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This week I was going to vote for 1. Diane Abbott, 2. Ed Miliband,  3. David Miliband, 4. Andy Burnham, and 5. Ed Balls.  But I have been persuaded by an expert’s analysis of the voting system for the leadership election that this would be risky. I now plan to vote 1. Ed Miliband, 2. David Miliband, 3 Andy Burnham,. 4. Diane Abbott, 5  Ed Balls. Here’s why.

Of the two candidates for the Labour leadership with the basic qualities required in a party and national leader, Ed Miliband seems to me to have the edge over his brother on policy and values, and to look reasonably papabile.  But of all five candidates, only Diane Abbott’s views on almost all major issues chime with mine – on the UK nuclear deterrent, Iraq and Afghanistan, other foreign wars, prisons, terrorism, civil rights, taxation, the economy, and more.  Until recently I accordingly planned to give Diane my first preference, on the basis that if she gets a respectable number of votes that will oblige the new leader to take her and her supporters’ views seriously. But I don’t think that she has the personality or skills to be an effective party leader or a credible candidate for election as prime minister (sorry, Diane). Moreover, I don’t think she can win enough first or second preferences in the parliamentary or union sections of the electoral college to stand a realistic chance of winning the Labour party leadership election itself, however well she might do in the constituency section – although it’s never safe to base one’s votes on assumptions about how everyone else will vote .  All the same, it seemed reasonable to translate these views into votes by giving my first preference to Ms Abbott, in the confidence that at some stage she will be eliminated and that my second preference, for Ed Miliband, will thereupon be reallocated to him.  Mission accomplished!   But is it?  Now read on….

This plan seemed to be confirmed by the advice in a letter in the Guardian on 27 August which advocated exactly what I was proposing to do:

Seumas Milne is absolutely right that those who want to return the Labour party to its correct place within the political spectrum should ensure Ed Miliband beats David (Ed is the only Miliband who offers a genuine alternative, 26 August). However Ed Miliband is young and untested, and his leadership will not just be determined by his platform; it will be shaped by context. The first context will be the dynamic within the party following the result. A radical confident leadership from Ed will most likely emerge if the starting point is a strong Abbott vote that transfers to him. It is therefore imperative that Diane Abbott supporters hold firm in their first preferences, determined, as Milne describes, “to see a voice for the left in the country’s main party of reform”. Vote Abbott 1, Ed Miliband 2.
Daniel Blaney
Basildon, Essex

However, I had a nagging suspicion that I might be missing something here.  So I sought the advice of a Labour supporter who understands the electoral system better than I do.  Here is what she said in reply:

Let’s start with the simple case, in which your only interest is who gets elected (that is, ignore for a moment your desire to use your vote for the additional purpose of “sending a signal” as well).

Then it is all simple.  One of the principal merits of AV (some would say the only merit) is that it is simple for the voter to know what to do, even if it is not simple to explain how the system works.  The voter should simply number the candidates according to her ranking of them.   There is no way to vote tactically. Even if a voter knew exactly how everyone else was going to vote (which of course she doesn’t) there would not be a reason to do anything other than number the candidates in order.

To answer specific questions that have been raised:

- In an election with five candidates, putting preferences by four of them, and leaving the fifth blank is identical to ranking the last candidate fifth.  (Your last preference votes won’t ever be counted because it is not possible for four candidates to be eliminated and their second or lower preferences re-allocated in a five-candidate election.)

- If you want “anyone but Balls”, your best strategy is not to put a number next to Balls.  Putting a number next to a candidate can’t harm them. If it is the lowest possible number (ie 5 in a five-candidate election) it won’t help them either (see above).  If it is any number other than last, it might help them.  If you don’t want them, don’t vote for them.

- Your votes have to start with 1 and go down as far as you have preferences. In some elections a minority of voters put a “1″ next to the candidate they want and “5″ next to someone they detest, without putting the numbers 2, 3 and 4 in between.  Some electoral officers will count this first preference; most will just declare the paper spoiled.

Now we make it more complicated, by acknowledging that some voters want to use the election not only to choose a winner but also for the secondary purpose of sending a signal.  In the normal case, the signal a voter wants to send is aligned with her preferences in the election (that is, if a voter wants to send the signal that she likes what Ed Balls has to say, she is also likely to think that Ed Balls would make the best leader).  In that case, we are back to the simple case – the voter should simply number the candidates according to her preferences.  It is more complicated for a voter who wants to send a signal that is not aligned with her actual preferences for leader.  So a voter prefers Ed Miliband to be leader, but wants to send the (false?) signal that he prefers Diane Abbott to Ed Miliband.  If the voter is trying to pursue these two objectives simultaneously, that reintroduces the possibility of tactical voting.  The optimum strategy for the voter in this special case depends on (a) the relative weight the voter attaches to these objectives; and (b) what the voter thinks other voters will do.

In the actual case at hand, in which the voter reasonably expects that Diane Abbott has almost no chance of winning, he might put Diane Abbott first and his actual preference for leader (in this case, Ed Miliband) second.  This would achieve the secondary objective (sending a signal) but there are two ways it might backfire on the first objective (choose Ed Miliband to be leader):

*      first, there is a possibility (probably small in this case) that Diane Abbott might actually win, which is not what the voter intends;

*       second, if enough people who want Ed Miliband put someone else first for the purpose of sending a signal, then there is chance that Ed Miliband could be eliminated early on. Suppose Andy Burnham goes out first, and most of his second preferences go to Diane Abbott.  Then Ed Miliband might conceivably still be below Diane Abbott in the next round, and he’d go out before she does.  She’d go out next, and then would be a straight race between David Miliband and Ed Balls.  So in this story, the voter who has put Diane Abbott ahead of Ed Miliband to send a signal would have inadvertently made it more likely that Ed Balls gets elected leader, even though the voter has correctly anticipated that Diane Abbott herself has no chance of success.

Whether the voter regards this as a risk worth taking depends on (a) the relative weight he attaches to the two objectives of electing the right leader and sending the signal; and (b) his view of the probability that Ed Miliband might be eliminated ahead of Diane Abbott.  (Note that this is not the same question as whether Diane Abbott might get more first preferences than Ed Miliband).

I have to say, my guess is that it is probably quite rare for a voter to prefer one candidate but want to send a (false) signal he prefers another.  So in general, the aphorism that there is no tactical voting in AV is correct.

So the conclusions are:

*       In the case where your objectives are limited to choosing a leader, you should number them in order of preference as far as you have preferences, and then stop. If you specifically don’t want a particular person, don’t put a number next to them.

*      In the case where you want to send a signal that is different from your preferences for leader, it is more complicated.  You should only vote for a “signal” candidate ahead of the candidate you really prefer if you are pretty confident that the signal candidate will be eliminated ahead of your true preference.

I am persuaded by this.  If the argument in Mr Blaney’s Guardian letter, no doubt also being advanced by others in Labour groups and forums up and down the country, influences enough voters to do what Mr Blaney recommends, which of course is also what I had been planning to do, it could conceivably cause Ed Miliband to be eliminated before Diane Abbott, who would then either be eliminated in her turn — or else even go on to win, if (for example) we have all guessed wrongly how the voting in the parliamentary and trade union sections is likely to go. The more first preferences go to Ed Miliband, the less the risk that he might be eliminated before a candidate who has received a significant number of purely gesture preferences.  If you think that of the five candidates Ed Miliband would make the best leader of the party, best leader of the opposition and potentially the best prime minister, you should give him your first preference, and resist the temptation to use your first preference to make a political statement in favour of a candidate whose views you like but who you know lacks the personality and other attributes to lead the party, the opposition or the country.  If  – out of loyalty, sentiment or bloody-mindedness – you insist on giving your first preference to, say, Diane Abbott or Andy Burnham, you can limit the damage, or at any rate the risk, by being careful to give your second preference to Ed Miliband.  Take care to number the rest of your remaining votes also in order of your assessment of their leadership qualities:  even your fourth preference may be counted and thus affect the outcome, if your first three are all eliminated.  Only your fifth preference will not in any circumstances be redistributed or counted: reserve that for the candidate whom you think a seriously unsuitable choice for leader. Either number him 5, or don’t give him a number at all – provided that you have numbered all the rest 1 to 4.

Thus whichever your preferred candidate and order of preference, a first or even second preference vote for a candidate who you know lacks the qualities required of a future leader but for whom you want to make a gesture of support, is not only a waste of your opportunity to influence the election’s outcome in favour of the candidate whom you really want to win:  it may actually damage the latter’s chances.    With First Past the Post there’s scope for tactical voting (e.g. if you’re a Labour supporter who used to think that the LibDems were the next best thing and the Tories the worst, and you vote in a constituency where Labour always comes a poor third, it’s sensible, or used to be, to vote LibDem).  With AV, you should always give your first preference vote to the candidate who you think will be the best leader, however good or bad you rate his or her realistic chance of winning, and your second to the second best choice, and so on down to no. 5.

Next year we shall all need to consider, in the light of all these ifs and buts, whether we really prefer this Alternative Vote system for electing our MPs to the existing system of First Past the Post – the choice which will confront us when we vote in the referendum promised as blood money for the LibDems by the Con-LibDem coalition in its founding document.  But that’s for another day and another post.

Meanwhile some of us will have the opportunity to vote this week for a new leader of the Labour Party. I conclude from the analysis above that those who share my view of the best (and worst) achievable outcome should vote 1. Ed Miliband, 2. David Miliband, 3. Andy Burnham, 4. Diane Abbott, 5. Ed Balls.

