May 20, 2010
Why Ed Balls should not be Labour leader #1
Ellie Gellard thinks Ed Balls should be Labour leader. Her piece mostly operates at the level of vague gestures about “fairness” and something called “progressive universalism” (whatever the hell that is), and seems to think that Ed Balls should be leader mostly because he has “fire in his belly”.
I can’t comment on the bowel troubles which may or may not affect Mr Balls, but I can comment on why he shouldn’t be Labour leader.
Ellie notes that Balls is hated by the right-wing media. She somewhat bizarrely infers that this is because the right is afraid of him and his Grand Progressive Crusade. Which, let’s recall, included being Gordon Brown’s right-hand-man when it came to lightening the light-touch of City regulation in the early days, and pushing through the 10p tax reform later on.
I have an alternative hypothesis about Balls: that he comes across as a repulsive character, regardless of right-wing media glare. Put it this way: when someone like my dad – an instinctive left-wing voter, but deeply disillusioned with the Blair/Brown project – says to me “anybody but Balls, he’s bloody awful”, that’s something to take seriously. It’s not just that the right-wing media (of which my dad reads and watches none) don’t like Balls. It’s that he comes across like a slimy, self-satisfied, mendacious and slippery political manipulator. And the main reason for this, I think, is that whenever you see Balls on TV he looks like he’s sneering.
I don’t think he intends to look like he’s sneering. I think that’s just the way his face is stuck (although maybe there’s some deep Freudian causality we should postulate). But in a TV era, this sort of thing really matters. The Labour Party will not succeed if it is led by a man who constantly looks like he’s sneering at the electorate.
This may seem a petty analysis; “why not focus on E-Balls’ substance?” his apologists may cry. Well, aside from the fact that he doesn’t appear to have any that is desirable, the answer is: because politics is petty, and voters are fickle. Live with that, and adapt accordingly.
Bad Conscience is yet to endorse any single candidate, but it does at this stage have a clear message: No to Balls.
Case Study
I’ve written a fair few blog posts about how difficult a concept democracy is. In particular, I’ve drawn attention to the fact that “democracy” does not ensure all values harmonise, and is not a panacea for soothing all conflict and disturbance. It’s therefore worth noting the situation in Thailand, which has been climbing up the UK news agenda as the death toll grows.
I’m no expert on Thai society or history (by a very long way), but the basics of the situation are illuminating. The troubles centre roughly around two groups, the Red Shirts and the Yellow Shirts. The former are mostly made up of the urban and rural poor, whereas the latter are more closely aligned with the professional classes and better-off urban “elites”.
Digging a little deeper, in 2006 the democratically elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted and sent into exile following a military coup led and supported by the Bangkok elites that distrusted and loathed him for his policies of mobilising support amongst the urban and rural poor. However we must not wear rose tinted spectacles; allegations of corruption and human rights abuses have dogged Shinawatra for many years, most notably when he briefly owned Manchester City football club.
In 2008 however, the the People’s Power Party led by Samak Sundaravej, and which Shinawatra supported, won the post-coup elections. Despite forming a coalition government the PPP was eventually ousted from power after so-called the Yellow Shirts organised mass sit-in protests at Thai airports (effectively shutting-down travel into a country highly economically dependent upon tourism). The Thai Supreme Court eventually backed the Yellow Shirts, declared Sundaravej guilty of conflict of interest, forcing his resignation as PPP leader. The party itself was then declared to have committed electoral fraud, and Thai law in turn rendered the party illegal. Charges were continued against Shinawatra for corruption, of which he was found guilty in absentia and sentenced to two years in jail. He has now obtained Montenegrin citizenship, but is alleged to be bankrolling the Red Shirt protestors, who are calling for his return.
Trouble has, accordingly, been brewing for the past two years and has boiled over into the recent bloodshed. What’s illuminating about the case is the extent to which despite having democratic institutions in place, as well as the second-fastest growing economy in South East Asia, Thailand has descended into violence not because of a lack of democracy but precisely because there is democratic formality without the underlying mores, or ethos, required to make those institutions function successfully.
