The Real World…

I was back in Birmingham for the first time in about three months last weekend, catching up with friends and reminding myself of the student life. After a more than filling curry, conversation moved onto politics, as it invariably does.

It was little more than I was expecting. Whilst my mates are unashamedly left wing in political outlook, it was the comment that Cameron, Boris et al do not live in the “real world” which stuck in my mind the most. It seems a strange comment, given the limited “real world” experience of the commentator. I sat there and kept quiet, avoiding a debate I simply could not be bothered with at that point.

It is true that students do have many problems, issues and complexities with which they have to deal. I’m aware of that, with my own experience as a part-time student continuing, and indeed, set to continue for the forseeable future. However it seems odd to me that a student, who has spent all of his adult life in education of some variety or other, should suggest that the folk of the Tory party do not live in the real world. I don’t profess to know quite what the “real world” is other than some notion used to lazily define the everyday man. I do know that a student with such a limited life experience cannot claim to understand what the real world is, let alone use it as the basis for dismissing the Tory party. I accept that he dislikes the Tories, but that suggestion was both odd and ill-considered.

By all means have a view of the world, but do not claim to have views representative of the “real world” as a) the label is misnomic and b) it is very unlikely that you do.

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.

Televise This…

Apparently, according to Lord Mandelson, our esteemed leader is considering the idea of a presidential style television debate with David Cameron in the build up to the  forthcoming general election. Of course, when this news broke yesterday, Number 10 were quick to distance themselves from the reports. The consequences of such a debate could be disastrous for Gordon Brown and the Labour party.

Don’t get me wrong, I for one would love to see such a debate. It would be, if nothing else, pretty good political tv. The opportunity to see Cameron against Brown in a one-on-one debate is intriguing. Free from the heckles of party backbenchers, this would be more interesting than PMQ’s, with the men on the spot having to think fast, answer convincingly, and remain cool. Obviously the Lib Dems wouldn’t get a say in this, nor would any other political party. This obviously would create the idea that Britain is aspiring towards a two-party state, much like America, which would create a large amount of unrest amongst the smaller political parties.

Nor should it be entertained by members of the Labour party. Brown would, in all honesty, struggle to maintain his composure in such an environment. It has long been rumoured that he has a short fuse, and by being placed, alone, in such an environment, it is possible that this would be exposed. He is not the most engaging public speaker as it is, and the more charismatic Cameron would, I believe, score big points with the voting public in such a debate.

The idea perhaps raises a bigger question though. The issue of how to re-engage the public who feel let down, angered and uninterested in politics is one which will dog all politicians (as well as Esther Rantzen) in the forthcoming months as we build up to the general election. Such a consideration by Brown is an attempt to re-engage the public. Expect more ideas such as this over the rest of the year.

Platforms and Fightbacks…

As the dust begins to settle following a pretty poor set of European election results for all the major parties (The Conservatives only gained 1%, and the Lib Dems were down 1.2%), the focus has fallen on the quite frankly ugly/evil mug of Nick Griffin. The Independent has it splattered across it’s front page today, coupled with the caption “A Dark Cloud Over British Politics“. I’m not sure what it is, but his face alone indicates someone who is just that bit evil (maybe that’s just me?). Anyway, so the question becomes what to do about the BNP?

At least, that’s what it should become. Again, maybe it is just me, but I feel I am seeing more about who is to blame for the BNP’s rise, rather than what can be done to stop it. Some blame Labour for losing the most seats in places where the BNP were successful, others blame politics more generally for failing to engage with the voters. The thing is, the one group who are not blamed, but should shoulder the responsibility for encouraging a racist/homophobic party to the fore, are simply the electorate. Those who put a simple black cross into the box next to the BNP last Thursday deserve to be labelled as the ignorant racist idiots who allowed themselves to get swept away in the sensationalist yarns spun by Griffin et al.

However, the vote shows me two things. The first is that the PR system of democracy is a flawed one, as I commented a couple of weeks ago. Griffin would have been nowhere near the limelight save for the system. He won less votes than in 2004, but because Labour did so badly, he didn’t need to worry.

