A grim day for David Laws but also the relationship between the media and government

When the PM decided to make his big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats, it was done because he recognised the necessity in forming a strong government in the wake of an ultimately indecisive election. He knew that the British public didn’t want to be at the polls again in October, he knew that the country couldn’t afford – and probably wouldn’t accept – Labour being kept in power and that in order to form the only coalition government that could claim a mandate he would have to talk seriously, sensibly and flexibly to a party between whose activists there has at times existed a genuine hatred.

No matter – that quite rightly has been placed aside in order to get the best people into government. And if you look at the excellent line-up of the cabinet – the PM and NC working together, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Ken Clarke, Vince Cable and others, you understand that the sacrifices both parties have made in their hearts and minds have been worth it.

David Laws has, for me, been the stand-out performer of the coalition. His handling of the announcement of the £6.2bn cuts last week was first-rate both in the house and in front of the media. His boss George Osborne was there with him but said very little and one hopes was watching carefully to see how it should be done. The point is it doesn’t matter whether he’s Lib Dem or Tory; if he’s got a mandate from the electorate and can do the job, the country needs him in place.

Enter the Daily Telegraph, whose view of the country is somewhat different. For them, the agenda is foxhunting, family values, favourable taxes and flag-waving. They don’t care much for Lib Dems – especially ones with secret gay lovers – and they’re not bothered about keeping the coalition together if it forces an election that could redress the result of May 6. Don’t get me wrong – I’m really disappointed that we didn’t secure an outright majority; but it was the failure to gain winnable Labour seats – not Lib Dem ones – that cost us victory.

The way in which the Telegraph has dealt with the David Laws story is bullying, immoral and reckless. What David Laws did was unquestionably wrong, although one can understand (just) why he did it. The money that he was taking from the taxpayer to pay his lover as landlord fell foul of regulations in 2006 that money could no longer be paid to “spouses” as “rent” (the fact it ever could be is bewildering). Had David Laws then not continued the payment, the question of why would have been asked – forcing him to reveal details of his private life.

Trouble is that £40,000 is a lot of money and he doesn’t need it any more than the PM. It creates the impression that a man asking the nation to make terrifying cuts across public and private fields is being less than austere with his own arrangements. For that reason, once the story became public, he has done the right thing in resigning – a very sad consequence of unjust parliamentary procedures in the first instance and social judgement in the second.

But for the Telegraph, there is no such mitigation. This angry, reactionary and backwards publication is an embarrassment to Conservatism and the nation it so very proudly wants to tell everyone it embodies. It represents exactly the kind of sneering, snobbish and bigoted values that the public reacted against in 1997 and brought Tony Blair into our lives. Why it felt it could not reveal the facts about David Laws during the original story is anyone’s guess and there is a rancid stench of spite and homophobia running through the decision to break it now – just as David Laws reaches the peak of his political career and achieves the platform to display his talents.

Who knows what’s behind it - there are of course powerful factions with an interest in removing a star in the making who wears the “wrong” colours (or the “right” colours in the “wrong” way) in both their political and private life. What amazes and disgusts me is that they, whoever they are, would choose to run so contrary to the national interest by fashioning the demise of potentially a key figure in the recovery and rebuilding of our economy.

The lowest nadir for UK journalism since the Sun decided it was in the public interest to publish topless pictures of the Countess of Wessex a few days before her wedding; and to trump the Sun on classlessness takes some doing.

It seems that there were a few hacks back at the BBC yesterday and today as someone has had time to stitch together a toadying news story about Gordon Brown, giving him carte blanche to attack everyone else based on a tepid interview he gave to Andrew Marr. He’s also led the bulletins throughout Sunday by announcing the new full body scanners at airports – steering us gently back onto a massive over-reaction to a very specific and concentrated terrorist danger.

I had to laugh at the headline – not “Full body scanners on the way” or “Airports to get full body scanners” but “Gordon Brown promises full body scanners” as if the PM and the PM alone has the power to do this as opposed to the companies that operate our UK airports. It goes to show the subtle yet insidious bias that remains within the corporation’s coverage of UK politics.

