Tuesday:
So Mr Balloon has promised that he'd make it the LAW that he won't let Gideon put up Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT. They'll change the law to stop them changing the law.
And then Master Gideon announces an "emergency" budget.
Yes, yes, a lot of people have made the joke that he needs to get in quick to start clearing up the horrible ghastly mess left by the previous government's budget in March. But really, WHAT emergency?
MAYBE he has an EVEN MORE SLY purpose: get in quick BEFORE Mr Balloon's daft law gets on the books.
A one-off increase in VAT from 20% to 22.5% would raise, I estimate, about £14-£15 billion in extra revenue, which immediately covers the whopping great unfunded gaps in the Conservatory manifesto: £8 billion for the NHS; £7 billion for tax cuts.
(Currently, VAT at the 20% rate brings in approximately £111 billion – 22.5 is 12.5% more than 20, and 12.5% of £111 billion is actually about £14 billion more, but close.)
[IFS November 2014, pdf]
Announcing that he's "found the money" for the NHS would make it EXTREMELY difficult for Hard Labour to reply, especially if he caught them on the hop, especially especially in their current state of leaderless disarray, even though of course he is very much robbing the less well-off working Peter to pay for the health service used mainly by the slightly better-off pensioner Paul.
But then I'd expect him to bring forward the increases in personal allowance, (and with a hand wave, also a hike in the higher rate threshold making for a bigger cut for the better-off 40% tax payers). He'd claim to be reducing the taxes on working and shifting the cost to spending. Or even, if he's in his most purple, pompous mode, to "profligacy".
And with prices falling for the first time since 1960, he might go so far as to try to excuse pushing up prices as a "counter-deflationary" measure!
Not that anyone facing a 0% (or less!) pay rise this year will end up thanking the Chancer for bringing back inflation.
(And although we should remember that because food and housing and a lot of travel is not VAT-able, it's a bit complicated as to just how regressive a tax VAT actually is, but raising it to give a tax cut to the better-offs is almost certainly not going to work out "progressive"!)
It would look like a work of genius – the papers would certainly all hail it as such – and the actual consequences of derailing the recovery with another VAT driven inflation spike wouldn't show up until we're already deep in the hole – which is pretty much what he did the last time someone let him try to ride the economy without stabilisers*.
Then it would just remain to pass the buck to Mr Iain Drunken-Swerve to figure out how to slash an impossible £12 billion from welfare, and with his free hand pass the McBuck to Ms Nicola the Insturgent with full fiscal autonomy and the power to deny her fellow Scots the tax cuts Gideon's just lavished on the English.
Gideon sits down to rapturous applause and a big step forward in his potential leadership ambitions, while Bojo sulks on the back benches and recently-stabbed-in-the-back-by-Gideon's-ally-Sajid-Javid Ms Teresa "Nuts in" May looks like she's swallowed another wasp.
Or maybe he'll just offer us some tea.
* Last time, of course, we had Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander able to come in and restart some Keynesian investment spending (which Labour's Captain Darling had cancelled, lest it be forgotten) and bring back some growth; goodness knows who can save us this time!
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Monday, May 18, 2015
Day 5251: Welcome, Our New Parliament
Monday:
Today we witness the return of Parliament after the General Election, including all the traditions: the formal opening; the re-election of the speaker; the swearing at, sorry in of the MPs.
We particularly welcome the surviving After Eight Liberal Democrats: Reverend Nick (Cap'n Clegg, retired); Tom (no) Brakes; The Laird of Carmichael; Shirley Williams; Pugh Pugh Barney McGrew; Greggs Pies; Norman Conquest; and Saint Timbo of Farron.
We wish them well and hope they all remember to vote against the abolition of the Human Rights Act.
Meanwhile, here are some totally unrelated pictures of fluffy sheeps (no relation)…
Today we witness the return of Parliament after the General Election, including all the traditions: the formal opening; the re-election of the speaker; the swearing at, sorry in of the MPs.
We particularly welcome the surviving After Eight Liberal Democrats: Reverend Nick (Cap'n Clegg, retired); Tom (no) Brakes; The Laird of Carmichael; Shirley Williams; Pugh Pugh Barney McGrew; Greggs Pies; Norman Conquest; and Saint Timbo of Farron.
We wish them well and hope they all remember to vote against the abolition of the Human Rights Act.
Meanwhile, here are some totally unrelated pictures of fluffy sheeps (no relation)…
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Day 5241: The Balloon Goes Up
Friday:
Well, as Sir Bedivere might have said surveying the field of Camlann and the ruin of the flower of England, that could have gone better…
Fear won the day. Scotland voted for the SNP out of fear of the Tories; England voted Tory out of fear of the SNP. This was terribly cynical populism on the part of Mr Balloon and Mr Nicola Insturgent. We are as a nation more divided, more diminished as a result.
Not that the Liberal Democrats' campaign was innocent of blame in this.
Fear won the day because we didn't give hope a chance.
Launching our manifesto, Nick Clegg said it was time to give people hope at the end of austerity, but instead we fell into a trap of saying we would try to moderate between extremists. "Who do you fear more?" was the underlying language of our "hearts and brains" message. "They're scary, vote for us because we'll keep you safe."
It wasn't what we WANTED to be saying – we had a story to tell about ending austerity once the job was done; about the opportunities of education; about lifting the stigma of mental ill-health; about creating a green future – but we quickly got side-tracked into debating deals, darkened rooms and red lines.
It would be easy to blame Cap'n Clegg. Some already have, though the swiftness and dignity of his departure has drawn much of that sting. He was at his best inspiring people in the debates before 2010 and in his resignation after 2015. It was only the intervening five years as Deputy Prime Minister that got in the way of seeing him as a decent man.
Hindsight and cynicism might say we should have replaced him a year ago, pulled out of the Coalition and let the Tories run as a minority for a year, to show everyone who bad it could get. But that was never what we went into Coalition to do. We wanted to show it could work and that we could be trusted in office to do our duty. We couldn't have defenestrated one leader and then saddled a new one with Coalition partnership.
And we're not really that sort of Party anyway (no matter how ruthless people think we were with Chatshow Charles and Sir Ming the Merciless).
Ultimately, this election was lost in May 2010. Never mind the tuition fees: that was the albatross hung around Cap'n Clegg's neck, but the opinion polls showed that the voters had already deserted us. We lost because we went into Coalition at all.
So add to the (depressingly long) list of things that the Great British public says that they want, but do not vote for: cooperation between parties that behave like grown-ups.
I was, fluffy feet in the air, totally sold on the Coalition. If we were or are to mean anything as a Party surely that has to mean getting our fluffy feet on the levers of power and implementing some of those policies. And implement them we did, many good policies – raising people out of tax; pupil premium, school dinners and apprenticeships; pension reforms; and most personally equal (er) marriage.
Pluralist politics is off the agenda, now. No one will go into a coalition, possibly ever again.
Before the election, the positioning of the Nationalists – the Scottish Nasties, their Welsh Mini-Mes or the English Kippers – and their hangers-on the Greens that they would never join a coalition, that their principles were too "pure" was just too precious and too self-serving for words. They would get their policies by "confidence and supply", they claimed – no, you get nothing for confidence and supply; if you want policy to be implemented you need a minister to guide it through; you've got to get your fluffy feet DIRTY.
But now, who in faith could recommend a Coalition deal if the punishment meted out by the voters is so vastly, disproportionately out of scale to the offence.
Which is a great sadness, as it marks the death of a tradition in British politics going back to the start of Cabinet government.
We become more Presidential, more dictatorial, more in the Thatcher-Blair model than the tradition of debate, scrutiny, argument and compromise that was very British.
And look at the things we might not have in five years' time: human rights, a welfare state, a place in Europe, the BBC…
Within hours of the election, the now-Liberal-free government was already planning on cutting benefits for the disabled while Theresa Nuts-in-May was revving up to rummage through your emails by reintroducing the "Snoopers Charter".
This will be the first test for the new Parliament. There are Tories – notably David Davis who forced a by-election on the issues of Civil Liberties – who might be persuaded, cajoled, even honour-bound to vote against the intrusive and unworkable spying on every citizen. Mr Balloon's majority is as thin as an After Eight – or an After Twelve, perhaps.
Leadership hopefuls, take note: the Liberal Democrats have got to be in that debate, making a lot of noise, and a dozen new friends!
