Tory government; Sir Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Minister just a week before the incumbent Education Secretary, whose services Home had retained, accepted Robbins. He was Sir Edward Boyle, by a wide margin the most liberal education minister the Tories have ever fielded.

Lionel Robbins: our Daddy

Another quotation evokes the climate in which my baby boomer generation grew up, a most delicate and fastidious line that appeared frequently on notices in shops: “Please do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends”. There were no credit cards in those days and only the most disreputable elements in society asked for anything “on terms” or, in the vernacular, “on tick”. To buy furniture and other large items by hire purchase – in other words, on an instalment plan – was thought to betray a low class mentality. Respectable people “paid their way”.

Sir Edward Boyle, more liberal than Vince Cable

The arrival of the Diners’ Club card, then American Express, then Visa and Access and Mastercard transformed all that. Nowadays you’re thought a fool to pay in cash, chequebooks are being phased out and people think nothing of causing a queue to build up at the checkout because they’re waiting for the PIN to go through to pay for a carton of milk on credit.

The mindset that believes that the only way higher education can be financed is on tick and that students should be happy to graduate with substantial burdens of debt built into their futures – futures in which the housing ladder will anyway be out of reach for decades and no pension schemes will take care of them before they are at least 80 – is utterly alien to my generation. “Live now, pay later” was a dreadful warning for us when we were young. “Study now, pay later” is an obligation to any present school pupil hoping to pursue her studies.

You might imagine that the political generation who have lived with the recession that began in 2008 – which originated, you recall, in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that caused the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the States – would be scrupulously cautious about resorting to credit as a tool of governmental policy. As always, lessons are only learnt when it suits. Universities are expensive and need to be paid for. What better way than to load the cost onto those who, in the crudest terms, benefit most? This is not a party political question. Labour introduced tuition fees. Politicians of all colours are mired in this mess.

The point is made that, for the sake of argument, a welder should not be obliged to stump up for some middle class kiddie sitting on his arse for three years pretending to read media studies. Put like that – in that highly reductive manner – it sounds like a bloody outrage. But we all pay for stuff that does not obviously benefit us. I have no children but I finance general education from nursery to present graduation level. I don’t drive a car, but I pay for roads and – you could say that roads benefit me, though a non-driver, in myriad ways, but you’d be hard put to argue that I derive much benefit from this provision – parking lots. I don’t support – indeed I vehemently oppose – the UK breaching the sovereignty of other nations, but I am still obliged to finance the Afghan War, as I was to pay for the invasion of Iraq. I don’t especially relish funding bankers’ bonuses, Trident, the Olympics, Trooping the Colour or Strictly Come Dancing, but I am not invited to vote on specific disbursements of public funds.

Nick Clegg in his subsidised Ziggy Stardust phase

Moreover, it is extremely narrow to propose that degrees in objective and scientific disciplines are the only ones to bring benefit to the whole of society. I am as disdainful as you are about some of the modern study areas that seem – on the face of it and without our troubling to go into it – indulgent and unprofitable. But whichever way you cut it, the more educated the populace – the electorate – the better.

In broad terms, an extension of general educational attainment benefits the whole of society. To fix such educational attainment in public philosophy as a privilege that must be paid for far into the future by its agents is a destructive and reductive argument. You want your doctor, your solicitor, your children’s teacher, your accountant, your chief constable, your MP, your poet, your philosopher and the maker of your television programmes to be competent and to deliver the goods. So you benefit if they are fully educated. That’s not a bad investment for society to make on your behalf.

The government argues that the deficit requires all to make sacrifices. It’s a seductive but also a reductive argument. Government is a process of choice. Economic policy is not shaped by what is affordable but by what is chosen. I would argue that foreign wars are not affordable. I maintain that everyone knows that the Taliban will take over in Afghanistan within six months at the most of NATO’s withdrawal and therefore that every day further spent in a country that, as history shows, will not yield to foreign invasion is a day – and the lives sacrificed on that day – wasted. But this government, like its predecessors, professes to imagine that building up resentment against ourselves across the Muslim world somehow guarantees the safety of our own streets. So the government chooses to spend money on waging futile war rather than on college provision or any other pressing matter at home. As I put it, they prefer to destroy livelihoods at home so that they can continue to destroy lives abroad.

