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Thoughts on Southport

June 7, 2010 — simonashall

Catching flies - Miliband won't be the threat Tories fear

Labour held its leadership hustings today in Southport and according to the BBC, which seems to be intent on pretending that Labour is still in power, this internal Labour Party process was an event that merited live TV coverage. In fact, the reason that the hustings were held at all seemed to me to be all about David Miliband in particular getting some welcome exposure.

Yesterday, the BBC news lead with the bare-faced revelation that Miliband was accusing the PM of “hypocrisy” on spending cuts and “broken promises”. The sheer brass neck needed to occasion such a piece of naked and mendacious opportunism is difficult to quantify with words alone – suffice it to say that the corporation seems to have decided that Miliband is the next Labour leader and they are determined to make him PM in 2015. Personally, I can’t see the British people going for it but there we go.

Today however and in front of the GMB, comrade Miliband was talking about “our people” and building Labour up “workplace by workplace“. And he’s supposed to be the Blairite – can we assume that the likes of Ed Balls, brother Ed and Diane Abbott would wish to be seen as even more substantially left? No doubt the coalition has pulled the Conservative Party to the left and the Liberal Democrats to the right to end up somewhere in the genuine centre rather than the centre-right with which many Conservatives would be more comfortable.

Is the only place for Labour to go back to the left? From 1994 onwards, Labour had a go at being capitalists but forgot that supporting and spending the proceeds of economic growth also entails a measure of responsibility and after 15 years of profligacy the money has run out. They can’t go to the right, they no longer look credible in the centre ground and so with Miliband heading back to the comrades for support, they can only move to that left ground vacated by NC. Fine by me.

Until today, I think most Conservatives were hoping that Ed Balls might get the leadership in an attempt to saddle Labour with a leader even more unelectable than Gordon Brown. However John McConnell seems to be intent on taking on that mantle after some very ill-judged comments about Lady Thatcher. I admire her in many ways; but not in others as I’ve said before. But the idea of assassinating political leaders is either puerile posturing or dangerous nonsense from a man who wants to become Prime Minister (presumably). Leaving aside the poor taste, if the best answer Labour has got to Britain’s problems is time travel back to the 80s and taking out the then PM – who for a greater part was simply sorting out the last mess Labour left – then their ideas barrel clearly has sprung a leak.

If Labour is sensible it will elect David Miliband as leader – but I’m not sure Conservatives should be too worried by that prospect.

Posted in Labour, news, politics. Tags: bad PR, BBC, David Miliband, Labour, political credibility. No Comments »

Tip of the iceberg

May 26, 2010 — simonashall

One suspects that if Nick Clegg had decided after May 6 to take up Campbell and Mandelson’s grubby little offer and a Lib/Lab coalition was in power, the BBC would have reported David Laws – rather than Alistair Darling – delivering £6.2bn cuts. As it happens, no such favours are granted to the Conservatives by a corporation whose very skin has been saved by the votes that denied the PM a majority.

The savings identified by the Treasury include some really good things, such as the austerity measures put in place to stop ministers using cars all the time, the abolition of pointless quangos and renegotiating government contracts. The rest of the news emerging from the details is less welcome but regrettably necessary, not least because it goes further than the public sector. The £690m cut from the DfT means contracts put on hold, which has a knock-on effect in the private sector – the A23 scheme and the third phase of the Birmingham Box Managed Motorways project are both, for example, placed on hold and this means uncertainty for the consultants and contractors employed to deliver them.

So too Communities and Local Government, which loses £830m and will have less to spend on meeting its core objectives but also on schemes and projects that are delivered and help fuel a large – and growing – portion of the private sector. Companies like Atkins, Capita, Serco, Halcrow and Balfour Beatty are major employers and cutbacks in local government spending – further underlined by the £1.165bn in savings being expected of local authorities – will mean tougher times ahead for these businesses. The best, of course, will survive – but those who don’t can expect to shed jobs in addition to those that will be shed by the public sector.