And this is merely the beginning of the scale of what faces the new Liberal Leader (I look forward to the contest, and Norman Lamb will no doubt give him a good debate and maybe even a run for his money, but it will be Tim Farron).
There are plenty of good people putting forward "where do we go from here" plans: Auntie Jennie, Auntie Alix, Andy Hinton, David Howarth, to name but four, all have decent takes. Even Daddy Richard tossed out some thoughts over the course of election night:
Firstly, and it's a thing that comes up several times from the suggestions my fellow Lib Dems are making, is the need to reboot the Liberal Democrats as a Party – hold our own constitutional convention, as Jennie puts it – to reform the organisation into something a bit less like a drunken gavotte by a spider drenched in ink. It is vital that the Party recognise its big failings from the years in power and before that allowed what happened with the likes of Mike Hancock and the whole Chris Rennard debacle, where no one saw any justice and we all came out looking sleazy. It needs to be done, so let's get it done, and do it right, but it is essentially inward-looking. We need to be projecting a positive face outwards too.
So, looking forward, HOUSING is the idea that clearly coming forward from the thinking in Lib Dem circles: it's a clear crisis in supply and one intimately linked to the fundamental flaws of the British economy, namely that most of it gets turned into wealth and tied up in property instead of working to create jobs and opportunities. Ideally driving down house prices would increase opportunity for people to own their own homes while releasing capital into more production, non-rent-seeking projects. Our ability to make large-scale changes – planning garden cities – may be curtailed by the wipe-out, but local campaigns can still focus on local developments, particularly those that fail to make affordable provision part of their mix.
This is a START but we need something BIGGER, not just managerial tinkering but real radical change.
The linking theme of those policies is that they are about changing things for the better, offering hope and opportunity.
That is an agenda that we need to move swiftly to seize. The roots of it exist within our 2015 manifesto, as I've already said, and in the slogan "Opportunity for Everyone".
The Blairite faction within Labour are already urging their Party to become the Party of "aspiration"; we need to give people a REAL CHANGE alternative to Thatcherism-lite, and do it pretty darn quickly.
Where, in all this, the Labour Party?
Well, Labour lost the election badly for all the reasons I've been spelling out for months: they never made the effort to address their failures at the end of Mr Frown's government, they didn't develop a critique of the Coalition's policies. No, shouting "traitor!" and "no cuts!" (then mumbling something about how you'd cut "nicely"), does not amount to a critique. Mr Milipede's personal handling – scoring cheap debate-club points and stunts, culminating in the infamous EdStone (now known as the "heaviest suicide note in history") – were every bit to blame, but so was the rest of the Party by letting him muddle through putting off the difficult decisions because he wanted to avoid the fights that characterised the Blair/Frown years in office.
Truly, Labour's problem was that they spent five years being ANGRY, and angry does not win elections.
The blogger Another Angry Voice put up a typical meme hitting out at the folly of the electorate punishing the Lib Dems for siding with the Tories by electing the Tories.
The suggestion is that Labour's spite sent teams to Sheffield to try and unseat Cap'n Clegg when they should have been working Ed Balls seat, and so they lost the shadow chancellor to their own decapitation strategy.
In a way, though, Labour will be helped by Ed Balls losing his seat.
Labour's travails do impact on us. So long as they remain in eclipse, they drag down the politics of hope with them. By looking a shambles, or worse in hock to the Scottish Nasties, they strengthen the Tory position, which is of course based on fear.
Which brings us back to where we came in.
We cannot let fear win.
There IS a place for the CENTRE: not as "neither one thing nor the other" but as heart and hope; not splitting the difference between left and right but healing the divisions in our society; not just holding back the tide against things getting worse, but saying it's okay to believe that things can and will get better.
Mr Balloon is David "Call Me Dave" Cameron, leader of the conservative party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with a majority of 12 seats on a 37% share of the popular vote.
Ms Insturgent is Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, the devolved government of Scotland, whose Party won 56 seats in the UK Parliament on 4% of the nationwide popular vote (the quirk of our voting system that it rewards geographical concentration rather than broad popular support – normally I call this Largest Loser Wins, but in Scotland in 34 out of 56 seats, the SNP polled more than 50% of the vote)
Cap'n Clegg is Nick Clegg, former leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister, resigned after winning just 8 seats on 8% of the popular vote. I should probably start calling him "Parson Blyss" now that he's retired.
Mr Milipede is Ed Miliband, former leader of the Labour Party and Her Majesty's Leader of the Opposition, resigned after winning 232 seats on 30% of the popular vote.
Chatshow Charles is Charles Kennedy and Sir Ming the Merciless is Sir Ming Campbell, the two leaders of the Liberal Democrats immediately preceding Nick Clegg. The Party's MPs persuaded Charles to stand down when it became apparent he had an alcohol problem; Sir Ming stood aside of his own accord when it became clear that the newspapers were only interested in his age as an issue, and not the Party's message.
Norman Lamb and Tim Farron are two of the remaining Liberal Democrat MPs: Norman is a former minister and seen (fairly or unfairly) as the Clegg loyalist successor; Tim is former Party President but stayed out of government to maintain his independence, seen as the hot favourite.
Mike Hancock and Chris Rennard are Liberal Democrats who were involved in scandals during the last five years (both alleged to have behaved inappropriately to women).
Yvette is Yvette Cooper, wife of Ed Balls, Labour's Shadow Home Office spokesperson, seen as a possible leadership candidate, though rumoured to be uncertain she wants the job now.
Well, as Sir Bedivere might have said surveying the field of Camlann and the ruin of the flower of England, that could have gone better…
Fear won the day. Scotland voted for the SNP out of fear of the Tories; England voted Tory out of fear of the SNP. This was terribly cynical populism on the part of Mr Balloon and Mr Nicola Insturgent. We are as a nation more divided, more diminished as a result.
Not that the Liberal Democrats' campaign was innocent of blame in this.
Fear won the day because we didn't give hope a chance.
 |
| Sometimes only chocolate can help |
Launching our manifesto, Nick Clegg said it was time to give people hope at the end of austerity, but instead we fell into a trap of saying we would try to moderate between extremists. "Who do you fear more?" was the underlying language of our "hearts and brains" message. "They're scary, vote for us because we'll keep you safe."
It wasn't what we WANTED to be saying – we had a story to tell about ending austerity once the job was done; about the opportunities of education; about lifting the stigma of mental ill-health; about creating a green future – but we quickly got side-tracked into debating deals, darkened rooms and red lines.
It would be easy to blame Cap'n Clegg. Some already have, though the swiftness and dignity of his departure has drawn much of that sting. He was at his best inspiring people in the debates before 2010 and in his resignation after 2015. It was only the intervening five years as Deputy Prime Minister that got in the way of seeing him as a decent man.
Hindsight and cynicism might say we should have replaced him a year ago, pulled out of the Coalition and let the Tories run as a minority for a year, to show everyone who bad it could get. But that was never what we went into Coalition to do. We wanted to show it could work and that we could be trusted in office to do our duty. We couldn't have defenestrated one leader and then saddled a new one with Coalition partnership.
And we're not really that sort of Party anyway (no matter how ruthless people think we were with Chatshow Charles and Sir Ming the Merciless).
Ultimately, this election was lost in May 2010. Never mind the tuition fees: that was the albatross hung around Cap'n Clegg's neck, but the opinion polls showed that the voters had already deserted us. We lost because we went into Coalition at all.
So add to the (depressingly long) list of things that the Great British public says that they want, but do not vote for: cooperation between parties that behave like grown-ups.
I was, fluffy feet in the air, totally sold on the Coalition. If we were or are to mean anything as a Party surely that has to mean getting our fluffy feet on the levers of power and implementing some of those policies. And implement them we did, many good policies – raising people out of tax; pupil premium, school dinners and apprenticeships; pension reforms; and most personally equal (er) marriage.
The Liberal Democrats paid a VERY high price today so that we could wear these rings as husbands. Thank you. We are SO grateful. It will NOT be forgotten.
Pluralist politics is off the agenda, now. No one will go into a coalition, possibly ever again.
Before the election, the positioning of the Nationalists – the Scottish Nasties, their Welsh Mini-Mes or the English Kippers – and their hangers-on the Greens that they would never join a coalition, that their principles were too "pure" was just too precious and too self-serving for words. They would get their policies by "confidence and supply", they claimed – no, you get nothing for confidence and supply; if you want policy to be implemented you need a minister to guide it through; you've got to get your fluffy feet DIRTY.