PS:  Don’t forget that if you’re a member of the Labour party and also a member of an affiliated trade union, and of the Fabian Society, and of the Society of Labour Lawyers, or any other affiliated organisation, you get a vote in respect of each.  MPs and MEPs don’t need to be told that they get another one too, and one that will carry far more weight than the vote of an ordinary party or union member.  Vote early, and vote often!

Any questions?

Brian

In the five hectic days between the election results on 6 May 2010 and the appointment of David Cameron as prime minister on the 11th, Labour never had a chance of a deal with the LibDems that would have kept Labour in office, even under a new leader. Some LibDems have suggested that they were forced into bed with the Tories by Labour’s failure to negotiate seriously with them or to offer a better deal than the Tories.  This is false, although it has a grain of truth in it.  The LibDems went through the motions of negotiating with Labour purely to maximise their leverage in the real negotiations they were conducting with the Tories.  It’s worth re-visiting those five days to see what lessons Labour might draw from them next time an election results in a hung parliament — something that now seems likely in most future elections while the state of the parties in the country remains broadly the way it is, even if the electoral system is not changed between now and the next election.  What really happened, and why?  In this third and final assessment of the lessons of the Five Days in May, I look at what Labour did and didn’t do in that frenetic period and what lessons Labour can learn from the experience.

An essential but widely neglected factor in these events is that the parties were seeking to conform to a new, or newly formulated, rule-book for a hung parliament, drawn up by the Cabinet Secretary and approved before the election by a parliamentary select committee and by the leaders of the principal parties.  (Before the election I wrote a more detailed analysis of the new rules, e.g.  here and here.) Briefly, they provided that (1) whatever the arithmetic of the election results,  the incumbent prime minister had not just a right but a positive duty to remain in office, and not to resign, until there was clearly and incontestably an alternative member of the new parliament able to form a government that would have the confidence of an overall majority of MPs;  (2) it was the duty of the party leaderships, not of the Queen, to negotiate with each other until there was clear, firm agreement on a government and a head of it able to command the confidence of the majority of the house of commons;  and (3) if inter-party negotiations failed to agree on such a new leader and government, it would be the duty of the incumbent prime minister, regardless of whether his or her party had the most seats in the new House, to present a programme of policies in a Queen’s Speech to the house of commons at the opening of the new parliament and to invite the House to vote to approve or reject it.  The purposes of these re-formulated rules were to protect the monarch from involvement in party politics and the need to make invidious and controversial decisions, and to ensure that government could be carried on, with a prime minister in place in No. 10, throughout the time needed for the negotiation of a new and durable government, so that in the event of a sudden crisis during that period, the ship would not be without a captain and crew.

It was clear from 6 May that although the Conservatives had failed to win an overall majority of seats in the house of commons (which would have required Brown to resign and Cameron to become prime minister immediately),  in every sense Labour had lost the election, having lost almost a hundred seats, with the Tories winning 48 seats more than Labour and more than 2 million more votes.  Unsurprisingly the Tory tabloids screamed for Gordon Brown’s instant resignation and vilified him for ‘hanging on in No. 10′, either not aware of the clear provisions of the rule book, or preferring to ignore it for a more newsworthy and politically exciting headline.  Clegg, who had repeatedly set out as his guiding principle before the election that the party with the most seats and the most votes should have the first opportunity to try to form a government, nevertheless invited both the Labour and Conservative leaderships to hold talks with him and the LibDems about the possibilities of a deal with one or the other.  (In an earlier and different age, the then Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe had advised with exemplary clarity and concision how his party should conduct itself if holding the balance of power: “Keep your distance but allow the largest party to govern.”  In the event Clegg acted on the second part of this advice, but ignored the first.)

The Conservative-leaning website TotalPolitics summarised what happened next according to the BBC programme “Five days that changed Britain”, made by its political editor Nick Robinson, in a review by Juliet Shardlow:

…But even as the bullish PM offered to step aside on the Monday, Robinson asserts that the Labour negotiating team just gave up. A key player in this loss was Ed Balls who even in his retelling of the frosty, unorganised talks with David Laws and co, seemed arrogant and bullish.  The programme sheds light on the future role of Vince Cable. His discomfort with the coalition was plain to see, having secret phone calls with Brown. Ming Campbell even claimed that the Liberal Democrats should avoid looking like a Tory “pet”.  William Hague could deny it all he liked, but the Conservatives obviously had a coalition back-up plan – putting an 11-point policy paper on the negotiating table for the Lib Dems. This slick attack broke any chance of a Lab-Lib deal.

According to the detailed and informative account of the five days in Lord Mandelson’s new book, The Third Man, well before the election Gordon Brown had begun to contemplate the implications of a possible hung parliament after the election and had been actively considering the potential for a deal with the LibDems that might enable Labour, if not Brown himself, to remain in office.  Throughout the five days, Brown clung to the hope that this might yet be achieved, frantically working the telephones to see what it might involve.  Recognising that the election result was in part a verdict on himself, he offered to step aside and allow a new Labour leader to head a Labour-LibDem coalition or a minority government with LibDem support, and indeed there was a long-lasting argument about how long, if at all, Brown could remain in office after the formation of the new government before formally stepping down.  (It seems not to have occurred to anyone that Brown could have remained Labour party leader while one of his Labour front-bench colleagues headed a new Labour-LibDem government.)  The question of Brown’s future so preoccupied the negotiators that discussion of the policy agreements and concessions which might have tempted the LibDems into a deal with Labour rather than with the Tories seems to have been rather a side-show.  Any pretence of seriousness was undermined by the harrumphing from the sidelines of a few has-beens such as John Reid and David Blunkett, unhelpfully trumpeting their opposition to any dilution of the fine wine of New Labour with the insipid water of the LibDems.   Only Brown apparently came prepared for a detailed negotiation: Labour had produced no collectively agreed plan ready to be presented to the LibDems in the way that the Tories had done, a fact which helped the LibDems to put all the blame on Labour for their eventually being ‘forced’ to sign up with the Tories.   Blaming Labour was something they needed and still need to do in order to try to pacify those on the left of the party who were and remain deeply unhappy at their party’s close partnership with a party of the political right.

In the end, the rule-book requiring the prime minister to stick it out in No. 10, humiliated by defeat, until the Tory-LibDem deal was signed and sealed and approved by the LibDem MPs and peers, proved to be unworkable.  Gordon Brown, his patience exhausted, and having been cannily advised by Mandelson to leave No 10 for the last time in daylight and dignity, not slinking away in the dark, telephoned Clegg to tell him he was going to the Palace to resign.  According to Mandelson’s account, Clegg was appalled:

“You can’t,” Nick replied.  He said he still couldn’t be sure a Tory coalition would work.  Gordon’s resignation could end up leading to a minority Cameron government.  Gordon was serene in his reply.  “The public has run out of patience. And so have I,” he said.  “I have served my country as best I can. I know the country’s mood.  They will not tolerate me waiting another night.  I have no option.  You are a good man and you have to make a decision.  I have made mine.  It is final.  I am going to the Palace.  Goodbye.”  [Mandelson, The Third Man, p. 554]

So much for the ‘rules’, imposing a duty on Brown not to resign until a new administration was agreed and ready to take over immediately:  the LibDems in parliament still hadn’t voted to approve the proposed coalition and its newly negotiated programme.  But Brown, of course, was right to resign when he did.  Had he obeyed the rule book and sat it out for another night while the LibDems went through their tortuous procedures, the whole process of secret haggling and horsetrading between the party bosses, already obnoxious to much of an electorate accustomed to clear majorities and clean quick handovers, would have been seen as having descended into farce.

The fact was, anyway, that there were at least two  obstacles, one of which was absolutely insurmountable, to any deal that would have meant  Labour continuing to occupy No. 10 Downing Street:  the plain rejection of Labour by the electorate, and the parliamentary arithmetic.  The voters had shown that a sizeable majority of them were tired of Labour after its 13 years in office, and wanted a change — almost any change.  A deal that would enable a heavily defeated party, widely although unjustly blamed for presiding over a major national economic and financial crisis, to hold on to the reins of power would have been seen, rightly, as a constitutional outrage.  Labour’s negotiators knew this in their heart of hearts;  no doubt that was why in their ‘negotiations’ with the LibDems it was evident that their hearts weren’t really in it.  Moreover, the total of seats won by Labour and the LibDems added together still didn’t add up to an overall majority.  A minority Lab-LibDem government would have had to rely on the support of some at least of the 6 SNP, 3 Plaid Cymru, 3 SDLP, 1 Alliance, 1 Green, and even possibly some of the 8 DUP members to win a vote of confidence in the House and to get its legislation and policy proposals through parliament.  Most of these votes would probably have been forthcoming, at any rate when the alternative would have been either a minority Conservative government or a fresh election resulting, probably, in a majority Conservative government.  But the opportunity for policy blackmail by one or other of the fringe parties would have proved irresistible over time, and a minority Lab-LibDem government on that basis could not have lasted long.  In any case, it was really ruled out by the first obstacle:  it would have been a constitutional outrage for a manifestly defeated party to hold on to office.