To usefully caricature and over-simplify, the situation is roughly as follows: the Yellow Shirts and Bangkok urban elites saw the Thaksin premiership, and his threatened return with the 2008 election win, as unacceptable. Despite a democratic mandate for the Red Shirts, the Yellow Shirts and their string-pullers lack the basic commitment to a fundamental principle of working democracy: that you accept losses and time out of power on the assurance both that this will not harm your interests too extensively, and that in a relatively short period you will have a fair chance of winning power back.
To be sure, it seems the policies and practices of the Shinawatra regime made it very difficult for the Yellow Shirts to adopt this basic democratic norm. But for whatever reasons, the lack of this basic norm led to a military coup in 2006 and a mass protest that led to the ousting of a democratically elected regime in 2008. On the other side, the Red Shirts are increasingly estranged from a democratic system which they will see as vacuous given that power is denied them even when they win at the ballot box. A turn to violent confrontation is therefore hardly surprising.
What political scientists have observed in so-called “transitional democracies” is that it usually takes 4 or 5 “cycles” of government before such democratic norms are established. That once both sides have experienced power and opposition without violence or serious damage to their interest, they tend to settle down into accepting the democratic trade-off as a decent way to pursue politics, and furthermore become attached to the system and seek to work within it rather than outside of it. When countries achieve these sorts of basic democratic norms they tend to become politically stable. Hence, for example, following the disputed 2000 election in the USA supporters of Gore and Bush did not take violently to the streets of Florida because a deep-seated acceptance of democratic institutions and power-alterations had rendered such courses of action unthinkable and unacceptable, such was the deference to the established constitutional system.
It’s not good enough to simply have democratic institutions; the people working within and living under them need to posses the democratic norms that make those institutions function over time. Acquiring those norms is no simple or straightforward process – as the case of Thailand tragically shows.
May 19, 2010
Sex Work, The State and Respect
As emerged in yesterday’s comments, some national press have reported that government job centres are advertising vacancies for women over 18 to work as sex line operatives, with the possibility of nude webcam roles. Indeed, a spokesperson for the (previous) Department of Work and Pensions admitted:
‘If a vacancy is legal we have to carry it. However, adult entertainment jobs are clearly marked as not suitable for people aged under 18 and are only discussed with people who inquire about them. We are currently consulting on the rules to see how we can tighten them even further.”‘
I think most people would find the offering of sex work (for that is what talking dirty to men on phone lines is) at government Job Centres unacceptable. That women who refuse such work could in turn have their unemployment benefits withdrawn, under planned ever-tougher rules, will strike many as appalling.
It is, however, worth thinking carefully about why we might justifiably react this way. I’ll start off, however, by narrowing my target as I want to keep this blog manageable by zeroing-in on a few particular issues. Specifically, I want to set out some reasons why I think it would be wrong for the state to withdraw benefits from women who turn down work as sex-line operators, leaving aside the larger question of whether these positions should be advertised in the Job Centre at all. My conclusions and reasonings can be extrapolated as you see fit, or not.
Firstly, however, I don’t want to argue – as some do here – that there’s a slippery slope to close off; that women who start off as sex-line operators will fall into full-blown prostitution and see their lives slip out of view. To begin with I think that’s a tenuous argument; I’m sure most women can and will draw their own lines about what they are prepared to do, and are autonomous and self-governing enough to do that without paternal figures benignly watching out for them. But more importantly I don’t want to rely on speculative consequentialist arguments which may or may not obtain in practice. I want to identify what is specifically wrong with withdrawing benefits from women who refuse to work as sex line operators, in itself. Accordingly, I think the action is on the point that working as a sex-line operator is especially and unacceptably degrading and unpleasant on a number of metrics.
Now, some will say that beggars can’t be choosers; that women on the dole should damn-well take whatever they are offered. But I think that’s straightforwardly wrong. The state surely has a responsibility to respect citizens in a fairly thorough-going way, and there are some things it should not ask of them regardless of whether those individuals are the recipients of welfare support. I want to say that sex-line work is the sort of thing that the state cannot push women into doing (by withdrawing their benefits) whilst consistently respecting them as citizens.
