Televise That…

And so, it seems, I was wrong. In part. And it’s not often I say that. I wrote, back in July that Mandleson was considering a TV debate, and how it’s something I would like to see, but not something I thought would happen as I didn’t think Brown or the Labour party would fare well out of it. Nor did I think the Lib Dems would get a look in.

Then I saw an advert today whilst watching Sky Sports, it was on behalf of Sky News, and it encouraged me to sign a petition. Now I sit up a bit when I see such requests on TV in advert form, as it is obvious that some thought has gone into this advert, rather than a chain email being passed around. The petition, available here to sign, is for a live TV debate with the three main political leaders. Apparently, since it was set up at the start of this month, Clegg and Cameron have both agreed, in principle, to the idea. Brown, as I suppose we’ve come to expect, is dragging his heels.

I’ve just put my name to it, and it seems I was the 6861st person to sign the petition, which goes to show just how popular this thing is. Which returns me to my original humble thoughts. I was wrong, I didn’t think this thing would happen. However I’m delighted to say I was wrong as it means that there will be some form of political engagement on a national level where the credentials of the party leaders are examined and scrutinised. From here the nation as a whole can begin to judge who the next PM should be. This is an important step on the road towards public re-engagement, it should be the first step of many made by MP’s over the course of the next few months.

Discriminate This…

So our esteemed temporary leader (with Harman out of the country the buck stops with him) Lord Mandleson has announced he is considering the idea of giving poorer students a grade boost to help them compete for places at top universities.

This is rubbish.

All this idea does is confirm the view that there is a problem with access to education. It does nothing to provide a sensible long-term solution to the matter. It is yet more proof that positive discrimination is live and kicking in the UK at the moment. I have written about this before, and it is still something which really irks me.

Ok, so there is a problem with who has access to various levels of education. Again, I have written about the growing pressures on the university system before. However, a short-term, blind-sighted view that Mandleson appears to be appropriating here seems so painfully naive. It is simply a quick fix, designed more as a vote winning suggestion than anything substantial to do with policy. I say that for two reasons. The first is simple, the Labour party need all the votes they can get at the up-coming election. By throwing this into the water, they have something with which to attract voters back with.

The second reason seems equally simple, but therein lies my own concerns. It is simply that the idea seems very unconsidered. As the BBC article points out, there is a whole middle group of society who will suffer more from this idea and will be outcast from the better universities simply because there would be a quota of poorer students who ‘have’ to go to any given university. Finally there is the problem of what to do with those richer students/families who study hard, get good grades but have to go to universities lower in the rankings simply because the government has decided that it needs a greater social mix at the top universities.

The suggestion is ludicrous, and shouldn’t get any further than this. However, it will, if not in this form, then in some other. And it will remain stupidly annoying. Positive discrimination is here to stay as long as the Labour party decree it so and lead by such a poor example. It will never, ever solve any problems, and will always be a short-term solution to a larger, longer-term issue. It is nothing more than a daub of paint casually thrown at a wall to hide the two-foot wide crack.

Turmoil and Rationality…

Apparently, following the departures of four members of the Government in the past four days, Gordon Brown’s time as British premier are numbered. It is apparent that the Labour Party are in turmoil, they are suffering in the local elections (I am writing this before the results are all in, but the early results do not seem good for Labour), they are suffering in the media, and, depending on what you read, they are suffering thanks to their backbenchers. The overall problem is that they are suffering. And, according to some sensationalist parts of the media, and a growing number of public voices, the only solution left is for Brown to walk away from the post he coveted for years.

This is irrational, illogical, and as far as I can see, will not happen. These may prove to be famous-last-words, but Brown will only leave No.10 when the results of a general election have seen him off. And, seeing as how he has the choice of when to call an election, I simply do not expect this to be any time soon. To my mind it makes no sense for him to call an election from his point of view. He wanted this job for years, and now he’s got it, he won’t give it up without a fight (which, according to Simon Carr in Thursday’s Independent, he has “got the hang of” now). Why call an election when he is suffering badly?