And with an emergency budget in June and a Comprehensive Spending Review in October, the bad news is that £6.2bn is only the tip of the iceberg. The total deficit is £157bn and quite how this will be eradicated is anyone’s guess - even ten times what the government announced on Monday is only a third of what is needed. There is a great deal of pain to come and taking the decisions won’t be easy. Although there is a chink of good news in terms of a rise in GDP, the OECD is putting yet more pressure on George Osborne to raise interest rates and avoid cutting too quickly.

It all goes to demonstrate two things: firstly, that there has been – and will continue to be for a while – no real recovery, merely a plot by a Labour-staffed treasury to pump vast amounts of taxpayers’ existing and new money into the economy to delay the onset of recession and the necessity to make fiscal and spending adjustments until after the election. This may turn out to be more damaging than the recession itself.

Secondly, if you vote in a Labour government, sooner or later it runs out of money from which the only recovery is a Conservative government (or in this case coalition) to administer social and economic shock treatment. The only way Labour gets into power is when it promises to spend money - that is the central ethos of democratic socialism. In good times, it will always look more attractive than the more cautious Conservative within-means alternative. But there’s a catch; and we are about to find out exactly what that entails.

Posted in Economy, Labour, politics. Tags: BBC, Conservative Party, Economy, George Osborne, Labour failure, recession, road to recovery. No Comments »

Change that works for them

April 28, 2010 — simonashall

During the last few days, the Lib Dems have been playing a clever PR game by trying to link electoral reform – by which they mean proportional representation’s introduction as our voting system – with “new”, post-expenses, politics.

I’m not altogether against electoral reform. I think that the boundaries currently used for our first-past-the-post system are unfair and give Labour a huge advantage by handing them a built-in majority of about 90 seats, according to Electoral Calculus. I want to see those boundaries re-drawn and the number of seats re-calculated to make for a fairer local representative system – and that includes fairer to the Lib Dems as well.

You routinely hear commentators in the press and the BBC say that the FPTP system discriminates against the third party, as if they had done some research on it and drawn a scientific conclusion. That’s rubbish. All that conclusion is based upon is the realities and record of the system – there is no reason why the Liberal Democrats should have any more difficulty in winning constituencies than anyone else.

The reason it is biased against them is quite simple – they pretend to be a centre-right alternative to the Conservatives in London and the South and a hard-left alternative to old Labour in the north and Scotland. Their manifesto for 2010 cleverly leaves either possibility open. But it does mean that such a dual-personality party cannot hold a “core” vote sufficient for it to win constituencies in sufficient numbers to hold power in FPTP. If the Lib Dems decided what they wanted to be – rather than just pitching for whatever they think they can get away with – their vote in some areas would harden and in others soften. It’s their choice to be at a disadvantage in the system.

But they’re quite happy to overlook that. What they want to do is hold the country to ransom by demanding a referendum on proportional representation in return for offering stability in the event of no party receiving a majority. PR, of course, would not only allow them to hold the balance of power, it would help put pay to their biggest weakness – the idea that a vote for the Lib Dems is a “wasted vote”. It would also allow them to pretend to be “savage cutters” in the south and “tax the richers” in the north while scooping the maximum value from each deluded voter.

It’s not a bad strategy for them – but it should be ringing alarm bells with every single previous Conservative supporter who’s thinking of giving Clegg a chance because he came over well on telly. If you give him the chance he wants, he’ll go into coalition with Brown (or more likely Miliband). They’ll embark on a series of tax hikes and spending cuts not witnessed before in the post-war era. That’s not necessarily to their discredit because any government will have to do the same.

But if you decide after four years that you don’t like them, if Clegg turns out to be not quite what you thought (on Europe, immigration and law and order) and you think in 2014/5 that you’re going to give the Conservatives a chance after all – well, you won’t be able to. Because Lib/Lab will have changed the way things are done and neither the Conservative Party nor Labour would ever be able to govern on their own again. And guess who the beneficiaries of this gerrymandering will be? That’s right, the Lib Dems.

