AV: A Tactical Question for England ?

I'm in the 'Oh alright then, if that's the only thing on offer' camp on AV.

That's simply because, on balance, I think it is just a tinsey bit more sensible that FPTP. But proportional and fair it sure ain't. Not that any electoral system can necessarily guarantee those aims: you pick a electoral system to fit the underlying political sociology in my view, not to change it. Therefore a system which allows (it doesn't guarantee this of course) the two major parties to be cut down to something closer to their declining linkages to the political outlook(s) of the mass of us is probably preferable. That's as far I as tend to think about it before giving up with a yawn.

Up to now, I've been a bit dismissive of folk who think about this choice in purely tactical terms. I distrust those who tell me they'll be voting this way or that because of some predicted short term political effect. In general, I simply don't think people - even practiced spinners from the no-longer-smoke-filled backrooms - can predict that sort of thing. Life is just too messy. But this poll has concentrated my thoughts: it appears that pro independence parties - the SNP and Scottish Greens - may, for the first time, win a majority in Holyrood.

Now, this might not happen of course. & even if it does it's a long way from Salmond having a majority in his parliament to him actually wining a referendum on Scottish Independence. But it does focus the leftwing English mind on how FPTP elections might be expected to go in the future without the Caledonian contribution. We'd be looking at more or less permanent Tory government.

So I've changed my view. There is a tactical question involved here, but it's not about giving Cameron or Clegg a black eye, or encouraging the 'left' LibDems to jump ship or whatever. It's about an insurance policy against the possible day when the Scots leave us.

Media Luvvies Desert New Labour

Peppa Pig, the popular children's television character has been withdrawn from a Labour event, after its creators said they wanted to avoid any "controversy".

The cartoon character, which is broadcast on commercial television, had been due to appear at a party election event on Tuesday highlighting Labour's policy on families.

A life-size character was due to appear with Yvette Cooper, the Work and Pensions Secretary and Tess Jowell, the Cabinet Office minister, at a Sure Start children's centre in south London...

"Peppa Pig is a well known fan of Sure Start children's centres but, in the interests of avoiding any controversy or misunderstanding, we have agreed she should not attend," they said.

Labour had previously said it was "delighted" that a "megastar of children's television" had accepted the party's invitation to join the senior ministers.

A spokesman for the Labour party said: "We have agreed that it would be better that she should not attend the visit."

A spokesman for Gordon Brown added: "The Prime Minister and his family are big fans of Peppa Pig and he understands that she has a very busy schedule and so couldn't make it."

Sometimes things are true even if they're in the Daily Telegraph.

My money is on Noddy being a true blue Tory, but Big Ears has the look of a possible UKIP voter to me.

Thoughts on a Hung Parliament

In public, the Labour Party seems to be pretty sanguine about the polls suggesting a hung parliament. The much discussed vagaries of our FPTP system mean, I'm told, it would be quite possible for Labour to come third in the popular vote but still wake up on May 7th to discover they have the largest number of MPs in a hung parliament. It's even more likely that they would have the second largest number of seats. There would be an obvious attack narrative available to them: "the Conservatives haven't 'sealed the deal and are still not trusted'; the electorate has punished us for being in power too long,for sure, but the important thing now is a coalition for electoral reform before the inevitable second election we hope will produce a representative parliament to face the huge economic challenges facing the country." Result? The Tories locked out of power for another political generation.

Labour bloggers seem much less relaxed about this: Shuggy thinks the fight to avoid third place is a sign that they are done for, and Don is equally unequivocal:

It seems obvious to me that if Labour comes third in the popular vote, then that's it - they are out of government. ..... people would have made it quite unambiguously clear that they don't want Labour in government. I absolutely shudder to think what would happen if they tried to do a deal with the Lib Dems and stagger on while presiding over the massive cuts to public spending of the kind that Clegg and Cable have repeatedly said that they want.

& this, I think, is the rub for both Labour and Tories - a hung parliament could well set off a vicious bout of in-fighting inside their parties even as their leaders suddenly started talking about co-operation and 'working together for the national interest'. I mean, shiny Dave has had everything going for him - surely a failure to pluck the lowest hanging fruit in recent electoral memory has got to raise questions about his leadership? (Both in his party and, perhaps more acutely, in the Murdoch camp)*. As for dour Gordon - well that nice Mr.Miliband stands ever ready to present a new face to the public.

Cameron, on balance, could probably survive until a 2nd election - but he'd certainly be toast if he failed to win that. But Brown? I don't think so. The knives will be out for him before the last constituency declares on May 7th. It might be difficult for the LibDems to even contemplate doing a deal with Labour if he stays because he is absolutely the epitome of 'no change'. So a gap would open up between the interests of the Labour Party and the interests of its leader. & we all know New Labour has a sparkling track record in dealing with that sort of situation, don't we?