From a party point of view it makes little sense either, why call an election when you are guarenteed to be hammered pretty much everywhere, thus making the (presumably) Conservative majority even stronger? Would it not make sense to wait until 2010, ride out this storm, recover some ground somewhere, and really give the election fight a good go, thereby making some dents in the Conservative majority?

The other point is that there really does not seem to be anyone to take up the post. Alan Johnson has made a good job of distancing himself from the position, despite rumours persisting that he would be the most likely to succeed should Brown make way. Other names, such as Cuddas, the Milibands or Balls, hold only bit-part support. There is not much in the way of other options for the Labour party.

The public may want an election now, but this is the result of two things. The first is the media, who have been driving this frenzy pretty much since the Telegraph broke the first expenses story. The second is public naivity. They want to have a say in who is actually running the country, rather than watch someone, who was, in their mind, unelected, blunder his way from problem to problem. They do not seem to understand that a party was elected to govern, rather than an individual.

To dam the cascading torrent of problems with a cabinet reshuffle seems to be akin to stopping up the Niagara Falls with a rotten branch. However, today Brown has brought forward the resuffle to divert some of the attention away from the local election results. The one key thing which stood out for me was that Alistair Darling remained as Chancellor. To my mind this makes sense from Brown’s viewpoint. It is obvious that the economy is in dire straits, by keeping the same guy in the position of Chancellor, this can dissipate the blame away from Brown. If he had appointed someone else, the blame-game consequences would have seen him take on more, rather than less, responsibility for the state of British finances. By keeping Darling, at least he can be consistant in sharing the load for the predicament.

These are testing times for Brown and the party as a whole. The Telegraph revelations have now written their way into the history books. The results of these revelations are still being written.

The Growing Clamour…

As MP’s continue to live in fear for their jobs, and, as has been suggested by some, perhaps even their lives, the Independent has found ten “respected figures at Westminster” for their solutions to the problems. Which, it seems, is increasingly in the call for political reform. Which is, apparently, an idea that has been floating around in the heads of many surviving MP’s for a long long time. Apparently.

The cynic in me suggests otherwise. The only way out of the hole is to push the case for political reform. And so they are. I will come back to the issue of reform shortly, but first I want to look at the continuing issue of expenses.  I’ve written previously about the hypocrisy of the Great British public, but I want to elaborate upon this a little more. I am convinced that anyone in the same position would have done the same. If they were not being stopped by those who should have prevented such abuses, they were inevitably going to claim for what they thought they could. It is easy for the public to act all high and mighty over this subject, but it should be remembered that MP’s are only human, with the fallabilities that the rest of society has. Now I do not condone what they have done, but I think I can understand it.

Anyway, returning to the issue of reform. David Cameron is climbing out of the political wreckage with a lot of credibility, if only because it has given him the opportunity to look more like a man of the people than ever before. His suggestions for reform, whilst not entirely new, certainly carry a lot of weight in the midst of the current predicaments. He has talked of “Progressive Conservative”, in much the same way it seems as Tony Blair once talked about “New Labour”. Two of the suggestions that have emerged are set-term parliaments and a change of system. Of course there are others, but it is these I wish to discuss.

I think I agree with the notion of a fixed-term parliament. The notion is easy to talk about and promote at the moment, with the clamour behind the idea, but in reality it is much harder to bring into practice. Fixed-term parliaments would tone down the level of party-politics that exists at the moment. Rather than the PM calling an election when his party is performing well in the polls, instead he would be forced to have it at a certain time, regardless of poll performances, regardless of situation or circumstance. Regardless of anything. It takes away frustrating uncertainty that grows with not being able to have a say when the chips are down for any government. There are problems with the idea of fixed-term parliaments, I will admit, but I think that for politics to move forward, steps such as this need to be taken.

The second issue is that of the system. People have criticised the ‘first-past-the-post’ system as being too ineffective, and not representative of enough of the electorate. Chuka Umunna, a Labour candidate, writes that it’s a “ridiculous situation” where “around 100,000 voters in a few marginal seats decide the outcome of an election”. Possibly. However, I do not think that the alternative is much more conducive to a strong, and more importantly, a stable country. PR, I would suggest, only serves to weaken any government into a fragile coalition incapable of making significant progress. I have never been convinced by the PR system and cannot see it providing any more answers than the system we currently have.