They may call themselves Liberal Democrats, but that doesn’t seem very liberal or democratic to me.

Posted in elections, lib dems. Tags: BBC, Conservative Party, electoral reform, Labour, Liberal Democrats, political credibility, silly ideas. 6 Comments »

Inside track on Question Time

April 11, 2010 — simonashall

I still haven’t had a chance to see Question Time from Woking but Spiderplant, who was lucky enough to get a ticket, has written an interesting account here. Definitely worth a read.

Posted in Other blogs, politics. Tags: BBC, Woking. No Comments »

Questions partly answered

April 2, 2010 — simonashall

So we now know three of the five members of the panel who will be in Woking for Question Time on Wednesday – they are David Miliband, Ming Campbell and Simon Schama. I had a sneaking suspicion that Ming Campbell might be the Lib Dem because he’s been to a few functions in the area before. I wouldn’t exactly say that sending your most unsuccessful leader in recent history was a filip for your local party in what is a serious target seat for the Liberals – but there we are.

It’s funny, I also had visions of David Miliband here too – I didn’t suggest him because I thought that the Foreign Secretary might be a bit busy to hike out to Surrey, where Labour has no MPs and there are plenty of councils without Labour members. I guess the theme of the evening is going to be foreign affairs then – in which case, is William Hague likely to be the person joining the panel too? I have met William Hague in Woking before, so it’s not unthinkable. But perhaps a little bit too risky given all the fuss about Lord Ashcroft’s entirely legal, if slightly translucent, tax arrangements.

I’d never have called Simon Schama, although I did say that a left-wing think tank (in this case an academic) would be represented. I rather like him as a historian and his History of Britain did to history on the television what Tony Blair was attempting to do to politics in Westminster. It is his misfortune, though, that David Starkey has since taken this format and perfected it in his Monarchy series. But seriously, what is Mr Schama going to bring to the debate except more of the liberal, London-centric narrative that so dominates BBC opinion already? Let’s not forget that Mr Schama has been employed by the BBC and was part of its “bright new future” after May 1, 1997.

The only question is whether they will balance him out by another supposedly “apolitical” figure like an actor/comedian who’s actually a left-winger or whether it’ll be a right-wing blogger or columnist who can easily be dismissed as totally bonkers. Perhaps a member of UKIP?

Posted in politics. Tags: BBC, Woking. 4 Comments »

Winterton of discontent

February 18, 2010 — admin

Another day, another Conservative MP rolls up to the Stephen Nolan show on Five Live to commit political self-immolation. This time it’s Nicholas Winterton on trains and Pete Waterman he ain’t.

Just so he knows what it’s like in second class these days, I went into the City earlier on South West Trains and had to stand next to the toilet due to the volume of people aboard. It’s pretty difficult to get your laptop out or start leafing through reports when you’ve go no seat to use, despite paying the same fare as the people who have got seats. So I hope he’ll forgive me if I don’t share his “outlook on life” when on the train, it’s just that usually I’m having to listen to kids noisily playing I-spy or someone sitting across from me using a personal music device that’s anything but personal.

I’d love to have a “business environment” in which to work, but sometimes you just have to share your world with other human beings and make the compromises that that inevitably entails. He should try it sometime. My company doesn’t pay for me to travel First Class – and neither should taxpayers pay for MPs to do the same. Give them the regular fare – if they want to top it up from their considerable wages, so be it. But I suspect that some of them could do with a bit of second-class travel.

On the way back, I did manage to find a seat, open my laptop and do a few emails before the train pulled into Woking. You see, Sir Nicholas, some of us carriage-classers are capable of doing work on the train, despite being a different type of person. There’s no reason that MPs can’t do the same at certain times of the day.

