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

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

___________________________

Brian

*     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *

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

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.

______________________

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

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/

I genuinely hate to say it, but I found the lecture terribly disappointing.  In a reappraisal of where Labour should be going, I look for two main ingredients: first, an assessment of the successes and failures, but especially the failures, of Labour’s 13 years in government, frankly acknowledging the defects and mistakes, discussing the reasons for them and ways to make sure that they are not repeated;  and secondly, an outline of a new overall Labour policy for dealing with the principal issues of our time, indicating how a Labour (or Lab-LibDem coalition) government would handle at least the most pressing of the following, even if only by a sentence on each:

recovery from recession, debt and the budget deficit, including the balance between taxes and expenditure cuts:  restructuring of the economy generally and the banks and financial institutions in particular: financing pensions as people live longer:  immigration:  retention, strengthening or liberalisation of the mass of anti-terrorism and crime legislation inherited from the last Labour government:  the Human Rights Act: the prison overcrowding crisis and sentencing policy, including the now discredited system of indefinite sentences “for public protection”, i.e. preventive detention: Britain’s place in the EU and relations with the US:  global poverty:  climate change:  Britain’s status as a nuclear power, and the future of Trident:  how long we continue to take part in the Afghanistan war and in what circumstances we would withdraw our forces:  Iran and Israel-Palestine: the doctrine of  “liberal intervention”: and ‘whither devolution?’ with still no answer to the West Lothian question, continuing discontent in Scotland and to some extent in Wales, and signs of restiveness (or worse) in England at the continuing denial of devolution to the biggest of the UK’s four constituent nations.

This adds up to a meaty and complex agenda.  We’re entitled to know where each of the five candidates stands on at least the most pressing items in it.

On most of these issues I would expect a major policy pronouncement like the Miliband lecture to pinpoint and explain the differences between the new post-election policies that he would pursue if elected party leader, and those of the present coalition government.  Attacks on the latter would, in my ideal lecture, be carefully placed in the context of a superior Labour alternative.  Where Labour and coalition government policies now largely coincide, I would hope to see praise and support for some at least of what the Cameron-Clegg government is beginning to do or at least to promise, especially in the area of civil liberties and Afghanistan.  Importantly, I would hope that the Labour leadership, including the candidates for election as leader, would resist the temptation to continue to defend the plainly indefensible elements in the policies and legislation of the Blair and Brown governments, especially in the fields of foreign policy and civil liberties, and to applaud the promises of the coalition government to reverse some of them.

Applying these hopes and expectations to Mr Miliband’s Keir Hardie lecture, I’m sad not to find in it any honest acknowledgement of the three great failures of the Labour years:  (1) the Iraq war crime, still not openly acknowledged as such from the Labour front bench despite still mounting evidence of its criminality (not to mention the slide into an unwinnable and  increasingly costly war in Afghanistan); (2) the relentless assault on individual liberties under cover of a hyped-up fear of terrorism; and (3) the constant indulgent kowtowing to the City and the financial institutions, leading to obscene inequality in our society, a poisonous celebrity culture fed by inconceivable personal wealth for the few, and now an almost total economic collapse which has given a profoundly reactionary Conservative party a golden opportunity, seized with greedy hands, to dismantle the welfare state.  Miliband’s lecture barely touches on any of these major failures (apart from a half-hearted admission of failure to address the excessive role and inadequate regulation of the financial sector), still less offering any specific new policies designed to guarantee that no future Labour government will ever repeat them.  Instead, there is sentence after sentence of what can only, in all charity, be described as pious waffle, to much of which careful analysis can attach virtually no meaning at all.

Perhaps worst of all, the lecture suggests absolutely no concrete policies for dealing with an unsustainable budget deficit and national debt, combined with nursing the first timid signs of recovery from recession, as a coherent alternative to the enthusiastic regressive butchery now already beginning to be practised by the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne triumvirate.  It’s a waste of time denouncing each new cut as the axe falls, bewailing each new loss of valuable programmes and projects, and stridently supporting every noisy interest group as each is targeted in turn by the Osborne axe, without being able to offer a positive, detailed and more socially responsible alternative programme.

We’re not fools:  we know that a Labour government would have had to make painful decisions about increased taxes and public expenditure cuts, and we are entitled to know what they would be. We need to know if Labour will stick to the illiberal and timid policies of the Blair-Brown era which so strained the loyalty of millions of its members and supporters.  Mr Miliband doesn’t tell us.  Would Labour under Miliband really be able to avoid raising VAT (as Alistair Darling favoured when Chancellor, until foiled by Gordon Brown) and abolishing some of the more obviously wasteful quangos? Would it really have persisted in the mindless follies of ID cards and the associated monster national database;  of wasting more billions on nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art fighter-bombers that we don’t need and can’t afford; of 28-day detention without charge and thousands of section 44 stop-and-search intrusions; of continuing to expand our shamefully inflated prison population, and building yet more prisons; of continuing the cull of brave (or even cowardly) young British men and women (not to mention Afghan civilians) in a literally purposeless war in Afghanistan; of extraditing Brits to the US on the basis of vague and menacing accusations which would cut no ice at all if we sought to use them as a basis for extraditing Americans from the US?  Would Labour still be refusing to hold a proper independent inquiry into serious charges of British collusion in torture? If the five candidates for the leadership can’t give us specific answers, indeed commitments, on questions such as these, it’s hard to see how they can lay claim to the votes of party members or the blessings of Labour’s remaining supporters.

It’s easy to pick holes in the Miliband lecture and perhaps it’s unfair to judge it in isolation from DM’s other policy speeches and interviews.  But I haven’t so far seen much to applaud in them, either.  The title of Miliband’s article in the New Statesman of 5 July — “How to solve the English question” —  raised my spirits: here at last a potential future Labour leader would surely tackle head-on the problem of unfinished devolution, England still denied the partial self-government enjoyed by the other UK nations, the West Lothian question, all that:  but no.  All Mr Miliband had to say on that complex of issues was:

An “English Parliament” is not the answer. We must strengthen the civic pride and economic resilience of English towns and cities. This is how the sense of identity, belonging and place of the many Englands can be better embedded and expressed. Labour needs to work with the grain of local and institutional affiliations – from army regiments to hospitals, from fire services to local authorities.

So much for the gaping devolution deficit.  So much for the unanswered West Lothian question.  We must just be satisfied with strengthening the civic pride and economic resilience of English towns and cities.  Perhaps we need a new Ministry of English Civic Pride and Economic Resilience for the purpose.  No reasoned argument: just the bald assertion —  ’an “English Parliament” is not the answer.’  I wonder why it isn’t the answer.  Actually, I’m pretty sure that it’s at least part of the answer, as a stage on the way to a full UK federation.  That seems to me worth discussion, not bland dismissal.

If I have to admit to not having read every word of D Miliband’s lectures, articles and interviews since he became a candidate for the leadership, I plead in mitigation that much of it is so stodgy and abstract that it’s very difficult to get through it all without nodding off or turning on the telly half-way through.

It’s such a shame.  The older Miliband is in many ways an attractive figure — highly intelligent, sometimes eloquent, unfailingly articulate and well informed, obviously decent;  he was a good foreign secretary, the best for several years, with the potential, perhaps, of becoming a great one.  He ought to be an irresistible candidate for the leadership.  But he’ll need to do better than this if he’s going to come anywhere near earning my vote.

Brian

The Prison Reform trust has now (8 July 2010) published a 74-page report,  Unjust Deserts: imprisonment for public protection [PDF], containing a full academic and practical analysis of the whole system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, the fruit of two years’ research. The report is a damning indictment of the system — its underlying philosophy, its inherent unfairness, and the fatal way in which it is mismanaged in practice.  There are a number of conclusions and recommendations, the first of these being that the system should be abolished and determinate sentences substituted for indeterminate sentences still being served.  You can read selected extracts from the report here, and a general summary of it here (“8 July 2010: ill-drafted IPP sentence leaves thousands locked up in bureaucratic limbo“).

The report spells out in detail:

• the way the system of IPPs was originally misconceived and carelessly drafted, resulting in consequences that were neither intended nor foreseen:
• how it is inherently unjust, relying on a mistaken belief that it’s possible to foresee an offender’s future behaviour in hypothetical future circumstances and on unsupported faith in the efficacy of prison courses to change behaviour while addressing only a small part of the roots of offending behaviour: and
• how the system is incompetently administered, grossly under-staffed and under-resourced, resulting in totally unnecessary costs to the taxpayer of something like £100 million so far, with costs steadily increasing.

One of many depressing features of the report is its revelation that with very few exceptions all the judges and psychologists who contributed their comments to the authors of the report were in favour of the IPP concept, some strongly so:  apparently unable to see anything wrong with a system that abandons the concept of punishment being proportionate to the offence committed, substituting the proposition that a person who has served the punitive part of his sentence, but can’t prove that he will not reoffend if released, can properly be incarcerated for years, and indeed in principle for life, being harshly punished for future offences that he or she has not committed and might well never commit if released.  This is risk aversion gone mad.  It’s worrying that so many of our judges can’t see it:  and almost equally worrying that the psychologists, on whose advice on behaviour management and assessment parole boards tend to rely, can’t see it, either.

My sole reservation about this otherwise admirable and comprehensive document is that it offers a number of possible options for reform, including amendments to the IPP legislation further to reduce the number of offences for which IPPs can be awarded.  Even though the recommended first option is outright abolition, the offer of a less drastic remedy by further amending the legislation (which has already been amended in the same direction without producing any very significant improvements) and a third, even weaker, option of simply allocating more resources to the management of IPP prisoners and the provision of more behaviour management courses for them, seems to me to weaken the force of the case for abolition.  The system is inherently unjust.  No amount of tinkering with it can make it fair.  Better management of it wouldn’t make it perceptibly less unfair — and it would cost far more money than is likely to be available in the present climate.  Conversely, the report calculates — almost in an aside — that the cost to the taxpayer of keeping thousands of IPP prisoners in jail for years after they have served the punitive part of their sentences and are still incarcerated in preventive detention is probably of the order of “around £100 million” so far — and this grotesque cost is likely to go on rising if nothing drastic is done to stop the monster in its tracks.  Now is the time to slay it.  Please urge your MP now to tell the Justice Secretary that the IPP has had its day.

Update (25 July 2010):  It has been reported that No. 10 vetoed a passage in Crispin Blunt’s ‘Churchill’ speech of 22 July in which he had planned to say something to the effect that he expected to abolish IPPs.  In fact the videotape of the speech at http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/sp220710a.htm proves that he delivered the section of his speech on IPPs almost exactly as in the text on that web page.  I think this is as promising as we can expect, given that he could not have been expected to make a firm decision on the matter in advance of the sentencing review.  And at least we have the certainty now that IPPs will be critically scrutinised as part of the sentencing review, which is to report in the autumn.  So far, so reasonably good.

Brian

Now the admirable Prison Reform Trust has produced one of its periodic Bromley Briefing Prison Factfiles (July 2010) covering a range of prison-related subjects  and containing a section on IPPs with some pretty horrific facts and figures.  It’s clearly not widely known, even among the chatterati and the blogospheriacs, that the number has exploded from 3,000 indeterminate sentences in 1992 to 12,822 in March 2010;  that by 5 February 2010 there were 476 people serving IPP sentences who had been kept on in prison for two years or more after they had served the ‘punishment’ element of their sentences — they had been, in other words, incarcerated in preventive detention for over two years, and many of them faced genuine uncertainty about whether they would ever be released;   or that since 2005 only 133 people serving IPP sentences have been released from prison, 33 of whom have been recalled.

With the Trust’s agreement, I have put the section of the Bromley Briefing Prison Factfile dealing with IPPs, together with the relevant section from the Introduction, on this website:  you can read it here.   It demonstrates with cold statistics and quotations the Kafkaesque or Catch 22 situation in which these thousands of (almost all) men are trapped.  In order to provide ‘evidence’ to the parole board in support of their applications for release, they are virtually bound to have attended various behaviour management courses that allegedly enable them to reform their characters and make reoffending on release less likely.  But some IPP prisoners are in prisons where such courses are not available, or where there are waiting lists of a year or even longer for a place on the relevant course, or where the prison staff say the IPP prisoner’s mental condition makes it unsuitable for him to attend the course.  Then in some prisons there are equally long waiting lists before an IPP prisoner can attend a parole board hearing to present his case for release (the onus is on him to show that he won’t offend, a wicked reversal of the position throughout the rest of the justice system); and even if he has managed to attend the requisite courses, the board may turn down his application, without being required to give a coherent reason.

One of the great virtues of the IPPs section of the Prison Factfile is that it provides hard evidence of the sheer scale of the injustice and inherently cruel uncertainty involved for the prisoners and their families.  The scale is huge, and actually growing.   Almost by definition, IPP prisoners are more than averagely vulnerable.  To quote the Factfile:

Nearly one in five IPP prisoners have previously received psychiatric treatment, while one in 10 is receiving mental health treatment in prison and one in five is receiving medication. One IPP prisoner in 20 is, or has been, a patient in a special hospital or regional secure unit.  Data from the Prison Service’s Safer Custody Group also confirm that IPP prisoners have a raised incidence of selfharm.  Three people serving IPP sentences took their own lives in 2009.

We are keeping hundreds of people with mental health problems incarcerated because we are scared to let them out into the community where they could in principle receive much more effective — and incidentally much cheaper — treatment.  We’re back to the pre-Victorian lunatic asylum, out of a shameful combination of fear and tight-fistedness — but a lunatic asylum in which the sufferers continue indefinitely to be punished and not simply confined.

New Justice Department ministers have publicly stated their disquiet at this unsustainable, indeed scandalous, situation.  They have announced that a review of sentencing policy is to be set up and to report in the autumn.  This doesn’t leave much time for you to ask your MP to press the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, to ensure that the sentencing review takes a hard look at IPPs and recommends that the whole system should be abolished:  no amount of tinkering with it can make it anything like acceptable.  Mr Clarke may well actually welcome pressure like this:  he can use it in evidence against the neanderthals in his own party (and to some extent in the Labour party, whose government introduced IPPs) and against the more viciously vindictive of the tabloids who think the thing to do with offenders is to “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” — which is more or less what an IPP sentence does, come to think of it.

Update, 8 July 2010:  Now see new Ephems post about a further and much fuller report by the Prison Reform Trust published today, Unjust Deserts: imprisonment for public protection [PDF].  Key extracts from this report are now here.

Brian

So why, when these are all statements of the painfully obvious, are the streets of Britain not seething with anti-war protestors, and our MPs not bombarded with angry demands to bring it all to an end, not in another five years’ time as David Cameron now seems to be half-promising, but starting now? The streets of Wootton Bassett are filled not with angry protestors but with silent weeping mourners as the coffins of our slaughtered servicemen are slowly driven past, day after day after day, and the hospitals and rehabilitation units are filled with the terribly wounded and maimed victims of the war, bodies broken and young lives wrecked in a cause that hardly anyone can credibly define.

But perhaps the prospects are not all black. I think the media missed the most significant remark by the prime minister in his comments on Afghanistan from the G8 meeting in Canada.  “Troops out by 2015, says Cameron” was the Guardian’s lead story’s headline on 26 June 2010, with the subheading: “Prime minister wants forces to leave Afghanistan before next election”.   The rest of the mainstream media focused on the same remark.  But they also reported, without apparently recognising its significance, what the prime minister went on to say:

“We can’t be there for another five years, having been there for nine years already.“  Cameron said: “I want us to roll up our sleeves and get on with delivering what will bring the success we want, which is not a perfect Afghanistan, but some stability in Afghanistan and the ability for the Afghans themselves to run their country, so they [British troops] can come home.” (Emphasis added.)

Both Cameron and especially the defence secretary, Liam Fox, have already sent out much more sceptical signals about the purposes and prospects for ‘success’ in the Afghan conflict than anything hinted at by their Labour predecessors.  The present government’s ambitions appear much less ambitious and therefore far more realistic.  Of course Cameron has had to take care not to open up a public rift with the Americans just as he was about to have his first face-to-face bilateral meeting with President Obama.  But the UK’s and the Americans’ options and commitments are very different.  If British troops were to be withdrawn in a planned and phased withdrawal, to be completed by the end of this year, that would not precipitate the collapse of the whole US-led NATO operation in Afghanistan in the way that an American military withdrawal would be bound to do.  Given enough advance warning of our withdrawal, NATO could replace British forces by contributions from other NATO member countries which have either not taken part in the military operation at all hitherto, or which have not contributed anything like as much as Britain in the past nine long years.  If no other NATO members could be found to volunteer to take Britain’s place, that would send an important political message of which NATO and Washington would have to take proper account.  It might result in a major shift of emphasis from the military to the diplomatic, political and developmental dimensions of the international effort.  There would be every reason for Britain to redouble its diplomatic, political and developmental contribution to a solution of the problem while withdrawing every last British soldier in as short a time frame as logistics permit.

So why are we not acting accordingly?

Our political leaders are, I think, inhibited by two fears, neither of which can possibly justify a single additional death or maiming of another British soldier.