So the lessons for Labour?  It’s unlikely that either of the two obstacles to a Lab-LibDem pact or coalition last May will apply in the situation following the next election, even if it again produces a hung parliament.  Depending on whether the present coalition’s slash-and-burn policies will have succeeded in reducing the budget deficit without too greatly impeding continued recovery from the recession, and if the level of unemployment, having initially risen sharply, has begun to fall, and if the sweeping changes to the NHS, the state education system and the structure of social benefits have resulted in perceptible improvements in these crucial public services despite the swingeing cuts in their budgets, then the electorate might well provide a mandate for the Tory-LibDem coalition to carry on — or even deliver a clear majority to the Tories.  But these are all huge ifs.  The likelier scenario is that coalition policies will have had only limited success, if any, and that widespread disillusionment will have set in.  The next election may even be precipitated by a split in the Liberal Democratic party or the eventual withdrawal of the LibDems from the coalition, out of nausea at their association with reactionary policies driven by an obnoxious ideology.  In that case another hung parliament will be very much on the cards, and Labour will need to be much better prepared for it next time.  With luck the problem of a deeply unpopular Labour leader won’t yet have arisen.  Before there can be another election, Labour will need to have worked out, published and campaigned vigorously  for a new and radically different programme for government, offering credible alternatives to reactionary Tory cuts and assaults on the welfare state, putting the restoration and protection of civil liberties at the heart of its agenda, and proposing realistic, hard-headed changes to such moth-eaten policies as those on the UK nuclear deterrent, intervention in foreign wars, the core functions of the armed forces, more realistic ways of tackling drugs, cutting the prison population to civilised levels, and so forth.  If Labour is ever to return to office, it must do so on the basis of a programme which the LibDems will be forced to recognise as hugely preferable to anything the Tories have to offer.  It must be manifestly realistic and progressive in its own right;  if it is, there should be no question of the LibDems even thinking about rejecting it.

But not only must Labour produce, very soon indeed after it has at last elected its new leader, a progressive, changed, radical and LibDem-friendly programme for government:  Labour must also get over its bitterness at what its tribalists (and others) see as the LibDem betrayal of the centre-left by climbing into bed with the Tories — and even worse, giving every impression of thoroughly enjoying the experience (always excepting the ever gloomy St Vincent Cable, of course).  Whatever the provocation, Labour must learn to treat the LibDems as likely future friends and partners, respecting the decision they felt they had to make in May, but resolved to make them a better offer next time and to welcome them as allies if they accept it.  Self-indulgently attacking the LibDems can only achieve what their critics accuse the LibDems themselves of having done: splitting the underlying centre-left majority and wrecking all hopes of a semi-permanent government of the left for the future.   Ed Miliband camp, please note.

[This is the last of three articles about the events of the five days immediately following the election in May leading to the formation of the Conservative-LibDem coalition government, and the lessons of those events for the Labour party.  The first two articles are here (also here) and here (also here).]

Brian

The LibDems made the wrong choice in May, not in going into coalition with the Tories instead of with Labour, but in going into coalition at all.  With the experience of 100 days of coalition government, and with hindsight, we can now see that the LibDems were wrong to go into coalition with the Conservatives:  they could and should have let David Cameron form a minority government, promising to support it, perhaps for a year, in votes of confidence and on the budget, but keeping their options open on everything else.  This would have maximised LibDem influence on Tory government policies: the government would have faced the discipline of needing LibDem votes to get its policies through parliament, issue by issue, instead of having the whip hand over a junior coalition partner which can if necessary be ignored on all but the greatest issues.  From outside the government, LibDem deputy leader Simon Hughes has been plaintively but implausibly pleading for a LibDem veto over every Tory policy not sanctioned in the coalition’s founding agreement.  With LibDem freedom of manoeuvre outside any coalition, LibDem MPs would have had precisely such a veto  This would have been good for the LibDems, who would not have been tarnished by such close association with illiberal partners and illiberal policies, nor subjected to such strains on party unity; and good for the country, because parliamentary control over government would have been re-established at last, with the Tories forced to curb their right-wing excesses in order to get their legislation through.   The only losers would have been the Tories, whose freedom of manoeuvre would have been much more limited and who would have been forced into a more consensual and less divisive mode of governing: and the current crop of LibDem ministers and their advisers, who would not have enjoyed the perks and baubles of government office or the opportunity to demonstrate that they were after all leading a party capable of governing.  Yet in those five crucial days after the election on 6 May, coalition seemed to most of us inevitable, the only question seemingly whether it would be coalition with the Tories or with Labour.  How could we have been so wrong?

Coalition so far remains popular with the public.  But the Guardian’s ICM poll, reported on 18 August, was startling.  It showed the Tories and Labour level pegging at 37 per cent each, and the LibDems trailing at 18 (compared with their percentage scores at the general election of:  Conservatives 36.1%, Labour 29% and LibDems 23%).  Tom Clark’s Guardian article drew a conclusion from Labour’s drawing level with the Tories which was at best counter-intuitive, at worst absurd:

The Conservatives have mislaid their lead but it is Labour, and more especially the Liberal Democrats, that ought to worry. That is the paradoxical message of today’s Guardian/ICM poll, which shows a leaderless Labour party drawing level with the Tories for the first time since Gordon Brown’s disastrous dalliance with a snap poll in the autumn of 2007.  Buoyed by strong personal ratings, David Cameron need not be fazed by news that the two main parties are each on 37%, with the Lib Dems on 18%. In the novel settings of coalition, the opposition party can catch up with the principal party of government without threatening the prime minister. And after 100 days at the helm, he remains secure – in charge of a government that most voters believe is doing a good job. Consequently, Labour should draw little comfort from the results.

But isn’t it rather striking that with weeks still to go before Labour elects its new leader, with the five candidates locked in introspective debate about the party’s future, with little or no coherent opposition assault on an increasingly vulnerable government, with the LibDems increasingly obviously split between critics and supporters of the coalition, and above all with nobody yet feeling any pain from the threatened swingeing cuts in basic public services or from the concentration of government fire on the poorest and most vulnerable — despite all these handicaps for the Labour opposition, Labour has already drawn level with the Tories in at least one reputable opinion poll?  Yet according to Mr Clark, it’s Labour that ought to worry — because the Tories have a secure parliamentary majority due to their coalition with the LibDems.  This seems to confuse the fluctuating results of the opinion polls, which can never in themselves “threaten the prime minister”, with the parliamentary arithmetic, which remains more or less static between elections, give or take a few by-election losses and the odd defection.  And the parliamentary arithmetic is plain:  Tories plus LibDems equals an overall majority;  Labour plus LibDems does not:  a centre-left coalition would have had to rely on the support of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish left-of-centre nationalists and the single Green for a majority.  It will take a mass defection from support for the coalition of around a half of the 57 LibDems to deprive Cameron, or Cameron-Clegg, of his or their secure overall majority, and since the LibDems overwhelmingly supported their leaders’ proposal to enter the coalition and the joint programme on which they proposed to enter it, a defection on that scale seems unlikely, at any rate for a time.  Mr Cameron is safe;  but those poll figures ought to keep him awake at night.  If Labour is already neck and neck, what will the poll figures look like in a year’s time, with the savage cuts biting hard, the recovery in obvious peril, and a new, young, confident Labour leader exposing Tory recklessness daily across the despatch boxes and in the media?

Thus it’s not the case that the LibDems took the only viable decision open to them after the end of polling on 6 May, as it seemed at the time.  Often what actually happened seems in retrospect to have been inevitable.  But what happened on the afternoon of Tuesday 11 May was not inevitable.  The usually reliable Jonathan Freedland made a remarkable claim in his verdict on the first 100 days in Guardian2 on 18 August 2010:

Indeed in those first evening hours Cameron’s fate lay in the hands of Liberal Democrat MPs and peers: without their votes he could not become prime minister.

But on the contrary: Cameron was in fact going to become prime minister regardless of which decision the LibDems were about to take.  Supposing that the LibDem MPs and peers had voted down Clegg’s proposed programme for coalition with the Tories, produced after those feverish days of negotiation between the LibDems on the one hand and both the Tories and Labour on the other:  Gordon Brown’s patience had run out and he had driven to the Palace to resign, to Nick Clegg’s consternation (he was by no means ready to sign up with Cameron because his coalition plan still had to be put to the votes of the parliamentary LibDems).  Brown had already recommended to the Queen, however, that Cameron should be invited to try to form a government.  By constitutional convention, this is one of the few occasions on which the monarch is not bound to act on the advice of the outgoing prime minister:  but that advice is bound to carry great weight, and indeed the Queen predictably acted on it at once, inviting Cameron to the Palace, whereupon, equally predictably, he accepted the commission to try to form a government, even though he could not have been sure at the time that his gamble on a coalition with the LibDems would come off.

If Clegg had at that point been prevented from going into a coalition with the Tories through lack of support for the coalition in his own party, Cameron would have had two alternatives:  he could have formed a minority government, with or without an understanding with the LibDems that they would not vote against the government in a vote of confidence or in votes on the budget, remaining however free to vote either way on everything else;  or he could have returned to the Palace to tell the Queen that he had been unable to form a government which would enjoy the confidence of a majority in the house of commons, and recommended accordingly that the Queen should dissolve parliament forthwith to enable another election to be held within a few weeks.  Given that a fresh election so soon after the previous one would not necessarily have delivered an overall majority to any one party this time, either, and anyway would have been extremely unpopular, this was hardly an option, especially in the depths of a major economic and financial crisis.  It’s clear that Cameron would if necessary have formed a minority Conservative government, presented the house of commons when it assembled with a moderate programme clearly designed to make it difficult for the LibDems to oppose it, and dared the LibDems to defeat him in a vote of confidence.  Cameron, Clegg and the Cleggmen (and Cleggwomen) would all have known that to bring down a fledgling Tory government on a vote of confidence only days after the election could only result in fresh elections:  and that these would have been dangerous to the nation’s financial health at a time of fiscal crisis and international market mistrust, and hugely unpopular with the voters, who might well have held the LibDems responsible for the deadlock and punished them accordingly at the polls.  The LibDems would not have dared to take such a risk.  A Cameron minority government would have survived that first key vote of confidence and proceeded with the business of government, although severely constrained by its lack of a majority in parliament — a constraint that it has avoided by successfully luring the LibDems into coalition.