Vince Cable as a student Macbeth: "Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,/Loyal and neutral in a moment? No man"

And then there is the Lib Dem dilemma. The argument is advanced that the Liberal Democrats have to be "realistic" over tuition fees because they are partaking in a coalition government. I would rather propose that, in making their solemn pledge over tuition fees during the election campaign, the Lib Dems were then being far from realistic. In what circumstance did they anticipate forming a government other than within a coalition? How far – if at all – did they plan for an accommodation in practice with either Labour or the Tories? They sprinkled undertakings like confetti because they did not imagine that they would ever be called upon them. Now, in the harsh glare of administration, the chickens have begun to come home to roost.

So I suggest that the cynicism demonstrated by Nick Clegg and his team resides not so much in the stance on tuition fees that they have taken in government but in the stance that they adopted in opposition. There is a warning here for Ed Miliband and he has shown some realism in resisting the temptation to pledge that a Labour government will repeal the government's measures. It probably won’t do him any immediate electoral good because people are, even now, susceptible to the promises of politicians. But it’s a shrewd move.

Nick Clegg well cast as a supremely arrogant student

There can be little doubt that the Lib Dems will, in the fullness of time, be punished at the ballot box for their antics on this issue. By a quirk of governmental dispensation, it fell to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, to execute the government’s policy on tuition fees. Cable’s own humming and hahing this last week about how he might vote has made him look a fool. Nick Clegg as deputy PM and Lib Dem leader has been the lightning rod for the students’ righteous anger. Both of them have been badly wounded by this episode. It’s hard to find much sympathy. We all recall Cable’s lethal thrust, when acting Lib Dem leader, against Gordon Brown at PMQ’s when he noted “the remarkable transformation of the Prime Minister from Stalin to Mr Bean”. This is not yet the moment, but I have readied a letter to The Guardian noting the remarkable transformation of the Business Secretary – whom David Cameron introduced to his new department as “an absolute star” – “from absolute star-turn to Mr Has-Been”.

PARTY HARMANY

I find it hard to squeeze out many tears for the fate of Phil Woolas. The erstwhile MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth has been barred from elective public office for three years at a court hearing and banished to political outer darkness for rather longer than three years by the Labour leadership.

Woolas has always struck me as a chancer, not someone whom I would admit to my confidence. His offence during the election was, the court found, to have promulgated in his election literature an untruth about the campaign of his nearest rival, Elwyn Watkins, the Liberal Democrat candidate. Given that the Lib Dem was beaten by only 103 votes (there must have been a few recounts), it’s hardly surprising that Watkins should seek to overturn the result by other means.

Phil Woolas: if I pull my right ear, it means I'm fibbing

The complaint is that Woolas accused Watkins of “wooing Islamist extremists” in the constituency. As immigration minister in the outgoing government, Woolas ought to have been able to be relied upon to raise such an issue with authority and sensitivity. He cannot have helped his case at the election court by conceding that the disputed leaflet “sailed very close to the wind”.

What the leaflet (reproduced below) actually says is this: “Extremists are trying to hijack this election. They want you to vote Lib Dem to punish Phil for being strong on immigration. The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay. It is up to you. Do you want the extremists to win?”

The leaflet that did for Phil

It rather depends on where you are coming from whether you find this archetypally robust knock-about of the kind that occurs in elections or in one way or another unacceptable. The case has certainly raised a number of issues. The first is that of Islamophobia. Two days before the general election, the Lib Dem leader of Oldham Council lodged a complaint before the Equality and Human Rights Commission against the leaflet: “I believe that this type of inflammatory literature is incredibly detrimental to community relations and promoting equality” he wrote.

The Oldham Labour party’s conflation of immigration and extremism was certainly inflammatory and it seemed to yank a perfectly understandable nervousness in the community towards radical Islam into a much less sympathetic pitch – “strong on immigration” – that hardly differs from that of the BNP. But whether that constitutes an offence under the Representation of the People Act seems to me to be highly moot.