The fact is that people have been getting on board aircraft and hijacking them for years. They have been planting bombs on them and evading airport security for even longer. If the UK government had been serious about this issue it would have acted far more strongly after Lockerbie to ensure that aircraft departing from this country are subject to far stricter and no less time-consuming security specifications. The Lockerbie bomb – if you accept it was such – could have been contained within bomb-strengthened luggage containers that are readily available but not commercially preferable to airlines.

The PM has had 12 years to bring forward these full-body scanning measures and although the technology in this field is advancing all the time, why has he waited to an election year rather than 2001 and 9/11 or 2005 and 7/7 to announced this? We’ve already had the case of Richard Reid when nothing was done. The sudden focus on tightened security is just a get-tough measure that Brown hopes to use to propel himself back into No 10.

What you won’t find on the BBC website is two things. Firstly that among the 

“Experts [who] have questioned the scanners’ effectiveness at detecting the type of bomb allegedly used on Christmas Day in an attempted plane attack over Detroit.”

is a Conservative MP who has advised companies on the design of such things and who no doubt knows a great deal more about the subject than Gordon Brown.

You also won’t find reference to the fact that the PM claimed he had spoken to President Obama about the “new” Yemeni dimension to the terrorist threat, something that turned out to be totally untrue. Funnily enough, there’s no story on this – apparently body scanners are more important than a PM who’s a liar – but you can unpick the angle from the interview transcript.

So we’ve got Yemen, the closed embassies, the airport scanners and top-level US co-operation. It sounds to me very much as though the Labour Party is spinning madly on the security line for a political hit to get the year off to a decent start. We can expect more bogeymen and women hiding in the shagpile – from Yemeni extremists to Conservative MPs – as this government enters into its final throw of the dice; a general election of fear.

One of the key things in the the Pre-Budget Report was the headline to “halve Britain’s deficit” during the next four years, bringing this down from 12% of GDP where it currently stands (up from 2% in 2007) to 6.5%. In other words we are going to reduce the £180bn-a-year borrowing levels to something more “manageable”.

But this is not the same as reducing the deficit ie paying back what we owe – it simply indicates that the government, over the next four years, wants to reduce borrowing to £90bn a year, adjusting for inflation. During that time, of course, they could have borrowed the best part of £600bn more.

It doesn’t pay off the amount borrowed – it doesn’t even pay off the interest – it is simply a commitment to reduce the future levels at which we borrow. Strangely, this distinction doesn’t seem to have made it past Tom Clark in The Grauniad, as the paper happily swallows the government lines that Labour is to “halve the deficit”.

The total figure for what Britain owes is not easy to find but one must assume it is heading towards £1trillion. In addition, the nation has promised £2trillion in public pensions that it doesn’t have.

What the government is actually doing is spending £100 on a credit card every month. It used to spend £20, but the recession meant it needed to borrow more. It has not paid any of the money back and is intermittently paying back bits of interest. The bank is watching closely to see if the credit limit should be reduced. So the government is now looking to reduce its spending to £50 within four years. It is not saying that half the total amount on the card will be repaid.

That isn’t the impression left by James Lansdale on the “full story of the pre-Budget report” on the BBC, or even by the Daily Telegraph, who also seem happy to take the government’s suggested wording.

What the government is seeking to do is halve year-on-year borrowing, nothing else. It might help if journalists read the report itself rather than the Treasury’s press release, or even understood a little bit about how the economy works.

The week got off to a bang this morning with the Boy George going around every media outlet and explaining his bright new policy about limiting High Street banks’ bonuses to £2,000.

What a silly idea. Well, actually, it’s quite a good idea but it was hardly going to be popular with the bank workers who unsuprisingly prefer cash to shares and it completely misses the point that it is the investment banks rather than the High Street ones that had a destructive bonus culture.

More importantly, the BBC has allowed Liam Byrne and Vince Cable more airtime to criticise the idea on subsequent bulletins than they allowed Osborne time to explain it initially. That’s the BBC for you, as we’ve seen in other areas over the past few days – about as balanced as Mohammed Al Fayed and often a good deal less intelligent. Osborne (who is sounding more credible than he was six months ago even if today’s idea was shaky) and DC have to learn to say nothing when they’ve nothing worth saying.