As I mentioned previously, there are  many more issues that come with political reform, many of which will be explored by the politicians in the coming weeks. There is one thing that is clear though. The idea of reform is very clearly on the table, and it won’t be going anywhere for a long time. What is to be seen though is whether Cameron can manage the pressures of promises with the reality of government.

To Be Lived In Or Learned From…?

As a historian, this question is one which poses problems. In essence the answer is simple, learn from the mistakes, but never repeat them. In the real world though this is somewhat more difficult to achieve. Instead the solution seems to be to live in the past, using it as a justification for the now, when, in reality, it is far from any such thing.

As someone who not long ago finished university, I still have friends who are currently plodding their way through another set of exams. It is for this reason that I make no apologies in the two cases in point which I wish to use to illustrate my point.

The first comes from the Birmingham University Conservative Future blog, which can be found here. The people over on this blog, of whom, I will admit, I either do not know, or know by name or sight alone; write about, naturally enough things pertaining to the Conservative way of thinking. The trouble is, this invariably leads back to a certain individual, whose shadow sits long on the political landscape. Margaret Thatcher is a name which is as synonymous with political divisions as it is with miners, or the Falklands. Those over on BUCF, perhaps unsurprisingly, seem to write about her and her legacy, with almost metronomic regularity.

Now I do not have a problem with posts about her in small doses, she did divide the nation with her actions. However, the regularity with which she is held up and talked about by those on the site is, for want of a better word, boring. Perhaps more valuable would be a stringent analysis of why the Conservatives, despite Brown’s continuing failings, are failing to impress as the other option. I still see the Conservatives winning the next general election, but smaller groups such as UKIP, the BNP, the Green Party etc will be much better represented than ever before, and I think, certainly in the case of the BNP, this is a political failing of the mainstream parties. For now, the Conservatives seem to be content to ride on the wave of Labour’s self-destruction to the election. This is reflected in the blogging of the folk on BUCF, which seems, to my mind at least, to ignore the larger political issues of the moment in exchange for Labour bashing (which, as fun as it may seem, is counter-productive in the long run).

All of which leads my nicely onto the next problem. Hopping over the political spectrum to the folk at Birmingham University Labour Students, I find a similar problem. They too are stuck lauding over past success in exchange for neglect of current predicaments. In their case, the past success is much more recent, but still, to my mind, is barely enough to hang their hopes on. The minimum wage, undoubtedly a good thing, seems to be left high and dry as the one thing that Labour now really has left following twelve years of government. Their record on child poverty is in tatters, unemployment is now no better, legacies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ireland have all been left, but we wait to see how soon these may fall apart in volatile areas of the world. It is entirely questionable as to whether healthcare has improved all that much, and whilst there are some shining lights in education, there are really not that many. There was a general enjoyment of success whilst Britain was riding a wave of optimism and big spending in the early years of the government, but this has spectacularly fizzled out as we have hit the ‘bust’ section of the cycle. Labour too has had the misfortune of being the party in power at a stage where increased litigation has forced in the country down a route of increased bureaucracy, something the wider public seems to be growing increasingly frustrated with. All of which inevitably spell curtains for the party as the British government, and this is before we hit the media problems which have dogged the party in recent times. Those on the blog though seem to be ignoring the problems. There is rarely any comment about negative Labour headlines, something I feel is to the detriment of themselves and their readership.

Perhaps it is me, floating around in my idealistic bubble, but I think I would prefer to discuss the problems, agree that there are some, and work out what the party can be doing to overcome these problems. I feel that public acceptance of the problems would be a start, and is certainly better than anonymity. Both sides at the ‘grass-roots’ level of the party perhaps have to move out of the realm of comfort blogging and start considering the bigger issues, which, sooner rather than later one would guess, will become their problems.