Working as a sex-line operator will be found especially unpleasant and degrading to a great many women for a great many reasons. Firstly, sex to most women is an extremely personal and intimate thing. It is not something they want to share – or even discuss – with strangers. Connectedly but more strongly, most women will therefore find the idea of talking to strangers in ways designed to arouse those strangers a masturbatory aid utterly repulsive. Indeed, it will make them feel bad about their work, and bad about themselves as well as making them feel disgusted in a pretty thorough-going way.
Furthermore, many women looking for work will be married or in relationships with men or women they love and care about. Given that sex for most women – and their partners – is an intimate and private thing, the idea of one partner engaging in sexual work will be distressing and hurtful to both. The fact it will be done out of the necessity to make money will only add insult to injury. Even for single women, it is again worth noting that having to undertake this sort of work for the necessity to make money adds an extra dimension of insult, as well as unpleasantness, because it emphasises the dependency and powerlessness of the woman undertaking the work.
Finally, I would also stress the worrying state of affairs whereby the state actively coerces women into pursuing employment that contributes to the general objectivisation of women, caricaturing them as convenience appendages delivering sexual services to paying (and therefore more-powerful) men, and the further detrimental effects (in terms of self-esteem, working pride, etc) of such objectivisation upon the specific women forced into such work. Internet trolls who spend all their lives in mummy’s basement often don’t realise this, but in real life most women do not want to be leered-at and slobbered-over by drooling men, they want to be respected as persons and found attractive in a tasteful manner that remembers they are human beings with feelings, not pieces of meat to be selected and consumed.
Now, I don’t want to deny that there are some women out there who (might) like nothing more than to talk dirty to unknown men cracking one off down the phone. It’s a big world, and it takes all sorts. But firstly let’s be careful about how important the quality of respective choices are and how important context is when making value assesments (i.e. read this post about prostitution and choice). Secondly, let’s also remember that women who want to do sex-line work are not the object of discussion: we’re talking about those who don’t, but are faced with a choice of sex-line work or benefit withdrawal by the state.
At this stage, my opponents have a tired, tested rejoinder to throw: that sex-work may be unpleasant, but then so are lots of others jobs so why should sex-work be treated differently? The favourite supposed counter-example is of being a bin man. That’s a rubbish (s’cuse the pun) and dirty job, but surely nobody’s going to suggest that it should enjoy some privileged status whereby the state doesn’t require people to take the work if it’s offered?
I enjoy this particular rejoinder because it’s illustrative of a multiple myopia. For firstly, being a bin man actually isn’t viewed across society with the same sort of haughty disdain that sex work usually is. A working class friend of mine once pointed out that on the estate where he grew up “doin’ the bins” was a very respectable job: it was regular, honest, and paid OK. There were plenty of worse things you could do, and that many did. The “You wouldn’t want your daughter to be a refuse-collector either, so what’s so special about sex work?” rejoinder therefore misses that prejudice against people who empty bins is likely to be far more class based than usually assumed.
But returning to the issue of sex work, it seems to me overwhelmingly obvious that this falls into a different category of stigmatised employment. To illustrate this most effectively, let’s recall that ours is a society that positively vilifies female sexuality and sexual activity. That’s why we have a powerful array of condemnatory words to throw at women who transgress the sexual mores of female modesty, as well as those we just happen to feel like insulting and hurting. Try: slut, whore, slag, hooker, prosie, slatern, tart, floozy, harlot, hussy, vamp, tramp and so on. (Also note that these insulting words broadly lack equivalent counterparts for the male of the species). There is something especially and thoroughly stigmatised about female sexual profligacy in this society, and as most of those words attest, it is especially stigmatised for women to conjoin sex with money.
But some will at this stage dig-in their heels, denying any qualitative distinction between female sex work and other forms of unpleasant employment. They will claim that we don’t live in a society that vilifies sexually-active women who are paid for their services. That in fact there would be nothing essentially different between little Jenny going to school and saying “my mummy cleans bins” and “my mummy says naughy things to dirty old men whilst they wank themselves off”. Reaching this point, however, I’m reminded of one of my favourite passages of recent(ish) philosophy. It comes in Bernard Williams discussion of certain philosophical manoeuvres made by dogmatic utilitarian thinkers:
“Such arguments may involve some interesting points on the way, but their strategy is shamelessly circular: utilitarian rationality is made the test of what counts as happiness, in order to remove that sort of happiness which constitutes an objection to utilitarianism. All that is needed to counter this at the theoretical level is a suitable unwillingness to be bullied.”