The first is the fear that our withdrawal will be interpreted as a failure, and a defeat for British arms.  But it need not be so.  Britain has been second only to the Americans in the size and effectiveness of our contribution to the war over nine years, and in the cost of it in blood and treasure.  It can reasonably credibly be claimed that our war effort has real and tangible achievements to its credit:  al-Qaeda’s presence and power virtually eliminated, Taliban control of towns and villages removed and girls’ schools reopened, social development schemes instigated and funded under British military protection, Afghans given political options denied to them in the years before 9/11 and the arrival of NATO forces.  British forces have not been defeated: they have made their contribution to the progress made, and after nine years it’s time for others to replace us and also for political, diplomatic and social priorities to replace the military effort in pride of place.

The second inhibiting fear is that our British dead and maimed and their stricken families will seem to have suffered in vain if we withdraw before we can make any meaningful claim of ‘victory’.  But here again, we can justify withdrawal by reference to the progress made in Afghanistan during our nine-year military presence, progress that would not have been possible without a military effort which has been costly but indispensable in progressively removing a major threat posed by al-Qaeda’s Afghan activities to Britain’s and the western world’s security.  There’s also the point that if we wait for a recognisable ‘victory’ before we bring our troops home, they will be there for ever;  sooner or later we’ll have to face the reality that there will be no such thing as an outright demonstrable ‘victory’ and that to go on leaking the blood of our young men and women while we wait for a chimera, the waste will be unforgiveable.

These claims of sufficient success in improving the situation in Afghanistan to justify our military withdrawal now will of course be hotly disputed.  Those forced to make them won’t all sincerely believe in them.  Not all the bereaved and maimed will be altogether consoled by them.  To many they will appear no better than a fig-leaf.  But what’s the realistic alternative?  If we struggle on for another four or five years, how will we be any better able to justify our withdrawal then, after what will then be nearly 15 years of war and loss?  It’s a cliché to remark that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.  But it’s a useful truth.  It looks as if Cameron and Fox understand it.  But they need the help of public opinion and of the chattering classes and of the enlightened media in creating a climate of opinion in which they can begin the process of military withdrawal without being accused of admitting defeat, or of causing the bereaved and maimed to feel that their suffering was all for nothing.  Which of the candidates for the Labour party leadership is going to come out loud and clear for withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2010 with heads held high and a wave of national pride in what our boys have achieved?

“We can’t be there for another five years, having been there for nine years already.“  If David Cameron can say that, why can’t the Milibrothers, the other Ed, Diane[1] or the other Andy — not Murray — say it too, and draw the logical conclusion from it even more boldly?  Meanwhile the slaughter in Afghanistan continues, with hardly a peep of protest at home apart from routine muttering from the usual suspects.  A 2.5% rise in VAT looms much larger.  Our deadly, unwinnable war is truly the dog that still doesn’t bark in the night.

[1] Actually Diane Abbott has got this right, as she has so many other things right:  “I would tackle the deficit by coming out of Afghanistan, slashing the defence budget and scrapping Trident.” (Candidates’ answers to questionnaire, The Observer, 27 June 2010)  Make it the centrepiece of your campaign, Diane: now that England’s out of the world cup, perhaps people will sit up and take notice.

Brian

The change of government last month (May 2010) has brought a ray of hope that this indefensible system might soon be abolished.  Yesterday I submitted the following letter to the Guardian for publication:

Sir,

Polly Toynbee is right to point to the obscene waste of public money involved in short-term prison sentences which achieve nothing (Forget being tough, it’s time to get realistic on crime, Comment & debate, 22 June).  She might also have mentioned the folly, waste and injustice of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), which currently add massively to shameful overcrowding in our prisons. They waste public money on a vast scale by keeping in prison thousands of
people who have served their sentences imposed for punishment, rehabilitation and deterrence but who can’t prove to a Parole Board that they won’t reoffend if released, often because there are no places for them on the behaviour courses which they need to attend as a virtual condition for release.

These people are in preventive detention, being punished for future offences they haven’t committed, often with no hope of release, fearing that they are in prison for life, having already been punished for often quite minor offences.  The onus is on them to prove a negative about the future, which is conceptually impossible as well as reversing the normal onus of proof.  The proportion of IPPers so far released is minuscule.  Justice Department ministers of the new government have  acknowledged that the system is unacceptable: Crispin Blunt told parliament on 15 June that “We have 6,000 IPP prisoners, well over 2,500 of whom have exceeded their tariff point. Many cannot get on courses because our prisons are wholly overcrowded and unable to address offending behaviour. That is not a defensible position.”

It’s inhumane, unjust and a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money.  All parties should now insist that the system is swept away and those IPPers who have served their minimum sentences should be released forthwith, either unconditionally or on licence. Here’s a useful cut in government spending that will benefit everyone.

Yours sincerely
Brian Barder
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
22 June 2010

A version of this letter is published in today’s Guardian (scroll down to the third letter on the web page), but so indiscriminately ‘edited’ that many of the main points I had hoped to make have been amputated (indeterminate sentences are not even identified as ‘IPPs’ in the published version!).  Still, what was published is probably better than nothing.

Recently Michael Robinson, a partner in a firm of solicitors with extensive experience of IPPs and the injustices they inflict, wrote to the new prime minister:

Dear Prime Minister,

Re: Cost to the Tax Payer – The IPP Sentence

Britain is overwhelmed with debt. As the incoming Prime Minister you have the unenviable task of reducing the vast deficit left by the last government. It is time to cut waste from areas in which money is being spent for no ascertainable benefit.

In March 2010 the total prison population stood at 85,608, which is approximately 800 more than the highest figure predicted for March 2010[1]. The prisons are, by anyone’s estimation, full. A very significant number of these prisoners are serving Imprisonment for Public Protection. These prisoners are given sentences by judges who set their minimum term – the ‘punishment’ period – at half of the length of a determinate sentence.

In reality, the expiry of the minimum term is almost never the date on which the prisoner is released. In fact only about 1% of all IPP prisoners have been released and have subsequently stayed out of prison. This means, for example, that someone sentenced to a 12 month IPP in November 2006 (the equivalent to a two year determinate sentence) could technically have been released in November 2007 but could still be in prison today. To date they would have served three years and six months, the equivalent of a seven-year determinate sentence.

There are approximately 6,000[2] IPP prisoners in custody, and the figure is rising at a rate of around 70 per month[3]. With the average cost of keeping a prisoner in jail estimated at £40,000 per year this equates to a total of £240m per year for this class of prisoner alone, and which will continue to rise under the current system.

In order to have any chance of being released on parole, these prisoners are wholly reliant on demonstrating their reduction in risk while in prison. These prisoners are unable to access the courses they need because of the continuing problem of woefully inadequate funding. In a shockingly high number of cases, these people are simply not being given the opportunity to earn their release.

The previous government admitted that there were no centrally available reliable figures on the number of IPPs waiting to access courses.[4] To compensate for the overcrowding, they embarked on a program of early release for determinate sentenced prisoners. There is a clear contradiction here which, we submit, cannot have been the intention of the sentencing judiciary.

Rather than being saddled with this enormously inefficient, not to mention ‘inhumane’[5], regime we implore you to make your pledged wholesale review of sentencing, including the IPP, a priority. So much money is wasted currently holding individuals in prison who have, because of a lack of availability of courses, been unable to demonstrate that they are no longer dangerous to the satisfaction of the Parole Board.

We are not suggesting that offenders should not be punished for their offences: On the contrary, we wholeheartedly support your proposals for mini-max sentences. If prisoners have definite dates for their earliest and latest release this will give them an impetus to want to earn release as soon as possible. This will encourage good behaviour amongst all prisoners, rather than just those serving indeterminate sentences who are scared to ‘step out of line’ while those currently serving determinate sentences aren’t as adversely affected if they are punished for misbehaviour.

Mini-max sentences will reduce pressure on the operation of the Prison Service as a whole by promoting good order inside prisons; they will enable this government to budget more accurately in terms of the annual cost of the Prison Service; and will still act as a sufficient deterrent in terms of serious crime.

The changes to IPP in 2008 did not go far enough – and there are many, many short tariff IPP prisoners still languishing in jail who were sentenced under the earlier regime. Only abolition of the IPP will put a stop to this wasteful expenditure.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Robinson

[1] Prison Population Projections 2009-2015
[2] Pre-election Conservative line on IPP
[3] Pre-election Conservative line on IPP
[4] Jack Straw, House of Commons Hansard Written Answers 16th June 2009
[5] Independent Monitoring Board

Under the Conservative-LibDem coalition agreement the government is to set up a review of sentencing policy.  This is to report by October.  Taking into account the parliamentary summer recess, that doesn’t leave all that much time to make sure that the sentencing review will conclude that the whole IPP régime should be wound up (there should be no attempt to ‘improve’ it, since it’s inherently flawed) and that all IPPers should be automatically released at the end of their tariffs (‘minimum sentences’).  There may be a case for introducing ‘mini-max’ sentences; but that’s a separate issue which should be independently debated.

If you agree, therefore, that it’s time to get rid of IPPs as a blot on our justice system and a wicked waste of money, please write to or email your MP, urging that the sentencing review should include a review of IPPs and that this should lead to their outright abolition.  Ask your MP to make urgent representations accordingly to the Justice Secretary (Kenneth Clarke).  Please give your reasons in your own words — but then I recommend that you also attach or enclose a copy of the letter I submitted to the Guardian (the full text as submitted, quoted above) if your MP is Labour, LibDem, Green or a nationalist party member):  or, if your MP is a Conservative, I suggest that you attach or enclose a copy of Mr Robinson’s letter to the prime minister, also quoted above.  By all means also invite him or her to read http://www.barder.com/696 and especially some of the heart-wrenching comments underneath it.

This is an opportunity to rid ourselves of a system which is unjust, which causes untold fear, misery and anguish, and which wastes millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, all to no purpose whatever.  The opportunity may be unrepeatable.  Please take ten minutes now to help ensure that the government and parliament do the right, necessary thing, soon.

Update (25 June 2010):  A shortened version of this post is now published on the left-of-centre website, Labour List:  you can read it here.  It’s already attracting an interesting and sympathetic debate in comments, and I hope it might prompt many more letters to MPs while there’s still time to influence the government’s review of sentencing policy.  Thanks to those who have already been in touch with their MPs in response to this Ephems post (see comments below).

Brian

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury … nor shall any person be …  compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law… [Emphasis added]

Anyone tuning in yesterday (17 June 2010) to the UK or US television live coverage of what the New York Times called “the much-anticipated grilling of BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee” over the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, could have been forgiven for assuming that the hapless Mr Hayward was indeed on trial for his life, or at best in imminent danger of being sentenced to 120 years’ hard labour in the federal penitentiary, such was the uninhibited savagery of the questioning, the harshness of the comments on Hayward’s replies, and the crestfallen, cringing demeanour of the accused.  Yet this was not technically a trial at all;  Mr Hayward has not been charged with any offence, still less convicted of committing one;  the members of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee were not at the hearing in any legal or judicial capacity.

Above all, Mr Hayward was afforded not a single one of the safeguards required by elementary justice and by American law in a criminal trial.  No impartial judge would have allowed the prosecution — the role that the Committee’s members awarded themselves — to ask more than a handful of the questions to which Mr Hayward was subjected.  Most questions could have been answered only by someone who had been personally involved in the decisions whose consequences had led to the oil spill (which Hayward had not), or else by someone who had read the full report of inquiries into those decisions that had been rigorously conducted and fully completed (which they have not, at any rate not yet).  Mr Hayward repeatedly explained that for these reasons he was in no position to answer many of the numerous questions put to him.  It made no difference.  The distinguished Congressmen continued to harass, hassle and hound their victim with more and more plainly unanswerable questions, and then to denounce his explanations of inability to answer them as evasiveness amounting, by implication, to a contempt of Congress.  Mr Hayward, much to his credit, remained studiously low-key, refusing to betray the anger and sense of injustice that he must have felt, maintaining an expression of deep penitence but never any other emotion.

The hearing lasted for many hours; Hayward sat facing his inquisitors alone, unsupported by colleagues or staff, unrepresented by counsel, unprotected by even any pretence of impartiality by the Committee Chair.  The UK’s Daily Express summed it up accurately, for once:

Throughout the session, the atmosphere became increasingly heated and confrontational with Congressmen repeatedly interrupting the BP boss. The conclusion was clear — the majority of those engaged in this show trial had already decided he was guilty.

Perhaps the Daily Mirror’s mistaken assumption that “those engaged in this show trial” were Senators, not members of the House of Representatives, resulted from a folk memory of other, even more discreditable show trial hearings on the Hill conducted by another Congressional committee in the early 1950s, more than half a century ago.  Those hearings ended on 2 December 1954 when the Senate voted by 67 votes to 22 to condemn Senator Joseph McCarthy on the explicit grounds, among others, that he had

acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity.

Of course McCarthyism was a far more lethal and destructive plague, destroying far more victims, than anything so far visited by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the Chief Executive of BP.  But some of the techniques employed yesterday had an eerily familiar echo.

One or two further observations are perhaps in order.  Mr Hayward and the BP Chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, have apologised handsomely to the American people for what has happened, accepting BP’s responsibility for it, and promising that BP will pay the full costs of repairing the damage done.  BP is an international company with as many American shareholders as British; the ‘B’ in BP no longer stands for ‘British’ (or anything else).  As the various inquiries and investigations proceed, BP may no longer find itself alone in the dock.  Transocean Ltd, the owner of the faulty drilling rig (BP was merely leasing it), is the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, based in Switzerland, with offices in 20 countries including the US and Scotland.  It’s been suggested that the cement slurry which the US firm Halliburton (remember Halliburton?) was pumping into the drill hole prior to the Horizon’s explosion may have  been at fault.  Halliburton is the world’s second largest oilfield services corporation with headquarters in Houston, Texas.  The US Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service inspectors may also come in for criticism for failing to follow up expressions of concern about the safety of the shear rams used to seal off out-of-control oil and gas wells in deep-water drilling.  According to the Wall Street Journal, “the Fed may suddenly find itself the target of public anger, along with Transocean, which bought the rams, and Cameron International, the manufacturer.”  Cameron International’s headquarters are also in Houston, Texas.

At least some of the pressure on BP, as on all other oil exploration and production companies, to cut costs and perhaps therefore also corners, arises from the Americans’ ravenous appetitite for oil — the US consumes some 25 per cent of world oil production — and their unshakeable reluctance to pay the true economic price of it, taking into account not only the heavy production costs of deep sea drilling as in the case of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, but also the environmental cost to the planet of the excessive use of carbon fuels.

And finally:  on 6 July 1988, in the words of the BBC’s account, –

The ill-maintained and overloaded North Sea oil rig Piper Alpha was destroyed in a fire which also killed scores of workers.
Leaking gas on the Occidental Oil drilling platform ignited late in the evening of 6 July 1988, causing a devastating blaze in which 167 of the 226 men on board perished. Many of the oil workers leapt 100ft (30m) into the sea to escape the fire and toxic fumes, despite being told their jump would almost certainly be fatal.
It is still the world’s worst-ever offshore oil disaster.

Occidental Petroleum, the operator of the ill-fated Piper Alpha oil rig, affectionately known to Americans as “Oxy”, is the fourth largest U.S. oil and gas company, the largest oil producer in Texas and the largest natural gas producer in California, with operations also in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico.  The Piper Alpha disaster occurred in UK territorial waters in the North Sea, north-east of Aberdeen.  In the subsequent inquiry Occidental was, in the words of the Wikipedia entry, found guilty of having inadequate maintenance and safety procedures. But no criminal charges were ever brought against it. I can find no record of any British parliamentary committee having hauled Occidental’s Chairman or Chief Executive before it to pound them with questions that they wouldn’t have been able to answer, or to denounce them for failing to answer them.  Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any self-respecting senior American businessman consenting to subject himself or herself to any such indignity.

Brian

If the Labour Party is going to make a healthy recovery in time for the next election (which, despite the CameroClegg’s pronouncements about a fixed term, may turn out to be much less than five years away), we all need to recognise and admit that the coalition government has got off to a cracking start.  Cameron and Clegg and most of their teams give a strong impression, on television and in their press interviews and articles, of being sensible and likeable, even progressive.  The coalition’s programme includes a goodly number of items which many Labour supporters (including probably a majority of Labour MPs in the last parliament, even perhaps a majority of Labour ministers, and certainly including me) were desperate for our Labour government to adopt.  Who knows how much better Labour might have fared had the then leadership listened to the many Labour voices calling for a return to humane and liberal policies, and the rolling back of the oppressive and authoritarian measures which disfigured the records of successive Labour home secretaries?

It’s too late now to lament what our Labour government could so easily have done better.  Now we are suffering the shaming experience of being outflanked on the left by the first relatively enlightened Tory leader in years, and by LibDem ministers who really do seem to be exercising a benign, liberalising influence on their unexpected bedfellows.  Of course it’s still early, honeymoon days, but it would be rash to assume that it can’t last.  Even when the Osborne axe begins to fall on ordinary people’s standards of living and on the services they depend on, don’t forget the capacity of the British people for masochism in a crisis, if the measures to tackle it are persuasively presented as necessary and reasonably fair.  “Blood, toil, tears and sweat,” remember?  Labour can’t afford to appear to want the coalition’s campaign to get Britain out of its financial crisis to fail.  Great care is needed in selecting individual measures that deserve to be opposed, and even then only constructively.  Overall support for the government’s efforts must be the order of the day, if the Loyal Opposition is not to be dismissed as irresponsible, feckless, needlessly negative and old hat.