Radio 4 this morning reported Moodys, the rating agency, as being pretty positive about a hung parliament on the grounds it might lead to a grand coalition to force through the 'necessary' cuts. Paul Mason reports that the City isn't especially worried about a hung parliament per se - what they're concerned about is :

"... a "chaotic" hung parliament where there's maybe one Green, two Respect and one or two BNP members of the Commons, with strong showing from Plaid and the SNP. Right now the political class is thinking Cleggmania might go away, or recede, leaving the old two-party slugging match to get back into business. ..... What they have not even begun to plan for is if Cleggmania begins to give the electorate "permission" to just break away from the whole mainstream party circus."

But a chaotic hung parliament is possible even without a further crumbling of the Tory and Labour votes. All it needs is a civil war within one or both of those parties. If I were a Lib Dem strategist, I'd be sparing some time to think about how I might help that prospect along.

But I'm not a LibDem strategist. I'm just someone who wants to see the re-emergence of a multiple voiced social democracy. I actually want a chaotic hung parliament. & here's how you can help.

*H/T to B&T for this link

That Wire Analogy (Yet Again)

So I get back from whatever it is I've been doing to find the long shadow of my favourite TV show still bugging the blogosphere - and indeed mainstream journalism. Chris Grayling's comparison of inner city Britain to the version of Baltimore peddled in the Wire is the gift which just keeps on giving.

He's been given such a hell of a kicking on all this that I thought it might be fun to try to sketch out some ways he might, inadvertently, have stumbled on something. Not, obviously, in terms of crime. The local Manc paper dealt with that :

"[Baltimore], home to about 600,000, was blighted by 234 murders last year. That compares to 35 in Greater Manchester, which has a population of around 2.5m."

No, the real comparison is about how our lives - like the lives of The Wire's drug dealers, police, dockers, politicians, schoolkids and journos - are haunted by an imbalance between agency and structure. Or just by structure, actually.

The whole series could have been written by Talcott Parsons or Louis Althusser: no one, or almost no one, escapes their circumstances for any length of time. Structures call forth successions of individuals - Avon, Stringer, Marlo - to fulfill essentially the same roles. People change in all-to-predictable ways: just as Daniels, who makes Commissioner, has a guilty secret from his time on Narcotics, so Carver, originally a kind of joke, puts his days of petty corruption behind him and rises up the ranks as a reliable officer. But you just know he won't leave his past behind, any more than Daniels manages too. Individual initiative is, ultimately, crushed, be it Bunny's Hamsterdam or Carcetti's new broom in City Hall. Even the great symbol of individualism - Omar - loses, and I reckon we see in Michael's trajectory a proto Omar in the making, so even the individualism at the heart of the American Dream is structurally produced.

Yeah, that strikes me as being quite like Britain today - even before one gets into in business of 'public service reform', performance targets and the near universal 'gaming' of these things. There is no real social mobility, no real opportunity for individualism. Chris Grayling is right, inadvertently.

"If we’re lucky, it won’t be any worse than Thatcherism."

There's a new benchmark in journalism about the economic crisis and the failure of the banks: John Lancaster's long but incredibly rewarding, incredibly clear and incredibly angry piece in the current London Review of Books. He brings a novelist's clarity to the necessary unpicking of otherwise arcane banking euphemisms. Go educate yourself.

I'll restrict myself to two delicious quotes. First, here he is summing up after a long, penetrating description of the nature and origin of toxic assets and Anglo American governmental attempts to deal with the crisis:

"Many of the banks will turn out to be insolvent. In that case the bank is nationalised, or at the very least goes into administration and receivership. Then, a number of options become available, one of the principal ones being to break the bank up into the viable part of the business, which will eventually be refloated back onto the market, and a ‘bad bank’ of dodgy assets which must be sold off (or arguably held until the values recover) in whatever way makes the most possible money for the taxpayer.Nobody in power wants to do that. Nobody with power in the banking system, and nobody with power in government. Both the British and the American plans to help the banks are very, very, very expensive variations on the theme of sticking their fingers in their ears and loudly singing ‘La la la, I’m not listening.’ This is what’s happened so far."

Second, here he is on the meaning of the disaster:

"....the cost of the financial crisis is going to be paid not over a few years but over a generation, we have a perfect formula for a deep and growing anger. Expectations have risen a lot, over the last three decades; that’s going to have a big impact on how furious people feel about the hard years ahead. The level of future public spending cuts implied in Darling’s recent budget – which included the laughably optimistic idea that the economy will grow by 1.25 per cent next year – is greater than the level of cuts implemented by Thatcher. Remember, that’s the optimistic version. If we’re lucky, it won’t be any worse than Thatcherism."