What is the lesson of all this for Labour?  First, Labour’s new leader must have in mind at all times the real possibility that the coalition may come a cropper well before its vaunted ‘fixed’ five-year term is up, with another general election the almost certain consequence.  The increased unemployment likely to result from the almost unprecedented reductions in government spending to which Osborne has committed the government will both add to the unemployment and other benefits bill to be paid by the Exchequer and reduce its tax receipts, thus widening the budget deficit yet further.  There is no obvious indication that the private sector will move in to fill the public sector gap, as Tory ideology recklessly assumes.  Even if the dreaded double dip recession can somehow be avoided, it seems overwhelmingly likely that the recovery from recession will be drastically slowed down, perhaps to a stagnant halt.  Meanwhile the dire effects of the cuts on the unemployed, the poor and the vulnerable will increase back-bench LibDem restiveness:  further damage to the LibDems’ standing in the polls may further frighten them.  If Labour moves convincingly into the lead in the opinion polls, the attraction for the LibDems of a switch from support for the Tories to a loose — or formal — alliance with Labour might well prove irresistible.  The consequence might be a split in the Liberal Democratic party, the loss of the coalition’s majority in parliament, and fresh elections in a year or 18 months.  Labour had better be prepared for that, and be ready to encourage, not maul, those LibDems whose defection alone could bring it about:  not by overtly trying to exploit dissension within the government or among the LibDems, but by patiently developing policies which are both right on their own merits, but also likely to appeal to the socially liberal wing of the LibDems and patently preferable to the ideology-driven axe-swinging excesses of the Tories.  Labour can afford to be progressive again, and can’t afford not to be.

The formation of the Con-LibDem coalition has another lesson for Labour.  If a fresh election within the next two years or so produces another hung parliament, but with Labour this time the largest party in the house of commons, Labour would actually benefit from forming a formal coalition with the LibDems (or with their left-leaning faction), exactly as Cameron has benefited from his coalition.  A minority Labour government dependent on ad hoc LibDem (and other small parties’) support, issue by issue, would create great difficulties for Labour and damaging uncertainties for the country.  It follows that (as I argued in an earlier post about the lessons of the five days in May) Labour should already be wooing the LibDems, not succumbing to a natural temptation to assail them as traitors to the left who have been suckered by the wily Tories (even though some of them are, and have been).  Jack Straw’s recent expression of relief that negotiations after the election for a Labour-LibDem coalition failed, because it would have been so tedious to have to consult the LibDems on government policy all the time, was absolutely contrary to both the Labour party’s and the country’s interests.  Similarly, John Reid’s and David Blunkett’s interventions immediately after the election with denunciations of any kind of Lab-Lib pact were  spectacularly wrong-headed.  Such a pact or coalition was not in fact on the cards, for several reasons which I shall discuss shortly in the third and last of these reflections on the lessons of the Five Days in May.  But open hostility to the idea of a centre-left deal, however formal or informal, was and still is seriously mistaken.  In the new era of hung parliaments (which will become even more likely if AV is approved at the forthcoming referendum and introduced before the next election), it behoves Labour to treat the LibDems as a possible fiançée, not as a discarded girl-friend whose one-time affections have been alienated in a bitter quarrel.  Like it or hate it, we’re going to need them sooner or later; and we might yet be surprised to find that an engagement is actually beneficial to them, to us, and to the country.

Up-date, 21 Aug 2010:  According to a report in today’s Guardian, Ed Miliband, one of the two serious contenders for the Labour leadership, has (a) threatened to make the LibDems an extinct species if he wins the Labour leadership, and (b) stipulated that if Labour has to negotiate a pact with the LibDems in a hung parliament after the next election, a condition of any agreement would be that Nick Clegg should no longer be the LibDem leader.   Does Ed Miliband, who’s not stupid, not see any contradiction between those two propositions?

Up-date, 23 Aug 2010:  I’m very glad to see Jackie Ashley, whose finger is generally pretty firmly placed on the Labour party’s pulse, making much the same point as this post in her Guardian column today — see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/22/labour-playing-nasty-bad-politics.

Brian

David Cameron dropped a memorable clanger in Washington, saying the UK was the “junior partner” in the World War II fight against Germany in 1940 – and then dropped another one trying to correct the first.  He was speaking on 22 July 2010, the second day of his first trip to the US as prime minister:

“I think it is important in life to speak as it is and the fact is that we are a very effective partner of the US but we are the junior partner.  We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.”
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10719739]

Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, David Miliband, commented that “We were not a junior partner. We stood alone against the Nazis.”  The prime minister was predictably challenged on his ‘gaffe’ after his return to the UK, and replied:  “There was no senior partner. We were on our own in 1940. What I meant to say was that I was referring to the 1940s, not 1940. You are absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong.”

But the correction itself required correction.  A letter from a Professor Richard Clogg in the Guardian of 11 August pointed out that Britain had not been ‘alone’ in 1940, as both Messrs Miliband and Cameron had asserted:  the Greeks were engaged in fighting the Italians, long before the US entered the war.

This in turn stirred J. (the historian of the family) to send the following letter to the Guardian, which published a slightly abridged version of it on the 13^th:

It wasn’t only Greece that Mr Cameron forgot when he spoke of Britain standing alone in 1940 (Professor Richard Clogg, letters 11 August). As Winston Churchill said in June 1940:  ”Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

It was indeed Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and hundreds of thousands of troops from British Colonies who stood with Britain in 1939 and 1940.  And we should not forget Poles and Czechs flying in disproportionate numbers in the Battle of Britain and, like other Free Forces from Occupied Europe, fighting in all theatres of conflict from September 1939 until 1945.

British politicians of this generation have forgotten a lot. On one of his US visits, Tony Blair praised the United States as standing with us in the blitz.   I was bombed out in the blitz, fifteen months before the US entered the War: I wrote to Number 10 to put  Mr Blair right about this but did not receive a reply.

Jane Barder

This in turn prompted the following reaction in a private message from an old New Zealand friend and distinguished former national and international public servant:

The New Zealand Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage said on the outbreak of war in September 1939: “Both with gratitude for the past, and with confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand.” Then we sent off all thirty of our Wellington bombers, fully crewed, to Britain and subsequently hundreds of trained aircrew to join the RAF. Not many got back. The first fighter ace of the War was a Kiwi, the head of Bomber Command also. Of course it was you Brits who took the daily pounding from the Luftwaffe so you alone take the credit for surviving that.

If you have the opportunity, add the Indians to your “honour list”—they were very much present in the Western Desert and Italy, as well as Burma.

I loved your pulling up Blair too. Reminded me of a session with Foreign Affairs luminaries in Washington in the middle of our nasty tussle with the Americans over our non-nuclear policy when an admiral accused us of “not pulling our weight “. My colleague, a feisty journalist, told him acidly that by the time the US got involved in the First World War her great uncle had died in Flanders and by the time they got involved in the Second her uncle had died in the Libyan Desert: “don’t talk to me about not pulling our weight,” she snarled at the speechless admiral.

I am in a pro-Brit phase at the moment because I am halfway thru the first volume of Churchill’s History of the English-speaking Peoples and hugely enjoying it. We trained historians may have some questions about his verification of the occasional myth but we cannot match his gift for capturing in a few words the sweep of history and the ultimate significance of this or that era or incident or individual.

I may even end up partially forgiving him for sending our troops on forlorn expeditions like Gallipoli (WW1), Greece and Crete (WW2), though most Kiwis of our generation would not necessarily be with me on that.

J. replied gratefully:

I was including Indians in ‘troops from British colonies’, although it is difficult to think of India ever being a colony!  Three thousand Indian troops were killed in the Battle of Keren, a decisive event in the liberation of Ethiopia.  The Italian commander surrendered in May 1941 while the Soviets were still allied with the Germans and while the USA was still sitting it out.  In addition to the splendid Indian Army (including many subsequent Pakistanis) there were equally valiant though not as numerous troops from East and West Africa and the West Indies.

When the United States did eventually enter the war as our ‘senior partner’, to the huge relief of the Allies who had been at war for more than two years already, it was not exclusively prompted by a gallant impulse to defeat Nazi and Japanese fascism and rescue the world for democracy, as has sometimes been suggested subsequently.  The US had little choice in the matter once Japan had attacked the US Pacific Fleet and naval base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, “a date that will live in infamy“: and even then it was left to Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy promptly to declare war on the United States, not the other way round.

David Cameron was a star pupil of Professor Vernon Bogdanor when reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford.  At Eton he had gained three As at A-level, in history, history of art and economics with politics.  Pity he didn’t keep up his history when he opted for full-time politics.

Brian

In an article in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy I discuss the two traditional rival views of the function and purposes of diplomacy:  the (often competitive) pursuit of the national interest, versus the (mainly collaborative) pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number — what the late Robin Cook, in a much misquoted phrase, called the ‘ethical dimension’ of foreign policy.  Our new prime minister, Mr Cameron, has added a third candidate for the purpose of diplomacy:  namely, promoting the country’s trade and investment with the outside world.   Unfortunately this (hardly novel) idea was unveiled too late to be dismissed as risibly old hat in my Hague Journal article.

The Journal‘s title does not refer, even obliquely, to Britain’s present Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary.

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy owns the copyright to this article, but I am permitted, exceptionally, to publish it on this website.  You can read it (either as a web page or as a PDF reproducing the printed pages) at –

http://www.barder.com/diplomacy-ethics-and-the-national-interest

Comments on the article, critical or approving, analytical or anecdotal or both, are, as always, welcome;  factual corrections even more so.  Please append any such comments to this blog post, not to the article itself.