What other lessons should we learn from this impressive beginning to the coalition’s period of office?  First, we must avoid like Swine Flu any impression that Labour opposes the liberalising measures promised by the coalition, such as the abandonment of identity cards and their supporting monster database, and virtually all the other reforming measures promised in the coalition’s agreed programme under the heading “Civil Liberties”.  It’s essential that the whole of the parliamentary Labour party should vote enthusiastically for almost all these measures, whatever the idiot media might say about U-turns:  if ever there was a time for some Labour U-turns, this is it.  We should all heed the warm welcome given to the coalition’s programme for the repair of our civil liberties by no less a person than Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust and secretary general of Penal Reform International.  Any former Labour home secretaries tempted to try to defend their dismal legacies, or to oppose coalition action to reverse them, should be firmly silenced both by yourself as interim Leader and by all the candidates for the substantive leadership.  (Two important exceptions to this general rule are discussed later.)

Secondly, the coalition’s period in office seems to have been marked so far by a new atmosphere of cooperation and mutual respect in the political arena.  Old-fashioned knee-jerk newspaper columnists such as Simon Hoggart have been lamenting the absence of noisy bear-baiting from prime minister’s questions;  the rest of us rejoice at it.  PMQs should never again be allowed to deteriorate into a juvenile Punch-and-Judy show for the delectation of the stupider luminaries of the commentariat.  It’s up to the Labour front bench and all Labour back-benchers to see that this new and constructive atmosphere is sustained.  Many of us devoutly hope you in particular will use all your influence as Leader to enforce sensible, adult behaviour on the pack behind you, praising the government when it does well (as it currently seems to be doing) and offering collaboration whenever possible, not opposing for the sake of opposition.  This is an essential ingredient in the task of winning back a degree of public respect for politicians in general and for the Labour Party in particular.

In my first letter on 19 May I respectfully suggested two golden rules to guide the Labour Party’s behaviour and goals in opposition, and discussed how the first of them might usefully be implemented.  Here are some further thoughts about the second golden rule, which you’ll remember was:

Radically overhaul every aspect of the late Labour government’s policies, brutally slaughtering sacred cows, and boldly thinking the hitherto unthinkable.  In the words of Danton: De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace! Avoid like the Black Death any impression that if and when Labour is re-elected you will simply take up where the Blair and Brown governments left off.  If that’s how it looks, you won’t be returned to the government benches for a generation, and you won’t deserve to be.

Labour in office from 1997 to 2010 had many really substantial achievements to its credit, mainly ones that no Conservative government would ever have matched.  The rescue of the National Health Service and state education from the years of Tory government neglect were certainly among the proudest of these.  Perhaps though the greatest were the raft of measures to reduce poverty, both at home and globally.  The Tories taunt us for allowing the gap between the richest and the poorest to widen during Labour’s time in office, and it’s dismaying that it did.  But that doesn’t mean that the poor got poorer:  the figures show that the poor became less poor but the rich got richer at a much faster rate, and that without Labour’s campaign against poverty in the UK the poor would have been further impoverished and the gap would have been even wider.   Those who dispute this can be referred to the analysis by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2010 (pdf).

Similarly, Labour’s record on aid for development and poverty reduction overseas has won world-wide respect and indeed has been explicitly praised by the Conservatives and LibDems who have promised to continue where Labour left off.  Labour is entitled to claim credit for these and many other achievements and to spend its time in opposition planning how to make its promotion of development and poverty reduction even more effective when returned to office.  Meanwhile the opposition should clearly support the coalition government as long as it continues to work towards the goals set by Labour in office.  Andrew Mitchell as Secretary for Overseas Development will need lots of all-party support if he is to preserve the programmes and objectives of development and aid established by Labour against the inevitable assaults of the Tory neanderthals when the going starts to get rough.

There are however two areas of Labour’s legacy where a clean policy break is absolutely essential:  Iraq plus Afghanistan, and civil liberties.

On the latter, I have already suggested earlier in this letter the need for Labour to support wholeheartedly the liberalising reform measures now promised by the coalition. If this is interpreted gloatingly by the government and the right-wing media as a repudiation of a sizeable chunk of Labour’s record in office, so much the better.  There are, though, two important areas of civil liberties where Labour in opposition should tenaciously defend its record:  Freedom of Information (whose scope the coalition promises to enlarge, hopefully with Labour’s cheerful support), and the Human Rights Act, on which coalition intentions remain obscure.  Here Labour should defend the existing Act, ensuring that any ‘British Bill of Rights’ designed to add to or replace it doesn’t erode existing rights, and above all that any new legislation doesn’t commit the egregious error of appearing to make our fundamental rights dependent or conditional on observance of ‘responsibilities’ as defined by the state.  That poisonous and misguided doctrine has been used in our lifetimes to justify some of the worst repression inflicted on tens of thousands of victims by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and assorted lesser villains.  It may well become necessary to face down the Murdoch press and the Daily Telegraph, as well as the puritans of the Tory right, on this issue.

Now to the difficult subject of Blair’s Wars.  There’s no need to spell out to you, dear Harriet, the reasons for the dismay and anger felt by thousands of Labour Party members and supporters over the disastrous decisions made by the Blair government over Iraq, including what many of us firmly believe to have been the lies told to justify them.  Some of us also recognise that despite the strident supporting role adopted by Tony Blair in regard to the NATO attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo in 1999, that attack was equally illegal under international law, equally unjustified, equally unnecessary, equally unsuccessful and equally fraudulently explained in attempted justification to the British people and to the world.  There’s no point in the opposition reopening that argument now, but it would be prudent for opposition spokespersons to resist any temptation to boast of success for either the Kosovo or the Iraq conflicts, or to attempt to defend the ways in which the Labour government sought to justify either war.

Two of the candidates for the Labour leadership have already, at the time of writing, acknowledged that Iraq was a “mistake”.  There’s no need for a formal apology by the Labour opposition for Iraq (or for Kosovo):  indeed, an explicit apology would be widely scorned as a hypocritical gesture, cynically designed to win back votes.  But there should be no disguising the fact that Britain’s role in the Iraq war was an aberration which with hindsight should never have happened. The eventual report of the Chilcot Inquiry into Iraq and the lessons to be learned from it may well turn out to be bitter medicine for Labour:  all the more reason to be seen to be willing to swallow it with good grace.

The positive way to signal a radical change of policy on the resort to military force, implying (but not necessarily stating explicitly) a promise never to repeat the Iraq criminal blunder, would be to declare formally that no future Labour government will ever again send British forces into action overseas unless (a) in response to an armed attack on sovereign British territory (as permitted under the UN Charter) or else (b) to participate in peace-keeping or peace-making operations expressly authorised by the United Nations Security Council. Labour would also do well publicly to endorse the present coalition defence secretary’s useful reminder that in any case Britain is not a “global policeman” — and should never again try to act as if it were. He who “punches above his weight” tends to end up on the canvas.

And that leads us to perhaps the most difficult current policy dilemma facing the government — but also facing the opposition.  There is an immediate requirement for Labour to reformulate its policy on Afghanistan.  It has become increasingly difficult for ordinary sensible and responsible people, especially perhaps Labour people, to see what useful purpose is now being served by our military presence in Afghanistan; indeed, it’s increasingly obvious that western military intervention is now doing more harm than good.  It’s time to withdraw British forces from Afghanistan as soon as logistically possible, and Labour needs to say so, now, loud and clear.

Labour need not do an 180-degree about-turn and pronounce the whole Afghanistan operation a mistake.  The early withdrawal of all British forces from Afghanistan would clearly not entail the withdrawal of the entire US-led NATO force from the country.  There are plenty of other NATO countries which have not yet made a military contribution on anything like the scale of Britain’s, and it’s time for some of them to take our place.  We can be proud of what our servicemen and women have done there: no-one has to call it a failure or say that those who died or were wounded in combat suffered in vain.  We have done our stint and it’s time for someone else to take our place.

Accordingly, Labour should call for the withdrawal of all UK military forces from Afghanistan over a period of the next 12 months, allowing time for NATO to replace them from another member country or else to revise its strategy to minimise the effects of our departure.  We could offer to maintain and reinforce our development aid presence and commitment for as long as it is demonstrably able to achieve positive results (but no longer).  If the Labour opposition were very soon to adopt this policy, it might even be quite welcome to the coalition government.  It would demonstrate Labour’s responsible attitude if the Labour opposition were to offer to discuss its intentions privately with the government before announcing it, in order to minimise any damage to the morale of our forces or any boost to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  But Labour dug Britain into this hole, no doubt with the best of intentions: it’s now up to Labour to say that it’s time to stop digging.  Almost the entire country, and much of the military, would heave a huge sigh of relief.

This is one area where Labour can rightfully resume its proper place to the left of the coalition partners.  Another is the future of Trident — not just of this particular weapon and its replacement, but the whole issue of Britain’s nuclear deterrent.  No-one has the slightest idea whom the UK deterrent is supposed to deter.  No nuclear weapon can blunt the threat from international terrorism.  No country poses a nuclear threat to Britain, nor is any country at all likely to do so.  Our deterrent is not ‘independent’, despite the label often tied to it:  we depend on the Americans to keep it active and could never use it without US approval.  Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Canada — none has a nuclear deterrent, none seeks one, and none is less secure than Britain.  The argument that it’s impossible to predict what threats might arise in future, and so it’s just as well to go on spending billions on keeping our deterrent just in case, is fundamentally fatuous:  it could be used to justify any kind of lunatic expenditure designed to protect us against every conceivable — or inconceivable — risk (don’t we need a programme to save us from being hit by an asteroid?).  Maintaining the nuclear deterrent  grossly distorts our defence spending and involves huge expenditure that we can’t afford.  It gives our ministers delusions of grandeur, tempting them to behave as if Britain were still a global great power, instead of pursuing policies that are proportionate to our real position in the world.  Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament, which would have been unacceptably risky during the cold war, is now a policy whose time has come.  Labour should not be afraid to adopt it.

So for the immediate future the motto needs to be:  support wherever you can;  oppose where you must.  Better to collaborate than to obstruct.  Defend those elements of Labour’s legacy of which we can be justifiably proud:  support the reversal of everything that shames us.  Treat Labour’s adversaries with respect;  behave like adults.  Remember that the coalition government has an electoral mandate to address Britain’s crisis in the ways it promised, and that Labour has no mandate to try and prevent it.  Britain’s recovery is as much in Labour’s interest as it is in the government’s, and most of all it is in the interests of the British people.  Labour must be seen to be playing its part in helping to promote it.

For the longer term future, this is an unrepeatable opportunity for Labour to reclaim its old radicalism as the party which represents the poor and vulnerable against the rich and privileged, as the champion of fundamental human rights, as an internationalist party whose policies are firmly rooted in respect for the United Nations Charter.  Above all it must once again be the party which recognises and uses the power of the state to achieve by universal collective action what can never be achieved by individuals acting privately.   Without the state, the Big Society is a delusion.  Labour should now resume its place as the party of the positive state.

PS:  Was the Labour government serious about abolishing FM radio in favour of DAB?  Making us all abandon our hifi tuners and portable FM radios and car radios and replace them all with those pale brown boxes with their primitive, virtually unworkable controls?  What kind of lunacy is that?  Let’s for heaven’s sake  abandon the whole crazy project (and invite the government to call it off before they think of it themselves), with a craven apology to the radio-listening public, perhaps using the Fergie defence — we must have had a lot to drink before adopting this proposal and we “weren’t in our right place”.

Yours sincerely (and hopefully),

Brian

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/israels-naval-blockade-pitches-and-rolls-with-the-law-of-the-sea/article1589981/

In the words of Norman Geras (to whom a profound hat-tip), it’s a piece–

by Ed Morgan, professor of international law at the University of Toronto, [who] looks at the incident in the light of the Law of the Sea and in opposition to what he calls ‘politicized interpretation’.

Comment on it really is superfluous, cliché and all.

I should stress that my passing on a useful tip by Norm Geras has nothing at all to do with the publication today on his blog of the 350th in his long-standing and fiendishly addictive ‘profiles’ of fellow-bloggers.  No. 350 is at –

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/06/the-normblog-profile-350-brian-barder.html.

Fame at last!

Brian

But actually his sexuality and his desire for privacy have nothing at all to do with his downfall.  He has been forced to resign by the revelation that for years he has been breaking a pretty basic rule governing MPs’ expenses: namely, that you can’t claim back from the taxpayer ‘rent’ on your second home that you pay to your own spouse, partner or relative.  The gender of Mr Laws’s partner, to whom he has been paying rent for their shared homes, is completely irrelevant.  Nor is it the case, as one of the BBC’s army of political correspondents was saying on television last night, that Laws’s offence was to pay rent to his partner.  There’s no rule against that;  Mr Laws has always been entirely free to pay his partner whatever he thinks right, whether in rent or anything else.  What, however, he was not free to do under the rules was to claim it back in expenses from the public purse.

Mr Laws’s initial defence was to deny that the person with whom he has lived for several years, evidently in a sexual relationship, was his ‘partner’ within the meaning of the rules governing MPs’ expenses.  His justification for this interpretation was that he and his room-mate have separate bank accounts and lead separate social lives.  There seems no need to spend time on a scrutiny of that defence, which indeed Mr Laws now appears prudently to have abandoned.  At any rate, he now acknowledges that he feels that “what I have done was in some way wrong” (I love that “in some way”, as if he’s still not quite clear what it was, like the injured look of a puppy who’s been smacked for peeing on the carpet and can’t understand what was wrong about that).

There is certainly a sad and worrying implication in Laws’s acknowledgement that the reason for his concern for ‘privacy’ (code for secrecy about his sexual orientation) was that he didn’t want his Roman Catholic parents to know that he was gay.  It seems incredible that in this day and age there should be in this country parents to whom a middle-aged man, a spectacularly successful MP and former banker, didn’t feel able to talk frankly about such a central aspect of his life and personality:  such is the bigotry generated by a cruel and irrational but widely shared religious doctrine.  But none of this has the smallest connection with the offence that brought down Mr Laws.

Liberal Democratic party leaders are queueing up in front of the cameras and microphones to assert that  David Laws’s tragedy is the result of his honourable concern to protect the privacy of his private life.  That however is nonsense, even if it’s well-meant nonsense motivated by kindness to a friend and colleague.  Homophobia and the right to privacy and a private life have nothing to do with it.  David Laws claimed from public money some £40,000 to which on any rational analysis he was not entitled.  Nothing about his sexuality or his desire for privacy forced him to claim and receive this money as parliamentary expenses: amid all the furore about MPs’ expenses it beggars belief that it never occurred to him that he was cheating.  He’s a multi-millionaire:  it’s not as if he needed the money.  Other MPs have been forced to leave parliament and abandon their political careers for lesser offences.  Laws’s position as Chief Secretary to the Treasury with prime responsibility for axeing public services, at the expense of tens of thousands of people incomparably poorer than Mr Laws, was manifestly untenable once it became public knowledge that he was an expenses cheat — and a cheat on such a substantial scale.

We should all feel sorry for him.  He’s obviously exceptionally talented and exceptionally well equipped for the unsavoury task to which he had so recently been assigned.  It’s fair to hope that he’ll be back in government before long.  His colleagues’ loyalty to him in his time of crisis has been commendable.  But the idea that he’s somehow a victim of prejudice or newspaper intrusion, or indeed that he’s a victim at all,  is strictly for the birds.

Brian

…the day after an email exchange about liberty between Tony Blair and I was published in the Observer, …
Henry Porter, The Observer 16 May 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/16/henry-porter-civil-liberties-coalition

…an exhausted-looking Boulton jabbed his finger and furiously refuted Cameron’s claim that the Sky man wanted to see David Cameron in Downing Street.
James Robinson The Observer, Sunday 16 May 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/may/16/adam-boulton-alastair-campbell-sky-news

Andrew Marr, whose Sunday morning BBC show goes out at the same time as Boulton’s Sky programme, …
Ibid

Boulton’s own high standing may even mitigate against such a radical change of direction.
Ibid

The Camerons, as the first new occupants of Downing Street since first lady fever began, thus find unprecedented attention focused on Samantha.
Jess Cartner-Morley, Guardian, 12 May 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/12/samantha-cameron-profile

…given Mr Cable’s occasionally coruscating attacks on Mr Osborne’s judgment in the past.
George Parker, FT, 22 May 2010
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/87246f86-5fb9-11df-a670-00144feab49a.html

Addenda, 25 May 2010

On overhearing my husband and I discussing this….
Letter, New Statesman, 24 May 2010

Out of these pieces, my mother would sew dresses for my sister and I….
“Author” Justine Picardie, Liberty Print catalogue, May 2010

But Paul’s success dwarves even these.
Ewen MacAskill, Guardian, 19 May 2010, p.21

But, along with the principal of basic rights and freedoms, …
Seumas Milne, Guardian, 20 May 2010

Decisions about what kind of opposition Labour is going to be obviously can’t wait until the leadership elections in the autumn:  it falls to you to set the tone and issue the guidance as soon as you possibly can.  I was pretty horrified to see Alan Johnson on television today attacking, in his amiable way, the coalition government’s decision to “Adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database”, and trying to defend the Labour government’s policy on this touchy subject.  I suggest that this kind of thing, however understandable, is the worst possible start to Labour’s stint in opposition.  Many of the policies set out in the coalition agreement which now constitutes the basis of the new government’s programme, especially the section on civil liberties, are skilfully chosen, not just to look liberal and enlightened, but actually to represent real improvements on Labour’s legacy, even or especially when they propose to reverse or repeal some of the more illiberal of the measures left to us by the Blair era.  Many of us who are loyal but worried members of the Labour Party, or just instinctive supporters of it, have been dismayed by some of the illiberal excesses of Labour’s record — and I don’t just mean Iraq.  The 2010 election defeat gives the party the opportunity to make a fresh start, which must include acknowledging past mistakes, however painful that might be for those who were chiefly responsible for making them;  or if not acknowledging them, at least not trying any more to justify or defend them.   It will send the right message if you enthusiastically support government measures to correct or reverse past mistakes, and better still if you make your own proposals for more enlightened policies, even or especially when they conflict with those of the past.  There’s plenty in Labour’s record in government to boast about;  as for the authoritarian and belligerent excesses, the less said now, the better.