There are many issues with our trains and overcrowding and punctuality are just the surface of a deeper problem, which the Wintertons might like to look into and lobby Andrew Adonis about. The fact that the most pressing problem in Sir Nicholas Winterton’s mind is that he wants to travel first instead of second class just demonstrates how much better off Parliament will be without him.

Posted in Conservatives, Transport, news. Tags: bad PR, BBC, Conservative Party, South West Trains, Transport. No Comments »

May still a long way off

February 17, 2010 — admin

Teresa - know what you are going to say and what might be said back before you say it!

I drove out to Dorking this morning along the A25 via Send for a business meeting. The road, which I know very well from reporting days and past lives, is in a truly awful, appalling state. But that is Guildford and Mole Valley’s issue – the reason I mention it was that I was stuck for about ten minutes in the aftermath of a nasty car crash (at which I hope no-one was seriously hurt) that seemed to mirror what I was listening to on the radio.

Teresa May, shadow employment secretary, appeared on the Stephen Nolan Show, BBC Radio Five Live (you can listen here but need to fast forward), to talk about today’s unemployment figures (notice how the BBC allows Lib Dem Steve Webb to get in a pop at cutting the deficit at the bottom - no bias my foot), which are mixed. It is good that overall unemployment is down – but with the number of Jobseekers’ claimants up and long-term unemployment up it is difficult to argue that it’s a great day. Teresa presumably went on the air to point out the mixed message – specifically that the number of “under-employed” people – where they have been forced into part-time and reduced-hours work – stands at almost three million.

Instead, she allowed herself down a classic funnel by stating that Labour has closed Job Centres at the average of one a month since 2008. There was no need for her to go there – all she needed to do was talk about the Work Programme, express sympathy and understanding and stay calm. By raising the matter of closures, she prompted the inevitable comeback “so would you re-open them?”, to which she had no answer.

The funnel happens when you’re drawn to a pinch point from which the interview cannot go forward without an answer, usually a yes or no question. “I’ll ask you again, if you say that Labour was wrong to close the Job Centres, will you commit to re-open them?” Again she evades – it sounds very poor. Now she’s struggling because once you’re in the funnel, it’s difficult to climb back out again. “Look, you are hoping to become the next government in three months’ time, I think people have a right to know whether you will right a wrong that you say Labour has committed – so yes or no, will you re-open the Job Centres?” Crash, bang.

It’s not the point she has come on air to make (if it was, it was extremely ill-judged and poorly prepared). So why does an experienced politician like Teresa May allow herself to be dragged into the funnel so easily? By the time Labour minister Jim Knights is introduced into the proceedings, he could have danced around like a chicken and sounded more credible than Teresa. To be fair, she improved towards the end but the damage was done. And I don’t blame the BBC for being hard on her – if you make such basic unforced errors, you get what you deserve.

So how to get out of the funnel? Firstly, avoid going there in the first place. Why bring up the mistakes of government on such a peripheral matter? The essence lies in Conservative policy, which in this case is very credible. Once you’re in, there are only two options – attack the basis of the question or tell the truth. In Teresa’s case, she could have done either.

Attack the basis of the question: “I understand why you as a journalist are asking me that question but whether or not we commit to re-opening the centres is not relevant. The damage has already been done and the people who those centres could have helped have not been helped, which adds to the problems that we face now. The time to save those centres was 2008, not 2010. Instead of talking about committing to re-open those centres, we have adjusted our policy to suit the needs of today’s unemployed people.” If nothing else, it looks less evasive and puts you back in control of the issue, dismissing the question as outdated.

Tell the truth: “I think it’s important to give an honest answer to you and that answer is that we are not in a position to re-open those centres given the state of the public finances. If they had been kept open in 2008 we wouldn’t now close them because that money would already be in our budgets. This government has ruined the economy and left us with huge debts and that means that as much as we’d like to, we simply can’t go and undo this and many other bad decisions that Labour has left us with. In the light of these tight resources, it’s important that we target them properly and that is what our new programme is designed to do.”