The Death Knell Tolls…

As the dust settles on one of the most unpopular budgets for a long time, the battered red briefcase waved by Chancellor Alistair Darling seems indicative of the Labour party itself. Battered and increasingly unpopular, the budget, along with the party, has proven to be far from the reassuring comfort that is needed during a time of economic plight. Instead we are told of, in the best case, simple hikes in the price of fuel and alcohol offset by a variety of incentives, and in the worst, a class war.

Now I’m not sure of the strength of the latter case, although it is easy to see where the critics are coming from with such a point. The increase in taxes to offset the substantial, and increasing debt is painful reading for most who happen to drive, drink, smoke and earn. The BBC’s simplistic calculator works out that I will be roughly £80 worse off next year, if all else remains constant.

Reading various responses to Darling’s budget has been interesting, those left-wing writers, whilst stopping short of praising the whole thing, do at least champion the case for taking money from the rich. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian writes that “Taxation is the only easy way to restore a very small measure of sanity to the unjust rewards of the rich” and such a view is supported by Jonathan Freeland, who tells goes on to tell us that “Darling’s wasn’t a swashbuckling performance, but under almost impossible circumstances it was surely the best that could be done“. The general concurrance is that Darling has reignited the embers of a dying class fire. There seems to be an acceptance now of the impending fate of this government. The measures have been put in place. The legacy has been left, and the pieces are there to be picked up by a Conservative government. This may not have been inspiring stuff, but politically and tactically it was marvellous. In years to come historians will look at this budget as the beginning of the left-wing fightback, begun before they had even been removed from office.

Naturally the right-wing are up in arms about the budget. The right-wing focus lies away from the class issues though. For those on the right side of the fence there is a simple problem. The numbers don’t add up. For Jeff Randell of the Telegraph, melodramatism conveys the point: “A ball-and-chain of spirit-sapping debt has been clamped to the nation’s future“, and this is taken further by Camilla Cavendish in The Times (incidentally the only newspaper for which you need capitalise “The”) who wrote “we got growth forecasts that were fantasy even by forecast standards“. And the point is a good one. The figures, from the guy who is meant to be in charge of this sort of stuff do not seem right, and do not fall into line with any forecasts by other equally (if not better) qualified people. 2032 is the early estimate of when things might return to a ‘normal’ level. That’s if we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear rage induced by poor stock markets.

For the Tories, there is little they can do. The acceptance seems well spread. Labour are burning out. They seem to be resigned to losing the next election and this budget has done nothing but add to this feeling. The Tories just have to maintain their course. They do not need to over-react, nor, it seems, do they need substantial policy. They just need to be there for the country when Labour has proven itself not to be. This will come within the next year and the General Election. Then there is the trouble of picking up what has been left. The long term game is being played here, by both parties. Labour’s game has just begun, but for the Tories, plan A (which generally has involved letting Labour burn themselves completely) quickly needs replacing, otherwise the “oh crap, what the hell do we do now” sketch will write itself all too easily when David Cameron steps through the doors of Number 10 as the country’s leader.

News…

I don’t know which bit of news has annoyed me more today, the sentencing of the seven members of the gang who killed Gerry Tobin, or the interrogation and arrest of Damian Green for revealing information about various immigration blunders by the Government. At this stage I wish to add that I am not in the best of moods, and so am unwilling to be sympathetic or indeed impartial.

Anyway.

My problem with the first story is this. All seven members of the biking gang were sentenced for killing Tobin. The judge admitted that he did not know exactly who pulled the trigger. In horse racing this is called “hedging your bets”. Obviously the murder was appaling, as is the back story to it. But at the end of the day, the judge has sentenced six people for killing someone when they didn’t do it. I would be willing to bet that in say, five years, at least two of them have appealed this sentence on the grounds that they didn’t shoot Tobin, thereby giving the name of the guilty man. I thought it was the job of the police/ detectives et al to work this stuff out? I know it might be hard, but surely that’s their job? As it is, they have come to court unsure of the real killer, and so the judge has had to “hedge his bets” and sentence them all.