But the biggest ear-opener for me was “The Treasury” slamming the idea. I though the “The Treasury” was a government department staffed by politically neutral civil servants whose job it was to help the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the First Lord of the Treasury deliver government fiscal policy? I thought that political statements were there to be made by useful people like Mr Byrne. Or is the BBC misreporting this?

Whatever the reason, I think trolls in the Treasury would be almost as bad as bats in the belfry.

Flawed but not floored - can he turn it around

It’s a bit early to define a narrative from the Labour Conference in Brighton just yet but so far the most interesting thing coming out of the proceedings there is the attitude of the BBC.

First, we have a surprisingly combative interview from the normally obliging Andrew Marr, who went so far as to raise with the PM the issue of his alleged medication. Predictably, Brown dodged the question and instead went for the sympathy vote over his eyesight, something that David Blunkett – a far more robust and substantial man – would never have done. Whatever the answer, it caught me (and quite a few of the Tory Twitterati that I follow) out – one wonders whether this is the last Marr/Brown interview.

It obviously irked Marr to ask the question as much as it did Brown to have to answer it. The BBC man’s pleading that it was a “fair” question was followed up by some serious feigned interest in Brown’s sob story. Obviously I’m sorry he has a sight impairment – but it was noticeable how much detail he was prepared to give up on this in contrast with the actual question about prescription drugs.

Then we had this from Laura Kuenssberg (@BBCLauraK) – she really is a gem on top of a compost heap. Not only was she prepared to tell viewers the actual mood of the conference on Brown’s arrival (ie pretty dreadful) but also to lob some real questions at him about his law-breaking ministers and then reflect that the party activists (the BBC usual calls them crowds as if to ignore their handpicked pedigree) were making so much noise that he couldn’t hear her. And she hinted, quite correctly, that this was probably deliberate.

But look at the story headline – “Labour ‘should expose the Tories’”. Clearly the online staff have gone seriously off message – or on message with PM. It doesn’t reflect the downbeat message from LauraK and about Labour – or indeed much about Labour at all. It’s just a pop at the Conservatives.

Previous to this, of course, was this beauty – again courtesy of online staff – suggesting that Brown and Barack Obama are, after all, the closest of chums and that Obama doesn’t see Brown as a washed-up political liability or “depressing to be around“, as one of his staff leaked to the press. According to the BBC, this official line “quelled rumours” of an Obama snub. No it didn’t – and who are they to report that as fact? Any moderately sensible person watching the polls will realise that the last thing Obama needs with his problems at home is to become embroiled in some tawdry scheme by a foreign political party to prop up their ailing government with lent popularity.

Obama isn’t my cup of tea but he’s certainly not a fool. And only a fool would consider anything other than refusing any more public airtime with Gordon than was absolutely necessary. Any suggestion to the contrary is completely counter-inituitive and total propaganda, which the Beeb is only too happy to repeat.

Going back to the polls, not even Obama could have found a way to spin a poll that suggests you are heading out of office positively. I can’t now find the link on the BBC website – maybe they’ve seen sense and pulled it – but this poll, which states 41% of people think Brown is almost certainly going to lose is bad, bad news. Instead, the BBC concentrated on the 48% of people who though Labour still had a “slim chance” of winning in 2010, along with the 11% who think he will win.

It’s a silly question – you can’t ever rule out that a party has a “slim chance” of winning. I’m not surprised so many people ticked that box rather than commit themselves but it doesn’t reflect reality. The BBC is supposed to be here to present facts not spin to us that 59% of people think Gordon is still in with a chance next year – of course he is, he’s taking part in the election. They are more aware than ever that politics is self-fulfilling and by buying into this silly poll (I though they didn’t report routine polls anyway) they are just playing PM and the PM’s game for them. At our expense.

I don’t expect the BBC to give DC a free ride. I don’t expect them to push through government PR work. But there is a bipolarity within the corporation at the moment between the political pragmatists that realise the New Labour years are 95% drawing to a close and the politically-motivated staff who desperately want to play a hand in upsetting the odds with sly journalism. It’s got no place in the BBC and they have no place on the public payroll.

The BBC is a service, not a political tool. I’m afraid quite a number of its staff work there for the wrong reasons – they should stand for election instead.