My sense is that, as with Williams’ utilitarians, all that is basically needed to resist those who would deny that sex-line work is a particular – and especially, perhaps even uniquely – degrading form of employment for women is a sufficient unwillingness to be bullied.
For most women, sex-line work will be deeply objectionable in the ways I’ve tried to enumerate above. Furthermore, we should find this utterly unsurprising given that we live in a society that not only promotes the valuation of sex in the lives of healthy functioning adults as something private, intimate and deeply emotional, but which also vilifies and castigates women who break the social rules of female modesty, especially when that involves the receipt of money.
Accordingly, I would say that it is obvious to anyone with a halfway decent attitude towards women that for the state to threaten to withdraw benefits from women who do not take sex-line work is for it to fail to show those women the basic concern and respect that all citizens are due from the state.
Having said that, a number of people without halfway decent attitudes to women patrol this blog semi-frequently, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing from them in due course.
May 18, 2010
Here comes the future
As you may know there was recently an election. During the campaigning for that election, the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain ran a series of election posters with Gordon Brown’s face next to the words “I increased the Gap Between Rich and Poor, Vote for Me”.
As you may also know, the biggest jump in inequality in Britain of the past century took place in the 1980s. Under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher poverty measured as below 60 per cent median income rose from 12 per cent in 1977 to 25 per cent in 1992 – more than doubling. Poverty measured as below 50 per cent mean income rose from 8 per cent in 1977 to 25 per cent in 1992 – more than trebling. As this helpful graphic shows [PDF], that led to an explosion in inequality.
However, after 13 years of Labour government inequality was sadly even higher than the Tories left it, with the Gini Co-Efficient for the UK standing at it’s highest ever figure of 0.36.
But it’s important to remember that Labour was “running up a down escalator“. And indeed, it’s not enough to simply point to the increase in inequality. We must instead ask the counterfactual: what would have happened if the Tories had remained in power and all Labour’s achievements in poverty-reduction via redistributive policies (as confirmed by the IFS) had not taken place?As Giles has angrily pointed out, what happened under Labour was that the gap between rich and poor increased. That’s not the same as saying Labour increased the gap. And indeed, it seems overwhelmingly likely that sans-Labour action on redistribution inequality would be even higher.
But it’s now May 2010, and the Conservative Party has returned to power (albeit with a little help from their Liberal friends). We won’t need to keep asking the counter-factual question for long, because we’re about to see what happens to inequality under Tory governments.
Of course we all know there are going to be big spending cuts. And we all know there’s going to be a lot of pain. But in the midst of that we also have to remain focused on the most basic tenets of a nominally fair society: that individuals are not obstructed from gaining employment and advancing their careers because their parents are poor. In turn, we have to take steps to defend or establish such basic tenets of fairness. Accordingly, I’ve previously explained my objections to the present unwaged system of intern exploitation. It is an anathema to social mobility (one essential component of combating inequality), insofar as it debars the poorer from access to many professional, high-earning careers.
To say that I’m appalled to hear that the Metropolitan Police are planning to introduce compulsory internships in all but name is something of an understatement:
“Scotland Yard is considering an overhaul of police recruitment to save millions a year in training costs. Under the proposals, future police recruits in London would need to work as volunteer special constables for at least a year before they could apply to become full-time paid Met officers.
As the excellent Interns Anonymous website puts it:
“Who are the next generation of police officers? Only those who can afford to work for free for a year! Incredible. Absolutely incredible.
One thing is clear. This is a sign of things to come. If you want a job in the public sector APPLY NOW before this becomes the norm.
It’s one thing for small think-tanks or charities to employ unpaid interns… but for an organisation as big as the POLICE FORCE do away with paid training. We are lost for words.”