Neither answer gets you off the hook completely but it allows you to move on. There’s nothing the public hates more than politicians that blatantly won’t answer questions and evasiveness is not a good thing for voters or party members to hear. I don’t know who’s advising Teresa May on dealing with the media but they clearly have a lot of work to do.

Posted in Conservatives, Economy, news. Tags: bad PR, BBC, employment, road to recovery, Teresa May. No Comments »

Fiddling the system

February 3, 2010 — admin

Tony Blair talked about it after his win in 1997 but soon kicked it into the long grass when civil servants pointed out the advantage that it could potentially give him during the next 10 years. I am of course talking about the first-past-the-post voting system, which has served the country well for 150 years by delivering strong governments in a two-party system.

Yes, it tends to flatter the winning party – enabling them to get legislation through that would otherwise be compromised by protracted negotiations with coalition partners. We haven’t had a hung parliament in this country since 1974 and you have to go back to 1929 for the one before that. In that time, the country has undergone radical economic and social change and the fact that we’ve had governments able to push through their legislation – both popular and unpopular – has been one of the factors that still allows us to be competitive nearly a century after the onset of post-Imperial decline.

Now Gordon Brown wants to change all that. Isn’t it interesting that having thought about it in 1997 as Chancellor only now is he coming to realise that perhaps it might be a good idea after all? Or, more likely, isn’t he just after a chance to gerrymander the electoral system? He knows that if he wins the election in May, he’s very unlikely to deliver a fifth term for Labour in 2015 because governments just don’t stay popular for that long. So, he reasons, let’s change the system to make it tougher for the Tories, if they don’t win in 2010, to get in at a later point.

And it’s interesting that a graphic in the Guardian today shows how the House of Commons would have looked if the AV system had been in place already. We can see that while it appears to bolster the interests of the largest and smallest parties at the expense of the one in between, that isn’t really what happens. What happens is that Conservative voters are far more likely to vote Lib Dem as their second choice, Lib Dem voters far more likely to put Labour as theirs and Labour voters also likely to vote Lib Dem as a second preference. So with Conservative shorn of the majority of second choices, they have to win on the first preference votes alone, whereas the other two parties are more likely to win on second choices.

It, in effect, seals an unofficial electoral pact between the Lib Dems and Labour – even though a good many people who vote Lib Dem do so because they don’t want to vote Labour or Conservative and have little idea what they are voting for – except they “think that Vince Cable is ever such a nice chap”.

There is an issue with the first-past-the-post system in how it works in a three-party, not two-party system. The largest party is inflated, the smallest party negated. But the Lib Dems have always called for proportional voting out of self-interest and not because they believe it enhances democracy. I don’t remember it being quite so far up their list of priorities 100 years ago when they were forming governments on the back of the FPTP system.

Thankfully, not everyone is taken in by the PM’s Saulian conversion to the cause of electoral reform. I’m heartened to see that the BBC reports (I’ll quote becuase it’s a long way down):

“Campaigners for democratic reform give a mixed reaction on Mr Brown’s proposals, with some, such as Power 2010 saying it did not go far enough: “Without troubling the public for their views, ministers hand-picked the voting system they favour in a cynical exercise aimed at wrong-footing the Tories ahead of a likely election defeat.

“The future of our democracy is far too important to be decided by empty gestures such as this.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Posted in Labour, elections. Tags: BBC, elections, electoral reform, Gordon Brown, Labour, Liberal Democrats, tactical voting. No Comments »

Ten good things about the BBC

January 28, 2010 — admin

I’ve done two things today. Firstly, following a discussion on Twitter with @PaulTwinn, who took issue with my last posts and comments about Nick Robinson, I’ve added Biased BBC to my blogroll because it is a decent blog that has some insight into the very subtle way BBC bias manifests itself.