I’m beginning to understand how annoying I must have been as a journalist. I often used phrases that were technically true but stretched the lexicographical boundaries of semantics and the great English language. They nearly always made for better headlines and more irrate PRs.

This week, the News and Mail have carried on the noble traidtion with Woking taxpayers fund energy for Milton Keynes. Let’s start with the first par:

“Woking taxpayers have invested more than £44m in a company that provides
energy to Milton Keynes.”

No, they haven’t. Money for Thameswey has largely come from borrowing and money for the subsidaries has entirely been taken from the money markets. Nothing has come from the council taxpayer ie through council tax to fund Thameswey operations.

The paragraph implies that the company only supplies energy to Milton Keynes – it doesn’t. Most of its activities are Woking-based, including subsidising cavity insulation for residents and providing information on energy efficiency. Furthermore, Cllr John Kingsbury and the Conservative executive have pledged to conclude operations in MK early at the end of Phase I and that no new borrowing be approved for further project. There has been no such pledge from the Liberal Democrats.

Bob Shatwell, always good for a quote, thinks the whole thing is “scandalous”, which is about as good as it gets from him. Chris Bore makes a much more valid point – that the lack of transparency about Thameswey – which Ray Morgan insists is just because he’s never gotten around to it – is it’s own worst enemy.

In good times, the company has failed to get across the message of its success. In bad times, the level of resentment is that much higher because people don’t understand what the big secret is and assume the worst.

When I was at the News and Mail, I tried to run a series of articles on Thameswey to explain its role to readers and spent several hours with Ray Morgan getting into the financial nitty-gritty. It was about as enthusiastically received as mouldy bread by editorial staff and stonewalled on the grounds that people weren’t interested. They can’t have it both ways!

The News and Mail leads this week with a “fears are growing for the…” story on the Marjorie Richardson centre, which has understandably caused alarm. There is a paper on this going to the executive on September 3 that asks members to consider whether to re-instate funding to the centre on the basis of its current grant, £15,285 rather than the £20,000 it wanted.

There are, it has to be said, a couple of things that the story omitted, which is understandable because the newspaper needs to focus on the people rather than the background.

At Horsell Village Hall, we don’t rely on the council for funding, although it’s nice when it comes along. We have to do our own fundraising, balance our lettings books and seek grant funding from elsewhere. There is nothing preventing the centre from doing the same thing, so by turning down funding, the council is not “closing” the centre, it is merely saying that it cannot provide the funds it has done in the past.

The centre has now submitted a business plan – and not before time. Any operating model that relied so heavily on one source of income (WBC) is clearly in need of review. The plan shows that the centre is making £20k a year on sales as well as a £15k WBC grant but is spending more than £25k on management! This I would suggest, not WBC’s meanness, is the real problem – it’s a pity no-one at the News and Mail bothered to look it up.

In addition, the story tells us that 45-55 people each day use the centre – which is slightly at odds with the 433 a week in the grant application. However, if we multiply 50 by 5 and then 52 to get a rough yearly figure, it’s around 13,000. This seems to imply that with 15,500 visits for the year in 2007/8 (not people using the centre as the newspaper implies), we have roughly the same 50 people using the centre each day with a few extra here and there.

£20k, or for that matter £15k, is quite a bit of money to spend on – let’s be generous – 150-odd active individuals out of 92,000 residents in Woking. No-one likes to see the axe fall anywhere and taking funding away from community groups is not what Conservatism is about. But if you think that Horsell Village Hall received £3,500 for its 2,000 individual users, it does seem to introduce some perspective here.

My understanding is that the Marjorie Richardson Centre could be given time to make the new arrangements – ie a proper rather than pie-in-the-sky business plan – work. But users and staff blaming the council for the state it’s in, aiding by some unquestioning journalism, doesn’t paint it in the most favourable light.

I’m sure it will come back onto the news agenda but Swine Flu seems to have dipped off the radar for the moment.

Instead, the media is looking around for evermore virulent and morbid epidemics to scare us with. The truth is that there are too many humans in the world and at some point the earth, like the stock market, will contrive a “correction” to reduce our numbers.

Expect more of this now the public has been softened up to hysterical levels.