Nobody denies that the public finances are in a terrible mess. But cutting the deficit is not a government’s only responsibility: ensuring a fair deal for all people when it comes to employment and careers is also essential. Less than two weeks into the so-called New Politics, I’m distinctly pessimistic about the prospects of our new overlords ensuring that talent and hard work, rather than parents’ wallets, are the determining factors of future success.
May 16, 2010
The Inconvenience of the Real World?
I’m often accused of not realising that other people have different political views. Strictly speaking, this is an inaccurate criticism. I am fully aware that other people have different political views. I just think they are wrong.
When being defensive I pull a smart-arse manoeuvre. I point out that if I thought other people’s views were right then they would be my views too, because I have a general policy of only holding views I think are right. And if other people choose to go round believing things they think are wrong, that’s a problem at their end, not mine.
Which of course deliberately, and cravenly, misses the point.
The point is that I shouldn’t be a dismissive rude bastard. Firstly because I frequently make mistakes and have to go back on myself. Secondly because even if I was always right (which I’m not) it’s still not a nice way to behave. Thirdly because it’s counter-productive: people like Chris, Chris, Don and Giles are able to make points far more effectively than I because their ability to remain calm and courteous gives them a gravitas that I forfeit in the process of trying to bulldozer people into oblivion.
So those are some faults at my end. But I make no real apologies for finding faults in others when we’re playing politics. In particular, crass over-simplicity and an apparent inability to wake up to the fact that the world is really bloody complicated.
Although I commend the Fabian Society for reaching out to non-leftists at their events, I do with they’d stick to picking people like Jonty Olliff-Cooper who, although in my opinion confused, is clearly intelligent and thoughtful. But please, no more Jonathan Isaby. Regular readers may recall that I recorded Isaby’s incoherent views on inheritance tax, to which he responded with a piece of supreme silliness.
At yesterday’s Next Left event, Mr Isaby returned for another round of Disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells huffing and puffing. Responding to Chucka Umunna‘s point that the UK is not a first-tier world power and needs to start behaving accordingly, Isaby huffed and puffed furiously at the outrage of Umunna calling us “Little Britain” For we are Great Britain, damnit! A major world power! With military bases around the world! A crucial presence at the forefront of international relations with a Security Council seat! Or some such pontificating. I don’t recall exactly what was huffed-and-puffed, because I kept thinking Major Gowen was on the stage.
But what really amazed was Isaby declaring that the Iraq War was a good thing. Why? Because Saddam was an evil dictator murdering his population. Never mind the hundreds of thousands now dead. The lack of WMD. The destabilisation of the region. The knock-on effects vis-a-vis Iran. Increased risk of domestic terrorism. Etc (you all know the drill by now).
So as you can gather I don’t have much time for Mr Isaby’s opinions and don’t think they’re of the standard Next Left should be aiming for. But something interesting happened yesterday as well; Hopi Sen did a little tweet:
“stranges time. Tory on #nextleft panel says tony Blair right to overthrow muderous dictator Saddam. I’m only person in room to clap.”
This is interesting because there’s simply no way of dismissing someone like Hopi as stupid or ill-considered, which is what I long-ago decided Isaby is. So here I’m confronted with the brute fact that somebody and on the same political side as me – the same party, in fact – who has extremely thought-out and incisive views is just on a totally different planet when it comes to something as important as the biggest foreign policy disaster of the past 60 years. Now that’s got to rankle a bit.
Furthermore, I’d love to be able to say that stupidity and over-simplification are vices only of The Enemy. And although I do strongly suspect that conservative worldviews encourage Conservative Stupidity, the existence of the New Economics Foundation proves that the left can be awesomely imbecilic too (and here and here).
Why does any of this matter? Well, because it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the above contours of psychological assessment and reaction, of value divergence and conflict, of strategic approaches for going about convincing or berating others whilst assuming that opponents are wrong because they are opponents are all absolutely at the heart of what politics, as actually practiced, is ultimately about. Remove the above and whatever your left with looks a hell of a lot less like politics than any actual practitioner would recognise.