But now, who in faith could recommend a Coalition deal if the punishment meted out by the voters is so vastly, disproportionately out of scale to the offence.
Which is a great sadness, as it marks the death of a tradition in British politics going back to the start of Cabinet government.
We become more Presidential, more dictatorial, more in the Thatcher-Blair model than the tradition of debate, scrutiny, argument and compromise that was very British.
And look at the things we might not have in five years' time: human rights, a welfare state, a place in Europe, the BBC…
Within hours of the election, the now-Liberal-free government was already planning on cutting benefits for the disabled while Theresa Nuts-in-May was revving up to rummage through your emails by reintroducing the "Snoopers Charter".
This will be the first test for the new Parliament. There are Tories – notably David Davis who forced a by-election on the issues of Civil Liberties – who might be persuaded, cajoled, even honour-bound to vote against the intrusive and unworkable spying on every citizen. Mr Balloon's majority is as thin as an After Eight – or an After Twelve, perhaps.
Leadership hopefuls, take note: the Liberal Democrats have got to be in that debate, making a lot of noise, and a dozen new friends!
And this is merely the beginning of the scale of what faces the new Liberal Leader (I look forward to the contest, and Norman Lamb will no doubt give him a good debate and maybe even a run for his money, but it will be Tim Farron).
There are plenty of good people putting forward "where do we go from here" plans: Auntie Jennie, Auntie Alix, Andy Hinton, David Howarth, to name but four, all have decent takes. Even Daddy Richard tossed out some thoughts over the course of election night:
We need to stop being so cautious, playing piggy-in-the-middle and say something that might frighten the horses, so:
1) Housing. We need a radical alternative that says how we can deliver the "build more" we all know is the answer. So raise a tax on existing property equal to the (few billions) you need to spend building. And to discourage NIMBYism, the more houses we build the lower the tax (hmm, taxing existing land values, strikes a familiar chord). And while we're at it, pay for housing benefit by taxing rents.
2) Clean the air of our cities. This means planning to replace *all* cars with electric, which means planning the charging infrastructure and planning how we're going to generate all that electricity (which means fusion).
3) Wi-if. Free. Nationally. Same rationale as the penny post in the Victorian age – it's a key architecture for government so the public might as well get it for nominal cost too.
4) Drugs policy. Currently the war on drugs is obviously utterly counterproductive. Decriminalise. Medicalise. Possibly even legalise regulate and tax in case of weed.
Firstly, and it's a thing that comes up several times from the suggestions my fellow Lib Dems are making, is the need to reboot the Liberal Democrats as a Party – hold our own constitutional convention, as Jennie puts it – to reform the organisation into something a bit less like a drunken gavotte by a spider drenched in ink. It is vital that the Party recognise its big failings from the years in power and before that allowed what happened with the likes of Mike Hancock and the whole Chris Rennard debacle, where no one saw any justice and we all came out looking sleazy. It needs to be done, so let's get it done, and do it right, but it is essentially inward-looking. We need to be projecting a positive face outwards too.
So, looking forward, HOUSING is the idea that clearly coming forward from the thinking in Lib Dem circles: it's a clear crisis in supply and one intimately linked to the fundamental flaws of the British economy, namely that most of it gets turned into wealth and tied up in property instead of working to create jobs and opportunities. Ideally driving down house prices would increase opportunity for people to own their own homes while releasing capital into more production, non-rent-seeking projects. Our ability to make large-scale changes – planning garden cities – may be curtailed by the wipe-out, but local campaigns can still focus on local developments, particularly those that fail to make affordable provision part of their mix.
This is a START but we need something BIGGER, not just managerial tinkering but real radical change.
The linking theme of those policies is that they are about changing things for the better, offering hope and opportunity.
That is an agenda that we need to move swiftly to seize. The roots of it exist within our 2015 manifesto, as I've already said, and in the slogan "Opportunity for Everyone".
The Blairite faction within Labour are already urging their Party to become the Party of "aspiration"; we need to give people a REAL CHANGE alternative to Thatcherism-lite, and do it pretty darn quickly.
Where, in all this, the Labour Party?
Well, Labour lost the election badly for all the reasons I've been spelling out for months: they never made the effort to address their failures at the end of Mr Frown's government, they didn't develop a critique of the Coalition's policies. No, shouting "traitor!" and "no cuts!" (then mumbling something about how you'd cut "nicely"), does not amount to a critique. Mr Milipede's personal handling – scoring cheap debate-club points and stunts, culminating in the infamous EdStone (now known as the "heaviest suicide note in history") – were every bit to blame, but so was the rest of the Party by letting him muddle through putting off the difficult decisions because he wanted to avoid the fights that characterised the Blair/Frown years in office.
Truly, Labour's problem was that they spent five years being ANGRY, and angry does not win elections.
The blogger Another Angry Voice put up a typical meme hitting out at the folly of the electorate punishing the Lib Dems for siding with the Tories by electing the Tories.
 |
| It's obviously enjoyable seeing so many Lib-Dems MPs suffer the consequences of their self-serving treachary, but seeing so many of them lose their seats to Tories beggars belief. How can you punish the Lib-Dems for collusion by voting for the very people they colluded with? |
AAV says "It's obviously enjoyable seeing so many Lib-Dem MPs suffer" demonstrating *exactly* why the left lost this election. When you would rather see people suffer than campaign to *stop* suffering, then you're part of the problem, not the solution, no matter how clever you think you are by calling the electorate "drunk".
The suggestion is that Labour's spite sent teams to Sheffield to try and unseat Cap'n Clegg when they should have been working Ed Balls seat, and so they lost the shadow chancellor to their own decapitation strategy.
In a way, though, Labour will be helped by Ed Balls losing his seat.
I am sad for Ed Balls personally, for losing a job he clearly loves.
But more broadly, I hope that it helps Labour move on, rethink their economic policy and admit to and move on from the errors of the Gordon Brown era.
Also, it will allow Yvette to contest the leadership without the shadow of standing against (or blocking) her husband which would have been used (unfairly) in the way Ed v David was used.
Labour's travails do impact on us. So long as they remain in eclipse, they drag down the politics of hope with them. By looking a shambles, or worse in hock to the Scottish Nasties, they strengthen the Tory position, which is of course based on fear.
Which brings us back to where we came in.
We cannot let fear win.
There IS a place for the CENTRE: not as "neither one thing nor the other" but as heart and hope; not splitting the difference between left and right but healing the divisions in our society; not just holding back the tide against things getting worse, but saying it's okay to believe that things can and will get better.
In this diary:
Mr Balloon is David "Call Me Dave" Cameron, leader of the conservative party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with a majority of 12 seats on a 37% share of the popular vote.
Ms Insturgent is Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, the devolved government of Scotland, whose Party won 56 seats in the UK Parliament on 4% of the nationwide popular vote (the quirk of our voting system that it rewards geographical concentration rather than broad popular support – normally I call this Largest Loser Wins, but in Scotland in 34 out of 56 seats, the SNP polled more than 50% of the vote)
Cap'n Clegg is Nick Clegg, former leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister, resigned after winning just 8 seats on 8% of the popular vote. I should probably start calling him "Parson Blyss" now that he's retired.
Mr Milipede is Ed Miliband, former leader of the Labour Party and Her Majesty's Leader of the Opposition, resigned after winning 232 seats on 30% of the popular vote.
Chatshow Charles is Charles Kennedy and Sir Ming the Merciless is Sir Ming Campbell, the two leaders of the Liberal Democrats immediately preceding Nick Clegg. The Party's MPs persuaded Charles to stand down when it became apparent he had an alcohol problem; Sir Ming stood aside of his own accord when it became clear that the newspapers were only interested in his age as an issue, and not the Party's message.
Norman Lamb and Tim Farron are two of the remaining Liberal Democrat MPs: Norman is a former minister and seen (fairly or unfairly) as the Clegg loyalist successor; Tim is former Party President but stayed out of government to maintain his independence, seen as the hot favourite.
Mike Hancock and Chris Rennard are Liberal Democrats who were involved in scandals during the last five years (both alleged to have behaved inappropriately to women).
Yvette is Yvette Cooper, wife of Ed Balls, Labour's Shadow Home Office spokesperson, seen as a possible leadership candidate, though rumoured to be uncertain she wants the job now.
Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Day 5239: Worst! Election! Eveh!
Wednesday:
A British General election is NEVER an "edifying" process. The electoral system makes most voters irrelevant and the media craves the spectacle of a car crash not informed debate, so the voice of the people is most often lost under the slanging match.
In my fluffy lifetime, I've seen one or two British General elections. (Well, four, ACTUALLY, but I don't remember 2001 when I was 1 [R: nothing] –shut up, daddy), and my Daddies have seen LOADS more, but even THEY don't remember one that's been as HOLLOW and EMPTY a CHARADE as the current Cavalcade of Whimsy™.
The prospect of another hung Parliament, almost guaranteed if the current polling is even remotely close to accurate, has made the question of the Parties' policies, their differences and their overlaps, ever more vital to the empower the voter to understanding of how to use their choice.
So OBVIOUSLY the entire campaign has been reduced to two questions:
• who will "get into bed" (in a "darkened room") with whom – or, apparently more importantly, who will RULE OUT getting into bed with whom; and
• dividing ALL policies of all Parties into (not, as you might expect, those that cause cancer and those that cure cancer), but into those that are RED LINES and those that are TUITION FEES.
The media are of course completely culpable, and have totally let down the public (though the public's almost complete disinterest in controlling their own lives was just begging to be let down).
We have not had any representation of different policy or philosophy; instead, we've had a three-ringed circus, where the clowns throw meaningless custard pies at each other and the Nationalist/Green alliance – riding on the suddenly-popular coattails of Nicola Sturgeon (this year's Nick Clegg, lest she think she's in any way special) – have had three bites of the cherry in every debate while former media darlings the Farragist Kippers have been sidelined to their furious but impotent chagrin and the Liberal Democrats have been stitched up like, well, kippers.
Only the third, "Question Time" style "debate" came close to properly interrogating the leaders and drawing out any differences. Even then, the differences were primarily: "I won't tell you where I'm cutting" v "I won’t tell you I was overspending" v "sorry about that".
The meeja have OBSESSED about what the deals post-election will be like – it's almost as though they're deliberately ignoring the one part of the narrative that they cannot control and is increasingly predictable only in its unpredictability. So they've been pressing all and sundry on who would do the deed with whom, leading to this silly spectacle of ruling out partnerships that the public may press upon us.
Yes, I realise the Liberal Democrats did that too. Yes, we were wrong to. This is a democracy: we have to work with who the people send to Parliament to represent them. You won't beat the Nationalists by isolating them – that just makes them SPECIAL. Northern Ireland could only BEGIN the path to healing when we TALKED to the Irish Nationalists. Where does not talking to the Scottish Nationalists get us, other than BROKEN? Liberalism BEST represents people by bringing them together. We are pluralist by nature; we form coalitions because it is our PHILOSOPHY not merely pragmatism.
So please, no more ruling out deals before the people have got a word in edgeways!
And if I NEVER HEAR the words RED LINES again in my LIFE it will be too soon.
(Yes, we are guilty of this one too.)
The possibility that it might just be SLIGHTLY more complicated than "this policy will cause an irretrievable breakdown of coalition negotiations" while "this policy will be tossed to the winds for a whiff of the ministerial leather", does not apparently excite anyone.
So we see Cap'n Clegg trapped on Andy Marrmite's sofa between Nasty Nige and Yvette "the Snooper" Cooper and trying to put on a brave grin as he is harangued from left and right, as each howls like a banshee to demand that he rule out this or rule in that; while interviewers, thinking they are being SOOOO clever, try "trapping" candidates with the question "well, it's not on the front of the manifesto so is it a red line?"
(Apparently we're afraid to just answer: "no, we'd like it and we'll get it if we can", to this. It would be nice to think that that would be the grown up answer, but you just KNOW it only sends us further down the rabbit hole of "well, is it more important or less important than your pledge on tuition fees?".)
And you know what, not even the tuition fees policy was as simple as "red line" or "toss it aside": the Liberal Democrats had to barter it up to a better deal for students, effectively a graduate tax, and the price for that rather than just Labour's system plus unlimited fees, was having to vote for it.
The nadir of this is the blind arrogance of Hard Labour's "our entire manifesto is the red line"; the take it or leave it and accept nothing from anyone else approach. Well, it's what Mr Milipede and the rest of the Labour "negotiating" team "offered" the Liberal Democrats last time. Remind me, how'd that work out for him?
(Clue: it got his boss fired.)
The bitter irony is that there's nothing IN Hard Labour's manifesto, their anodyne pledges – carved, ludicrously, into a giant tablet (of soluble aspirin, probably) – do not amount to a hill of beans large enough on which to mount the fatuous Ed Stone!
I think – I hope – that people voting for the Labour Party are doing so because they hope for a better society, a more compassionate one, a more responsible one where people care for each other.
(Because the CYNICAL view is that it's a load of public and third sector workers demanding that the government spends a lot more of other people's money on the public and third sectors… and calling the Conservatories the SELFISH ones. But that would be – almost literally – uncharitable.)
What I regret, though, is that I see absolutely no evidence that the Labour Party will deliver on that hope.
Harriet the Harminator and Rachel the Reaver promising that Labour will get "tough" on benefits. Mr Milipede, son of immigrants, promising that Labour will get tough on immigrants. This is not a ploy to fool the Kipper vote and slip into power; this is what these people truly believe. If power means sacrificing some poor/foreign people, they'll be first to construct the giant wicker Kinnock.
I remember who it was who started taking away the benefits of disabled people because they decided that people too sick to get out should prove they were not fit to work. And it wasn't the "evil" Tories. The Tories may be VENAL, but they only want to cut the money. Hard Labour will sanction your benefits BECAUSE IT IS "GOOD" FOR YOU.
And so, the beginning, middle and end of ANY deal the Liberal Democrats do with the Hard Labour Party has got to be to require the HARM PRINCIPLE be made a fixture of the work and benefits system!
"First Do No Harm" is the Hippocratic Oath; we need a "First Do Not Starve People to Death Because You Believe They're Not Working Hard Enough" Oath!
(I refer again to how ANGRY I am with the Greens for making such a total DOG'S BREAKFAST of selling the Citizens Income!)
In spite of this… in spite, or even BECAUSE of the Milipede-crafted model of offering nothing to anyone in order to offend no one… I was almost coming to the conclusion that Mr Milipede, arrogant and yet useless as he is, with his talent for holding things together by an act of zen-like doing nothing, might be the man for the job, the Perfect Prime Monster for a Parliament that no one wins and cannot do anything.
And five years of Parliament doing nothing might be a blessed relief to us all.
But then he went and told a direct lie.
He told Mr Marrmite: "The deficit didn't cause the financial crisis; the financial crisis caused the deficit."
This is palpably, provably untrue. Hard Labour spent more than they raised in tax, and so had to borrow the difference – that is, in the jargon "ran a deficit" – in 2007. And in 2006. And in 2005. And 2004. And 2003. And 2002. And 2001. A Debt Odyssey. Long, long, LONG before the economy was consumed in the flames of Northern Rock's crash and burn and Lehman Brothers' self-immolation.
But that lie was a cock-up. A rhetorical spasm caused by trying to sound cleverer than he really is.
The real lie that Labour have been telling is a complicated one, hidden by claiming that they are the ones lied against: that the story of the recession is itself a lie, one told against them.
The left generally, and Labour particularly, have latched onto this line: "Labour's borrowing did not cause the financial crash".
This in itself is NOT clearly true.
Certainly it's not a DIRECT cause – the banks lent too much money to people who could not afford to pay it back, and in the end those loans (the so-called "sub-prime" mortgages) going bad is what toppled the global banking system.
But WHY and HOW did the banks lend that money?
WHY did the banks lend the money? It takes two to tango, so WHY did so many people go on a borrowing and spending spree? WHO – implicitly, even explicitly sometimes – encouraged them? Buy now pay later was the ethos of the naughties, condoned by a Hard Labour government "entirely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", and who totally played along with their PFI schemes, paying for vanity projects on the never-never.
The bankers were ABLE to lend too much because credit was so cheap, because the West's leading bankers – including those in the Bank of England – wanted to keep interest rates low to stop the bursting of the dot-com bubble from turning into a recession. Mr Frown's fingerprints are on that decision, entirely supporting the "wizard" Alan Greenspan at America's Federal Reserve, just as Lord Blairimort gave unquestioning support to President Bush.