I would like respectfully to offer you two golden rules that should govern the behaviour of the Labour Party in opposition, in and out of parliament:

(1)  Be a responsible and constructive opposition, actively cooperating whenever possible, opposing only when absolutely necessary.  Concentrate on showing that you’re an enlightened and above all a different government in waiting, not merely a party hell-bent on opposing whatever the government does;  and

(2) Radically overhaul every aspect of the late Labour government’s policies, brutally slaughtering sacred cows, and boldly thinking the hitherto unthinkable.  In the words of Danton: De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace! Avoid like the Black Death any impression that if and when Labour is re-elected you will simply take up where the Blair and Brown governments left off.  If that’s how it looks, you won’t be returned to the government benches for a generation, and you won’t deserve to be.

The first of these rules will require a degree of restraint, and behaviour often contrary to every tribal Labour instinct, which won’t come easily to those accustomed to the no-holds-barred bare-fisted combat tradition of adversarial British politics.  But it’s essential to recognise that ordinary decent people detest the kind of yah-boo order-paper-waving point-scoring politics of prime minister’s questions, and yearn for a government and opposition that behave like grown-ups, especially at a time of national crisis, with the nation’s finances in ruins and the threat of a double-dip recession and yet more massive unemployment hanging over us.  The spectacle of both government and opposition back benches baying and screaming at each other, in fits of bogus merriment or of equally fabricated indignation, does almost as much harm to the standing of politics and politicians in people’s minds as the scandal over MPs’ expenses.  Even when the government’s economic and financial policies seem to us misguided, inferior to ours, unlikely to succeed, please remember that they have a mandate to pursue them, and it’s no part of an opposition’s right or duty to try to prevent them from working.  None of us, least of all the poor, the vulnerable, the homeless and the unemployed, has a stake in the government’s failure.  If Labour in opposition is seen to have contributed to failure, we shan’t soon be forgiven.  Explain how things could and should be done differently, more fairly, but then work hard and uncomplainingly to make the elected government’s policies succeed.

Exercising restraint and practising grown-up politics in opposition will call for the kind of discipline that won’t come easily to some of your Labour colleagues, especially those with hearts of gold  on the wilder back-bench shores of militancy, even with a small m.  There’ll be ample provocation from the government side to hit back in kind when they bellow their cheap shots about the frivolous over-spending of Labour’s last days in office, the skeletons they claim to have found in every ministerial cupboard, and stuff like that (some of it probably well founded: much not).  We know from the pre-election style of Cameron, Osborne, Hague, Theresa May, Fox and Lansley and other Tory luminaries, even some of the Tory-inclined LibDems, how unscrupulously partisan they’re going to be.  They’ll taunt you with attacks on Labour’s record in government, and some of the attacks will hit home.  Don’t respond in kind; don’t try to defend and justify every last policy and action of Labour in office.  Persist in asking sober questions that genuinely seek information.  Enforce on your colleagues, especially those on the front bench, the rigid rule: never ask a question to which you already know the answer.  Offer the government your support when they deserve it.  Indicate willingness to take part in consultations with ministers as policies on great national issues are evolving, and promise not to exploit or abuse your participation in consultations if your offer is accepted.  Show that you are more serious, courteous and conscious of the national interest, as distinct from party advantage, than the cheapskate Tories in their triumphalist euphoria.

Implicit in this is that Labour in opposition needs to acknowledge, explicitly and often, that harsh and painful measures to restore the country’s finances were always going to be inevitable, whichever party or combination of parties won the election.  Some cuts in public services are bound to figure in the menu and the living standards of many people are bound to suffer.  There will be room for legitimate but sober argument about the fair and proper balance between increased taxes and reduced government spending; about how best to protect the most vulnerable in society from the worst effects of the measures that will have to be taken;  and about ways to reconcile continued government support for the nascent recovery from recession with the need to demonstrate — as much to our own public opinion as to the fickle and febrile markets — a real determination to put the country’s affairs in order with a minimum of delay.  But that can’t and mustn’t mean opposing everything the government does for the sake of opposing.  The electorate will harshly punish a Labour opposition which can plausibly be portrayed as obstructing the measures that sensible people of all political persuasions recognise as necessary and unavoidable. Similarly, seizing every opportunity to exploit and exaggerate frictions within the governing coalition will harm Labour much more than it will harm the coalition.  Leave that to the harlots of the media.

You will face especially difficult choices when the government’s axe begins to fall on the public service and the services that it provides.  There will be protest marches, demos, work-to-rule, probably strikes.  Labour’s instinct, especially in opposition, will be to support the protests and the strikes, almost regardless of the merits of each case.  But in a situation where almost every section of British society is going to have to bear some of the burden of restoring the nation’s finances, and most sections of society are naturally going to come out in the streets to defend their own sectional interests, the Loyal Opposition simply won’t be able to give indiscriminate support to every demo and every strike, without giving the fatal impression of reckless ideology-driven irresponsibility — which will rightly be taken by many as evidence that Labour is unfit to return to office.  How you and your colleagues behave in these first rather feverish weeks and months of opposition will set the scene for how Labour is seen and judged for the rest of this parliament.

And finally, a highly sensitive point:  you simply can’t afford to allow Labour’s front bench to look like a seamless continuation of the last one.  Those few who watched the opening of the new parliament on television will have flinched at the spectacle of Jack Straw there on the bench beside you, nodding and grinning as smugly as ever, as if he personally was quite untainted by his association with all the previous government’s failures and excesses.  We flinched again hearing the misguided voice, yet again, of David Blunkett, of all people.  Whoever selected him to speak on this iconic occasion?  It’s time for the Straws and the Blunketts and most of the other tarnished stars of “New” Labour — and please let’s never hear that always tawdry term used again — to retire gracefully to obscurity on the back benches, to be replaced by fresh faces whose freedom won’t be circumscribed by a commitment to the unbending defence of past disasters.

All this adds up to a tall order, especially for a caretaker leader.  But you enjoy the unchallengeable legitimacy of having been elected by all wings of the party to your present position.  You enjoy, and deserve, huge goodwill, respect and support.  Insist that the candidates for the leadership use their influence to ensure compliance.  As long as you lead the opposition, most of your Labour colleagues will accept your leadership and follow the course you set.  The great majority of Labour’s millions of supporters out here in the country are silently cheering you on.  Don’t give in to the taunts of the government benches or the vicious slanders of the right-wing press:  maintain a statesmanlike commitment to the national good.  And when your few swivel-eyed militant knee-jerk Tory-bashers get out of line, smack ‘em down!  There’s no-one, but no-one, on the opposition benches better placed than you to bring it off.

I’m going to write to you again later about the second of my proposed Golden Rules.  This is more than enough to be going on with.  And it’s not meant to be advice — that would indeed be an impertinence on my part.  It’s an appeal;  a desperate, not very optimistic appeal.

Good luck!

Best wishes
Brian

Three factors, I think, pulled down the shutters on any hope of a government of the progressive majority:

1.  The LibDems couldn’t in the end risk incurring the odium of having rescued a heavily defeated Labour Party, even a Labour Party soon to shed Gordon Brown, and prolonging its hold on power, thereby seeming, plausibly, to be spitting in the face of the electorate.

2.  A progressive alliance government would have depended too heavily on the support of the centre-left nationalist parties of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for its survival.  Even though the smaller parties would not have needed to be included in a formal Lab-LibDem coalition or other formal alliance, reliance on their support in votes of confidence and budget resolutions would have made the government vulnerable to nationalist party blackmail, as indeed the SNP and Plaid Cymru leaders were already brazenly threatening.  The arithmetic was simply too precarious for any hope of stability and strong government.

3.  In my view Nick Clegg’s gut preference was always to work with Cameron rather than Brown — and the impossibility of knowing who would succeed Brown in just a few months’ time must have strengthened that preference.  Clegg played his cards skilfully, using his talks with Labour to gouge further concessions out of the Tories, and the Neanderthals in David Cameron’s party must be outraged by the thought that he probably made more policy concessions, and more generous promises of key posts in a coalition government, than were strictly necessary to hook and land his fish.

Now that the die is cast and the LibDems are tightly tucked up in bed with the Tories, a typically British blame game is in full swing, the Labour Party team insisting that they were negotiating with the LibDems in good faith and that their talks seemed genuinely promising until for no good reason the LibDems broke them off and defected to the common enemy, while the LibDems say that Labour never made a remotely convincing offer and seemed generally uninterested in a coalition or any other alliance.  Perhaps I’m unduly suspicious, but it seems to me that the LibDems need to try to pin the blame for the failure of the talks on the Labour Party, in order to placate the many grass-roots LibDem supporters and members who are sickened to find themselves not just seduced but actually impregnated by the Tories.  The anti-LibDem alliance fulminations of such Labour has-beens as Mr Blunkett and Dr Reid did of course seem to lend credibility to LibDem assertions that Labour’s heart wasn’t really in it.

*   *   *   *   *

As was (almost) said of Charles I, nothing became Gordon Brown in office like the leaving of it.  His offer to resign by the autumn if this would help to persuade the LibDems to join an alliance with the Labour Party, justified by his frank acknowledgement of personal responsibility for  Labour’s election defeat, was an act of great personal courage on the part of this proudest of men, always deeply reluctant to admit to failure or error. Similarly, his resignation statement outside No. 10 Downing Street, and his remarks after his resignation to party workers and colleagues at Labour headquarters in Victoria Street, did him great credit.  Few who heard these farewell statements can have failed to be moved to sympathy and admiration for a man of enormous talent who has achieved many great things in these past 13 years but whose limitations of personality and character have denied him the ultimate success, the respect and the affection, to which in many ways he was entitled.  He will probably be missed more than most people would now expect.  Despite the terrible temper, the secretiveness, the uncollegiate manner of working, the reluctance to take quick decisions, and the flawed judgement of the people with whom he chose to surround himself, he was nevertheless a towering political figure for more than a decade.  Many of us genuinely wish him and his family well.

*   *   *   *   *

Assuming that prime minister’s questions (PMQ) in the House of Commons continue in some form or other, there’ll be a widespread yearning for a more sober, more informative, less tribal atmosphere when the two principal party leaders face each other across the despatch boxes. Scorn and contempt for the yah-boo shouting matches, the cheers and jeers of the excited back benches, the petty and often flagrantly dishonest point-scoring, of PMQs in the last several decades have contributed almost as much to the low esteem into which parliament and politicians have fallen as the MPs’ expenses scandal.  New prime ministers generally promise to  eschew point-scoring in PMQs and to treat the occasion as an opportunity for MPs of all parties to seek and receive information about government actions and policies; such promises rarely survive more than a handful of gladiatorial sessions.  Much will depend on Harriet Harman, now leader of the opposition ad interim, pending Labour’s election of its new leader.  Public opinion would respect a Labour opposition which promised to support the government whenever possible as it grapples with the nation’s worst economic and financial crisis since the 1920s, rather than seizing every opportunity to make its life more difficult and its decisions more unpopular.  I wonder if Ms Harman is up to it?  Mr Cameron can’t realistically expect a sober and constructive opposition if he constantly accuses Labour of responsibility for the financial mess we’re in, and misrepresents Labour’s 13 years in office as an uninterrupted chronicle of mismanagement and failure — as the irredeemably, jejunely tribal William Hague, our new foreign secretary, was doing without a shadow of embarrassment on the radio this morning.  There was another jarring echo of it in today’s CamClegg press conference in the No. 10 garden.  The omens are bad.

*   *   *   *   *

Our new rulers already promise, or threaten, to change the constitution in various ways, including the introduction of fixed-term parliaments.  There are obvious potential merits in this idea:  it would prevent an opportunistic prime minister seizing a moment of popularity to go to the country for a premature and perhaps unnecessary election, sometimes for fear of electoral punishment if he or she hangs on to the bitter end of the 5-year term.  It could allay doubts in the markets and elsewhere about the short-term survivability of the government when the confidence of the almighty markets is the Holy Grail of our national life.  But it raises some awkward questions about what happens if the votes of rebels or by-election changes in the composition of parliament deprive a government of the majority it needs to pass its basic legislation, or if there’s no longer a parliamentary majority available to vote supply.  In such circumstances, if there’s no party leader able to secure a majority for an alternative government, it’s hard to see how a fresh election can be avoided even if the fixed term is nowhere near up.  In which case declaring that parliaments will in future be for fixed terms has a rather limited meaning.

*   *   *   *   *

As Labour licks its wounds — not for too long, one hopes — elects a new leader, and then starts to think about the direction it will take in opposition, the values it will define and the programme it will offer to the country at the next election (whenever that might turn out to be), the search will be on for a new big idea that might catch the imagination of that elusive progressive majority on whose support Labour’s hopes will depend.  There is one big idea available which ticks so many boxes that it’s a wonder none of the mainline parties has hitherto picked it up and adopted it:  the eventual completion of devolution, one of Labour’s most courageous successes, by the adoption of a fully fledged federal system for the United Kingdom.  Labour would need to acknowledge that this could be achieved only with the whole-hearted, cross-party consent of a sizeable majority of the British people; that it would take at least two decades to complete the project; that at every stage extensive consultation would be required by Royal Commissions, Speaker’s Conferences, parliamentary Select Committees and parliamentary votes, constitutional conventions and several referendums.  Along the way to federation a new separate parliament and government for England would have to be established, in itself a huge and controversial undertaking;  and all remaining internal powers not so far devolved would need to be transferred to each of the four UK nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  This would mean a massive localisation of real power over people’s lives, draining power from the federal government and parliament at Westminster to the four federated nations.  All parties claim to favour decentralising power and giving local people a greater say in how their lives are organised.  Here’s the big idea which would energise that otherwise vague aspiration and provide an objective and a context for the changes that are already long overdue.  Come on, Labour:  how about some vision for a change — and I really mean “for a change”!

Brian

Twitter / LabourList: Brian Barder on what Gordon’s people should say to Clegg’s people if parliament is hung …
http://www.barder.com/2526
Brian Barder on what Gordon’s people should say to Clegg’s people if parliament is hung… http://bit.ly/9wKCI0.
twitter.com/LabourList/statuses/13413302414

I wrote this two days before the election and put it on my blog.  It also appeared in LabourList.  “Gordon’s people” are now apparently reading from my suggested script almost word for word.  I shouldn’t say “I told you so”, but….

My proposed imaginary message for Labour to transmit to the LibDems concluded, if you remember:

One last point.  Strictly between ourselves, Gordon has told me that whatever happens he’s definitely going to step down in six months’ time and retire from politics altogether.  He wants to devote himself to charity work and to spend more time with his family.  But he would love to be able to leave behind a stable centre-left government based on a close LibDem-Labour collaboration that would have the best chance of safeguarding the economic recovery and building on his legacy.

That was pure guess-work laced with advocacy, written on 4 May (before the election) and derided by some readers as absurd.

Unfortunately my powers of prophesy don’t extend to forecasting the outcome of the current Westminster soap-opera.  A tug-of-war seems to be in progress:  Clegg and the rest of the right-wing faction of the LibDems seemingly want to seal the deal with the Tories on the terms now offered by Hague (and presumably Cameron) despite the rumbling opposition of the Tory troglodytes;  the LibDem left (probably Huhne, Hughes, Cable and the majority of the grass-roots) is pulling the other end of the rope towards a deal with Labour, now that the Brown obstacle is effectively removed.  Clegg may well be using his negotiations with Labour simply as a means of strengthening his position in his bargaining with the Tories (and he has already had some striking success in this); some in his party, perhaps a majority, genuinely want them to succeed.  Clegg has the advantage of being the leader; the LibDem left probably has the numbers within the party’s organs.  The outcome, it seems to me, is anyone’s guess.

The objections to a government of Labour and the LibDems with the likely support in major votes of the smaller centre-left parties don’t seem to me impressive.

The right-wing tabloids complain that Gordon Brown’s successor, to be elected by the arcane processes of the Labour Party constitution, would be yet another “unelected” prime minister.  But all our prime ministers are “unelected” by the British electorate.  Only the voters in the putative prime minister’s constituency get to vote for (or against) him or her.  In Brown’s case, he was re-elected in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath with an increased majority.  The rest of us voted for candidates identified by their parties, and research has shown that the vast majority of the electorate determine their votes by reference to the party of their candidate of choice, only rarely influenced by the candidate’s personality or record.  (The expenses scandal may of course have distorted this generalisation in the case of this month’s election, but the generalisation remains broadly valid.) Thus it’s basically the party which is elected, not its leader.  The regrettable precedent set by the ill-conceived television “leaders debates” may have obscured this truth, but truth it remains.  There have been numerous examples of changes of prime minister between elections without the querulous bleatings of the Daily Mail declaring them illegitimate because they served as prime minister without having fought a general election as party leader.  One prime minister in recent history actually held office in No. 10 for two weeks while not even a member of either of the houses of parliament: and even after that he was only elected an MP in a by-election, not in a general election.  Few complained at the time that anything unconstitutional had happened or that his position as prime minister was invalid.  We elect parties, and the parties elect their leaders, with parliament choosing which party to entrust with office.