Which is odd. Because the dominant trends in academic Anglophone political philosophy of the past 40 years have largely ignored all these sorts of factors and concentrated instead upon things like the idealised choice-processes of hypothesised rational agents in situations of selective ignorance, on attempting to come up with definitions of freedom, of deciding whether people who suffer mental anguish when they are deprived of plover’s eggs should be compensated by the state, whether governments need to send rude letters and cheques to the ugly, deciding whether justice is merely a function of idealised institutions or depends also on social ethos, and pondering whether all governments are in fact illegitimate because none ever received the unanimous consent of their populations (even though Hume pointed out this was silly 230 years ago).
And despite taking a rather haughty tone I do really rather enjoy all that stuff. But I just can’t help thinking that whilst it’s all very good as philosophy, it has pretty much bugger all to do with politics.
May 15, 2010
That was all very nice, but what about the Calling for Politics?
Today I watched Ed Miliband deliver his opening leadership bid speech at the Fabian Society.You can read the standard summaries over at the standard news websites. What they won’t give you is an angle on whether E-Mil has the all-important ability to be a leader. Not just a leader of the Labour Party mind, but a real leader; a figure ordinary voters will back to govern the whole country.
The substance of Miliband’s speech was broadly pleasing to a Fabian audience. But then, positioning himself to the centre-left was always going to work with that crowd – which is maybe no bad thing. An acknowledgment that Iraq was a mistake, and a commitment to seeing increased gender parity within the Labour Party and across society more widely, can only be applauded. Similarly a belief that the state is vitally important to improving many people’s lives will be welcomed by all those on the left who see government’s role in reducing poverty and inequality as essential. On the other hand, acknowledging that the state can have extremely undesirable effects was good to hear – even though Miliband’s claim that New Labour has been “too casual” about civil liberties wasn’t enough. As Clifford Singer later noted, NewLab wasn’t casual at all: it was enthusiastically authoritarian.
These things all make E-Mil attractive to leftist Labourites. They may help drain support away from the Elder Brother, too. But will they make Miliband electable as a national leader?
As phrased, that’s actually a pointless question. First, as Sunny Hundal pointed out to me, today Miliband was solidifying his base; later he will reach-out and appeal to less natural supporters. Second, we don’t know what the hot-button issues of the next election will be, so it’s useless trying to guess policy-appeal now. Third – and most importantly – because the harsh truth is that policy is altogether less important in winning elections than politics geeks and party hacks might wish.
As anybody who’s ever watched Question Time or gone knocking on constituency doors will know, many (though certainly not all) voters hold contradictory and frequently factually incorrect views. Connectedly, people don’t straightforwardly vote in their obvious economic interests, or for parties that in policy-terms promise to do the most for them, albeit for myriad and complex reasons (but take, for example, entrenched hostility to inheritance tax by people who will never, ever be affected by it). And many voters straightforwardly mis-attribute policies to competing parties anyway.
What really matters in mass-democratic politics, especially in a TV era, is the entirely non-rational impact of the personal pulling-power of individual leaders. The ability to inspire confidence in an electorate. Call it charismatic authority, if you like.
Tony Blair had it in abundance. His policies weren’t so important to middle England as the belief that he was a pretty straight guy you could trust with your wallet and your daughter. What Labour ultimately needs is a man with Blair’s awesome political charisma – though preferably with principles and integrity to boot this time.
Does Ed Miliband have this something extra, this calling for politics? I’m afraid he doesn’t. No amount of walking around the platform without wearing a jacket, or giving a speech without notes (h/t David Cameron c.2005) is going to change that. Neither is sounding – and looking – so very much like Cleggeron, and being part of the same Oxbridge-Machinepolitics-Westminster elite.
What Labour really needs is someone who can storm the stage and inspire belief in the electorate. No matter how nice a guy Ed Miliband undoubtedly is, he doesn’t have that special leadership extra. Which, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean he shouldn’t be leader of the Party. He’s certainly preferable to D-Mil and the odious Balls. But my advice to Labour is to keep looking. Waiting in the wings could be somebody altogether special. It happened for Barack, after all, and it’s worth seeing if it can happen for us too. Which is only one more reason not to rush things.
May 14, 2010
Go John!
As everyone knows, I worked for the Lib Dems for most of 2009 – or more specifically, I worked for John Pugh, the Lib Dem MP for the town of Southport where I grew up. Southport is a Lib Dem/Tory marginal, so growing up there a Lib Dem vote was always a “keeep the Tories out” vote.