And who should have been regulating the bankers? Step forward City minister, Ed Balls. Oh yes, egged on by the Conservatories. (And of course over the protests of the Liberal Democrats and sage warning of Dr Vince "the power" Cable!) And as the old saying goes, if Mr Balloon had said go "jump in a lake" would the Labour Government have done that too?
So Hard Labour are far from INNOCENT of responsibility when it comes to causes of the crash.
But that ISN'T the point.
Overspending IS A BAD THING.
It is A BAD THING regardless of whether the entire global economy goes into meltdown on your watch.
Hard Labour's BORROWING might not have led directly to money-geddon in 2008, but that absolutely does not mean that borrowing to cover your spending at the height of the biggest bubble in history was OK!
WHO said "no more boom and bust?" Who was proved SPECTACULARLY WRONG about that?
There's a very scary thesis about – called Modern Money Theory (but known as the Magic Money Tree for reasons that quickly become obvious) – that a lot of dangerously stupid people who think they are clever (cough cough Ed Balls cough cough) have latched onto, that says "if you print your own currency you cannot run out of money". Oh BOY are they wrong!
The Chinese famously invented paper money. The VERY NEXT thing they invented was HYPERINFLATION when the Emperor's children thought "if we're printing this stuff, then we cannot run out of money".
[Sidebar: In fact, Great Britain and Americaland HAVE printed a whole lot of money during the recession – the "Quantum of Easing" you may have heard of – and the Eurozone is doing it now. But we just about got away with it because the DEFLATIONARY pressures of the economy IMPLODING kind of cancelled out the INFLATION of blowing up the currency.
But when Mr Alistair "Captain" Darling – ADC to Mr Frown's General Melchett – printed a whole lot of money in 2009, there was a huge spike of inflation in 2010. Coincidence? (Darn it, fairness makes me admit that partly it WAS – food and energy prices also shot up as India and China expanded. But only partly!)
So it's treated like playing with FIRE because everyone but everyone knows that if it goes into a hyperinflation spiral then it's next stop Weimar Germany and literally Goodnight Vienna!]
And yes, it's correct, as they keep saying like it proves anything, the national debt WAS a lower share of national income in 2007 than in 1997 – that's because the debt was at a high point in 1997 and was brought down by following Ken Clarke's Tory spending plans for Labour's first term, and the economy was in a dip in 1997 (post housing crash, pre dot.com) and at the height of a boom in 2007, a bit like saying you're shorter as a share of altitude when you jump off Beachy Head than when you jump of Brighton Pier. It's still not clever to jump off either!
The Tories ran up the national debt in the Nineties to get themselves out of the political and economic hole caused by the Poll Tax and the ERM debacle and the house price crash. And they were JUSTLY punished for their economic incompetence. Why do Labour think THEY should be allowed a free pass for hosing money on THEIR political toys?
So Hard Labour say that it's a "Big Lie" that people say "Labour's borrowing caused the crash".
But that itself IS the lie – NO ONE says that; what they say is that Labour's borrowing (and their decision to put all our eggs in the City's basket, AND their failure to supervise the unscrupulous bankers, AND the climate of borrow today and leave the future to deal with the debts) left us in the WORST position to survive when the crisis hit.
We, Great Britain, had the longest, deepest recession and slowest recovery of the Western nations. But Labour says that was ALL the Coalition cuts, and nothing to do with the depth of the swan dive they had taken. Oh no, honest guv, you can trust us, we're mates with that Russell Brand now.
Labour's economic message is one of COMPLETE DENIAL, a total failure to recognise that they were in any way to blame for the pain of the last five years, or that they would have done anything substantially different, or to come up with any realistically different alternative plan for the next five years. ("The same but with the pain lasting a bit longer and not properly finishing the job," would be the fairest assessment. And the SNP's "end to austerity" is just "the same as Labour but with even longer pain again"!)
When Ed Balls (and those on the left who parrot him and retweet him mindlessly) accuses Master Gideon of ending up where Labour were planning to be in terms of borrowing as much as Labour planned and cutting as much as Labour planned… what exactly IS the accusation here? That Labour wanted the cuts to be deeper?
So how DID we end up where Hard Labour were planning to be?
Well, dur! Because Master Gideon's "long term economic plan" lasted about a FORTNIGHT!
It was about that long before the nice people in the Treasury realised he couldn't even work an abacus and gave him some bricks to play with while asking Danny Alexander to take charge. (David Laws, alas, not available!)
(Master Gideon, remember, is the "genius" who engineered the "No" vote in the AV referendum and thereby GUARANTEED that the Tories would LOSE this election.)
Lib Dem policy was to invest in infrastructure. Ooh look, the Coalition invested in infrastructure. Classic Keynesian spending in a recession and the economy started to recover. The quid pro quo of shifting to Plan B was we allowed Osborne to keep CALLING it Plan A!
Which of course makes even MORE ridiculous the Tory campaign of: "let us stick to the path we've been on (by veering off sharply to the right into these dark and trackless woods and I'm sure that's not a cliff ahead of aaaaghh!)".
Labour's total failure in the last five years to come up with ANY economic answers AT ALL, is intimately bound up with the Tory's decision to throw economic caution to the dogs and promise anything and everything to everyone: £7 billion for middle-class tax cuts; £8 billion for the health service; £10 billion for a free pony in every child's bedroom (not actually true); and a surplus on the accounts on top!
And all to be funded out of £12 billion of unspecified cuts to "benefits". But not pensioners. Or children. Or the disabled. Or workers. Or non-workers even… It seems we must give a LOT of money to IMAGINARY claimants! That must be why so many REAL people need to use FOOD BANKS!
But not content with stealing Labour's clothes to spend money we don't have, the Conservatories ALSO want to derail the recovery by clamping down on the people who are making the economy work (immigrants) and the people who are buying what we make (Europe).
Hard Labour may want to blame all the ills of the economy (since about 1799, it would seem) on the Coalition – while giving themselves a FREE PASS for "global events" – but back in the REAL world, we are part of the European economy and instability in the Eurozone – Greece, again, but also the domestic slowdown of our neighbours in France, and even Germany, not to mention the troubling, brooding presence of Vlad the Bad making war in Ukraine – are all bad for business.
All of which makes it a REALLY bad time to be causing EVEN MORE uncertainty over whether we might even stay IN the biggest economy on the planet for the sake of FLIRTING with Nationalism.
(It's possible that by now, the pressures that the Kippers and the Europhobe Tories have built up have reached such a pass that ONLY the explosive release of a referendum will settle them; that's no excuse for having built up those pressures in the first place, and this campaign has only stoked the fires further – all heat and no light at all. And, of course, as we've seen with the twisty-turniness of the SNP when avoiding ruling out a Neverendum for Scottish Independence, one referendum is never enough; it's just a temporary "hit" before the cravings start to build up all over again. Or until you kill the patient.)
As for the GROTESQUE pandering to the Kipper tendency over immigration – indulged in by BOTH Tories and Hard "Controls on Immigration, indeed" Labour – is just economically illiterate. The idea that you could just round up the unemployed youth of the country, ship them off to Norfolk or Morecombe and have them replace semi-skilled labourers like crop or cockle-pickers would be FARCICAL if it would not be so RUINOUS to our wellbeing.
(And the Liberal Democrats got burned on this last time so we are FAR TOO CAUTIOUS when we should be defending the rights of people to live and work and contribute where they wish. Immigrants, after all, are PEOPLE who have been GOOD enough to choose HERE of all places to make lives!)
So the Tories want to undermine our key economic strengths of being open for business; pull savings out their fluffy behinds by cutting benefits to they won’t say who; and at the same time spending like it's going out of fashion on unicorns and magic beans.
So OBVIOUSLY their entire campaign has been about the SNP!
It's been the FEAR election, hasn't it?
Hard Labour want you to be afraid for the NHS.
That is, the one Party that has NOT promised the £8 billion extra funding that the NHS's own Stephens report said was needed… and that privatised TWICE as much of the Health Service's services when they were in power than the Coalition ever did… says you should be afraid that the two Parties who HAVE said they WILL fully fund the NHS, and didn't put as much out to the private sector, will instead cut the service and sell it off.
So THAT makes sense.