It’s perfectly legitimate to debate Islam and its acceptability or otherwise as a force in British society. Political leaders generally have allowed themselves to be persuaded that such discussion is somehow off-limits, both because it might suggest that one might be racist and because the Muslim vote is critical in several constituencies, usually Labour ones. In my view, politicians need to be a bit more grown-up and a bit braver in stating what they think. After all, Muslims living in Britain are considerably freer to pursue their superstitions than are non-Muslims in countries where Islam furnishes the government.

An earlier moment of Woolas fame, when bearded by Joanna Lumley (that look!) over the Gurkhas

Islamophobia – if that is indeed what is involved in this particular matter – does not derive from the same kind of perception as xenophobia. To put it in a nutshell, I would suggest that xenophobia is a response a priori and Islamophobia a posteriori. In the last week, a fanatical Islamist woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to knife to death her constituency MP, Stephen Timms, like Woolas a minister in the outgoing government. Her rationale was that Timms had voted for the invasion of Iraq. So did hundreds of other MPs. Many more vote frequently on social and other issues in ways that would put them at odds with radical Islam. There is cause for concern here in a way quite different from generalised xenophobic rantings against an imagined “flood” of immigrants.

At the same time, it was widely commented during the election campaign that all the major parties were running away from immigration as an issue and refusing to debate it. As part of the post mortem discussions in all the parties – and especially in Labour – there was wide acknowledgment that the issue ought to have been addressed more thoroughly. Woolas might not have been actually discussing it in his literature but he certainly wasn’t ignoring it.

The Labour leadership has taken an impulsive and heedless line on Woolas, one that suggests a number of knee-jerk reactions based on fear: fear of being thought Islamophobic; fear of being thought soft on party transgressors; fear of a run of abuse from the media. By the Labour leadership, I mean just now Harriet Harman, who is acting leader in Ed Miliband’s absence on paternity leave (though she will doubtless have cleared her line with him). Her line, in short, is that Woolas has been hung out to dry.

Harriet Harman tells Andrew Marr what a good egg Phil Woolas is (not)

The parliamentary party gave Harman a rough ride at its meeting on Monday night. She was accused of pre-empting the final outcome of the case – Woolas is attempting to appeal the court’s decision and must raise £50,000 to pay his legal fees because Labour will no longer support him – and pandering to supposed public opinion which is probably misinformed. What’s more, beyond the Labour party, thoughtful members on the government benches have publicly wondered what restrictions are now likely to be deemed necessary in election literature and whether this doesn’t set a damagingly restrictive precedent.

As it happens, no party has been more often accused of conducting dirty campaigns than the Liberal Democrats. At the May 6th general election, I decided not to vote for our local Lib Dem candidate because he had made a wholly mendacious and unjustified charge against the Tory candidate and refused to withdraw; instead I cast my vote (vain in this Lib Dem/Tory marginal constituency) for the Labour candidate.

Politicians libel each other all the time; it’s part of the game. But the Woolas case has changed the rules. He is the first MP since 1911 to be barred from the Commons by court order. MPs across the house say that it should be for the electorate, not the courts to decide who sits in parliament. They have a point.

Furthermore, there is a dark suspicion that the Labour leadership feel confident about a by-election in a Labour marginal just now, especially one where the challenger is a Lib Dem. They reckon that aggrieved Mr Watkins will end up as toast, after having had to defend the policy reversals that his party have made since the election against a Labour favourite parachuted in for the occasion. (You may stake folding money on it that Oldham East and Saddleworth Labour Party will not get to select a candidate without firm direction from Central Office).

La Lumley reflects sadly on her little friend's fate in her own special way

The Lib Dems have certainly handed Labour a good case, what with comprehensively reneging on their highly trumpeted pledge to oppose any rise in university tuition fees and their broad support for a manifestly unfair assault on the unemployed and those claiming sickness benefit. What is the point of Lib Dems being in the coalition if they cannot effect as rigorous a squeeze on the tax-shy as their Tory partners are applying to the alleged “work-shy”?