But with John as MP since 2001, it increasingly became – for many people – a “vote for the guy who works really hard and is fundamentally really decent” ballot too. That, basically, is why John has just doubled his majority compared 2005, bucking the national trend and taking votes from the Tory opposition.
However, having moved away from the Lib Dems there was always there was always the risk that John and I could subsequently come into political conflict. But not this week, at any rate.
I am pleased to be able to report that John is unashamedly making a nuisance of himself to the Lib Dem high command. And indeed, given that the buggers have previously denied him campaign funds on account of his having his own mind in the past, I say well bloody done:
MERSEYSIDE MP John Pugh became the first Liberal Democrat to throw doubt on the new coalition government – warning he was “very concerned” about being tied to savage Tory cuts.
The left-leaning Southport MP urged his colleagues to pursue “a distinctive path” to ensure the poor did not suffer when spending cuts are speeded up, as promised by Chancellor George Osborne yesterday.
Dr Pugh also declined, twice, to say whether he voted in favour of coalition at the crunch meeting of Lib Dem MPs late on Tuesday night. Seven MPs did not – although most were thought to be absent.
And he said: “I’m very, very concerned that efficient public services will be targeted and I will argue the case to ensure they are not.
“I’m very aware that everything hangs, not on what happened yesterday or today, but on the tough decisions around the corner, when we have to address the deficit and what areas are to be cut.
“I think there is a danger that Liberal Democrats fall into agreeing with decisions made by the ‘Sir Humphreys’ in the Civil Service – the ‘Sir Humphreys’ and George Osborne.”
Asked whether he anticipated having to rebel against the Conservative-Liberal coalition if it proposed unacceptable cuts, Dr Pugh replied: “I’m not in that territory.”
But he added: “It will involve arguing our case forcibly and independently. It is a risk and an opportunity, and I need time to wrap my mind around the new circumstances.” [Source]
The people of Southport did not vote Lib Dem to put David Cameron into Downing Street. I fully back John’s public grumblings, and wish him the very best of luck. May the People’s Republic of Southport – as I’ve overheard whiney Lib Dems staffers describe it – live long and prosper. Hurrah!
May 13, 2010
A Little Punt
Fresh from showing off my Tiresian powers of foresight at Freethinking Economist, I’m going to make a little prediction tonight.
Namely, that David Miliband will not become leader of the Labour Party. Nor, however, will Ed.
D-Mil is too tainted by the New Labour legacy, and anyway acts far too presumptuously in assuming that post-Gordo he can slide smoothly into place, betraying his lack of acumen for this sort of thing. His time was a year ago, but he lacked the stomach to wield the knife. E-Mil by contrast – although a very commendable politician and seemingly fundamentally good bloke – lacks the killer instinct, and isn’t ruthless enough to make the bid, especially against big bro.
And it won’t be Jon Cruddas or John McDonnell, for no better reason that they are too left wing.
And it won’t be Alan Johnson, because he’s already backed D-Mil, and it won’t be Harriet Harman because she is hugely unpopular with the public, for no better reason (as far as I can tell) than she is a successful, intelligent and principled woman, and that the Mail et al really, really hate that and it’s seeped into popular consciousness.
So who will it be?
My prediction: somebody absolutely nobody is expecting, who will declare at pretty much the last opportunity.
Of course, I could be completely wrong in which case this blog post will be surreptitiously deleted. But if I’m right, I get to shout “I told you so” across the blogosphere. And there’s nothing I like more than shouting “I told you so” across the blogosphere.
Blond Watch
It’s been a bit quiet on the Blond front round here, because the whole world has had far more important things to think about. However, the question of how Blond is going to adapt himself to a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, after last month releasing a book in which liberalism was claimed to be the root of all evil, is a tantalising one.
Stuart White over at Next Left has got the ball rolling, with a hilarious analysis of how Mr Blond has flipped 180 degrees to stress the great affinities between Cameroon Conservatism and liberalism. Which is funny, because his book Red Tory claims that the two are fundamentally at loggerheads (well, insofar as Red Tory contains anything resembling an argument, and allowing for the fact that the liberalism in his crosshairs is a pathetic caricature).