I accept totally that people within the organisation don’t detect bias or believe that they are on anything other than the middle ground. I’ve never worked for the BBC, but I do have a Master’s Degree in Journalism and Media Theory, five years in the industry and am studying for a Postgraduate diploma in Public Relations after three years in that industry. So I know how the system works. And it isn’t just me claiming there is bias in the corporation – they admit it themselves.

Anyway, enough of the BBC bashing, I think it’s important to remember that the BBC’s coverage of politics is staffed by many good journalists who are earnestly seeking to present the truth to people in the best way that they can. Taking it a stage further, the BBC is also graced with many very courageous and skilled reporters who risk their lives in war zones and undercover investigations to bring the news into people’s front rooms. It is not without reason that the BBC commands respect across the globe.

I am one of the few people I know who believe that the BBC’s investment in BBC3 and BBC4 and digital technology is money well spent – the corporation cannot afford to rest on its channels complacent in the knowledge the licence fee exempts it from having to make progress. It doesn’t and the BBC has been prepared to make risky decisions to stay with its commercial rivals.

So the second thing I am doing today is enforcing a bit of impartiality upon myself by listing 10 reasons why I am happy to pay a licence fee – even if I believe it could be cheaper!

1) The BBC carries British values and standards throughout the world and will remain the most trusted and respected trans-global broadcaster well into the 21st century. Such regard is not built up for no reason.

2) There exists a tradition of quality wildlife and natural world programming at the BBC that the corporation has maintained and even improved (the Planet Earth series was the best recent example). I hope this will continue even when Sir David Attenborough cannot.

3) The BBC has made a substantial proportion of its back catalogue available to the public first on VHS and then on DVD. Okay, this helps bolster its income but means that people born after Fawlty Towers was originally broadcast are able to enjoy it, along with other classics such as Yes, Minister and The Office.

4) iPlayer – the corporation has displayed a high degree of acumen and foresight by pioneering this technology and making it available on platforms such as Virgin, BT and even the iPhone as it doesn’t require Flash Player.

5) The BBC has one of the most accessed and wide-ranging websites in the UK, not to mention one that is fully customisable and has content from cookery to history. It is certainly a lot better than Sky’s and ITN’s and of the online newspapers, only the Grauniad runs it close.

6) Jeremy Clarkson. It’s fair to say that he is the antithesis of everything that the liberal BBC stands for. It’s not just that he’s there – ITV could have done that – it’s that an organisation with such a loud exponent of its collective political anathema gives him a platform that its instincts tell it should be denied. Long may it continue.

7) BBC Parliament. Hardly anyone can receive it and of those that can, hardly anyone watches it. But as Sir Humphrey said of Radio 3, the countryside, the opera and the universities “It’s vital to know that they’re there!” Televising parliament was a huge turning point in our political culture and the BBC covers it well. It’s not its fault that no-one’s interested.

8 ) Local radio. In many places, it has been marginalised by commercial competitors but it still serves a small but significant part of the population who if it wasn’t there, would have little or no access to local news. Local radio plays a part in helping communities define themselves.

9) The Reith Lectures, which have been commissioned by the BBC since 1948 and most recently broadcast on Radio 4. The 2008 lectures on China were particularly fascinating – it’s a shame that they are not put out on TV; BBC2 is an obvious home for them.

10) Charitable events, notable Comic Relief and Children in Need. The corporation has helped raise more than £1bn since the 1980s with these two charities and that is something to be very satisfied by. Some may think it’s all got a bit too much but in this case I believe the end justifies the means.

So there we are – ten very good things about the BBC. I don’t oppose it, I don’t want to see it privatised, it has an important place in the nation’s fabric. I accept that it will always be an organisation with a culture that prefers a particular way of presenting things. But I won’t just ignore that fact.

Posted in Mundane occurances, Other blogs. Tags: BBC, Twitter. No Comments »

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