This though trifles in comparison to the Damian Green story. Arrested by counter-terrorism officers, interrogated for nine hours, whilst having his home and office raided; it sounds like something more fitting in Stalinist Russia than 2008 Britain. And all because he brought some information which painted the government in a bad light into the public domain? Really? I agree with good ol’ Dave Cameron here, the public have a right to know this sort of information. It has been indicated that immigration policies were proving poorly handled, and Green merely brought this to our attention. Ok, it makes the government look bad, but that’s the oppositions role in this thing called democracy. They are there to seize upon mistakes of the party in power in order to bring about change. There has been something seriously flawed in governmental operations, but instead of worrying about that, arresting the guy who brought this to light was the choice made. Whilst the government, and now the police force too, are insisting that the Labour party had nothing to do with this there is likely to be an element of doubt (although conspiracy theorists are already relating it to the departure of Sir Ian Blair) as in my mind the whole incident paints both Labour and the Metropolitan Police Force in bad light.

Reading through some comments about this on Nick Robinson’s blog, there is one very interesting comment made. The writer DistantTraveller asks three questions:

“I think we are entitled to ask if Sir Ian Blair and Jaquie Smith knew about this in advance?

If not, why not?

If so, how do they justify it?“

Either way, this is not looking good for the two groups. It is interesting how this could maybe work positively for the Tories following, what, on the surface, looks like a bad revelation.

Pure Class…

I sat down to watch John Prescott’s programme on class yesterday on IPlayer in the hope that he would bring something constructive to the discussion about class. It was a fools hope though, as I became increasingly bored of good old JP reciting his own personal history and his utter damnation of the upper classes (and to a lesser extent the middle classes). The programme, rather than being a useful tool to stimulate discussion (as it had the potential to be), actually proved to be a vehicle for him to waste an hour of BBC scheduling time with left-wing working-class rhetoric.

When the trailers for the programme appeared on our TV’s a couple of weeks ago, my Dad remarked to me “why would anyone want to watch that drivel, we’ve all had enough of him“. Indeed the programme itself seemed to reinforce the point, with low levels of people queueing up to get signed copies of his autobiography in Asda, Hull, his home town.

His insistance on repeating that he was still very much working class, despite his manor and croquet playing tendancies throughout the course of the programme was a major irritation to me, as was his apparently closed minded approach to the topic. Whereas the programme should have been posing questions such as “is class still relevant to today’s society?” or “how much of a class divide still exists in Britain where most would define themselves as middle-class?” it instead followed ‘Prezza’ as he visited various examples of the different classes and used them as a microcosm of society. This in itself was a flawed approach, the examples chosen were as close as possible to social stereotypes, picked, very deliberately, to paint a picture of Britain that Prescott himself was happy to criticise. Whereas to my mind it would have been much more worthwhile for him to have visited more communal places, with a wider demographic, instead the programme makers chose to pick lunch with an Earl, a meeting with three young girls who were very definately not chavs (apparently), and a meeting with a couple of young men at a private school to help Prescott vent his spleen about why class is bad.

The trouble the programme had was that it never really tried to define what class was, it worked on pre-supposed ideas of the viewers, all the time influencing thought with outlandish examples of the various classes, “oh the upper classes must all live in manors, with butlers and posh crockery” or “the working class must all be completely ignorant of the world around them because society has failed them“.

The trouble with stereotypes is the familiarity with them that society has. Hence, I suppose, why they are stereotypes. No-one dares challenge them, they are accepted. They are, by social ignorance, the ‘truth’. The programme makers capitalised upon this, and ran with it. Not once did they appear to think that perhaps the stereotypes were maybe not a fair reflection of todays multi-cultural society. Such thinking would have made the programme much more watchable and interesting, but would have obviously contradicted the point of having Prescott as the front man, the selling point.

If some unknown presenter had run with it then the programme would have been infinitely better as we would have been able to have some degree of impartiality. With Prescott though we were always likely to have him plugging left-wing commentary, given his history.