Anyway, to indulge in a little hyperbole, I’d like to follow Tim in pointing and laughing at the vaguely fascistic tendencies in some of what Blond appears to advocate (the roots of which you can read about over here). Of course, Stuart White is right when he stresses that Blond isn’t really a fascist of any kind, he’s just confused and suffers from delusions of intellectual grandeur. But on this particular point of turning 180 degrees to do whatever serves D-Cam the best, Blond does rather recall to mind another supine so-called philosopher* who was quick to offer his services to a political man of the moment:
Higgledy-piggledy
Herr Rektor Heidegger
Said to his students
“To Being be True!
Lest you should fall into
Inauthenticity
This I believe—
And the Führer does too!”
–
* OK, OK, Heidegger is clearly much more of a real philosopher than Blond. But they’re both unreadable, right-wing and annoy me, and that’s good enough for today because I’m feeling lazy and facetious. Yes, even more so than normal.
One Really Good Thing About the Con-Dem Coalition
Whatever else can and will be said, I think one absolutely fantastic thing about the Con-Dem coalition is that Vince Cable is Business Secretary. And it’s not because he wants to regulate banks and bring bankers to heel (though of course that’s welcome). It’s because Cable is set to inherit responsibility and direction for Britain’s universities, which former Dark Prince Peter Mandelson arrogated to himself – betraying the managerialist mindset of New Labour that saw education and learning as but mere “skills-acquisition” in training people for the “jobs of the future”.
First off, let’s recall that before working as Chief Economist for Shell, Cable had a brief spell lecturing in economics at Glasgow University, where he received his PhD. This is important. It indicates that Cable is a man who actually has familiarity (albeit now at somewhat of a distance) with how universities work – and more importantly, the sorts of ways in which external prodding and meddling are likely to be counter-productive.
Furthermore, having briefly worked with Cable’s office in 2009 and had some contact with him, I’ve got a personal perspective to add: the man is fundamentally descent, highly intelligent and absolutely not the sort of crass philistine instrumentalist that Mandelson basically is on these things. I say that, of course, as somebody who walked away from the Lib Dems and joined the Labour Party. But it’s true. Mandelson was a menace (and here) to British universities. Everyone involved in higher education, and everyone affected by it (which means basically, er, everyone) should be very pleased indeed to have Vince at the helm.
Undoubtedly there are going to be cuts – and big ones – to British universities. But who makes those cuts, and how, is really important. We should resign ourselves to an increase in student fees, and perhaps not all that heavy-heartedly. The Lib Dem policy of abolishing fees was rightly watered-down by Clegg due to the fiscal climate, but it was anyway in itself unjustifiable representing (especially in tandem with abolishing Child Trust Funds) a redistribution from poor to rich. But even despite that, more rightist Lib Dems like Giles were basically correct in previously arguing that it is simply reasonable for students who go on to see considerably increased earning-power from the benefits of higher education to pay for that themselves, albeit in a deferred manner so as not to penalise or disincentivise the poorer. In any case, the Tories will surely not allow a fee-abolition, and indeed with them in the driving seat we can probably expect the fee cap to be lifted.
And indeed this may be the only way to save funding for many British universities, also meaning the axe must fall less damagingly elsewhere. Whilst science will – due to short-term economic dictates – probably be most protected, we should again be grateful that in Cable we’ve a man who appreciates that the arts and humanities not only have value in themselves, but are also essential to the long-term delivery of a highly-skilled and adaptable workforce. As I’ve always said, we can’t train for the “skills of the future” because we don’t know what they are yet. The best we can do is train people to be able to adapt to new situations and circumstances. And that’s exactly what the arts and humanities do.
Today the Times Higher Education supplement has an open letter to the Business Secretary, penned prior to the known outcome of the election. It has an important concluding paragraph:
“I conclude by warning you off accepting too readily the bullish language of marketisation, of the seeming attractions of replacing public providers with private ones, and even of the desirability of allowing market failure in higher education.”
In Vince Cable, we have a politician on whom those words will not be lost. And for that, I am very grateful.
