Thursday 29 July 2010

Mel

See today that Melanie Phillips has joined Twitter. Will have to follow her. That woman fascinates me. Her views are so abhorant I sometimes find it hard to believe the whole thing isnt a joke - like a more realistic Punch and Judy show. "SHE'S BEHIND YOU!"

Monday 24 May 2010

The cutting agenda

I have found Clegg’s repositioning on the issue of cuts this year disappointing. As I have said, I have no problem with compromises or changed minds. But politicians need to be more open and honest with the voters if they want to avoid being seen as just another lot of lying, power-hungry opportunists, doing what is necessary to keep themselves in power.

I would love to have heard Clegg say: "As you know the LDs were against making the cuts too soon. We still believe this to be the case. However, our Conservative partners won the most votes on a platform of promising cuts sooner rather than later, and therefore we feel they have a mandate to do that. We have made our concerns very clear, and have indicated the areas we think would be most harmful to an economic recovery.” Hopefully exceptions could be made if they had concerns in specific areas and they could say they had managed to influence policy in those areas, but conceded there was perhaps a little room for cutting in some other areas.

Another option, of course, would be to say: “Now we have seen the books, and considering what has happened with Greece, we feel we lost the argument on this one. In the current circumstances, the Tory position has been vindicated. Let’s get cutting.” Some kind of hybrid of the two would be perfectly acceptable too.

I guess the second option is more or less what they are saying, but I would like to see it put a little more explicitly. I just don’t buy this argument that they didn’t really know what was going on with our books: they might not have had the specifics but they must have known things were dire. Likewise, while the Greece situation has taken us by surprise with its ferocity, we all knew it was on the cards. That’s what this whole debate about the urgency of cutting has been about – maintaining the confidence of the markets. Greece is just a live show – a reminder about what the stakes of this game are.

Surely coalition government doesn’t have to be about reinventing or glossing over the past, refusing to ever admit you got something wrong or pretending the two parties agree on everything.

Maybe Im in the minority on this. Presumably political PR believes any admission of having made an error will be a sign of political weakness, a chink in the armour that other parties will exploit. Maybe, taking everybody into account, it is better to keep trying to sound omniscient, rather than take a more plain-spoken approach. But I personally would find it refreshing.

Friday 21 May 2010

Over egging the pudding

This whole "new politics" thing is starting to get a little cringeworthy now. As a soundbyte it did its job but it seems like too many people are being taken in by it, believing this is the start of a completely new political way of life.
It isnt. Its a marriage of convenience. If we are lucky it could lead to PR. There is every chance it wont. Whatever it is, it was imposed by political gridlock and financial crisis, not enlightened ideas about how to conduct the affairs of state.
Constantly going on about new politics like it is something tangible, some wonderful new idea conceived by Clegg and Cameron, just shows the Lib Dems (and Tories) to be as beholden to the other kind of PR (public relations) as Labour were. And that is what this whole thing is starting to remind me of: the new deal. What was that again? Some magic, hitherto undiscovered solution to society's ills? No, it was called living on borrowed money. Lets not go on and on about this until it is shown to be something equally vacuuous.
The Lib Dems and in government, in a coalition, with the Conservatives. Lets just see what they can get done and stop banging on about how clever we are, and how much better than Labour. Or we will end up just like them.

Thursday 20 May 2010

Banker bashing

There’s a lot of banker bashing and anti finance sentiment out there. I understand that well enough. In terms of the sentiment behind it – the outrage that a sector can have caused such a lot of problems, and yet be so utterly immune to the repercussions of them. Of course I want “them” to be held to account. But who exactly is “them”? And more importantly, what can we do to put it right without hurting ourselves as much as we hurt them?

Disclaimer: I have no idea what the answers to these questions are.

What I have a slightly better idea about it the much easier issue of what some of the main pitfalls we need to avoid are. The biggest and most obvious of these – and the one we are currently marching directly towards – is that decisions are made for political reasons, rather than sound economic/financial ones – to quench this widespread feeling of outrage.

It is easy to rush out regulation to make life more difficult for bankers and other fat-cat finance types. It is easy to sell that regulation to angry voters, and the chances are this is a vote winning strategy in the short term.