The second thing is that a no-platform policy to these extremist prats is just not a viable option. I found myself agreeing with Glenda Jackson’s summation of the whole thing in the Indy today. She wrote,

“At least the way ahead is clear. The days of arguing whether we should confront or ignore the BNP are over. We won’t confront them. We will tear into them. We will highlight and expose their agenda of prejudice and bigotry and division.“

It sounds like something from a bad film, but the point is clear. Let us (by which I mean intelligent, educated folk regardless of politics) have a platform with these people, let us demonstrate why they are racist, homophobic, simple minded folk who have no clear idea about the way British society is now constructed, let us consign them to history along with other extremist groups. Let us show you why this party does not represent everything that Britain now stands for. It is not about nationalism, but multi-nationalism.

The very worst thing that we can do is have a no platform policy against them. It is clear that there are a few pockets in Britain who swallow the BNP’s empty rhetoric with all the hunger of a malnourished dog. Forcing the BNP underground through the no-platform approach would serve to make them martyrs to a cause. They would gain more from being ostracised by society than simply allowed into rational debate. Even Griffin must know, deep down, he has nothing. He is gambling with a two and five, hoping something falls his way. At the moment, the cards seem to be falling for him, expenses, recession, falling political confidence. All aid his cause (and he still didn’t do that well at the European elections). Yet to salvage these problems would leave him raising the stakes with nothing. It is the job of the main parties, as well as the likes of the Greens and UKIP to begin to sort these problems out. Faith needs to be restored. That’s the simple bit that most already know.

The question of how is infinitely harder. Perhaps it has to be the grassroots levels, perhaps it has to be the folks in the street knocking on doors, talking to people. Perhaps it has to be at the top, with Cameron, Brown and Clegg leading by strong example, setting the tone for others to follow. It was only today that Jeremy Vine was talking about how the ‘green shoots of recovery’ are beginning to sprout in the economy. Perhaps the only thing that the system needs is time itself. Let the wounds heal and let politics begin to speak for itself again through it’s actions and consequences.

The main thing that does need to change though is that people need to feel a connection with their MP. People need to know their elected MP will fight their cause in Parliament. At the moment, they don’t, hence why they are looking for other options. Or indeed, why they are not voting in the first place. To some, politics is just men in suits aye-ing and nay-ing to various issues. To others it is a tool designed to impeed the person on the street. Levels of crazy bureaucracy, red tape, and silly laws all do not help. Politics is something that the public need to get reacquainted to. The consequence of them not is the grizzled mug of Griffin plastered across a few more front pages.

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.

The Power of the Game…

I retain a belief that football is a great unifying force for good. Whilst I accept that there are footballing rivalries and hooliganism, football also does an emormous amount of good too. As if proof of the point of the force of the sport, I found this article which serves to indicate the influence of football. The upcoming elections are important ones, as is every election in a democratic society. That football is trying to encourage as many people as possible to vote can only be a good thing.

Loopholes…

The general hypocrisy of the great British public never ceases to amaze me. Over the course of the past week we have had the revelations about MP’s expenses. These revelations have caused uproar, and quite rightly so. Some of the abuses of the system that MP’s had made were startling and shocking. In essence though, they had been playing the system, and had been doing so for many years. They were exploiting loopholes in the law which meant they could claim for all sorts of things for all sorts of homes. The public have reacted with fury to the way MP’s have abused a system designed, in its origin, to help the MP’s living away from home.

Which is why I’m really annoyed about this story. Here is a loophole that the landlady has jumped through to avoid the smoking ban, and increase numbers back into her pub. Having listened to the person who ‘found’ this loophole on the radio this lunchtime, I grew increasingly annoyed as he showed no awareness of the hypocrisy with which he was surrounding himself. On the one hand he showed himself to be critical of the MP’s who had been exploiting loopholes, but on the other, he was proudly boasting that he knew of at least another couple of such holes to be exploited (naturally enough, he didn’t want to reveal them). There were many smokers who rang, texted, or emailed the radio to show their support for the landlady and her cause.  Many thought that declaring a pub a “research centre” was a good idea as it allowed people to smoke inside. There was simply a complete lack of wider understanding. It is, at least according to a proportion of the public, fine for the public themselves to exploit loopholes in the law, but not for MPs. I can only repeat my opening thoughts. Hypocrites.

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.