The other ingredient in Harman’s position reiterates the spineless stance that all the parties have continually taken over the matter of MPs’ expenses. There is little doubt that the rules were confused and poorly enforced. MPs clearly ought to have sought to uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the regulations.

But the media embraces many much larger snouts that are forever in the trough and ministers and shadow ministers ought to have had the gumption to point this out. Fiddling exes and taking backhanders is no less egregious just because it occurs in the private rather than the public sector. On the contrary, successive Tory and Labour leaderships have bent over backwards and forwards to do the bidding of billionaire media owners, Rupert Murdoch in particular. Harman probably feared that The Times, The Sun and the Daily Mail would have kept up a daily barrage, had she waited to see whether Woolas won his court case. Well, sometimes leadership means stiffening your resolve against the daily slings and arrows in pursuit of the more just cause, even if the upshot takes time. The Woolas case, unattractive though its protagonist might be, is one of those occasions.

The MOST UNKINDEST CUTS of ALL

Now at last we know what the government intends for us and what its philosophy is: we’re all in it together but those already least likely to vote for the coalition are a whole lot deeper in it than the rest. George Osborne’s unleashing of toxic sludge into Britain’s hitherto relatively secure communities has been cunningly contrived. He and his fellow ministers, Tories and Lib Dems alike, have been assiduously softening up the ground by repeatedly attacking supposed benefit scroungers, blaming Labour for “the mess” and trotting out Margaret Thatcher’s trusty TINA mantra (“there is no alternative”). So far, the softening up appears to have achieved the desired effect. Public opinion polls – of which I am ever sceptical – suggest that these spins have been widely believed. Whether a majority will swallow the toxic sludge remains to be seen.

I earlier wrote at length about Osborne’s attack on those who, in his phrase, make “a life-style choice” of living on benefit (‘Lifestyles of the Poor and Infamous’ September 11th below). The Labour blame-game is readily scotched: this has been a global recession (remember?) and. while Gordon Brown was arguably a tad premature in claiming to have “saved the world” (rather than, as he clearly meant, “the pound”), the Labour government led the way in addressing the global recession (oh yes, read the far-seeing American economists Paul Klugman and Joseph Stiglitz, both Nobel laureates).

As for there being no alterative, some excellent analyses lately have put the lie to that: see http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Countering-the-cuts-myths and www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/17/finances-cuts-public-services-welfare
I would add that it’s critical to bear in mind that there are always alternatives, that politics is about what Rab Butler called “the art of the possible” but that possibilities are virtually endless. Economic policy is never about what is baldly affordable and always about what the government intends to do. Economic policy is never about inescapability. It is about free choice. To dress up choice as unavoidable is to tell bare-faced lies.

Another cynical but crafty stroke has been to contrive it that agencies other than the Treasury are obliged to wield the axe and so – in theory, at least – take the blame. The headline on a piece in today’s Guardian puts it admirably succinctly: “Outsourced: town halls must do Osborne’s dirty work”. Local councils across the land have been told they must make spending cuts of 26 percent before the next general election. Those of us who remember living through rate caps, the poll tax and the general decline of local services following Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979 will know that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 100,000 jobs in the gift of local authorities – one in ten of the work force – are expected to be lost. Neighbourhood services, already indiscernible in many areas, are to be squeezed further.

The poor rely on local provision proportionately much more heavily than do the comfortably off. The same is true of public transport. Rail fares will rise by 5.8 percent in January but will have risen by fully 30 percent by January 2015. Over the same period, a 20 percent cut in bus fuel subsidy will force up fares well above inflation. London tube fares, partially announced yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson with a fine disregard for candour, will rise, it emerged today, by as much as 16 percent. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997, bus and coach fares have risen 24 percent above inflation, whereas overall motoring costs have fallen 14 percent in real terms. Ministers in their chauffeur-driven cars – which they still enjoy despite loose talk of such provision being surrendered shortly after the general election – have no sense of what travelling by bus, tube or even train is like, nor of how punishing those who depend on such transport find the fares and the daily travelling conditions.