Brian

Several lessons for Labour need to be learned from Nick Robinson’s BBC programme Five Days that Changed Britain, broadcast on 29 July, about the five days in May between the election and the formation of the Tory-LibDem coalition government.

The first and most important lesson was summed up towards the end of the programme by Peter Mandelson, usually a canny strategist, when he speculated that we were now in an age of coalition politics, in which no single party was likely in the foreseeable future to win an overall majority in the house of commons:  that if ever there was to be another Labour government, it would probably have to be in coalition or some other kind of alliance with the LibDems:  and that Labour strategy would need to adapt itself to this new and by implication unfamiliar and unwelcome reality.

Yet it has been all too obvious in recent weeks that the Labour parliamentary leadership and perhaps also the PLP as a whole still haven’t learned this lesson.  Directing its firepower more at the LibDems than at the Tories, excoriating Nick Clegg for his supposed betrayal of LibDem principles and promises by joining the Tories in government, trying to drive a wedge between the coalition partners — all these self-indulgent activities have been directly contrary to the interests, not only of the Labour party, but also of those hundreds of thousands of people who will lose their jobs and in many cases their homes and the availability to them of the welfare state safety net as a direct result of Cameron’s and Osborne’s slash-and-burn ideology-driven policies.  The latest folly has been to commit Labour to voting against the Bill providing for a referendum on AV (the LibDems’ main jusification for being in the coalition) and for a reduction in the number of MPs and re-drawing of electoral boundaries to make their population sizes more nearly equal.  There are certainly serious flaws in the detail of the Bill, which need to be addressed at the Committee stage, but to oppose the entire Bill (especially after Labour had been the only party to promise a referendum on AV in its manifesto) is simply crass, partly because it makes Labour look opportunistic and unprincipled, and partly because it’s bound to infuriate and alienate the LibDems whose support Labour is sooner or later going to need as an absolute condition of forming another government.  It really is time for Jack Straw (and some other ageing Blairites) to hang up his penchant for opportunistic ducking and weaving and leave the strategic thinking to younger men and women.

We aren’t necessarily thinking only about what might happen in five years’ time, however much Cameron may try to fix the constitution to keep himself and his coalition in power for a full parliament.  Germany’s PR system means permanent coalition governments, with the Free Democrats, the German equivalent of our LibDems, almost always being in the position of king-maker after every election: since its foundation in 1948, the FDP  “has been in federal government longer than any other party, as the junior coalition partner to either the CDU/CSU (1949–56, 1961–66, 1982–98, and since 2009) or the Social Democratic Party (1969–82)” (quoted from this).  But the significant point is that twice in this period, in 1966 and 1982, the FDP has switched sides between elections, causing the fall of a right-of-centre CDU/CSU government and its replacement by the SDP in 1966, and vice versa in 1982.  It’s constitutionally perfectly possible for the same thing to happen here if three conditions come to be satisfied:

• first, very widespread disillusionment in the electorate with the dire consequences of Tory economic and social policies;
• secondly, mounting dissatisfaction among LibDems in parliament and the country with Tory policies which LibDem members of the government are being forced to support;
• thirdly — and easily the most important:  a Labour opposition offering a coherent and practical set of alternative policies fully consistent with LibDem principles, including active support for the repeal of New Labour’s most illiberal measures eroding fundamental civil liberties (even if the repeal is the work of a Tory-led government), renunciation of any policy of military intervention in other countries unless in self-defence or under UN auspices, and economic-social policies expressly designed to protect the poor and vulnerable and the public services on which they depend, and to ensure that the sacrifices necessary for recovery are made only by those rich enough to make them.

If all three conditions are satisfied, the pull of a transfer of LibDem support to a Labour programme (and a Labour leader) hugely more attractive to the vast majority of LibDems could prove irresistible.  Of course the fall of the Tory-led coalition government and its replacement by a new Labour-LibDem administration under a Labour prime minister would certainly need to be ratified very quickly by a fresh election, probably within weeks.  But all this could happen surprisingly quickly.

There’s no guarantee that it will.  Tory slash-and-burn policies just might succeed, against all informed expectations.  The LibDems might continue to be repelled by the idea of putting into power the party which without doubt lost the last election by a substantial margin.  Cameron’s and Clegg’s  apparent personal chemistry might yet keep the coalition going for the full five years, and current LibDem ministers might be reluctant to put their ministerial perks and power at risk by abandoning the Tories and putting alternative support for Labour to the test in an unpredictable fresh election.  But all this is very iffy.  And in any case, Pascal’s wager applies:  Labour could have a huge amount to gain, and anyway nothing whatever to lose, by developing a coherent set of centre-left progressive small-l liberal policies calculated to appeal to the LibDems just as soon as the new leader has been elected in September — and helping, not hindering, the LibDems on their journey back to their true and natural home on the centre-left of British politics.  It’s not just that this could help to bring about a transfer of LibDem support from the Tories to Labour:  it’s also the right and necessary thing to do on its own merits.  But in the meantime it’s essential to treat the LibDems as potential future allies, not as irreconcilable enemies.  Don’t trash them: woo them!

A recent blog post on Labour List by Hadleigh Roberts, Countering the coalition: Don’t attack the Lib Dems, arrived at the same conclusion but by a somewhat different route.  Such a strategy may not satisfy the blood-lust of the more pugnacious Labour front-benchers, blinded by their anger at what they choose to see as LibDem treachery to the left.  But that anger needs to be tempered by recognition that in those Five Days that Changed Britain, the LibDems ultimately had no alternative.  Clegg had enunciated an unexceptionable guideline for action if there was a hung parliament:  that whichever party had won the most votes and the most seats should be allowed the first attempt to form a government.  The country would have felt betrayed if the LibDems had used their limited but crucial numbers to keep in No. 10 the party which had manifestly lost the election.  And while the Tories immediately presented to the LibDems a coherent policy programme with attractive concessions to LibDem policies as the possible basis for a coalition, Labour failed utterly to present a coherent alternative, apparently caught on the hop without having done any homework against the possibility of a hung parliament.  But that leads to consideration of another of the three lessons Labour needs to learn from those Five Days, and that will be the subject of a further blog post.  Watch this space.

Brian

David Cameron’s visit to Washington this month (July 2010) collided with the resurrection by some American Senators of the controversy over the release in August 2009 on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government’s Justice Secretary of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.  Many, not all, American relatives of Lockerbie victims, and their Senators, are furious, not only that al-Megrahi was released, but also that he’s still alive, 11 months after being released on the grounds that he had only three months to live. This seems to the Americans, and some others, to strengthen their suspicion that the mass murderer was actually released in exchange for a lucrative Libyan oil drilling contract being awarded to BP (BP!  All together now: ‘Booooo!’).

Herein lies one of several Lockerbie mysteries.  In 2007 the then British government agreed that al-Megrahi should not be excluded from the scope of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) being negotiated with Libya, as the UK side had originally demanded.  Jack Straw, then UK Justice minister, publicly acknowledged that this ‘concession’ (which implied that al-Megrahi could be transferred to serve the rest of his prison sentence in Libya) was motivated by British commercial interests in Libya, including the BP contract.  But it was part of the original UN-approved agreement on the management of  the Lockerbie suspects that if either of them was convicted, as al-Megrahi was, he would serve his sentence in the UK (in practice meaning in Scotland, as the whole process was to be conducted under Scottish law).  The terms of the agreement, formally approved by the UN Security Council in resolution 1192 of 27 August 1998 , are set out in a letter from the UK and US Acting Permanent Representatives to the UN, circulated in the UN as document S/1998/795 of 24 August 1998 (pdf).   The requirement that any sentences must be served in the UK could hardly be clearer:

“If found guilty, the two accused will serve their sentence [sic] in the United Kingdom.” (para 4).

In the event, one of the two accused was acquitted.  Al-Megrahi was convicted.  Clearly any transfer of al-Megrahi to serve part of his sentence in Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement so laboriously negotiated with the Libyans by Messrs Blair and Straw would have contravened the arrangements approved by the Security Council in 1999.

Question:  when Blair and Straw made their concession to the Libyans under which al-Megrahi was not after all to be excluded from the PTA, did they know, and remind the Libyans, that whatever the PTA said, under the original agreement approved by the UN,  al-Megrahi couldn’t be transferred to serve the rest of his sentence in Libya?

There are plenty of other murky questions still to be answered about the whole affair, but this must surely be one of them.  (An additional puzzle is why the embattled Scottish First Minister and Justice Secretary, Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill, never ones to miss a trick, have not seized the opportunity to skewer Tony Blair and Jack Straw by pointing out from the beginning that their PTA could never have been used to transfer al-Megrahi to a Libyan prison.)

It was painful to hear Messrs Obama and Cameron at their White House news conference on 20 July vehemently denouncing the Scottish Justice Secretary’s decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds after independent medical opinion had declared that he was dying of terminal prostate cancer and would probably — but not certainly — be dead within three months.  Under Scottish law that prognosis provided clear grounds for compassionate release.  Obama and Cameron are decent humane people and it’s hard to believe that they really disapprove so strongly of such an obviously humane decision by the Scots.  Presumably they both think it expedient to condemn the release in order to placate the grieving Lockerbie relatives and, especially, the indignant Senators.  I doubt whether we’ll ever know whether the decision was really based solely on compassion for a dying man, or whether it was influenced, even subliminally, by pressure from London not to let al-Megrahi die in prison for fear of the effects of that on UK commercial interests with Libya, or (perhaps more likely) by fear of what might be revealed if al-Megrahi’s appeal against conviction was allowed to proceed.