But it is much harder to implement rules that will a) prevent the problems we have had in the past occurring again in the future (which must, at the end of the day, be the number one priority) b) reign in the excessive tendencies of some elements within the financial markets without penalising everyone else, (remember, many players in the financial markets are trading with money that belongs to everyday people: some of the biggest investors in the world are pension funds and endowments of educational establishments, and many of the hair-brained regulatory initiatives feeding through the system right now are going to lose them money – that is pensioners and students, not just bankers, who are out of pocket.) And c) how to do a) and b) without crippling our own economies, causing unemployment or one of the dreaded ‘flations (in or de, which will it be?).

It is easy to believe the finance industry is trying to use the politics of fear to blackmail the rest of society to leave it alone, threatening social and economic Armageddon if anyone tries to take away their bonuses. I don’t believe that for a minute. There is a way to rein them in without the price to society being too high to be worth paying. We may have to sacrifice some growth, but that is not necessarily the end of the world, when that growth manifests itself in things like unaffordably expensive housing.

But if this is going to happen right, it is also going to happen disappointingly slowly, as far as the public is concerned. And the measures, when they come, may not be sexy or spectacular. Public bloodletting of bankers and hedge fund managers might be satisfying, but it wont be helpful. Most importantly, it will require politicians around the world to put their differences aside and work together, compromising for the good of global financial cohesion, rather than short sighted national interest. Perhaps the recent political developments of the UK can serve as an example to the rest of the world.

Monday 17 May 2010

In support of the new government

I can understand why people are so ambivalent about this Lib Dem – Tory coalition, and my instinctive response to it was also negative. But the more I think about it the more I think it is for the best. It is the best of a collection of less-than-perfect outcomes. Which is a strange thing to say, I guess, given that with a relatively feeble performance at the election we (I keep saying “we” and then deleting and replacing with Lib Dems, but I am getting sick of doing it. To qualify, I am a Lib Dem voter, not a party member. But I do feel a certain loyalty to the party) have found ourselves with a taste of power.

Bottom line: we believe in PR. That system requires forming coalition governments based on what the public has voted for. If all the parties say, in effect: “We will never ally with the Tories” then PR is not representative or democratic. For better or worse, more people voted Tory at this election than for anyone else. So it is fair enough they be in office. Personally, I would rather the Lib Dems came in with them and exerted some influence over policy than the Tories had an outright majority and allowed their right wing to run riot.

And yes, this will involve compromises. But then, it’s not like we would be getting more Lib Dem policies through if we didn’t form part of this coalition. Given the choice of either 20% of our manifesto or 0%, I’d take 20%. And given the choice of 100% of the Tories’ or 80%, I’d take 80%. I actually think the compromises are pretty reasonable, in the main.

I’m sick to death – and its only been a couple of weeks – of people talking about how the two parties have been merged into one now, and hinting at the LDs as now being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tories (this position was most notably put forward, from what I have seen, by Mehdi Hasan on Question Time last week. For the record I thought he was great value. I imagine if the conversation hadn’t been predominantly about the coalition I would have agreed with a lot of what he said).

The LDs are not a subsidiary of the Conservatives. Of course both parties deserve to be represented in a debate, even if they both support the same government. They represent completely different people within the electorate, and have almost diametrically opposed ways of looking at life. When a Tory looks at criminal figures, he demands more prisons. When a Lib Dem looks at the same thing, he demands schools, youth clubs or economic opportunities, to try to prevent crime being committed in the first place. To most people in this country that sounds naïve. So be it.

So I understand those that believe the LDs are spiritually and in terms of policy closer to Labour. I just about agree (despite not liking Labour’s authoritarian streak, and finding the constant repetition about “tax credits for middle income families” faintly ludicrous in the context of the economic situation we are in. Trying to seduce the middle classes with goodies is SO 1997 – come on Brown, get with the programme: 2010 is all about manageable austerity). But that is not what people voted for. Let’s not feed the view that we are just a protest vote for alternative Labour voters by giving the impression we do not have the independence to go it alone.

I am proud the LD politicians who have their reservations about this have so far held their peace and seem to be trying to make it work. I appreciate a lot of what I said above has been said before. But I hope some of the criticisms of the party die down – at least those from within – and the debate turns to more constructive things.