Nor need we be swayed by the ritual description of a Labour-LibDem coalition or pact as a “Coalition of the Losers”.  No single party won an outright majority either of the votes cast or of the seats won, so all of them are in that sense losers.  Labour and the LibDems combined would hold more seats in the Commons than the Conservatives and this has usually been the main criterion for forming a government.  It’s true that the two parties would still be short of an overall majority but the decisive question is whether such a government would command the confidence of the majority in the Commons in a vote of confidence:  and since most of the smaller parties belong to the centre-left and are more or less virulently anti-Conservative, it’s a reasonable expectation that on crucial votes they would support a Lab-LibDem administration in preference to the only alternative (a Cameron government or fresh elections); and that accordingly they would probably collectively provide a majority.  Of course a Lab-LibDem government wouldn’t be able to guarantee its ability to get every last piece of its legislation through parliament:  but that’s true of any minority or coalition-type government when intra-party rebels may defy their Whips.

It’s no doubt true that “the markets”, those ill-defined but apparently omnipotent forces, would prefer a Conservative government with LibDem support to a Labour government with LibDem support.  The markets calculate, no doubt accurately, that a mainly Conservative government would focus almost exclusively on reducing the deficit and paying off much of the national debt, starting yesterday, whereas Labour would attach at least equal importance to safeguarding Britain’s recovery from recession (since renewed growth in the economy is the key to deficit reduction and debt repayment) and to protecting the poorest and most vulnerable in society from the worst effects of cuts in spending on public services and increased taxes, both of which are inevitable whichever government emerges blinking into the sunlight later this week.  But one of the great issues of our time is whether we are tamely to accept the primacy of the markets over our own democratic processes and system of government.  Chancellor Mrs Merkel, Presidents Sarkozy and Obama, and many other world leaders are determined that we must not, and are actively working towards an international consensus on how to bring the menacing and fundamentally anti-social influence of the markets under democratic political control.  Such an attitude to the markets is anathema to both the British Tories and the British Blairites, both of whom have adopted a position of cringeing pre-emptive surrender to the City and its markets.  Now that the markets have demonstrated their essential destructiveness, and their blind commitment to the transfer of wealth from the many to the mega-rich few, by bringing the world’s economy to the brink of collapse, the case for bringing them under control by much tighter regulation must surely be unanswerable.  A Lab-LibDem administration is far more likely to play its part in that international effort than a Tory Party still in hock to its rich supporters.  The frenzied opposition of the markets while this process is being worked out will do us considerable harm, in terms of higher costs of government borrowing and general panic in the markets over Britain’s and other perfectly reliable countries’ creditworthiness, but the alternative — continuing to let the markets control our policies — will be far more harmful even in the medium term.  (My immoderate views on all this are spelled out more fully here.)

A more potent objection to a Labour-LibDem outcome is that a savage electoral penalty awaits whichever party is in office in the next few years of compulsory and unavoidable austerity, with the whole population having to suffer painful reductions in welfare and incomes and very little opportunity for other reformist measures, however desirable, costing money which the government won’t have.  It will be almost impossible for any government to avoid harsh and unpopular measures which may well bring thousands of people onto the streets in protest, as is happening already in Athens.  There’ll be a general feeling of gross injustice that ordinary people, who have not a shred of responsibility for the ecomomic and financial calamity that has overtaken us, should be made to pay much of the heavy cost of recovery from it.  If it’s a predominantly Labour government that has to bear the brunt of these perfectly justified protests and this sense of unfairness, it could be the end of Labour’s electability for a decade;  and if Labour’s unpopular measures have succeeded in bringing Britain out of the recession and made a start in restoring its financial balance, it could well be a decade or more of Tory government that will reap the benefit and govern in much happier times.  In other words, the next few years might be a good time to be in opposition.  Against this, though, must be set the deep damage likely to be done to millions of innocent people by the accession of a Cameron-Osborne government hell-bent on prematurely paying off the bankers at whatever cost to the nation’s recovery from recession, and regardless of the penalties inflicted on the most vulnerable people in our society,  while the mega-rich see their taxes cut and their inordinate wealth relatively undisturbed.  It would be intolerable to wish that on our country simply to preserve a medium-term electoral advantage for the Labour Party.  So the choice for decent progressive people is clear, pace Mr Blunkett and Dr Reid:  a Labour-LibDem administration, whether in coalition or a confidence-and-supply pact, would be vastly preferable to any available alternative.

Whether we’ll get it, however, remains an open question, at any rate as of 11.30am on Tuesday 11 May, 2010!

Brian

So while our pygmy politicians squabble at a glacial pace over electoral systems and tax credits, Greece is on fire and the fire is lapping at the gates of Portugal and Spain, then Italy:  no guesses at who’s next in line.  The Footsie 100 has seen its sharpest fall in five months;  EU leaders are “struggling to put together a European multibillion-euro emergency facility to protect the eurozone’s most vulnerable countries before financial markets open on Monday“, with Britain reportedly turning down the pressing  invitation to contribute to it;  “on Thursday, a cascade of automated trades tumbled through equity markets, knocking 650 points – just over 6 per cent of its value – off the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index in a matter of minutes. It recovered to end the day only 348 points down – but not before striking terror into the hearts of traders. On Friday, the FTSE 100 lost £35bn in value“, also according to the FT; and much, much more of the same.

Unless you buy the Financial Times, you wouldn’t know about any of this from the front pages or from the television Breaking News straplines.  All you’ll discover is that 99.9% of the population (or some such figure plucked from empty air) think that Gordon Brown should resign immediately as prime minister, blithely ignoring the reality that if Brown resigns now, the rest of the government resigns too, there’s currently no-one else who meets the requirements for being invited to form a government, and we’d be sailing our leaky ship towards the rocks without even the half-broken rudder that we have at the moment.  Meanwhile 5,000 excited people in peculiar hats assemble in Whitehall waving placards and shouting imprecations at young Mr Nick Clegg if he dares to climb into bed with Dave without first securing a new electoral system.  I didn’t hear a single demonstrator yelling at poor Nick “Never mind proportional representation, Nick: that can wait — for God’s sake get on with getting us a government before the markets open on Monday morning, or we’re all toast!”

The elder statesmen gravely admonish their boyish successors to take their time over the negotiations;  better to get it right than to get it soon, they say.  Other European countries do this all the time, and sometimes take months to reach a conclusion: what’s the hurry?  Clegg spends fruitless hours with various permutations of LibDem party leaders and their councils and committees, trying to get their permission to accept something less than 100 per cent of LibDems’ perfect-world demands in order to permit a Cameron government to be formed.  Cameron is similarly assailed by the troglodytes of his own party menacingly crying betrayal at any sign of willingness to make a few meaningless concessions to LibDem sensibilities.  From time to time Gordon Brown telephones Clegg from his Scottish croft with yet more imaginative bribes dreamt up by Lord Mandelson, and shouts angrily down the line at the hapless LibDem leader when he doesn’t instantly and gratefully swallow the bait.  You might think, mightn’t you?, that these great statesmen would be scared out of their wits at the thought of what the almighty markets will do to us if we still haven’t resolved our piddling little problems by Monday morning when the markets wake up and resume their  important blackmailing duties.  Not a bit of it.  Further party meetings are even now being scheduled — for Monday evening.  This is indeed the way the UK ends, not with a bang but a LibDem whimper.

While Greek workers riot in the streets in protest at the savage cuts in their living standards and jobs being forced on them by the omnipotent, all-seeing markets and their handmaidens in the Chancelleries of continental Europe, our own middle classes are decorously but equally angrily demonstrating in favour of various forms of proportional representation — a cause which on even the most favourable assumptions is highly unlikely even to be put to a referendum within the next five years, and if it is, might well be rejected by popular vote.  Polly Toynbee and Helena Kennedy are nevertheless in a state of uncontainable excitement all over the television screens and the columns of the Guardian at the marginally improved prospect that some time in the parliament after next, we might move to a referendum on an electoral system that would be guaranteed to land us in this kind of chaotic and paralysing mess after every single election, unlike First Past the Post which does it to us approximately once every 20 years.

So we have to pinch ourselves to be reminded that there’s a real, man-sized crisis going on out there in the real world, while we’re all busy examining our constitutional navels.  Two centre-right heads of government and/or state, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy,  our two most powerful EU partners, both of the political right, are vehemently denouncing the irresponsible power of the markets and the credit rating agencies over the policies and actions of sovereign independent countries and their elected governments.  Chancellor Merkel calls for the restoration of the primacy of politics over finance.  Merkel, Sarkozy, Obama and other leaders in Europe and the US  are calling for much more effective international regulation of the banks, to address the present glaringly wide democratic deficit.  Here is the overwhelming and most pressing problem of the decade, crying out for remedial measures before the whole structure collapses, and the only response from our doomed, caretaker government is a restatement of its stubborn opposition to any more regulation, speaking from a script composed by a committee of fat cats somewhere in the City.  And if ever we finally get around to transferring the tenancy of No. 10 Downing Street to young Mr Cameron, with even younger Mr Clegg trotting obediently along behind him, we may be sure that they will obey the reactionary and regressive commands of the City and the international bankers even more slavishly than New Labour has been doing these last 13 years.

Two postscripts, one exasperated and the other sad:

1.  Why do our political and constitutional pundits continue to talk as if the Labour Party would need to elect a new party leader before there could be a new Labour-led alliance of the centre-left parties under a new prime minister such as one of the Milibands or Alan Johnson (or, God help us, Ed Balls)?  Gordon Brown could perfectly well continue as leader of the Labour Party but step down as prime minister, provided it was clear before he resigned that Miliband/Johnson/[Balls] was the person demonstrably best placed to form a government that would have the confidence of a majority in the Commons:  a feasible but in my view highly improbable scenario.  (And why does the Guardian publish a letter from an enthusiastic joker who thinks that Labour plus the LibDems have an overall majority in the House of Commons?  Nought out of ten in arithmetic for the joker — and even less for the Guardian letters editor.)

2.  The death of Alan Watkins robs us of the best, most elegant, well-informed and wittiest political commentator of our age.  He was a delightful and convivial friend and a brilliant writer, whose weekly column in the Independent on Sunday took all the most perceptive people with an interest in politics straight to the IoS website, if not always to the newsagent, every Sunday morning.  We should all uncork a bottle of reasonably expensive red this Watkins-less Sunday and drink most of it at a sitting to his memory.  (His last column is here.)

Brian

I don’t think that the LibDems have any serious alternative to signing up to Cameron’s not particularly generous offer and getting the best deal they can in terms of policy concessions.  But they have a weak hand:   they couldn’t justify climbing into bed with Gordon after Labour has won under 30% of the vote, nearly as awful as 1983, and lost 91 seats.  The astonishing thing is that the Tories won only 36.1% of the vote when they started with so many huge advantages:  and they can’t explain that away by reference to the ‘unfair’ distribution of voter numbers among constituencies.

I had consistently and wrongly predicted an overall Tory majority, which seemed inevitable after 13 years of Labour, with a deeply unpopular Labour leader, the MPs’ expenses scandal, two unpopular wars, all flights grounded for days on end, and above all the deepest recession for a generation, all inevitably blamed on the Labour government, however unfairly in some cases.  I’m still at a loss to know why Cameron failed to get his overall majority when circumstances were so uniformly favourable for the Tories.  The LibDem share of the vote (a mere 23%, with only one more result due today) is less than 1 point better than they won in 2005, before Nick Clegg had been invented.

So I see no reason to change my revised forecast of this morning:  Cameron leading a minority Conservative government with the provisional acquiescence of the LibDems following loose agreement on a number of policy promises.  The mechanics of achieving this won’t be at all straightforward if Gordon Brown insists on exercising his right to meet parliament as prime minister seeking a confidence vote  on 25 May on a Queen’s Speech full of seductive goodies for the LibDems and for the other left-of-centre parties.  I suspect however that he will be prevented from dragging things out in this way by an appeal to his patriotism:  the country can’t afford to prolong the uncertainty and to delay urgent decisions on the economy for another 18 days.  Brown will also be under pressure from younger Labour ministers not to discredit the party in this way for fear of yet more punishment by the electorate in the next election, which could well take place within the year.

Brian

The main factors worth noting as pointers to what happens now seem to be:

1.  Gordon Brown has the right, as the incumbent prime minister, to remain in Downing Street until parliament meets in two weeks’ time, submit his policy programme to the House of Commons, and see if he can win majority support for it.

2.  Brown also has the duty, as distinct from the right, not to resign, even if it becomes clear that he can’t muster a majority for his programme, until there is an available successor who can demonstrate beyond doubt that he can form a government that will have the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons.  As of now, no such successor exists:  Cameron can’t demonstrate this morning that he could get majority support in the House, although he might be able to do so after negotiations with the other party leaders.

3.  Even if the LibDems were to promise to support a continuing Labour government, the combined strength of the two parties won’t give them an overall majority.  They would need additional support, e.g. from the left-of-centre Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh nationalists, all of whom would try to extort a heavy price in terms of continued or increased budgetary support for their respective countries — a price that no new government is likely to be able to afford to pay.

4.  The Conservatives, with a convincing lead over Labour in both seats and (especially) in votes, have the better claim to form a government, but even with the support of the right-of-centre smaller parties (Ulster Unionists, DUP — but who else?) they will struggle to muster an overall majority in the House of Commons unless they can persuade the LibDems to give them provisional and perhaps conditional support.

5.  It will be very difficult for the LibDems to refuse to allow a Conservative government to take office, or to cause it to lose the vote on their Queen’s Speech, since if they do, it could well be impossible for any other government to be formed, and it’s axiomatic that the country’s government must be carried on — especially in the midst of a major global financial and economic crisis demanding very early decisions by whichever British government is in office.

6.  There is very little common ground shared by the Conservatives’ and LibDems’ policies, but probably enough to justify LibDem support to enable Cameron to govern, at any rate for a reasonable period of time.  The joker in the pack will be a referendum on a change in the electoral system, which the Tories have hitherto strongly opposed but which has been a central plank in the LibDem platform.  There might have to be some kind of compromise on this:  perhaps  reluctant Conservative agreement to a referendum in which the Conservatives would campaign for a No vote.  Or the Conservatives might refuse to compromise on the issue and challenge the LibDems to prevent any kind of government from being formed.  The LibDems will also try to exact other policy compromises by the Conservatives as the price of their support, but it’s far from certain that they will succeed.  LibDem options are limited.

The inevitable outcome seems almost certain to be a minority Conservative government under David Cameron with reluctant and provisional support from the LibDems. Once that outcome is assured, Gordon Brown will have no alternative but to resign.  My gloomy guess is that this will happen before we all go to bed tonight.

The news which ought to dominate today’s front pages (but doesn’t) is nothing to do with our elections:  it should be the maelstrom in world markets and exchanges, including Wall Street and the Eurozone, as they are swept by panic over the prospects for the survival of the Greek economy and even doubts about the future survivability of the Euro.  Billions are being wiped off share prices and currency values while our party leaders, haggard from lack of sleep, embark on a process of haggling whose outcome is not really in doubt.  But the reality is that in most of Britain, all eyes are focused on the complexities of the election results.

Here’s how I saw it developing last night and in the small hours of this morning:

Midnight, 6/7 May: If the exit polls even roughly predict the eventual result, there’s a clear anti-Tory, centre-left majority that would justify a Labour government with LibDem support.  But the real results may be very different.  The few results declared so far suggest wildly different swings even in neighbouring constituencies.

Watch this space!

0015am 7 May:  Exit poll figures suggest Con 305, Lab 255, LibDem 61.  If eventual results were the same, Lab plus LibDem (316) still wouldn’t have the magic score of 326 that represents an overall majority.  But they could probably rely on support from Plaid Cymru and perhaps the SNP (? plus any Greens and Respect) to put them over the top (326 minus unoccupied Sinn Fein seats).  Alternatively the Conservatives plus Ulster Unionists plus DUP might get to 326.  Still seems possible that Brown could stay in No. 10, offer parliament a Queen’s Speech including referendum on PR, and challenge the LibDems to vote against it.

0030am: Swings from Labour to Tory in the few results so far begin to suggest an overall Tory majority some time later on Friday.  I’m sticking to my long established prediction that Brown will resign later today and Cameron will be commissioned to form a government.  But I still hope against hope that I’m wrong!

Now to bed with the laptop….

2am Friday 7 May: on the laptop

At last some good news:  our excellent MP for Tooting, the Labour Transport minister, Sadiq Khan, has been re-elected.  The Tories spent a fortune in the effort to unseat him but he won with a 1% increase in the Labour vote.  Bravo, Sadiq.

The swings around the country are now all over the place and it’s anyone’s guess whether the Tories, with or without support from the Ulster Unionists and the DUP (who have already lost one seat, that of the Chief Minister of Northern Ireland!), will have won an overall majority in the House of Commons.  In case they don’t, Labour leaders on television are valiantly keeping open the option of submitting a Queen’s Speech to the House which the LibDems would find it difficult to defeat.  They must have been reading my blog!

But whatever happened to Cleggmania?  The results for the LibDems so far are appalling.