There has been legitimate criticism of Cameron for his public dismissal in a foreign country of a perfectly reasonable and legally watertight decision by a senior member of the Scottish government.   There was nothing to stop him pointing out that in making his decision, MacAskill was acting in a quasi-judicial capacity, not on behalf of the Scottish government although he is a senior member of it:  that the decision was in accordance with Scottish law and precedent:  and that due process was rigorously followed.  None of that is affected by Cameron’s (and Obama’s) disagreement with the decision, which in the end comes down to a matter of judgement.  Why did Cameron fail to explain, if not to defend, the action of a member of one of Britain’s established and democratically elected governments?  Having virtually been wiped out in Scotland, the Conservatives might show a little more respect and tact in commenting on the Scottish government’s actions.

Several well informed people believe there are skeletons in this cupboard which powerful people in the UK and the US want to keep securely and permanently locked away right where they are.  For example, an impressive body of respectable opinion, by no means all professional conspiracy theorists, is not convinced that al-Megrahi was properly convicted. It’s impossible to know whether this doubt was a factor in Kenny MacAskill’s mind when he made his decision: fortunately for him, there were ample other grounds for compassionate release.  It does look however as if some of those concerned were anxious that al-Megrahi’s appeal should not be heard, either because it would risk bringing Scottish justice into disrepute by discrediting the original trial as unfair and defective, or for more sinister reasons.  Or were the likely consequences of al-Megrahi’s appeal possibly succeeding simply too awful to contemplate — for example, the reactions to be expected in the US, and the appalling questions then to be answered: if the two Libyan suspects didn’t do it, who did? And what compensation would be due to al-Megrahi or, if he had died in the meantime, his family?

So why did al-Megrahi agree to abandon his appeal before it could be heard? Was it because he feared that he would not live long enough to see it determined, or because abandoning the appeal was a condition, implied or explicit, of his release on compassionate grounds? Perhaps someone should put this question to al-Megrahi while he is still alive.

A recent article in the Independent newspaper alleged that the Libyan government had paid the doctors whose prognosis that al-Megrahi would die within three months had provided the justification for his release on compassionate grounds:

There are several facts that batter these claims with question marks. The most obvious is that, 11 months later, Megrahi isn’t dead. It’s the most amazing medical recovery since Lazarus. Or is it? It turns out the doctors who declared him sick were paid for by the Libyan government, and one of them says he was put under pressure by Libya to offer the most pessimistic estimate of life expectancy. Susan Cohen, whose only daughter died in Lockerbie, asks: “Why didn’t the Scottish Government pay for the doctors?”
[Johann Hari, the Independent, 23 July 2010]

But as a crisp comment on this canard pointed out, –

This is utterly untrue. The medical report was by Scottish doctors, NHS cancer experts. The ones paid for by Libya were not part of the evidence used by the Justice Secretary. Fact checking mate, you call yourself a journalist?

Indeed, the main medical advice on which MacAskill relied was provided by the Director of Health and Care of the Scottish Prison Service, Dr Andrew Fraser,  who has been described by MacAskill as a doctor of “unimpeachable integrity”.  Yet the slanderous claim that the prognosis had been provided by doctors paid by the Libyan government spreads like toadstools all over the blogosphere and into the MSM.  Moreover, it has repeatedly been made clear that the three-month prognosis was accompanied by a warning that he might die earlier, or he might live longer: no forecast in such circumstances could be certain.  And who knows whether al-Megrahi would still be alive if he had been left in his Scottish prison cell to die, in a foreign country miles from his family?  As to the repugnance commonly expressed at the ‘hero’s welcome’ he received on his arrival back in Libya, it needs to be pointed out that he was being welcomed back as a victim of a monstrous injustice, the Libyans believing almost to a man and woman that he had been wrongly convicted;  this was the opposite of a welcome accorded to a mass murderer and terrorist.

I’m generally suspicious of conspiracy theories but in this case I seem to smell a number of rats — not least because of the decision of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in June 2007 after lengthy study of the case to refer it to the High Court for a second appeal against conviction.  There were also a number of reports by Hans Köchler, who had been an international observer of the original trial, appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and who described the decisions of the trial and appeal courts as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice”. Some of the relatives of the victims, who have naturally followed all the proceedings closely, are doubtful whether al-Megrahi was properly convicted. There is a strong suspicion that Iran may have been involved, including a specific Iranian said to have been in the pay of the CIA (I am not of course suggesting that the CIA could have been involved in planning or carrying out the bombing). Al-Megrahi’s fellow-Libyan co-defendant was unanimously acquitted by the judges. There’s a good deal of doubt about the actual whereabouts on the relevant day of the principal prosecution witness, on whose testimony al-Megrahi’s conviction effectively stands or falls, and about his alleged identification of al-Megrahi at the trial, which was both shaky and possibly compromised. Even the vehemence of American protests at al-Megrahi’s release tends to arouse suspicion: what beans did they fear he might spill once out of prison? Why all the effort to prevent the second appeal from coming to court? And so on. It really does look as if someone, somewhere, has been and still is hiding something.

It’s important, however, to stress that it’s most unlikely that the British Labour government was involved in any kind of conspiracy with the Scottish Executive, not least because of enmity between Labour and the SNP and the obvious risk that the wily Alex Salmond would use any double dealing against it.  UK ministers certainly made it clear that Britain’s commercial and other relations with Libya would be damaged if al-Megrahi were to be allowed to die in prison in Scotland:  but this clearly expressed a hope that he would be transferred under the PTA (which, as noted earlier, would have been contrary to the original agreement);  and there’s not the slightest evidence that this sentiment was a factor in MacAskill’s mind in deciding on al-Megrahi’s  release on compassionate grounds.   All the same, I wonder why the previous UK government and the US government have hitherto refused to allow Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, to release the texts of their correspondence with him about the issue — correspondence which Salmond says he is ready to release immediately if the other two governments will consent to release. Perhaps we shall at last be allowed to read that.

Footnote:  The attempt by US Senators to summon Kenny MacAskill (and Jack Straw), to be grilled in Washington DC about al-Megrahi’s release by a Senate Committee, strikes many of us, including me, as impertinent.  Our political leaders are answerable to the British people through their elected legislatures, not to the legislators of a foreign country, however powerful.  I am glad that both MacAskill and Straw have both declined the ‘invitation’, although I regret that Straw at first shilly-shallied (talking of needing to consult Gordon Brown, of all people, before deciding what to do), instead of immediately and robustly saying, in effect, in the immortal words of the great American tennis-player, “You have got to be JOKING!!!”  The action of both the Labour and the Conservative spokesmen in the Scottish parliament in criticising MacAskill’s refusal to appear before the US Senate Foreign relations Committee was nakedly opportunist and unprincipled;  on this issue the Scottish executive plainly deserved full cross-party support.

Note to Ephems visitors: This post is based on sections of an earlier piece on this blog and responses to comments on it, but with substantial new material added, including detailed chapter and verse for the assertion that under the original arrangements approved by the UN Security Council, al-Megrahi, once convicted, was required to serve his sentence in the UK and so could never have been transferred to Libya under the PTA.

Update (26 July 2010):

Guardian Letters, Monday 26 July 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/megrahi-controversy

Vital point missed in Megrahi controversy

• The Guardian, Monday 26 July 2010

• Article history

In all the renewed controversy over the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing (Unthinkable? Bush testifies to Chilcot, 24 July), a vital point seems to have been missed. Under the terms of the US-UK “initiative” under which Megrahi was convicted, he was required to serve his sentence in the UK. The initiative was accepted by Libya and approved by UN security council resolution 1192. For that reason Megrahi could never have been transferred to serve the rest of his sentence in Libya under the prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) negotiated by the Blair government with Libya, regardless of whether Megrahi was included in or excluded from its scope.

It’s difficult to understand how the PTA came to be signed when it could never have been used to transfer Megrahi, the only Libyan then in UK custody. If BP was pressing for Megrahi to be transferred under the PTA, why was it not told that this was ruled out by the terms of the original agreement? Why didn’t Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill point this out to Tony Blair and Jack Straw when they were arguing about the pros and cons of the PTA? Above all, when Blair and Straw made their “concession” to the Libyans under which Megrahi was not after all to be excluded from the PTA, did they remind the Libyans that Megrahi couldn’t be transferred to Libya? If not, why not?

In an article published on Comment is Free on 1 September 2009, Oliver Miles pointed out that Megrahi’s transfer to Libya under the PTA would have been contrary to the original agreement. It’s strange that even then no one seems to have seen the implications of this.

Brian Barder
London

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Brian

The Kabul conference and David Cameron’s pilgrimage to Washington have generated plenty of articles and interviews agonising about Afghanistan.  Ministers are asked what would happen in that country if “we” withdrew “our” forces next week [approved answer: the Taliban take over the country again, invite al-Qaeda back, bombs explode all over London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast].  This, though, suggests a confusion over who “we” are.  If it means we the UK, the correct answer is presumably that either American or some other NATO country’s troops would replace ours, and the war would continue without missing a beat.  But questioners and those answering them seem to assume that without the British contingent, the whole NATO effort would collapse, surely an improbable scenario:  or alternatively that if the British pull out, the Americans would give up and pull out too – an even more improbable assumption.  Perhaps it’s just a case of everyone identifying “us” and the Americans as inseparable twins, joined at the hip:  whatever “we” decide to do about Afghanistan, the Americans will have to do whatever we do – a self-evidently ludicrous proposition, when you think about it.  We’ve done more than our share in Afghanistan, and suffered many more than our share of deaths and maimings there.  Someone else’s turn, surely?  As for the timing of and necessary conditions for the end of the whole western intervention in Afghanistan, the Americans will decide those, whatever we think and whether or not we’re still there. However, our coalition ministers clearly want out, and soon, which is something to be grateful for.