Meanwhile, the Tories want you to be terrified that Nicola Sturgeon will wrap Mr Milipede round her little finger, that Alex (missing in action) Salmond will lead a tartan army of about 7% of MPs to overwhelm the decent yeomen and backbenchers of this very England.
That is, the one Party that is ACTIVELY campaigning for something that could break up the Union, by destroying the equality of MPs, by giving extra powers to the English only… is trying to tell you that Hard Labour must rule out ANY kind of Coalition… while being IN a Coalition themselves, AND playing footsie with the Kippers.
So THAT makes sense too.
And don't think that the Liberal Democrats fluffy feet are clean in all this – we've been putting out the fear of EXTREMEISM (left OR right) to convince people to try and stay with our nice safe middle-of-the-road managerialism.
That is the one Party that should be radical and mould-breaking and tearing down the walls of the establishment and letting in some light and change is saying "you'll be safe with us, snuggles".
So THAT makes NO FLUFFING SENSE AT ALL! But it's all we got. Along with the red lines and the tuition fees.
Everyone insists on talking about LEGITIMANCY (isn't that a spell from "Harry Potter"?) as though the British Constitution were set in tablets of stone (soluble aspirin, again) rather than a form of INTERPRETATIVE DANCE!
Once again, Hard Labour's MORE STUPID bellows of betrayal come back to bite it on the ARSE! Just as the nationalist chickens of blaming EVERYTING on a Westminster elite that takes Scotland for granted has come to roost in the rise of the SNP to supplant them in all their safe seats North of theWall border, having spent five years slandering the Coalition as "unelected", they are REALLY in no position to claim a minority Labour administration will have ANY moral right to run the country.
Nicola Sturgeon talks about "legitimacy" only if a government draws members from all the nations of the Union, knowing full well how unlikely it is that Scotland will return Tories (Conservatories OR Laboratories!) in enough numbers to satisfy her test – and as a prelude for a pretext to claim "the Union has broken down; we must have another independence referendum!"
The Tories talk about "legitimacy" being conveyed by what I suppose we might have to call the "Clegg Doctrine" of the Party with the most seats and most votes having best and therefore first claim on forming a government. Of course, the Tories want to take this further and make it the ONLY claim on forming a government. Which is even MORE ludicrous, because they know they're not going to. The Party of the Union and tradition reduced to a dog in the manger.
If there's one good thing that might come out of this total disaster of an election it's this: the system is just so obviously, patently, totally broken, the result will be so plainly totally unfair and askew from what people voted for, and in such a way that it screws over both Hard Labour and the Conservatories AT THE SAME TIME, that everyone might finally realise it's time to stop using a Seventeenth Century system for the Twenty-First.
In fact, I'd say we should ditch ALL of our red lines for ONE thing: we will give you a government for six months – or a year – during which we will all take part in a Constitutional Convention under a Royal Commission that will let us TOGETHER sort out how we elect our Parliament (and executive, and if we want the one to be a chunk of the other or to separate them like America or France or Germany or, actually almost everywhere else, do); and who sits in Parliament (if we want unelected Lords and Bishops and Rooks and Castles, er) or even WHERE it sits (because they've got to move out of that Thames-side fun-palace before all the wiring catches fire)!
The answer is obvious so it will obviously take a great deal of time and patience to arrive at the obvious answer that we need a federal state with Parliament of multi-member constituencies elected by British Proportional Representation, and a national senate replacing the House of Lords Club.
But it can be done. The Scottish people showed the rest of us that it CAN be done: a proper reasoned – polite! – argument that sorts things out.
And maybe next time we can do this General Election thing PROPERLY.
And meanwhile we will rebuild a properly Liberal Liberal Democratic Party. A Party that exists to bring HOPE to people: a Party that will address the crisis in housing and give people the opportunity to live where they work; a Party that will invest in education and apprenticeships and even the living costs of all the students we now have going to universities; a Party that will clean up our environment, improve the quality of air in our polluted cities, by preparing the ground for switching to clean, all-electric cars (and there's a LOT of work that needs doing); a Party that will tax wealth more in order to tax income a less; a Party that will stop criminalising people for doing things that harm no one; a Party that will put a stop to bullying people for what they eat or how they dress or who they love or where they come from.
And, by Grimond, we might even do it in Government!
NOW, GO AND VOTE!
A British General election is NEVER an "edifying" process. The electoral system makes most voters irrelevant and the media craves the spectacle of a car crash not informed debate, so the voice of the people is most often lost under the slanging match.
In my fluffy lifetime, I've seen one or two British General elections. (Well, four, ACTUALLY, but I don't remember 2001 when I was 1 [R: nothing] –shut up, daddy), and my Daddies have seen LOADS more, but even THEY don't remember one that's been as HOLLOW and EMPTY a CHARADE as the current Cavalcade of Whimsy™.
The prospect of another hung Parliament, almost guaranteed if the current polling is even remotely close to accurate, has made the question of the Parties' policies, their differences and their overlaps, ever more vital to the empower the voter to understanding of how to use their choice.
So OBVIOUSLY the entire campaign has been reduced to two questions:
• who will "get into bed" (in a "darkened room") with whom – or, apparently more importantly, who will RULE OUT getting into bed with whom; and
• dividing ALL policies of all Parties into (not, as you might expect, those that cause cancer and those that cure cancer), but into those that are RED LINES and those that are TUITION FEES.
The media are of course completely culpable, and have totally let down the public (though the public's almost complete disinterest in controlling their own lives was just begging to be let down).
We have not had any representation of different policy or philosophy; instead, we've had a three-ringed circus, where the clowns throw meaningless custard pies at each other and the Nationalist/Green alliance – riding on the suddenly-popular coattails of Nicola Sturgeon (this year's Nick Clegg, lest she think she's in any way special) – have had three bites of the cherry in every debate while former media darlings the Farragist Kippers have been sidelined to their furious but impotent chagrin and the Liberal Democrats have been stitched up like, well, kippers.
Only the third, "Question Time" style "debate" came close to properly interrogating the leaders and drawing out any differences. Even then, the differences were primarily: "I won't tell you where I'm cutting" v "I won’t tell you I was overspending" v "sorry about that".
The meeja have OBSESSED about what the deals post-election will be like – it's almost as though they're deliberately ignoring the one part of the narrative that they cannot control and is increasingly predictable only in its unpredictability. So they've been pressing all and sundry on who would do the deed with whom, leading to this silly spectacle of ruling out partnerships that the public may press upon us.
Yes, I realise the Liberal Democrats did that too. Yes, we were wrong to. This is a democracy: we have to work with who the people send to Parliament to represent them. You won't beat the Nationalists by isolating them – that just makes them SPECIAL. Northern Ireland could only BEGIN the path to healing when we TALKED to the Irish Nationalists. Where does not talking to the Scottish Nationalists get us, other than BROKEN? Liberalism BEST represents people by bringing them together. We are pluralist by nature; we form coalitions because it is our PHILOSOPHY not merely pragmatism.
So please, no more ruling out deals before the people have got a word in edgeways!
And if I NEVER HEAR the words RED LINES again in my LIFE it will be too soon.
(Yes, we are guilty of this one too.)
The possibility that it might just be SLIGHTLY more complicated than "this policy will cause an irretrievable breakdown of coalition negotiations" while "this policy will be tossed to the winds for a whiff of the ministerial leather", does not apparently excite anyone.
So we see Cap'n Clegg trapped on Andy Marrmite's sofa between Nasty Nige and Yvette "the Snooper" Cooper and trying to put on a brave grin as he is harangued from left and right, as each howls like a banshee to demand that he rule out this or rule in that; while interviewers, thinking they are being SOOOO clever, try "trapping" candidates with the question "well, it's not on the front of the manifesto so is it a red line?"
(Apparently we're afraid to just answer: "no, we'd like it and we'll get it if we can", to this. It would be nice to think that that would be the grown up answer, but you just KNOW it only sends us further down the rabbit hole of "well, is it more important or less important than your pledge on tuition fees?".)
And you know what, not even the tuition fees policy was as simple as "red line" or "toss it aside": the Liberal Democrats had to barter it up to a better deal for students, effectively a graduate tax, and the price for that rather than just Labour's system plus unlimited fees, was having to vote for it.
CHAPTER ONE: LABOUR AND THE BIG LIE
The nadir of this is the blind arrogance of Hard Labour's "our entire manifesto is the red line"; the take it or leave it and accept nothing from anyone else approach. Well, it's what Mr Milipede and the rest of the Labour "negotiating" team "offered" the Liberal Democrats last time. Remind me, how'd that work out for him?