Brian

I have no problems with a conciliatory approach by Labour to the LibDems, based on mutual (but not one-sided) respect and a genuine effort to map out common ground as a basis for a government programme enjoying the support of all the main centre-left parties (which will between them almost certainly command the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons). Indeed this is the election outcome I profoundly hope for. I deliberately wrote my imaginary script for a Labour communication to the LibDems after the election produces a hung parliament (if it does!) in the form of a statement of intentions rather than a request for the launch of negotiations for several reasons.

First, I wanted to demonstrate that in this situation the Labour government will not be the demandeur, begging the LibDems for favours. Still being in office, and entitled to put forward to parliament a programme in the Queen’s Speech carefully crafted so as to be likely to win the support of the majority of MPs, Labour has the initiative and LibDem options are rather limited. They can make demands and lay down conditions if they like, but if these are ignored by the governing party, they still face the same decision: shall they defeat a government programme that gives them much of what they have been campaigning for? If they vote against it, or even if they abstain, they will be effectively obliged to sustain in office, for a considerable time, a Tory government whose policies give them nothing at all.

Secondly, I wanted to avoid the implication that at the moment when it’s clear there’s a hung parliament, “negotiations” must automatically start, between the LibDems and the Tories and between the LibDems and Labour, with the LibDems effectively auctioning their favours to the highest bidder. This would imply that the Tories and Labour have an equal chance to buy LibDem support by offering the most and biggest policy concessions. But the Tories are unlikely to have an opportunity to submit their government programme for parliamentary support unless Labour has done so beforehand and has been defeated on the floor of the House. The expectation must be that the first decision facing the LibDems will be whether to vote for or against the incumbent Labour government’s Queen’s Speech; there’ll be no way for the Tories to get theirs in first, unless of course the LibDems declare in advance that they are firmly committed to supporting a Tory government. And why on earth would they do that?

Thirdly, I wanted to show that even without bargaining and horse-trading between LibDems and Labour, there’s a very large area of potentially common ground between the two parties: all the items I included in my hypothetical communication to the LibDems would enjoy massive support among Labour Party members and supporters, even though some would require changes in current Labour government policy: and all would conform closely with LibDem policies in their manifesto. In combination they would add up to a progressive reformist programme for a centre-left government supported by both the main centre-left parties which together will have won a majority of the votes cast and the seats won in the election.

On the question (raised in another comment on my earlier post) whether the LibDems’ likely share of the national vote will entitle them to an invitation from Brown to take part in a formal Lab-LibDem coalition, with several seats in the Cabinet, I suspect that this might not be what they will want: they might well prefer the greater freedom to criticise and to hold somewhat different positions on current issues which they would enjoy if outside the government but supporting it ad hoc and conditionally, under a formal or informal pact. If their leaders are part of the government, running government departments and participating in Cabinet decisions, they will be bound by the doctrine of collective government responsibility, which would greatly limit their freedom of manoeuvre. They may also prefer not to incur the odium they might earn by being seen to sit down at the Cabinet table with the widely unpopular Gordon Brown: and going into a coalition with him would look even more provocatively like propping up and perpetuating an unpopular Labour government which on some criteria would be seen as having lost the election, even if it wins more seats than any other party. And not least, a semi-informal pact might not require the internal party formalities of meetings of the party executive and/or a special LibDem conference that would apparently be required for Clegg to enter a formal coalition.

Similarly, I’m not convinced that the Labour government would prefer a formal coalition with the LibDems to a less formal alliance or understanding with them. Reaching quick and clear-cut decisions would be more complicated if a group of LibDem Cabinet ministers had to be persuaded to acquiesce in them over every issue that might arise, and there could be considerable reluctance to hand over to them three or four (or even more) key departments of state: the current Labour ministers of those departments might not be overjoyed at having to step down from them to make way for a LibDem. Sections of the Labour Party in the country (what’s left of it) might also regard the acceptance of the LibDems into a predominantly Labour administration as a form of surrender, even betrayal. So both sides might well prefer a pact to a coalition.

I don’t however agree that the LibDems would suffer no electoral backlash if they were to deny their support in quick succession first to Labour and then to the Conservatives, thus almost certainly precipitating another election very soon after tomorrow’s.  Such a demonstration of uncompromising LibDem ideological purity might give some satisfaction to the political theologians in the Liberal Democratic Party but I think it would arouse considerable anger everywhere else. The LibDems would not be able to avoid the charge of having made it impossible for anyone to govern the country, and this at a moment of grave crisis when firm and resolute government is desperately needed. Such a charge could not be made against either Labour or the Tories, both of which would have been only too ready to carry on the Queen’s government (if you’ll pardon the expression) had they not been prevented from doing so by LibDem obstinacy. History, or at any rate the conventional wisdom and common sense, show too that the electorate doesn’t like being forced to go through another election campaign all over again so soon after the last one, when a little flexibility and willingness to compromise on the part of the LibDems would have made a second election unnecessary. It’s a fair bet that in such circumstances the electorate would punish the LibDems and that their share of the vote would drop like a bomb.

For these reasons I don’t believe that if the LibDems were to vote to defeat the existing Labour government’s programme in the Queen’s Speech, they would then realistically have the option of voting down the Conservative government that would inevitably at once take its place. They would be stuck with a Cameron government for at least a year and possibly longer, probably until Cameron himself judged that the moment had come when he could expect to win an overall majority in a fresh election and could thereupon ask for a dissolution (which would undoubtedly be granted). Thus the LibDems would find themselves forced to acquiesce, perhaps for years, in a Tory government over which they would have no leverage or influence whatever, as well as having to prop up a Tory government adamantly opposed to any change in the electoral system. In other words, if Brown can hang on for long enough to submit a LibDem-friendly Queen’s Speech to the house of commons, the LibDems will have no realistic option but to support it, thus ensuring the continuation of a Brown Labour government. To do anything else would be LibDem suicide. They would have only one shot in their locker, and if they fired it, that would be the end of them.

All this of course assumes that the LibDems will hold the balance of power in a hung parliament if that’s the result of tomorrow’s election.  This assumption may need to be qualified, or possibly reinforced, by the attitudes of the smaller parties if these succeed in materially increasing their representation in the House of Commons.  The Ulster Unionists are already in an alliance with the Conservative Party and DUP MPs would probably support the Conservatives as well, as might UKIP.  If Sinn Fein MPs continue to boycott the House of Commons, that will reduce the number of seats required for a majority.  Any Green, Plaid Cymru, SNP and Respect MPs are likelier to support a Labour than a Conservative programme for government.   So it’s not absolutely axiomatic that the LibDems’ votes in the House of Commons on their own will be decisive.  The devil will be in the arithmetical detail.  Seats in parliament, not the share of the votes cast in the election, will be the ultimate determinants, however much the Tory or LibDem press might clamour for the opposite.

It’s hard to envisage a better and more promising outcome to this election than a continuing Labour government in a formal or informal alliance with the LibDems and perhaps with other centre-left parties also.  The arithmetic of the opinion polls and the procedures that will apply if there’s a hung parliament strongly suggest that this is a perfectly feasible result.  My fears about this dream scenario are two-fold:  first, that Clegg shows signs of leaning increasingly closely towards the Conservatives (for reasons that are to me utterly baffling, even from a LibDem point of view): and secondly, that I still see a small overall majority for the Tories as somewhat likelier than a hung parliament, in spite of what the polls are saying.  Something very strange indeed is going on if the main opposition party can’t win an election outright after their opponent has been in power for 13 years, has launched at least two and probably three deeply unpopular wars (two of them also illegal), is presiding over the deepest recession for a generation, has eroded civil liberties to an extraordinary extent, and is led by an uncharismatic prime minister who, however unfairly, attracts dislike and contempt in roughly equal proportions. I know that it’s impossible to doubt which side to back when you consider Labour’s outstanding successes, Gordon Brown’s unquestionable strengths and achievements, and Labour instincts and values, compared with the lamentable record in office and reactionary instincts of the Conservatives, and their economically and socially illiterate programmes (throttling the economic recovery at birth, repealing the Human Rights Act, still further increasing our bursting prison population, cutting taxes on the rich and increasing them on the poor, recklessly privatising our basic public services under cover of a lot of waffle about the Big Society, wrecking our position in Europe, and probably attacking women’s rights by surrendering to religious bigotry over abortion).  But I also know that not everyone seems to see things that way!

Brian

“Chris, Gordon has asked me to come and see you to let you know what our intentions are now that we know there’s a hung parliament.  Gordon thinks you and Nick [Clegg] and your other colleagues have a right to know how he intends to proceed.  We both recognise that Gordon is permitted — actually under the rules he’s required — to remain in office with a caretaker Labour government until he has met the new parliament and tested by means of the vote on the Queen’s Speech whether he still commands the confidence of the majority of members of the House of Commons.  We realise that a lot will depend on how you and your LibDem colleagues decide to vote on our Queen’s Speech.  It seems to Gordon only fair that you and Nick should have an indication in advance of what we’re going to put in the Queen’s Speech as the programme of a centre-left government for the coming year.

“Well, we’re going to promise a referendum within six months on the electoral system for the House of Commons.  It will include some form of PR as one of the options, and we want to discuss with you what form of PR that option should be.  We’re also going to promise to reform the tax system so as to take more of the poorest people out of any tax liability and to increase the tax liability of the richest.  We want to make taxes fairer in other ways too, and again we want to discuss with you how best to achieve that.  We shall promise to set up an inquiry under a LibDem Chairperson (Vince, perhaps?) to make proposals on how best to split the high street banks from the casino speculators, and also to recommend how best to improve regulation of hedge funds and other speculative investment banks and funds.  We have an open mind about the future of control orders and we shall promise to suspend their operation for two years and then to set up an all-party review of whether we really need to reinstate them.  We shall institute an independent review of prisons legislation, including Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, to recommend the best and safest ways of identifying those now in prison who are not being rehabilitated there, and who don’t need to be in prison to protect the public, so that we can transfer them to different forms of rehabilitation and monitoring in the community and thus reduce prison over-crowding.  Sentencing policy will be reformed accordingly.  We are prepared to include the question of the renewal of Trident in the defence review to take place in the autumn, and we want all the major parties to take part in that review.  We’ll be suspending the introduction of ID cards until we are well out of recession and at that point we’ll have an independent review of the need for them.  And we’ll set up an all-party committee to try to agree on measures to control discretionary immigration in a fair and humane way, including what to do about illegal immigrants who have settled here for 10 years or more and who have become good, law-abiding citizens contributing to the economy and to society.

“We’re not asking you to give us your reactions to these proposals now, still less to enter into negotiations with us about them, or about other measures that you would like — of course we’ll listen to anything you might want to say and any further suggestions you might have, but we don’t think it would be fair to the electorate or to the other parties to get into any kind of process of bargaining or laying down conditions.  And we won’t make any promises to you or anyone else going beyond what I have just told you.

“We hope you, Nick and your other colleagues will think very carefully about what I have said.  Of course it’s your absolute right to vote against a Queen’s Speech on the lines of what we’re proposing, or to abstain on it.  But you must realise that if you do, the certain consequence will be that Gordon will resign and Dave Cameron will be invited to form a minority Conservative government.  I doubt if his government’s programme will contain any of the promises or policies that we shall be putting before the House.  If you LibDems were to vote again to defeat that government, the LibDems would be rightly blamed for making it impossible for any government to govern, at a time when the confidence of business and the markets is so vitally important to our country:  so you would be wiped out at the fresh election that would be bound to follow.  Any hope of electoral reform would have been lost for another generation.  There’d be a run on sterling, interest rates would be forced up, unemployment would increase and the beginnings of economic recovery would be throttled at birth.  All that would flow from a LibDem rejection of the programme we’ll be submitting to parliament.

“You and Nick will need to think about all this and we’re not asking for your comments or decision in advance.  We just thought you ought to know.  No — I don’t want to give Gordon your reactions now.  Let’s go and have a beer and discuss football.

“Oh — by the way:  of course none of this will be possible if Nick Clegg is foolish enough to tell the Palace, or the Daily Mail, that he and the LibDems have decided definitely to form an alliance with Cameron and the Tories and to support whatever programme Cameron puts forward in a Tory Queen’s Speech.   If that happened Gordon and the rest of us would have to resign straight away and Cameron would become prime minister.  You would have thrown away the possibility of a centre-left reformist government based on the centre-left majority in the House of Commons following the election.  What you would gain in return I’m not at all sure.  But that’s of course up to you.

“One last point.  Strictly between ourselves, Gordon has told me that whatever happens he’s definitely going to step down in six months’ time and retire from politics altogether.  He wants to devote himself to charity work and to spend more time with his family.  But he would love to be able to leave behind a stable centre-left government based on a close LibDem-Labour collaboration that would have the best chance of safeguarding the economic recovery and building on his legacy.  Now, what about that beer?”

Have you got that, Gordon and Duggie?

Postscript:  Sunder Katwala’s piece on the Fabian Society’s blog, Next Left, at –

http://www.nextleft.org/2010/05/revealed-tory-strategy-to-pull-queen.html

– should be required and urgent reading for everyone even slightly to the left of George Osborne (please also read my Comment on it).  Katwala predicts in excruciating and all too plausible detail the intense unconstitutional pressures that the Tories and their fat cat friends in the City are already planning to bring to bear in the event of a hung parliament in order to prevent exactly the kind of outcome enivsaged above.  It seems (e.g. from an extraordinary report in today’s Guardian) that Cameron may be planning to declare himself the winner of the election even when there is still a genuine possibility that a centre-left combination may have a far better chance of commanding the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons.  If Cameron were in effect to declare himself prime minister when Brown was still lawfully in office as head of a Labour government, or  demanded that the Queen should dismiss Brown and appoint himself prime minister instead, when there was no guarantee that he would be better placed than Brown to win the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons,  he would not only be dragging the Queen into an insupportable position: he would also in effect be staging a coup d’état and precipitating a constitutional crisis of a magnitude unprecedented in modern times.

Brian

In the London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 8 · 22 April 2010, Jonathan Raban analyses David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ philosophy which apparently steers many Conservative Party policies and plans.  We knew already that it derived from the strange ramblings of one Phillip Blond of Respublica, the Conservatives’ “Red Tory”, but Raban shows just how strange Blond’s ramblings really are — unsurprisingly, since they in turn derive from the reactionary politics of those two right-wing ex-fascist-sympathisers Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton, the now mostly and justly forgotten Chesterbelloc.  It’s seriously alarming that the man who may well be our prime minister this time next week sets his moral and ideological compass by his admiration for these weird and faintly sinister cranks.  Raban has done a definitive demolition job on the lot of them.  A must-read.  (Hat-tip for spotting this before I did: Bob Knowles.)

The second piece of required reading before Thursday has to be Nick Cohen’s piece in today’s Observer newspaper (2 May 2010).  It’s not necessary always to agree with the sometimes erratic Mr Cohen, but here he hits some nails accurately on the head in setting out the case, even now and in spite of everything, for voting Labour.  Another must, especially for the many last-minute waverers.

*   *   *   *   *

Cohen mentions one feature of the LibDem programme for government which seems to have gone almost unnoticed, although Nick Clegg boasted shamelessly about it in the third television debate and inexplicably neither Cameron nor Brown picked him up on it.  This is St Vince Cabler’s extraordinary proposal to raise the level at which income tax becomes payable to £10,000, a wildly expensive give-away and election bribe that would do nothing whatever for the poorest of our citizens but would mainly benefit the fairly well-off middle class.  It seems a very peculiar policy to put forward when everyone else is agonising over the desperate need to raise taxes, not lower them, and to reduce public expenditure in order to free resources for paying off the enormous debt — not to distribute it as largesse for the LibDem-voting bourgeoisie.   Poor doomed Gordon Brown is right to say that some of the LibDems’ policies are laughable:  but of course they have long lacked the disciplines instilled by the responsibilities of holding office, or (until the debates) expecting to do so;  they have no roots in the unions or any other major interest group in society;  they are overwhelmingly white and middle-class.  Any illusions about their essential decency and progressiveness have been exposed by their performance in local government, often in partnership with the Tories, where their ruthlessness in campaigning and wielding power has often outstripped that of the other parties.  Even the LibDems may have been brought up short, though, by the normally sober Will Hutton’s suggestion, also in today’s Observer, that if the new parliament does turn out to be well-hung, Brown should be made to stand down and Labour should invite Clegg to head a coalition LibDem-Lab coalition government — yes, Clegg!  In No. 10!  Well, in this chaotic election, almost anything can happen.  Even that.

*   *   *   *   *

Nick Cohen spells out the case for voting Labour in spite of everything;  it’s hard to take many LibDem policies seriously;  and Jonathan Raban exposes the reactionary follies that apparently underpin Cameron’s ideology.  But there are several other strong reasons for voting in such a way as to spare us the depredations certain to be inflicted by a Tory government.  Labour has rightly concentrated its fire on the dangers of starting to axe public services immediately after the election, as threatened by CamerOsborne, well before the tentative recovery of the economy is firmly established, thereby probably driving us into a double-dip recession.  But there are at least two other powerful reasons for dreading a Cameron government:  first, the Tory commitment to repealing the Human Rights Act, one of the Labour government’s greatest and bravest achievements, and an indispensable bulwark for the private citizen’s rights against an over-mighty executive (and we can only guess at what the Tories would replace it with);  and secondly, the certainty that William Hague, as a committed Europhobe, enjoying the feverish support of the even more Europhobic wing of the Conservative Party, will destroy what little influence we still have in the EU, having already thrown his party’s lot in with a raggle-taggle group of right-wing, sometimes antisemitic, homophobic, neo-fascist European fringe parties when Britain’s natural partners are the moderate, liberal, socially responsible parties of the European centre, including the governments of Germany and France.  No-one should even contemplate voting Conservative  who understands that Britain’s future lies in Europe, and that only in active collaboration with our European mainstream partners can we hope to make progress  over climate change, economic recovery, reform of the banks, the defence of liberal democratic values or the assault on world poverty.