In savaging the welfare state, on top of the squeezing of local authorities, public transport, legal aid, police protection and social housing, the government has very deliberately targeted those least able to fight back. Those areas where social deprivation is most widespread are not in Tory-held or even in Lib Dem-held constituencies. There is no recent tradition of the poor and vulnerable marching in protest and even if vast crowds of the disabled and the elderly take to the streets (and I hope they will, if only to enjoy the feeling that they have made their anger clear), the government will grit its teeth through the shaming spectacle. If trade unionists and students march, Cameron will easily shrug it off as “rent-a-crowd trouble-makers”. After all, the Blair government didn’t turn a hair at the rallies against the invasion of Iraq and in favour of fox-hunting.

Meanwhile, it’s striking that those traditionally termed “the Tories’ friends in the City” were broadly supportive of the spending review. Well, of course they were. Their enormous pay packets and even more outrageous bonuses will continue. Osborne’s weasel words on this matter are that he is going to “extract the maximum sustainable tax revenues from financial services”. This is spin-speak for his intention to do nothing that might discourage the spivs and shysters from staying in town. While they can make a fancy living at the expense of everyone else, they will stay. Once the attractions of some other centre where the gap between rich and poor is even more grotesque – Hong Kong, for instance – become irresistible, they will be off. Obviously Osborne would rather lose the 40,000 teachers and the 6,500 currently employed through the Home Office (including police and customs officials) who will shortly be applying for job-seeker’s allowance than any of his dinner table giests.

Osborne’s flourished “bank levy” will raise, by his account, £2.5bn. It sounds a lot but let’s just see it in the larger picture. It’s approximately three percent of the total spending cuts. And it’s less than 0.1 percent of bank profits. So, not too hard a knock, then. There’ll be the odd arbitrageur who will momentarily consider moth-balling the smaller private helicopter (the one the wife uses) but then decide anyway to tough it out till the gloom lifts. Poor sod.

There has been one more aspect of the government’s treacherous manipulation of policy disclosure: the contrivance of sudden switches of tack disguised as panic and/or incompetence and/or supposedly admirable reaction to public opinion but in reality a back-door method of forcing its intention through while people are looking the other way.

A fine example was the outrageous and vindictive eleventh-hour slashing of the BBC's budget by 16 percent. In the cold light of day, this vicious assault should be met by an equally combative response from the Corporation. I propose that it should both follow the logic of the government's philosophy on public provision and neatly reflect the cut's equivalence of the cost of the national radio stations. The BBC should announce that it will withdraw entirely its provision of radio services.

This makes good economic sense. The wireless is provided without charge. It generates negligible income. In the present climate, the BBC needs to maintain those of its enterprises that are capable of making money. And given that the government has reneged on its expressed commitment to avoid top-slicing – it has newly imposed the cost of the World Service and the funding of S4C onto the BBC's budget, but denied the BBC any editorial say in the Welsh service's output – it cannot be doubted that other public service burdens will be off-loaded onto the Corporation in future.

It will be a long time before commercial radio is able to offer any sort of replacement for what the BBC has built up over almost ninety years. Ministers would find themselves contemplating the loss of Today, The World at One and other platforms with dismay. And BBC Radio's constituency is fierce and loyal. It would rise up in fury. This is the kind of issue that decides significant numbers of voting intentions. The government would be forced to reopen negotiations.

It might be objected that the BBC is obliged by its founding charter to provide a full national service of wireless transmissions. In fact, the BBC’s charter is a surprisingly unprescriptive document, its provisions hung about with the reiterated proviso “for the time being”. In any case, ITV was also set up by charter – a much more rigorous set of provisions than those that obtained for the BBC – but it will be noted that the original infrastructure of a federation of locally-based franchises has been entirely overthrown without any executive order, legislative enactment or other kind of government intervention.

The BBC, the Labour Party and everyone else hit by these cuts – in other words, almost everyone aside from the superrich – need to gird up and fight this vindictive, ideological government. There are plenty of alternatives. Even unthinkable ones may come into play.