It's worth remembering this when you hear different economists or politicians comment on this or that latest tactical development. Take that business of the threatened S& P downgrading of Britain's creditworthiness for instance. Basically the siren voices of the Right claimed this was a sign we were heading for a Sovereign default and having to go cap in hand to the IMF. On the other hand people from Left and Centre tended to say, no, this is about a recognition of what we already know and, in any event, there is absolutely no chance of Britain going bust because it will, in time, balance its books through cuts and raised taxes after the election. But that last quote is Lancaster saying what the future is going to look like if the second set of voices are correct - in other words, that's the optimistic scenario.

Expenses: Further Thoughts & Petty Politics

Who seems the worse offender on all this in the shadow cabinet? Well, none other than little Alan Duncan and his remarkable £7,000 gardening bill. I think Cameron can afford to off load him to demonstrate the new found Tory commitment to clean government, don't you? It's a bit more problematic for him to sack Gove, Lansley or Maude who have been flipping their properties to exploit the system or, in Maude's case, just buying a new one. Then there's 'two brains' Willets who does seem to have had an awful lot of light bulbs popping at public expense - he'd be a loss as well. But, nonetheless, it may well be in Cameron's interest to ritually slaughter a sacrificial lamb or two. Why?

Well, then the pressure on Brown to do something similar would be pretty intense. & it's Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith who would have to be in the frame. Blears would be in the frame on a property flipping allegation, and Sir Alistair Graham, the former chairman of the committee on standards in public life has already described Smith's claim as "near-fraudulent". Could Brown survive the loss of the two senior women in his cabinet? Because it would be really quite hard to sack one and not the other if the Tories had taken a strong lead. Could he survive the fall out of doing so after what looks like being a disastrous set of local government and European elections?

These are the petty political thoughts of a Guardian columnist manqué, I know. Indeed, Jacqui Ashley goes further this morning and openly speculates on the possibility of a leadership challenge - or a snap general election. This, you might say, is not real politics, but the superficial froth of Westminster's very own 'Spanish practices'. & normally I'd agree with you.

But I sense a deep, deep loathing of politicians around these revelations - and especially of New Labour politicians. They seem to be attracting some of the hostility originally directed at 'fat-cat' bankers that is still very strongly around in popular political sentiment. Not many people understand Derivatives or other complex financial instruments - but we've all got an idea of what a buckshee bath plug looks like. New Labour are going to bear the brunt of this because (a) they're the Government, after all; (b) they came in on a wave of disillusionment with Tory sleaze, promising 'clean hands'; (c) they're supposed to be the party of fairness for chrissake.

Could this be the end of New Labour - and the pebble which starts a landslide of events which end in a general election this summer ?

Tangentopoli UK ?

I've just heard Tristram Hunt, unlikely ex-new Labour biographer of Engels, on Radio 4 opining that if Britain wasn't a Monarchy this expenses farrago would lead to a collapse of the State and the foundation of a new Republic. I'd guess the Italian experience must have been in his mind. Tangentopoli was the word they gave their situation - 'bribesville'. It took the emergence of the magistrate - not politician -led Manu Pulite ('Clean Hands') anti-corruption campaign to bring it down, and bring down the so called 'First Republic' as well.

Now, despite the fact that the British situation seems far less organised and structural - its all about individual venality as far as I can see, not organisational corruption in the Italian sense - I do think Hunt is on to something. Perhaps because he is the son of a weatherman he can tell which way the wind is blowing.

Dave Osler - and in a different way, Paulie - worry that this is feeding into an anti-political mood in the country. I agree with Paulie that the big threat is not the BNP - although I expect them to made some electoral gains in the Euro elections - but some charismatic and telegenic charmer on the Berlusconi model. (Please God, don't let it be Richard Branson.)

In a way our default model of political leader has been evolving in this direction anyway- think of Blair, and our two current Blair-lites, Cameron and Clegg. Anyone of them might, if they had accidentally lost an election in mid career, have evolved into a TV sofa host on the lines of Jeremy Vine or Kilroy Silk. Even the viciously combative ex-politician Portillo now seems eminently charming and personable as an all purpose TV talking head. The stage is surely set for some movement in the opposite direction - a TV talking head who arrives on the electronic PR campaign equivalent of a white charger promising to sweep away all this nonsense.

Because this is Britain, not Italy, I don't think, as yet, conditions are far enough advanced for such a 'new politics' (sic) to be successful. But I'm prepared to bet someone is going to try.