*   *   *   *   *

Most of the media have predictably hailed the ‘leaders’ TV debates’ as a triumph of democracy.  In my view the debates have irretriveably debased and trivialised it.  On substance and issues, Gordon Brown manifestly outperformed Cameron and Clegg in all three debates, especially the last, yet in most of the instant-reaction opinion polls he came a poor third in all three.  This was partly because responses to the polls clearly reflected pre-debate attitudes to the three leaders:  people mostly thought their party’s man had done best.  But it was also because the media relentlessly portrayed the debates as a talent contest on the lines of Britain’s Got Talent or Celebrity Big Brother, in which charm, charisma, good looks and breezy self-confidence score the points, and sound political judgement, experience, and political and economic literacy count for nothing.  If you’re BORING (i.e. serious), you get voted off in short order.  Coverage of the election campaigns has been dominated to an absurd degree by prolonged and mostly superficial discussion of the debates, crowding out serious analysis of the issues.  If the debates have really changed voting intentions to any significant extent (and it’s far from clear at the moment whether they have), the lookout for Britain is extremely gloomy.  Sadly, though, I fear that we’re stuck with debates like this at every election from now on.  No future leader will dare to refuse to take part in them.  Such is the malign power of our generally deplorable media.

*   *   *   *   *

In a comment on another Ephems blog post, a friend and former colleague has accused me of allowing political partisanship to influence my analyses of and commentaries on current political issues, calling on me to write sine ira et studio (without anger or partisan zeal).  How anyone can comment on the current political and social scene without anger is quite beyond me.  As to my comments being coloured by political partisanship:  Guilty, m’Lud!

Brian

“This is not a popular vote contest. Many votes are tactical, and would deployed differently if the metric was ‘national share’. Suddenly invoking national pluralities in a party constituency vote is like changing 100 metre race into a 100 yard dash a few feet away from the finishing line.”

That is absolutely right.  If our elections are suddenly going to be decided by the national vote totals while we still have First Past the Post in a single-member constituency system, we are in a desperate muddle.  It would put paid to tactical voting — but how many Labour supporters who plan to vote LibDem where the LibDem is the main challenger to the Tory are going to wake up to this in time and vote Labour after all, probably letting the Tory win the seat as a result?  Anyway decisions in parliament are going to continue to be made in accordance with seats held by the parties, not how many votes the parties won at the election.  If Labour wins more seats than any other party, are Labour MPs going to be prevented from voting on legislation and the great issues of the day just because Labour got fewer votes than the Tories?  It’s a nonsense.  Clegg wants us to behave as if we already have PR — because his party benefits from moving the goal-posts at the last moment in his direction.

* * * * *

One of the most revealing differences between Conservative and Labour policies for dealing with the national debtand the budget deficit is that the Tories‘ plan for rebalancing the national finances relies almost entirely on swingeing cuts in government spending on public services, which — even if you pretend, implausibly, that these can be made simply by “cutting waste” — means massive job losses and higher unemployment, a reduction in the services on which the poorest and most vulnerable most heavily depend, and the risk of killing the recovery from recession in its tracks.  There is no indication that the Tories will temper these blows by raising taxes on the rich, a partial alternative to spending cuts: indeed, they actually promise cuts in some taxes on the rich and on businesses, which will inevitably mean even more savage cuts in public services.  Labour promises a mixture of higher taxes on those well able to afford them and cuts in government spending targeted at lower priority public services, applied so as to protect the services on which the most vulnerable depend.  Where do the LibDems stand on this key issue?  They talk about ‘savage cuts’ in public spending (but don’t specify where they will fall), accompanied not by raising taxes but actually reducing them, promising a huge tax bribe — no income tax liability below a cut-off of £10,000 a year — which will put money in (almost) everybody’s pockets, except those who don’t pay income tax now,i.e. the poorest.  This will have to be paid for by yet more cuts in public services:  a strange position for an allegedly centre-left party to adopt.  No wonder Mr Clegg seems to be moving stealthily and steadily towards a deal with the Tories that would put Cameron into No. 10, even though on present form there may well be fewer Conservative MPs in the next parliament than Labour ones.

* * * * *

Professor Robert Hazell, head of the University College London Constitution Unit and adviser to the Cabinet Secretary on his new rule-book for hung parliaments, has pointed out in a letter to the Guardian that, contrary to the assumption in a recent Guardian editorial, if there’s a hung parliament there won’t be any question of the Queen having to decide, once the results are in, whom to invite to form a new government:  the existing government, headed by Gordon Brown, remains in office until there’s a cast-iron, documented cross-party consensus that someone else has a better claim to enjoy the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, or until Gordon Brown’s government is defeated in a vote of confidence in the House of Commons.  (This usefully confirmed the point I had made the day before in my own letter in the Guardian.) Although the Cabinet Secretary, in writing the new rule-book, is supposed to be doing no more than writing down hitherto unwritten conventions and principles of the existing constitution, some of his product is surely new, including the proposition that an incumbent prime minister has not just the right but also the duty to stay in No 10 until he can present a programme to the House of Commons for approval or rejection, even if on most criteria he has just lost an election: and also that it’s for the politicians, not the Queen and her advisers, to negotiate with each other until they reach agreement on who’s going to win the confidence of the House of Commons and thus be invited to form the new government.  It seems a rum sort of way to amend our constitution, but I suppose as long as all the party leaders agree with it….

* * * * *

Another misconception that keeps popping up concerns the possible demand by the LibDems that as a condition for them ‘supporting’ a minority Labour government, Gordon Brown will have to step down as prime minister and be replaced by, for example, David Miliband.   This prompts indignant protests in some Labour quarters: who do these LibDems think they are,  telling us who our party leader should be?  Others point to the inordinate amount of time that it takes the Labour Party to get rid of one leader and elect a new one, with special party conferences and who knows what else:  how long could the country be expected to wait, they enquire, while all this is going on?  All this overlooks the potentially useful fact that in order to become prime minister, D Miliband (or Alan Johnson or, heaven help us, Ed Balls, or whoever) doesn’t need to become the leader of the Labour Party as well.  Gordon Brown can constitutionally continue as Labour Party leader while handing over No. 10 Downing Street to Miliband/Johnson/Balls. (Churchill was not leader of the Conservative Party when he became prime minister in 1940, and there are other precedents too for splitting the jobs.)  So much for David Cameron’s super wheeze of a rule that when a new prime minister takes over without having won an election as his party’s leader (could he be thinking of Gordon Brown? or John Major?), there must be an election within six months.  An election six months after Churchill became prime minister in 1940 would have been a trifle inconvenient.  According to the Tories, the country is in almost as deep a crisis now as it was in 1940, although to those few of us still around (just) who were alive in 1940 it doesn’t feel quite as alarming.  At least we don’t have to dive into air raid shelters night after night to avoid the bombs being rained down on us by the bond markets or the IMF.

* * * * *

By what criteria will Nick Clegg decide which of Labour or the Conservatives he can live with in government?   “It’s not for me to second-guess the electorate.”   And if the election result is a hung parliament? “Whichever party has a mandate to govern.”   In terms of votes cast, or seats won? “Both.”   What if one party has more votes, and the other more seats? “Um: seats.  No, votes.  I mean it would be intolerable for a party which came third in terms of votes to form the government.”   So if Labour comes third in votes but first in seats, you won’t work with them? “I couldn’t work with Labour in that situation, no.”  But if Labour is offering a referendum on electoral reform, and the Tories remain strongly opposed? “We will work with whichever party has policies that coincide most closely with ours, especially our four top priorities: one, electoral reform–”   Yes, yes.  So if Labour offers electoral reform and the Conservatives don’t, you’ll work with Labour? “Not if they come third in votes.”   Then who will you work with? “Not with Labour if Labour is led by Gordon Brown.  I couldn’t work with him.”   But you could work with Labour if the prime minister was not Gordon Brown? “I’ll work with anyone, the man on the moon, anyone who has got the right policies.”   So your decision will be by reference to policies, not votes or seats won? “It would be obscene to work with Gordon Brown if he has come third in votes.”    But you just said – “It’s not for me to double-guess the electorate.  The people will decide.”    Thank you very much for being with us.  That was Nick Clegg.

Brian

I also summarised this argument in a letter to the Guardian which was published today (26 April) in only slightly truncated form (text here).   For the record, here’s the text of my letter as submitted on Saturday to the Guardian:

Some opinion polls suggest that on 6 May Labour may win fewer votes than the Conservatives (and possibly even than the LibDems) but still emerge as the party with the most seats in the House of Commons.  If that happens there’ll be demands from the right-wing press and the Tories for Gordon Brown to resign immediately, because he will have ‘lost the election’ in terms of votes.

However the new rules introduced by the Cabinet Secretary require the incumbent prime minister in a hung parliament to remain in office until there’s a broad consensus on a successor who will demonstrably command the confidence of a majority of MPs in his government and its programme;  and there are sound precedents for the party with the most seats to form a government, or to stay in office, even if it has won fewer votes than its opponent (elections in 1951 and twice in 1974).  As the incumbent prime minister Brown will have the right to continue in office and to meet parliament with a policy programme for the House to support or reject (Nick Clegg: the power balancer, 19 April).  As long as the LibDems have not declared whether they will vote to live with a minority Labour government or a minority Conservative one, it will not be certain that David Cameron would have a better prospect of securing majority support for his programme than Gordon Brown.

Even if Labour wins marginally fewer seats than the Tories, as well as fewer votes, Gordon Brown should exercise his right and duty to remain in office as required by the Cabinet Secretary’s code, offer a moderate policy programme including a referendum on electoral ‘reform’ and other items from the LibDems’ list of priorities, and challenge the LibDems to vote against it in the debate on the Queen’s Speech — in the knowledge that by rejecting it they will be installing a Cameron government in No. 10 which will be implacably opposed to any change in the electoral system.  The LibDems would then be in no position to use their balance-of-power votes to defeat — or even threaten to defeat — the new Conservative government which they had voted into office, having just chosen to eject a Labour one.  A premature resignation by Mr Brown would needlessly throw away all these possibilities.

I’m much heartened to see that a committed Conservative blogger has devoted a whole post to my earlier piece here, noting that it has also appeared in LabourList, and describing it as “A truly excellent, but entirely unnerving, article“, and sadly concluding that

Simply put, if my understanding of the piece is correct, should a hung parliament of one form or another be the outcome in which Nick Clegg held the balance of power, there would be no legal or even moral obligation for Brown to resign, so Clegg would be forced to bring down the Labour government by refusing to endorse the Queen’s Speech. This would trigger another general election which, you have to think, would hardly be in the Liberal Democrat’s best interest. The chances are, therefore, that Clegg would do a deal with Brown and Brown would continue as Prime Minister for the time being, despite having a smaller share of the vote than the Conservative Party.

This however isn’t entirely correct:  in my scenario, if the LibDems vote to defeat a Labour Queen’s speech despite its programme including electoral reform and most of the other things on the LibDem wish-list, the consequence would be a Conservative government which would neither offer nor need to offer the LibDems anything at all.  Only if they were foolish enough to vote that government down as well would there be another election immediately — in which the LibDems, having behaved so irrationally and irresponsibly in defeating both a Labour and a Conservative government in quick succession, could expect to be wiped out, with the Tories winning an overall majority in the second poll.  Surely even the LibDems would not commit electoral suicide in such a spectacular way?

All this, of course, is posited on there being a hung parliament after 6 May.  I remain unconvinced that this will happen.  But if it does, let’s hope that the prime minister will stick to his guns right up to the vote on his government’s Queen’s Speech.  If he does, he will maximise the chances, against all the odds, of emerging with a de facto alliance of convenience with the LibDems that will democratically reflect the overall majority in the election, both in votes and in seats, for the centre-left.  For a clear centre-left victory is the one thing it’s perfectly safe to forecast.

Brian

His Guardian obituary today, informative and affectionate, is required reading.  News of his death was in all the television and radio bulletins yesterday and is on the front pages of several newspapers today:  this may seem to some a little surprising, but should not be.  He was a great writer and a lovely man.

In memory of Alan Sillitoe I am reproducing below my blog post of February 2008, written to celebrate his 80th birthday.  And in celebrating Alan’s life and work, we should also think of Ruth, his friend, muse, companion and wife of 60 years, and of their children, David and Susan.

In celebration of Alan Sillitoe at 80

February 28th, 2008

On 4 March 2008, next Tuesday, Alan Sillitoe will celebrate his 80th birthday, and tens of thousands of other people the world over should be celebrating it too.  Everyone remembers him for those early masterpieces, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, two works that changed the English fiction landscape for ever and whose film versions, with Alan’s screenplays, are imprinted on the minds of everyone over 40 (and many younger too).  Alan Sillitoe has so far written (I calculate) 79 other books besides those two: more than one book for every year of his long life;  all published in the half-century from 1957 to 2007, this works out at just over one-and-a-half books a year, a truly Stakhanovite record — and the other good news is that he’s still writing and seems set to continue writing for at least another half-century.  His versatility is also very remarkable:  the books include (in addition to the prolific fiction) autobiography, writings for children, plays, essays, poetry, screenplays, short stories, and travel. His bibliography on the Web is extraordinarily impressive.  Many of his books have (unsurprisingly) won literary awards.

As this picture shows, Alan does most of his writing by hand, so it’s the more remarkable that he is also an expert amateur radio ham, including a reader and tapper-out of Morse Code, as well as a devoted collector and connoisseur of maps, activities descended from his service in the RAF in Malaya.  He has lived at various times in various places in Europe and north Africa; now a Londoner, but still unalterably nourished by his Nottingham roots: how appropriate, then, that he is shortly to be made a Freeman of the City of Nottingham (which, I’m told, will give him the right to drive a flock of sheep through the centre of town). He’s an undaunted but highly discriminating man of the left.  He has too a distinguished academic record:  Visiting Professor of English at Leicester de Montfort University (1994-7), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Geographical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of Manchester Polytechnic (1977).  He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Nottingham Polytechnic (1990), Nottingham University (1994) and De Montfort University (1998).

Meeting this sharp, observant but strikingly unassuming and friendly figure, you’d never guess that he’s what the tabloids would call a legend in his own lifetime: a writer whose style is so deceptively clear and simple that you’d easily miss the artifice and skill that lies behind it.   A review of one of his books in the Guardian, published in 2004, gives an excellent impression of him.

Not least, he’s the devoted and long-time husband of the distinguished poet Ruth Fainlight, of whom I’m proud to be a second cousin — as well as an admiring and affectionate friend of this amazingly productive and beautiful couple.

Happy birthday, Alan, and many more of them:  all, let’s hope, still at an average rate of a book and a half a year!

Brian

The first thing that’s wrong about this scenario is that no-one will be asked to “form a government” after the election, whatever the result, until and unless Gordon Brown resigns as prime minister (which would automatically mean the rest of the present government also resigning).  Until he goes to the Palace to resign, he is constitutionally entitled to continue in office as prime minister; all other ministers similarly remain in office (unless sacked or reshuffled by Brown);  and neither Brown nor anyone else is “invited to form a government”.  This is the case even if the Conservatives have won more seats than Labour, as well as more votes.  There are only two circumstances in which Brown will be constitutionally obliged to resign:  if Labour loses the vote in the House of Commons to approve the Queen’s Speech at the opening of parliament, some time after the election;  or if the government is defeated in a vote of confidence, probably even later.  Of course Brown may choose to resign the premiership earlier, taking the rest of the government with him (for example if he sees no realistic possibility of being able to get his programme and budgets approved by parliament and if David Cameron has an obvious entitlement to the first go at forming a government):  but he is not constitutionally obliged to do so.  So long as there’s even the faint possibility that the LibDems may decide not to vote against the Queen’s Speech and not to vote No in a vote of confidence in his government, Gordon Brown is entitled to soldier on.

The second point most often overlooked is that Gordon Brown will be under no moral or political obligation to resign as prime minister, just because Labour may have won fewer votes than the Tories and/or the LibDems.  The precedents are quite clear.  Three elections since the second world war have produced this anomalous result. In 1951 Labour, elected in 1945 in a landslide and re-elected in 1950, won more votes than the Conservatives, indeed more votes than Labour had ever won before (even in 1945) and more than it has ever won since, yet won fewer seats than the Tories, so Attlee immediately resigned and Churchill, defeated in 1945, came back as Conservative prime minister.   No-one seems to have complained that this was unacceptable or immoral.   The same thing happened at both the elections of 1974, this time benefiting Labour, which won more seats than the Tories despite having won slightly fewer votes. After the first of these, Heath as incumbent prime minister tried to do a deal with the Liberals, remaining in office for four days while he haggled with Jeremy Thorpe, but when he failed, he resigned and Harold Wilson formed a minority Labour government. Eight months later Wilson asked for, and was granted, a dissolution and fresh elections, at which Labour narrowly secured an overall majority (319 seats out of 635!). Few if any complained at the time of the first 1974 election that Labour, as the biggest single party, occupied No. 10 Downing Street despite having won fewer votes than the Conservatives: and the narrow overall majority of Commons seats won by Labour eight months later was not regarded as invalid even though once again the Conservatives had actually won more votes.