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Cameron’s visit to Washington collided with the resurrection by some American Senators of the controversy over the release in August 2009 on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government’s Justice Secretary of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.  Many, not all, American relatives of Lockerbie victims, and their Senators, are furious, not only that al-Megrahi was released, but also that he’s still alive, 11 months after being released on the grounds that he had only three months to live. This seems to strengthen suspicion that the mass murderer was actually released in exchange for a lucrative Libyan oil drilling contract being awarded to BP (BP!  All together now: ‘Booooo!’).  Herein lies one of several Lockerbie mysteries.  In 2007 the then British government agreed that al-Megrahi should not be excluded from the scope of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) being negotiated with Libya, as the UK side had originally demanded.  Jack Straw, then UK Justice minister, publicly acknowledged that this ‘concession’ (which implied that al-Megrahi could be transferred to serve the rest of his prison sentence in Libya) was motivated by British commercial interests in Libya, including the BP contract.  But it was part of the original UN-approved agreement on the management of  the Lockerbie suspects that if either of them was convicted, as al-Megrahi was, he would serve his sentence in the UK (in practice meaning in Scotland, as the whole process was to be conducted under Scottish law).  Question:  when Blair and Straw made their concession to the Libyans under which al-Megrahi was not after all to be excluded from the PTA, did they know, and remind the Libyans, that whatever the PTA said, under the original agreement approved by the UN,  al-Megrahi couldn’t be transferred to serve the rest of his sentence in Libya?  There are plenty of other murky questions still to be answered about the whole affair, but this must surely be one of them.

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Still on al-Megrahi:  I was sorry to hear Messrs Obama and Cameron at their White House news conference today (20 July) vehemently denouncing the Scottish Justice Secretary’s decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds after independent medical opinion had declared that he was dying of terminal prostate cancer and would probably be dead within three months.  Under Scottish law that prognosis provided clear grounds for compassionate release.  Obama and Cameron are decent humane people and it’s hard to believe that they really disapprove so strongly of such an obviously humane decision by the Scots.  Presumably they both think it expedient to condemn the release in order to placate the grieving Lockerbie relatives and, especially, the indignant Senators.  I doubt whether we’ll ever know whether the decision was really based solely on compassion for a dying man, or whether it was influenced, even subliminally, by pressure from London not to let al-Megrahi die in prison for fear of the effects of that on UK commercial interests with Libya, or (perhaps more likely) by fear of what might be revealed if al-Megrahi’s appeal against conviction was allowed to proceed.  Several well informed people believe there are skeletons in this cupboard which powerful people in the UK and the US want to keep securely and permanently locked away right where they are.

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Another issue in a politically exciting but depressing month has been the proposed Graduate Tax, under which the escalating cost of university tuition (in England?  England and Wales?) would be funded by university graduates who would pay a special tax once their earnings rose to levels that enabled them to pay it.  Coalition LibDem minister St Vincent Cable floated the idea and four of the five aspirants to the Labour party’s leadership have endorsed it.  None of these worthies has explained how it could be fair to pick out graduates to be made to pay income tax twice on the same income, given that if their university degrees were responsible for increasing their incomes, they would automatically pay more tax on the additional earnings anyway.  Nor was it obvious that this specific one of the many factors causing above-average earnings should be singled out for a special tax.  There seems no more reason to make graduates pay retrospectively for their university education than to make those who learned their three Rs at state schools pay for their school education, or to impose a special extra tax on those who owe their health or even their lives (and consequently their earning power) to their treatment under the National Health Service.  If extra revenue has to be raised to pay for our universities, it should surely be paid mainly by the richest in our society, by definition those best able to pay for it.  Graduates in their first few years after leaving university won’t usually be among the richest, nor qualify as those best able to pay more tax.  These simple principles really shouldn’t have to be spelled out to those with aspirations to lead HM Loyal Opposition and ultimately our government.

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There has been extensive discussion in recent days of the manifest injustice, even suffering, caused by the system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, or IPPs, introduced by David Blunkett when home secretary as a form of preventive detention.  Several thousands of people on IPPs who have served the ‘punishment’ element of their prison sentences (by no means only for serious offences) are kept in prison until they can demonstrate to a parole board that they won’t re-offend if released – something that it’s inherently impossible to prove.  As a result, already grossly overcrowded prisons are even more overcrowded by prisoners who’ve done their bird but whom the parole boards won’t release. The Kafka-esque character of this monstrous regime has been emphasised in a major report on IPPs issued during the month by the Prison Reform Trust and in reports by the head of the Parole Board and prison governors, among several others.  Yet in the hour-long oral questions to Justice Ministers on 20 July in the house of commons, the last before the long summer recess, not a single question about IPPs was asked.  Let’s hope that notwithstanding this apparent lack of interest in the issue on the part of our MPs, IPPs will be subjected to rigorous reappraisal as part of the coalition’s welcome review of sentencing policy, due to report in the autumn.  Those IPP prisoners who have served their tariffs but who are being made to wait for years to attend the behaviour management courses effectively required by parole boards as evidence of reform and rehabilitation, and then for years more while they wait for the parole board to consider their cases, and then for an indefinite period of years after that when the parole board has not dared to risk releasing them, should clearly be released without further ado.  Some will reoffend, but that’s just a risk we have to accept as a cost of living in what ought to be a free society.  Even more IPPers would not reoffend if released, and those are being indefinitely incarcerated for no reason whatever.

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As I pounded the treadmill in the gym while listening to Mahler on my iPod and reading some familiar Keats to relieve the boredom (licks finger and chalks an imaginary figure 1 on imaginary blackboard), it occurred to me that there are four discrete propositions in the famous couplet –

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

– and that all four propositions are not only untrue, but actually absurd.

Brian

“Is this the end of the UK?” was the title of a characteristically provocative and elegant article in the London Review of Books [Vol. 32 No. 10 · 27 May 2010] by Dr David Runciman, who saw in the contradictory swings and nagging anomalies of British contemporary politics an unravelling of the constitution that might eventually make the country literally ‘more or less ungovernable’.  Runciman, one of the most perceptive of political analysts, seemed to me to be missing something, most unusually for him.  This letter from me appears in the current issue of the LRB — Vol. 32 No. 14 · 22 July 2010 :

The End of the UK

David Runciman’s gloomy forecast of ‘the end of the UK’, because of the political consequences of devolution, ignores a central factor: in the words of Vernon Bogdanor in The New British Constitution, devolution ‘has turned Britain from a unitary state into a quasi-federal state’ (LRB, 27 May). Allan Tanner’s reply hints at this in predicting the inevitable ‘further devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’ and expressing bafflement at England’s reluctance to consider alternatives to what he calls the ‘Westminster system’, which I take to mean our current ‘quasi-federal’ and self-evidently transitional constitutional arrangements (Letters, 24 June). I’m baffled by this, too.

When Runciman is surprised by the absence of uniform swings at the general election, and concludes that ‘seen from one perspective, devolution has now made the United Kingdom more or less ungovernable,’ he is picking out a feature of federal constitutions, even quasi-federal ones, which is quite unsurprising to voters in the US, Australia, Canada, Switzerland or Germany, who take it for granted that there’ll be swings in different directions in different federal units – the reason often being that state governments can be unpopular whichever party runs them, which will affect the swing in that state accordingly. No one in a federation would think that this makes her country ungovernable. The same thing happened in the UK, with an unpopular Labour ‘federal’ government at Westminster, a popular Conservative Party in England and anti-Conservative (so pro-Labour) sentiment under a minority SNP government in Scotland. Other inconsistent sentiments dominate Wales and Northern Ireland.

Once we have the nous to move to a fully federal system for the four nations of the UK, these apparent anomalies will be seen as commonplaces. They seem now to make the UK ungovernable only because our existing constitution is a hopeless mixture of unitary and federal elements. As long as it stays that way, there can be no answer to the West Lothian question, and the Westminster government and Parliament will continue to struggle to play two inherently incompatible roles simultaneously. On the one hand, they are federal governing bodies for the whole of the UK in matters not devolved to the three smaller nations; on the other, they govern England in all matters. The composition of the House of Commons, with its numerous non-English members, is obviously quite unsuitable for an English Parliament and the composition of the government it produces is almost equally inappropriate for an English government, as we saw when Brown and Darling of Scotland, supported by an assortment of Scottish friends, were running the show, having been democratically elected by the whole of the UK to do so.

By the same token, it’s the lack of a proper distribution of powers between the federal centre and the four constituent nations that makes it ‘very hard’ for Runciman ‘to imagine how a Conservative administration in Westminster … will be able to impose painful spending cuts on Scotland and expect to survive there as a political force’. Revenue distribution among the constituent units of any federation is invariably a difficult and controversial issue, but in a fully fledged federal system, once Scotland (say) knows what its share of the national revenue will be, and given both full internal self-government and extensive tax-raising – or tax-lowering – powers, it will be up to the autonomous Scottish government to decide where, if at all, to impose cuts, not the federal government at Westminster. Runciman’s reluctance to apply the federal principle to the many anomalies he identifies leads him to the conclusion that

underneath the uncertainty is the steady, barely perceptible unravelling of a patched-up, threadbare UK constitution.

It’s the residual unitary features of the constitution, though, that are unravelling, including most prominently the absence of devolution to an English Parliament and English government, whose eventual creation is now inevitable, and the institution of which will complete the process of federalisation that began with devolution. The political leader who spots this, picks it up and runs with it, will surely score a famous try.