(Clue: it got his boss fired.)
The bitter irony is that there's nothing IN Hard Labour's manifesto, their anodyne pledges – carved, ludicrously, into a giant tablet (of soluble aspirin, probably) – do not amount to a hill of beans large enough on which to mount the fatuous Ed Stone!
I think – I hope – that people voting for the Labour Party are doing so because they hope for a better society, a more compassionate one, a more responsible one where people care for each other.
(Because the CYNICAL view is that it's a load of public and third sector workers demanding that the government spends a lot more of other people's money on the public and third sectors… and calling the Conservatories the SELFISH ones. But that would be – almost literally – uncharitable.)
What I regret, though, is that I see absolutely no evidence that the Labour Party will deliver on that hope.
Harriet the Harminator and Rachel the Reaver promising that Labour will get "tough" on benefits. Mr Milipede, son of immigrants, promising that Labour will get tough on immigrants. This is not a ploy to fool the Kipper vote and slip into power; this is what these people truly believe. If power means sacrificing some poor/foreign people, they'll be first to construct the giant wicker Kinnock.
I remember who it was who started taking away the benefits of disabled people because they decided that people too sick to get out should prove they were not fit to work. And it wasn't the "evil" Tories. The Tories may be VENAL, but they only want to cut the money. Hard Labour will sanction your benefits BECAUSE IT IS "GOOD" FOR YOU.
And so, the beginning, middle and end of ANY deal the Liberal Democrats do with the Hard Labour Party has got to be to require the HARM PRINCIPLE be made a fixture of the work and benefits system!
"First Do No Harm" is the Hippocratic Oath; we need a "First Do Not Starve People to Death Because You Believe They're Not Working Hard Enough" Oath!
(I refer again to how ANGRY I am with the Greens for making such a total DOG'S BREAKFAST of selling the Citizens Income!)
In spite of this… in spite, or even BECAUSE of the Milipede-crafted model of offering nothing to anyone in order to offend no one… I was almost coming to the conclusion that Mr Milipede, arrogant and yet useless as he is, with his talent for holding things together by an act of zen-like doing nothing, might be the man for the job, the Perfect Prime Monster for a Parliament that no one wins and cannot do anything.
And five years of Parliament doing nothing might be a blessed relief to us all.
But then he went and told a direct lie.
He told Mr Marrmite: "The deficit didn't cause the financial crisis; the financial crisis caused the deficit."
This is palpably, provably untrue. Hard Labour spent more than they raised in tax, and so had to borrow the difference – that is, in the jargon "ran a deficit" – in 2007. And in 2006. And in 2005. And 2004. And 2003. And 2002. And 2001. A Debt Odyssey. Long, long, LONG before the economy was consumed in the flames of Northern Rock's crash and burn and Lehman Brothers' self-immolation.
But that lie was a cock-up. A rhetorical spasm caused by trying to sound cleverer than he really is.
The real lie that Labour have been telling is a complicated one, hidden by claiming that they are the ones lied against: that the story of the recession is itself a lie, one told against them.
The left generally, and Labour particularly, have latched onto this line: "Labour's borrowing did not cause the financial crash".
This in itself is NOT clearly true.
Certainly it's not a DIRECT cause – the banks lent too much money to people who could not afford to pay it back, and in the end those loans (the so-called "sub-prime" mortgages) going bad is what toppled the global banking system.
But WHY and HOW did the banks lend that money?
WHY did the banks lend the money? It takes two to tango, so WHY did so many people go on a borrowing and spending spree? WHO – implicitly, even explicitly sometimes – encouraged them? Buy now pay later was the ethos of the naughties, condoned by a Hard Labour government "entirely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", and who totally played along with their PFI schemes, paying for vanity projects on the never-never.
The bankers were ABLE to lend too much because credit was so cheap, because the West's leading bankers – including those in the Bank of England – wanted to keep interest rates low to stop the bursting of the dot-com bubble from turning into a recession. Mr Frown's fingerprints are on that decision, entirely supporting the "wizard" Alan Greenspan at America's Federal Reserve, just as Lord Blairimort gave unquestioning support to President Bush.
And who should have been regulating the bankers? Step forward City minister, Ed Balls. Oh yes, egged on by the Conservatories. (And of course over the protests of the Liberal Democrats and sage warning of Dr Vince "the power" Cable!) And as the old saying goes, if Mr Balloon had said go "jump in a lake" would the Labour Government have done that too?
So Hard Labour are far from INNOCENT of responsibility when it comes to causes of the crash.
But that ISN'T the point.
Overspending IS A BAD THING.
It is A BAD THING regardless of whether the entire global economy goes into meltdown on your watch.
Hard Labour's BORROWING might not have led directly to money-geddon in 2008, but that absolutely does not mean that borrowing to cover your spending at the height of the biggest bubble in history was OK!
WHO said "no more boom and bust?" Who was proved SPECTACULARLY WRONG about that?
There's a very scary thesis about – called Modern Money Theory (but known as the Magic Money Tree for reasons that quickly become obvious) – that a lot of dangerously stupid people who think they are clever (cough cough Ed Balls cough cough) have latched onto, that says "if you print your own currency you cannot run out of money". Oh BOY are they wrong!
The Chinese famously invented paper money. The VERY NEXT thing they invented was HYPERINFLATION when the Emperor's children thought "if we're printing this stuff, then we cannot run out of money".
[Sidebar: In fact, Great Britain and Americaland HAVE printed a whole lot of money during the recession – the "Quantum of Easing" you may have heard of – and the Eurozone is doing it now. But we just about got away with it because the DEFLATIONARY pressures of the economy IMPLODING kind of cancelled out the INFLATION of blowing up the currency.
But when Mr Alistair "Captain" Darling – ADC to Mr Frown's General Melchett – printed a whole lot of money in 2009, there was a huge spike of inflation in 2010. Coincidence? (Darn it, fairness makes me admit that partly it WAS – food and energy prices also shot up as India and China expanded. But only partly!)
So it's treated like playing with FIRE because everyone but everyone knows that if it goes into a hyperinflation spiral then it's next stop Weimar Germany and literally Goodnight Vienna!]
And yes, it's correct, as they keep saying like it proves anything, the national debt WAS a lower share of national income in 2007 than in 1997 – that's because the debt was at a high point in 1997 and was brought down by following Ken Clarke's Tory spending plans for Labour's first term, and the economy was in a dip in 1997 (post housing crash, pre dot.com) and at the height of a boom in 2007, a bit like saying you're shorter as a share of altitude when you jump off Beachy Head than when you jump of Brighton Pier. It's still not clever to jump off either!
The Tories ran up the national debt in the Nineties to get themselves out of the political and economic hole caused by the Poll Tax and the ERM debacle and the house price crash. And they were JUSTLY punished for their economic incompetence. Why do Labour think THEY should be allowed a free pass for hosing money on THEIR political toys?
So Hard Labour say that it's a "Big Lie" that people say "Labour's borrowing caused the crash".
But that itself IS the lie – NO ONE says that; what they say is that Labour's borrowing (and their decision to put all our eggs in the City's basket, AND their failure to supervise the unscrupulous bankers, AND the climate of borrow today and leave the future to deal with the debts) left us in the WORST position to survive when the crisis hit.
We, Great Britain, had the longest, deepest recession and slowest recovery of the Western nations. But Labour says that was ALL the Coalition cuts, and nothing to do with the depth of the swan dive they had taken. Oh no, honest guv, you can trust us, we're mates with that Russell Brand now.
Labour's economic message is one of COMPLETE DENIAL, a total failure to recognise that they were in any way to blame for the pain of the last five years, or that they would have done anything substantially different, or to come up with any realistically different alternative plan for the next five years. ("The same but with the pain lasting a bit longer and not properly finishing the job," would be the fairest assessment. And the SNP's "end to austerity" is just "the same as Labour but with even longer pain again"!)
When Ed Balls (and those on the left who parrot him and retweet him mindlessly) accuses Master Gideon of ending up where Labour were planning to be in terms of borrowing as much as Labour planned and cutting as much as Labour planned… what exactly IS the accusation here? That Labour wanted the cuts to be deeper?
CHAPTER TWO: TORY FANTASY ECONOMICS
So how DID we end up where Hard Labour were planning to be?