There’s a third easily overlooked factor pointing to the likelihood of Labour continuing in office for some time after the election if there’s a hung parliament, regardless of the number of seats and votes won by Labour compared with the scores of the other two major parties.  The prospect of a hung parliament has for some time alarmed the City and the international markets because of the risk of a prolonged period of political uncertainty while the parties haggle over the deals or partnerships necessary for the formation of a stable and durable government able to tackle the huge problems of an unprecedented budget deficit and the mountain of national debt, as well as the task of nursing and accelerating recovery from the recession.  There is a fear that such uncertainty, if it lasts more than a very few days, will cause a run on sterling, turmoil in the bond markets and a possible need to raise interest rates, which would slow down and perhaps reverse Britain’s economic recovery.  To avert this potentially damaging fall-out from a hung parliament, the Cabinet Secretary, encouraged by the prime minister (and possibly with the agreement of the other party leaders), has written a new “rule book” — although No. 10 Downing Street has demurred at this description, asserting that it’s no more than a codification of existing and hitherto unwritten constitutional practice. The Cabinet Secretary’s code, apparently taking the form of a new chapter for the Civil Service Manual, provides, among other things, that if a hung parliament results from an election, the incumbent prime minister, regardless of the number of votes or seats his party has won, should not and must not resign as prime minister until it’s clear that there is a specific alternative MP likely to be able to form a government that will win the support of a majority of members of the House of Commons, expressed in majority support for that government’s  programme, as defined in the Queen’s Speech.  This formulation is designed to protect two fundamental constitutional principles:  the nation’s government must be able to be carried on without a significant hiatus; and the monarch must not be placed in a position of being forced to make a decision (such as having to choose whom to invite to try to form a government when there is no consensus on whom she or he should choose) that would entail, or seem to entail, political partisanship as between the parties, thus potentially damaging confidence in the monarchy’s position above party politics.

This (probably new) rule has important implications.  Newspaper editorials claiming that Brown will be morally and politically obliged to resign immediately as prime minister if Labour comes second or third in terms of votes cast, have got it wrong.  Brown and the Labour government would be obliged to continue in office for as long as there was any uncertainty about how the LibDems would vote on a Labour or Conservative government’s Queen’s Speech or on a vote of confidence in either government.

What’s more, the dilemma facing Nick Clegg will not be which of Labour or the Conservatives to ‘support’ in a hung parliament, but whether deliberately to bring down the existing Labour government in the vote on the Queen’s Speech or in a vote of confidence in the government.  But a decision by the LibDems to bring down a Labour Government could be taken only if they were prepared to commit themselves to acquiescing in a successor Conservative government under Cameron:  it would be indefensible for them to refuse to allow both Labour and the Conservatives to hold office, since to bring down both, one after the other, would certainly cause a prolonged period of uncertainty while fresh elections were held — and in a second election caused by such LibDem negativity, the result would almost certainly be a LibDem wipe-out and the election of a Conservative government with an overall majority.  Is that what the LibDems would want?  In other words, the LibDems’ ability to exact policy concessions in return for their ‘support’ for either Labour or the Conservatives is very limited:  if either of the other party leaders refuses to grant the concessions demanded, the LibDems’ only sanction is to bring down, or threaten to bring down, that party’s government — and if that precipitates a fresh election, the LibDems are likely to be the principal losers.  It will be like an insect that can use its sting only once, because it dies as a result of using it.

Nor will the LibDems have the luxury of choosing which of the other two parties to threaten to bring down if their policy demands are not met:  if Gordon Brown chooses to carry on as prime minister until Labour is defeated on the floor of the House — as indeed the Cabinet Secretary’s new ‘rule book’ requires him to do in the absence of a firm LibDem undertaking to allow a Cameron government to take and hold office instead — the LibDems will have to make their choice in relation to a Labour and only a Labour government.  Since by voting down a Labour government they would implicitly be demonstrating willingness to support, or acquiesce in, a Conservative government, Clegg would be risking a deep rift in his own party, most of whose members would prefer to allow a Labour government to continue in office rather than putting the Tories into No. 10 — this time without the option of turning them out, too, anyway for some time to come.

Thus the logic of the situation may virtually force Clegg to accept any offer from Brown either to join a Labour-LibDem coalition, with a few seats in the coalition Cabinet for Clegg, Cable and one or two others, giving them considerable influence on government policy, but with an inescapable obligation to support some Labour-inspired policies that the LibDems would prefer to oppose;  or alternatively to give a conditional promise not to vote against the (Labour) Queen’s Speech or against the Labour government in a vote of confidence provided that certain basic conditions were met by Brown.  If that happened, there would be no opening for Cameron to be invited to try to form a government since the Brown government would continue in office without interruption.  Of course this would mean the LibDems facing a storm of bitter invective for having kept an unpopular Brown administration in office despite Labour having ‘lost’ the election.  But the alternative — ejecting a broadly like-minded centre-left government from office and installing a potentially far-right Tory government in its place — might be even more unpalatable for grass-roots LibDem members and supporters.

The fifth and final point which seems to have escaped some commentators is that Clegg would be running a serious risk if he were to seek to offer to allow the Labour government to continue in office but only on condition that Brown stepped down, to be replaced by, say, David Miliband as the new prime minister (but not necessarily as leader of the Labour Party).  The moment Brown resigns as prime minister, the rest of the Labour government resigns also, right down to the most junior Assistant Whip.  Moreover, when Brown goes to the Palace to resign, he may or may not be invited by the Queen to advise her on whom she should appoint to succeed him (he is not entitled to volunteer such advice): but even if he is asked for and tenders that advice, the Queen is not constitutionally obliged to accept it.  There would therefore be no guarantee that the Queen would automatically invite David Miliband to form a new (Labour-LibDem) government even if Gordon Brown has advised her to do so: she might invite Cameron instead.   Unlikely, of course: but possible.

There’s an indispensable account of the constitutional position and the Cabinet Secretary’s ‘rule book’ in a Guardian article of 19 April 2010 by Professor Robert Hazell (‘Nick Clegg: the power balancer’).   Professor Hazell, director of the Constitution Unit and Professor of Government and the Constitution at University College London, is a formidable power behind (and sometimes in front of) the scene, having been a significant source of advice to the Cabinet Secretary in drawing up the ‘rule book’ and also maintaining contacts with the leaders of all three parties, among many others.  (In 2006 he was awarded the CBE for services to constitutional reform.)  If Gordon Brown justifies his refusal to resign as prime minister after winning fewer votes than the Conservatives (and perhaps than the LibDems) by reference to the Cabinet Secretary’s ‘rule book’, Professor Hazell will have earned a place in British constitutional history.  A significant constitutional amendment invented and brought into effect by diktat of the Cabinet Secretary should also be worth a footnote.  (There is also an excellent account of the relevant provisions of the constitution and their history in Chapter 3 of Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000.)

I have not attempted to deal here with every possible eventuality if there is a hung parliament.  One that is beginning to prompt a certain amount of speculation is what the Germans call a Grand Coalition, or what we sometimes call a government of national unity: a formal coalition of the two biggest parties, Labour and Conservative, with or without the participation of the LibDems also, usually only formed in the event of a national emergency.  The question whether the budget deficit and the size of the national debt amount to an emergency comparable with the threat of a German invasion and the imposition of government by the Gestapo and the SS may be endlessly and fruitlessly debated.  But Gordon Brown, who knows and understands the history of the Labour Party better than most, along with many other members or supporters of the Party, would be haunted and terrorised by the shade of Ramsay MacDonald if ever he had to decide whether to participate in a coalition government with the Conservatives.

Another possible eventuality that I have not discussed is a LibDem decision to abstain from voting on a Labour Queen’s Speech, leaving it to the arithmetic of the House of Commons (minus the LibDems) to decide the outcome, with the nationalist and any single-issue MPs, if sufficiently numerous, holding the government’s fate in their hands.  This alone would enable the LibDems to maintain their favourite position sitting on the fence, but it would lay them open to the charge of irresponsibility in throwing away their golden opportunity decisively to influence British politics and perhaps the UK constitution too.

And I have not discussed yet another scenario, in which Gordon Brown, having come second or third in the number of votes cast, or having failed to win more seats in the House of Commons than any other party, defies the Cabinet Secretary’s ‘rule book’, or judges that it doesn’t apply, by resigning as prime minister immediately after the election, in which case Cameron would almost certainly be invited to form a government.  This would present the LibDems with a different but very similar dilemma:  whether to bring down a Conservative administration under Cameron by voting against a Conservative Queen’s Speech, with the inescapable implication that they would vote in favour of a Queen’s Speech offered by a restored Gordon Brown (or his successor as leader of the Labour Party).

Perhaps only constitutional and political nerds actually enjoy splashing around in these murky waters.  We may be pretty sure that the leaders of the three parties principally concerned, mentored by Professor Hazell and the Cabinet Secretary, are fully familiar with them, even if a surprising number of our media pundits are not.  Anyway, it’s still far from certain that the election will result in a hung parliament: an overall majority for the Conservatives still looks to me a sound if highly unattractive bet. In which case all these speculative permutations will become academic fodder for Professor Hazell’s seminars, and nothing more — until we adopt Proportional Representation for elections to the House of Commons.

Afterthought:  I wish Nick Clegg and Paddy Ashdown would stop talking about the electorate not trusting either Labour or the Conservatives to govern on their own, if they vote for a hung parliament.  This is palpable nonsense.  The majority of those who vote Labour or Conservative (which means well over half of the electorate, even after the Clegg epiphany) want their party to win with an overall majority.  A few opinion polls claim to have detected growing enthusiasm for the idea of a hung parliament, but that result depends heavily on the way the question is framed, and even then there’s a clear majority opposed.  Even if you assume (without any evidence) that most — say two-thirds — of LibDem voters would welcome a hung parliament, and even in the unlikely event of the LibDems winning the same share of the votes cast on 6 May as the current polls would suggest, that would still amount to only around one voter in every five.  No single voter can vote for a hung parliament:  it’s not on the ballot paper, and the electorate comprises a few million single voters.

Brian

All nice and plausible so far?  A LibDem decision to join the Tories in a coalition in the circumstances imagined by Guido would be consistent with Clegg’s repeated pledge to “let the people decide” which of the bigger parties he should agree to support in a hung parliament, if, as in Guido’s scenario, the Tories had won a bigger share of the national vote than Labour.  But there would remain the problem of Labour, with a smaller share of the votes, having just a few more parliamentary seats than the Conservatives.  And under our constitution, it’s the seats that count when it comes to the right to have the first go at forming a government, as several clear precedents demonstrate.  I have accordingly posted the following awkward-squad Comment on Guido’s post:

Comment no. 108: Brian Barder says:  April 18, 2010 at 11:21 am

Pardon me for pointing it out, but there’s surely a gaping hole in this scenario. There is no need for Gordon Brown, as leader of the biggest single party in the house of commons, to resign as prime minister, and until he does, there is no vacancy at No. 10 that the Queen is at liberty to fill by inviting Cameron to form a coalition government with the LibDems. Brown would be free to form a minority government — perhaps inviting the LibDems to hold three or four Cabinet posts including Cable as Chancellor — and, when he has done so, to meet the House for the debate on the Queen’s Speech (written of course by Brown). The Queen’s Speech is full of LibDem-friendly goodies, including a mild form of PR. A frantic Dave Cameron pleads with the LibDems to come over to him and, together with the Tories, defeat Brown in the vote on the Queen’s Speech. Nick Clegg is tempted but Chris Huhne and Cable flatly refuse and make it clear that they are happier with Labour now that Labour is promising more concessions to their point of view than the Tories. The LibDems vote with Brown to defeat a Tory ‘no confidence’ motion and the newly vamped Brown government settles down to resume governing the country. The Queen is spared the agony of having to make difficult, loaded decisions. Everyone is happy — except the Tories. Oh, dear. How sad for the Tories.

http://order-order.com/2010/04/18/the-change-coalition/#comment-542607

Actually, despite the Clegg epiphany[1] on Thursday night, and the hysterical reactions to it by the opinion polls ever since, my money is still on an overall Tory majority on 6 May, meaning a single-party Tory majority government and no need for any concessions to the LibDems.  But I admit that my confidence in this forecast has been badly shaken by the post-Clegg polls, and also by Cameron’s distinctly below-par performance in the first debate.

Just suppose that:

• Clegg continues to do well enough in the next two debates to enable the LibDems to hold on to the seats which the Tories need to win from them if they are to form a majority government, or even to overtake Labour in the number of seats won:
• Gordon Brown repeats his well-informed, sober, unflashy, substantial performance in the two remaining debates, especially in the third debate on the economy, and confirms the suspicion aroused by the first debate that he is actually a much more solid and reliable prospect as prime minister than Cameron:  and
• the Tories’ attacks on Clegg and LibDem policies, prompted by the Clegg epiphany in the first debate, backfire badly with the swing voters and especially with younger voters, while Labour shrewdly continues its policy of highlighting its natural affinities with the LibDems and the glaring defects in the Tories’ platform, also offering some tasty bonbons to the LibDems (electoral ‘reform’, ditching Trident replacement and ID cards?):

– if all those possibilities materialise, the election outcome imagined by Guido Fawkes becomes a real possibility.  And if that happens, the consequences that might flow from it, as described in my comment on his post quoted above, look to me a whole lot more plausible than Guido’s Tory-LibDem Change Coalition.  Note that something like my scenario remains perfectly possible even if, as I would expect, Clegg and Cable were to decline Brown’s offer of seats in his new Cabinet, preferring instead to give a conditional promise of cautious support for a Brown minority government, with the emphasis on the ‘conditional’.

Perhaps all is not yet lost, after all?

[1]Epiphany: “A revelatory manifestation of a divine being” — http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

Brian

Sources close to Nick Clegg, the LibDem leader, were saying last night that the closure of all British airports and the uncertainty over when they would reopen demonstrated the failure over the last 65 years of both the tired old parties that had been taking it in turns to govern the country.  “Neither Conservative nor Labour governments bothered to do anything to prevent this disaster and it will now be up to a new, fresh, Liberal Democratic government headed by Nick to sort out the mess.”  Nick The sources added that Nick Clegg had been the clear winner in the leaders’ debate and looked forward to his invitation from the Queen to form a LibDem majority government.   St Vincent Cabling, the LibDem shadow Chancellor, told Jeremy Paxman last night on Newsnight that he had predicted the volcanic eruption as long ago as 1942 and had warned then that the prevailing winds would blow the ash over our airports, forcing them to close, unless we moved the airports to northern Spain while there was still time.  Unfortunately his warning had been ignored by the government of the day, as usually happened with his premonitions of assorted impending disasters.

In the same Newsnight programme last night, the Conservative shadow aviation minister, Henry ‘Jumbo’ Bumbleberry pointed out that when Labour came to power in 1997, they had inherited from the Tories a situation in which every single UK airport was open and functioning normally.  Now, after 13 years of Labour government, not a single plane was flying in or out of a British airport.   For 10 of those years Mr Brown had been responsible for the economy as Chancellor, yet in all that time he had done nothing to prepare the country for the crisis that had hit us last Wednesday.  He could not escape responsibility for the sufferings of British familes stranded in dangerous foreign countries such as the US or Australia, or whose binge holidays on the Costa Bravo had been ruined.  Who was to blame for “Labour’s ash-cloud” if not the Labour leader?  In reply, the prime minister pointed out that for years he had been trying to persuade the G20 to take collective action against Icelandic volcanoes but unfortunately the greedy investment bankers had refused to provide the credit to European governments that would have been needed for firm resolute action to be taken.  Mr Brown had himself been firm and resolute and had indeed been recognised as the world’s leader in the struggle against volcanic eruptions, but the rest of the world had lacked both the courage and the credits needed to follow him.  However, he had accepted his responsibility for what had happened and had apologised to the nation.

This morning a Liberal Democratic Party spokesperson issued a statement claiming that Nick Clegg had been the winner of the leaders’ television debate.  She added that “my Nick’s ready to be prime minister whenever that Gordon realises that with the airports all closed the game’s up and he will have to resign.  Gordon was right to apologise, though.”

A spokesman for UKIP blamed the EU for ordering Britain to close its airports so that other European countries could steal business from British airlines.  “Britain should get out of this cowardly European Union and order our aeroplanes to start flying again immediately.  Our brave British pilots aren’t afraid of a bit of harmless dust even if the faint-hearts across the Channel are.”   The BNP said immigration was out of control and that this was to blame for the airport crisis.  It was Nature’s wonderful way of preventing yet more immigrants flying in to take away jobs from Englishmen.

In a new up-date at 2am this morning, the Civil Aviation Authority announced that in view of the Met Office’s latest forecasts, all flights in and out of UK airports would remain suspended until 4am on 31 January 2011 at the earliest.  A further statement would be issued in the middle of the night on 25 December 2010.

In the latest MeGov opinion poll in the Son newspaper, the LibDems were on 95%, the Tories on 4% and Labour on 1.  Experts predicted that if this was still the position on polling day, Labour would be the biggest party in a hung parliament.

[Note: The first sentence above is true.]

Brian