Needless to say I shall not be tuning back in to watch the second part. It barely seems worth my time to listen to Prescott’s agenda for another hour. There is much more to be said about class and the current state of Britain’s class system, but it is too contentious a topic for the BBC to cover adequately in an hour. Perhaps Channel 4 could do a better job…

Mixed Priorities…

Having previously enquired on BULS about the problems within the Labour Party, only to be accused of single handedly attacking one of the writers, it is with a sigh that I read the latest post to grace their site. The aforementioned writer (who, it must be said, I do not have any personal gripe with) has posted another article on the sex lives of the Tories.

As I see it therefore, based upon his justification (“I simply cannot be bothered“) for not talking about the internal disputes, and resignations of various MP’s a few weeks ago, the only conclusion to draw is that the priorities from the writer are more focussed upon attacking the Tories than considering their own affairs ‘in house’.

To my mind it seems a case of mixed priorities, it reads as though it is more important to criticise the Tories for various minor sex scandals than it is to consider internal rumblings (which, despite an apparently promising conference), will return sooner rather later to my mind. Why not talk about issues, if they are there to be talked about? Likewise discussion of the various things to come out of the Labour conference would not have gone amiss, but instead we are treated to blogs attacking the other parties.

I therefore am left confused, is this really a ‘Labour’ blog, or is it an ‘anti-other-parties’ blog? How much overlap should there be between the two? If I knew the answers, I would be sure to pass them on.

Note: Since this post another two posts criticising the Tories have popped up on BULS, making it 6 anti-other-party posts in the last week. Out of a total of 9. Hmm.

The Greatest…?

An image on the BBC Homepage caught my eye as I was performing my usual review of frequented websites this morning. The caption beneath the image read “Who’s our Greatest Post-War PM?”.

Certain names immediately present themselves. Thatcher, Blair, Churchill (although his post-war legacy is somewhat sketchy), Attlee. All have a certain iconic status to them. All contributed to shaping Britain, however much you may disagree with what they did and how they did it.

The article asks you to list in order of preference, who you consider to be “the greatest”. It’s a simple task really, which PM do you like the most?

The trouble is, it is not a simple task for a plethora of reasons. I will list but three:

1. Few people who will vote will remember all the candidates (there are comments to be made here about the average age of internet users, and the age of people who will be able to remember all the candidates). Therefore the judgements they make will be based upon books/ recordings/ papers etc, ie, all second hand material (I will return to this point later).

2. It very much reflects the political views of those who vote, that is, if more Conservative voters take part in the poll, there will be inevitable skew (almost certainly in favour of the Iron Lady).

3. A good leader and success rarely go hand in hand (Churchill was, I believe, a good leader, but his overall record, as mentioned above, was sketchy). Leaders will get judged more on their failings than their successes (perhaps this is the right way to do it?), and for example Blair’s reputation will be forever tarnished with the gloomy spectre of the Iraq war, despite some notable success (Ireland for example).

So, it is with difficulty that one can choose who is “the greatest”, which, in itself is something of a misnomer as it encourages people to compare like with like (obviously impossible as the Britain of Macmillan, for example, is hugely different to that of Brown.)

Returning therefore to my first point of contention, the use of second hand material to judge people. The whole issue of source material is one which, as a history scholar, I have become very aware of during my academic life.  Warnings from teachers to not take the source at face value seem a long time ago, but still are (and forever will be) hugely relevant. When reading a newspaper, or watching the television, I seem to be thinking more about the angles things are portrayed at now than ever previously. I think you have to be very careful about so nonchalantly critique-ing people based on the value of a brief synopsis of their career written by a hard line left-winger, for example.

I therefore have refrained from voting in such a poll simply because it is a simple piece of time-wasting which companies such as the BBC can leap upon and claim that “Thatcher is the Greatest Post-War PM” (replacing ‘Thatcher’ with any such suitable candidate – for the record, I do think Thatcher will win such a poll, with Chuchill and Blair completing the top three). Obviously the poll is entirely inconclusive, and reflective of little more than the people who vote (shock horror, for example, that a poll in which 59% were Conservative voters, Thatcher won).

If, unlike me you do wish to vote in this poll, the link is here. Perhaps you are confident of making an informed, unbiased decision on who was the greatest post-war PM. I can’t, and I’m reasonably certain most people couldn’t either.