Brian Barder
London SW18

London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 14 · 22 July 2010,  letters.

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Update, 18 July 2010: ‘Leo’ has posted a comment here with a link to a highly relevant document that includes a number of possible objections to the propositions in my LRB letter above.  I have tried to reply to the principal ones in my response.  I reproduce Leo’s comment and my response here:

From Leo
July 17th, 2010 at 10:40 pm

Your solution is susceptible to a number of problems which Professor Bogdanor outlines in a very solid paper on the West Lothian question recently published in Parliamentary Affairs. You can download a copy here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ka1m21o5777uz1q

Brian writes: Thank you very much for this. I have read Professor Bogdanor’s paper with much interest, as I read his other constitutional writings. However, without, I hope, sounding presumptuous, I would argue that there are good answers to all his objections to the ultimate goal of a federal UK, including the objections to a parliament and government for England as a necessary part of it.

Professor Bogdanor raises three main objections: (1) that the English don’t want, and are not interested in having, their own parliament, whether or not as part of a federal system; (2) that England would be bound to dominate a federal system by reason of its size, for example because the other three nations would not be able to combine to outvote it; and (3) that it would be contrary to a basic principle of the constitution as people in Britain understand it that different areas of the UK should be free to adopt different standards of social services and other benefits, thus depriving the central government and parliament of the power to enforce basic uniformity of standards throughout the UK.

This is not the place to debate these objections in detail, but, very briefly:

(1) If no reform were to be adopted until there was widespread desire for it, we would still be living in caves.  There was initially very little desire for devolution in Scotland and Wales, but experience of it has greatly increased enthusiasm for it and indeed produced pressure for more.  I sense that there is increasing uneasiness in England about the ability of the Scots to follow a different path from that decreed at Westminster (most noticeably over university tuition fees: but it may well explode over National Health Service “reforms” imposed by the Tory-LibDem coalition in England [and Wales][1]), when England has no such option. In any case, this is a question of political leadership. A political party led by a good communicator could create an understanding of the benefits of federalism which would lead to a growing demand for it, including federal organs for England.

(2) English dominance of the UK by reason of size, and the inability of the rest of the UK to balance England by combining together, are a fact of life now, in a unitary (or union) state. A main purpose of devolution is somewhat to limit England’s ability to dominate the other nations, but England still necessarily dominates the ‘federal’ parliament and government at Westminster. A full federal system would minimise England’s dominance  (a) by ensuring that all four nations would enjoy separate but complete internal self-government, so that (e.g.) English MPs at both national and federal levels would be debarred from interfering in education policy in Scotland or in local government in Wales; and (b) by instituting a federal upper house, or Senate, on the US and Australian model, with an equal number of elected members from each nation, regardless of population, thus preventing England from outvoting the other three put together (and conversely enabling any two of the smaller nations’ senators to outvote England’s). England’s dominance, already reduced by devolution, would thus be much further reined in by a federal system, rather than representing an obstacle to it.

(3) The principle of uniform standards throughout the UK has already been breached as a result of devolution. Differences will grow and expand as more powers are devolved to Scotland and Wales before long, and probably to Northern Ireland too, as part of the price of having a predominantly Conservative government in Westminster when the Conservatives are almost unrepresented in Scotland. (Professor Bogdanor suggests that this could be resolved by adopting PR for elections to the house of commons, but since this is strongly opposed by both the Conservatives and most Labour MPs, it seems unlikely to provide a solution any time soon.) The British under federalism, as already under quasi-federal devolution, will have to get used to the idea of differing standards and systems in the different nations, which will be perfectly defensible so long as the differences reflect differing local wishes and interests as expressed in the three, or eventually four, national legislatures and assemblies. Serious imbalance would be prevented, as now, by equitable redistribution of all-UK financial resources: negotiated in a federal system through a mechanism involving all five governments and parliaments. So long as all four nations had access to roughly equal amounts of money per head of population, but, significantly, weighted to take account of need, each of the four could then decide separately how they wished to spend it, augmented according to local wishes by more or less revenue from local taxes. Screams of ‘post-code lottery’ would have to be answered by patient explanation of the basic principles of federalism. In any case, as indeed Professor Bogdanor acknowledges, that dam has already been breached with devolution, as even a baffled Tony Blair was forced by Paddy Ashdown to begin to realise (in a telling quotation near the end of Bogdanor’s paper).

Professor Bogdanor also argues that an English parliament would be regarded by many English people as no less remote from them than the Westminster parliament is now. Actually it would be bound to feel somewhat less remote, since it would be a purely English body which the Westminster parliament obviously is not. Anyway, so what? People in northern Queensland regard the state government down in Brisbane as remote and uncaring — and the federal (Commonwealth) government in Canberra as even more so. But life goes on and the Australian federation works pretty well, even though New South Wales and Victoria overwhelmingly dominate the other states.

Of course other problems will arise on the long and rocky road to federation, a journey that will take several decades and involve many stops and starts and setbacks. But I don’t believe any of the problems will be found to be insurmountable. The journey has already begun, and to try to halt it now at the present uncomfortable half-way house entails too many contradictions and anomalies to be sustainable. Having rejected all the possible answers to the West Lothian question, Professor Bogdanor is forced to conclude that it can’t be answered, and to argue that it doesn’t really matter. I contend that on the contrary it does matter and that there is one, but only one, answer to it. Once there’s a critical mass of understanding of the logic and the benefits of federalism, the thing will develop a surprising momentum. But to get the old cart moving again will require inspired leadership, a commodity that’s currently in rather short supply.

[1] I was wrong to say that the Con-LibDem NHS ‘reforms’ would apply to Wales as well as England: please see Hendre’s comment below.

18 July 2010

Ed Miliband, second favourite after his big brother for the Labour leadership, has written a piece on his campaign blog in which he argues for a graduate tax as a fairer alternative to tuition fees.  Four of the five candidates now favour a graduate tax and the press reports that the coalition government is actively encouraging the idea.  Vince Cable was on the radio this morning talking it up, not as an alternative to tuition fees but as an addition to them.   I see nothing fair about this idea.  I have posted a comment on E Miliband’s blog post explaining why, but it’s still “awaiting moderation”.  In case my comment doesn’t survive the moderator’s Delete key, I’m reproducing it here:

There’s absolutely nothing fair about a graduate tax.  It assumes that a university degree increases the earning power of graduates, which is no doubt true as a generalisation but certainly not true of all graduates — especially at a time when growing numbers of people are going to finish their university courses with degrees but no hope of a job at a time of very high unemployment.  It has never been true of the many graduates who work for the not-for-profit sector or even in many areas of the public sector.  Many graduates are forced to take jobs for which they are over-qualified and therefore underpaid, with no extra earning power attributable to their degrees.

But the even more serious objection to a graduate tax is that a university degree is only one of numerous factors that may result in above-average incomes:  high IQ, industriousness, unscrupulousness, good contacts through well-off parents or through having been to a ‘public’ school, an affluent upbringing and social confidence, good luck — the list is endless. There’s no possible justification or need for government to single out the beneficiaries of one particular advantage (such as a university degree) for an additional tax obligation:  if the tax system is progressive, as one day a future Labour government might just possibly make it, then the higher people’s incomes, the more tax they pay, regardless of the reasons for their relative affluence.  Why should a graduate pay more tax on her income than someone with no degree but an identical income?

Other arguments against a graduate tax are:

• that the provision of university education to all those who can benefit from it benefits the whole of society in numerous obvious ways, including indirectly those who haven’t been to university, so society should pay for university education collectively through the tax system;
• that the prospect of having to pay a graduate tax on top of income tax and other taxes would inevitably discourage many able young people  from aspiring to a university education;  and
• that a graduate tax, calculated to pay for the costs of university education, is in effect a hypothecated tax, whose proceeds would be earmarked for a specific category of expenditure; and this is contrary to the basic principle that taxes go into the Consolidated Fund which the Chancellor of the Exchequer can use with total flexibility for whatever needs may arise.

The fair solution to the problem of funding university teaching is a general increase in the higher rates of income tax, on the principle that all those who can afford to contribute more to social goods,  not just graduates, should pay more tax .  A future Labour government will need to be much less timid about taxing very high incomes — and wealth — on a steeply rising scale.  The new 50% marginal rate (which incidentally doesn’t mean anyone paying 50% of their entire income in tax, as many people seem to think) is a start, but there’s ample scope for much more.  Threats from the mega-rich to emigrate if their taxes go up are a bluff that should be called — and if it’s not a bluff, good riddance to them. To each according to his need….

Please think again, Mr Miliband and Dr Cable.  Tuition fees should certainly be abolished, but not to be replaced, still less supplemented, by a graduate tax.  The arguments for financing state school education out of general taxation apply every bit as strongly to higher education.  Grasp the nettle!

Up-date, 15 July 2010: My comment (i.e. this post) has now appeared on Ed Miliband’s blog (here).  So have a good number of other comments, mostly making very good points both for and — especially — against the idea of a graduate tax.  I was especially struck by this one:

Rob Hepworth  [Moderator]
It’s preferable to fees but still the lesser of evils. I’m nervous about hypothecated taxes. There’s a danger that our opponents will jump at this and do it for other services eg health – a “health Tax” – to be paid only by people who use the NHS ? Or a schools tax only paid by parents whose children use state schools ? No!! …  If we need a tax on top, why not a tax on larger companies whose future manpower depends on a supply of educated graduates?

Other comments on Mr E Miliband’s blog post advance additional cogent arguments against this deeply flawed idea.   And there are yet more very good points in comments on the version of this post at Labour List.  I can’t believe that Dr Cable’s heart is really in it, or that Ed Miliband’s should be.

Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/