Well, dur! Because Master Gideon's "long term economic plan" lasted about a FORTNIGHT!
It was about that long before the nice people in the Treasury realised he couldn't even work an abacus and gave him some bricks to play with while asking Danny Alexander to take charge. (David Laws, alas, not available!)
(Master Gideon, remember, is the "genius" who engineered the "No" vote in the AV referendum and thereby GUARANTEED that the Tories would LOSE this election.)
Lib Dem policy was to invest in infrastructure. Ooh look, the Coalition invested in infrastructure. Classic Keynesian spending in a recession and the economy started to recover. The quid pro quo of shifting to Plan B was we allowed Osborne to keep CALLING it Plan A!
Which of course makes even MORE ridiculous the Tory campaign of: "let us stick to the path we've been on (by veering off sharply to the right into these dark and trackless woods and I'm sure that's not a cliff ahead of aaaaghh!)".
Labour's total failure in the last five years to come up with ANY economic answers AT ALL, is intimately bound up with the Tory's decision to throw economic caution to the dogs and promise anything and everything to everyone: £7 billion for middle-class tax cuts; £8 billion for the health service; £10 billion for a free pony in every child's bedroom (not actually true); and a surplus on the accounts on top!
And all to be funded out of £12 billion of unspecified cuts to "benefits". But not pensioners. Or children. Or the disabled. Or workers. Or non-workers even… It seems we must give a LOT of money to IMAGINARY claimants! That must be why so many REAL people need to use FOOD BANKS!
But not content with stealing Labour's clothes to spend money we don't have, the Conservatories ALSO want to derail the recovery by clamping down on the people who are making the economy work (immigrants) and the people who are buying what we make (Europe).
Hard Labour may want to blame all the ills of the economy (since about 1799, it would seem) on the Coalition – while giving themselves a FREE PASS for "global events" – but back in the REAL world, we are part of the European economy and instability in the Eurozone – Greece, again, but also the domestic slowdown of our neighbours in France, and even Germany, not to mention the troubling, brooding presence of Vlad the Bad making war in Ukraine – are all bad for business.
All of which makes it a REALLY bad time to be causing EVEN MORE uncertainty over whether we might even stay IN the biggest economy on the planet for the sake of FLIRTING with Nationalism.
(It's possible that by now, the pressures that the Kippers and the Europhobe Tories have built up have reached such a pass that ONLY the explosive release of a referendum will settle them; that's no excuse for having built up those pressures in the first place, and this campaign has only stoked the fires further – all heat and no light at all. And, of course, as we've seen with the twisty-turniness of the SNP when avoiding ruling out a Neverendum for Scottish Independence, one referendum is never enough; it's just a temporary "hit" before the cravings start to build up all over again. Or until you kill the patient.)
As for the GROTESQUE pandering to the Kipper tendency over immigration – indulged in by BOTH Tories and Hard "Controls on Immigration, indeed" Labour – is just economically illiterate. The idea that you could just round up the unemployed youth of the country, ship them off to Norfolk or Morecombe and have them replace semi-skilled labourers like crop or cockle-pickers would be FARCICAL if it would not be so RUINOUS to our wellbeing.
(And the Liberal Democrats got burned on this last time so we are FAR TOO CAUTIOUS when we should be defending the rights of people to live and work and contribute where they wish. Immigrants, after all, are PEOPLE who have been GOOD enough to choose HERE of all places to make lives!)
So the Tories want to undermine our key economic strengths of being open for business; pull savings out their fluffy behinds by cutting benefits to they won’t say who; and at the same time spending like it's going out of fashion on unicorns and magic beans.
So OBVIOUSLY their entire campaign has been about the SNP!
CHAPTER THREE: SCARY MOVIES
It's been the FEAR election, hasn't it?
Hard Labour want you to be afraid for the NHS.
That is, the one Party that has NOT promised the £8 billion extra funding that the NHS's own Stephens report said was needed… and that privatised TWICE as much of the Health Service's services when they were in power than the Coalition ever did… says you should be afraid that the two Parties who HAVE said they WILL fully fund the NHS, and didn't put as much out to the private sector, will instead cut the service and sell it off.
So THAT makes sense.
Meanwhile, the Tories want you to be terrified that Nicola Sturgeon will wrap Mr Milipede round her little finger, that Alex (missing in action) Salmond will lead a tartan army of about 7% of MPs to overwhelm the decent yeomen and backbenchers of this very England.
That is, the one Party that is ACTIVELY campaigning for something that could break up the Union, by destroying the equality of MPs, by giving extra powers to the English only… is trying to tell you that Hard Labour must rule out ANY kind of Coalition… while being IN a Coalition themselves, AND playing footsie with the Kippers.
So THAT makes sense too.
And don't think that the Liberal Democrats fluffy feet are clean in all this – we've been putting out the fear of EXTREMEISM (left OR right) to convince people to try and stay with our nice safe middle-of-the-road managerialism.
That is the one Party that should be radical and mould-breaking and tearing down the walls of the establishment and letting in some light and change is saying "you'll be safe with us, snuggles".
So THAT makes NO FLUFFING SENSE AT ALL! But it's all we got. Along with the red lines and the tuition fees.
Everyone insists on talking about LEGITIMANCY (isn't that a spell from "Harry Potter"?) as though the British Constitution were set in tablets of stone (soluble aspirin, again) rather than a form of INTERPRETATIVE DANCE!
Once again, Hard Labour's MORE STUPID bellows of betrayal come back to bite it on the ARSE! Just as the nationalist chickens of blaming EVERYTING on a Westminster elite that takes Scotland for granted has come to roost in the rise of the SNP to supplant them in all their safe seats North of the
Nicola Sturgeon talks about "legitimacy" only if a government draws members from all the nations of the Union, knowing full well how unlikely it is that Scotland will return Tories (Conservatories OR Laboratories!) in enough numbers to satisfy her test – and as a prelude for a pretext to claim "the Union has broken down; we must have another independence referendum!"
The Tories talk about "legitimacy" being conveyed by what I suppose we might have to call the "Clegg Doctrine" of the Party with the most seats and most votes having best and therefore first claim on forming a government. Of course, the Tories want to take this further and make it the ONLY claim on forming a government. Which is even MORE ludicrous, because they know they're not going to. The Party of the Union and tradition reduced to a dog in the manger.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE FUTURE'S BRIGHT; IT MIGHT EVEN BE ORANGE
If there's one good thing that might come out of this total disaster of an election it's this: the system is just so obviously, patently, totally broken, the result will be so plainly totally unfair and askew from what people voted for, and in such a way that it screws over both Hard Labour and the Conservatories AT THE SAME TIME, that everyone might finally realise it's time to stop using a Seventeenth Century system for the Twenty-First.
In fact, I'd say we should ditch ALL of our red lines for ONE thing: we will give you a government for six months – or a year – during which we will all take part in a Constitutional Convention under a Royal Commission that will let us TOGETHER sort out how we elect our Parliament (and executive, and if we want the one to be a chunk of the other or to separate them like America or France or Germany or, actually almost everywhere else, do); and who sits in Parliament (if we want unelected Lords and Bishops and Rooks and Castles, er) or even WHERE it sits (because they've got to move out of that Thames-side fun-palace before all the wiring catches fire)!
The answer is obvious so it will obviously take a great deal of time and patience to arrive at the obvious answer that we need a federal state with Parliament of multi-member constituencies elected by British Proportional Representation, and a national senate replacing the House of Lords Club.
But it can be done. The Scottish people showed the rest of us that it CAN be done: a proper reasoned – polite! – argument that sorts things out.
And maybe next time we can do this General Election thing PROPERLY.
And meanwhile we will rebuild a properly Liberal Liberal Democratic Party. A Party that exists to bring HOPE to people: a Party that will address the crisis in housing and give people the opportunity to live where they work; a Party that will invest in education and apprenticeships and even the living costs of all the students we now have going to universities; a Party that will clean up our environment, improve the quality of air in our polluted cities, by preparing the ground for switching to clean, all-electric cars (and there's a LOT of work that needs doing); a Party that will tax wealth more in order to tax income a less; a Party that will stop criminalising people for doing things that harm no one; a Party that will put a stop to bullying people for what they eat or how they dress or who they love or where they come from.
And, by Grimond, we might even do it in Government!
NOW, GO AND VOTE!
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