Cassilis

"the man was never suited to the highest office. It should not be surprising that he has brought the party to a position where he might reasonably envy the electoral standing of Michael Foot. Labour won't recover from this till Gordon Brown's titular leadership is over."
Labour supporter, journalist & blogger Oliver Kamm (link)

"Have you noticed that, when the British economy is doing well, it is entirely because of the brilliant economic policies of New Labour and the independent Bank of England, but when things go wrong the rest of the world is to blame?"
William Keegan, Observer (link)

Isn't this a bit overblown? I understand the eagerness on the part of some on the left to see Boris mess up but the idea that a ban on alcohol consumption on the tube is 'suppressing personal liberty' is nonsense. Likewise the charge that it runs contrary to the principles Boris held to in his campaign.

A libertarian instinct is just that - an 'instinctive' preference for personal liberty. It's not an absolutist position and sometimes liberty has to be checked for the common good - we do that all the time. Did anyone really misunderstand this in Boris' case? I suspect it just that some peoples opinion of him is so partisan and extreme that the idea he might get through his first few days without messing up was inconceivable - hence the fabricated story.

"Freedom for public drunkenness" isn't a particularly rousing battlecry....

This weeks Think Tank Roundup - I've grouped the output into left/liberal & right/libertarian think tanks to help with some planned syndication elsewhere (more soon) but hopefully it's useful here too. It's not particularly easy to do because few if any think tanks have an overt party affiliation and they nearly all claim to operate 'across the divide' - still, I've done my best based on what I know of their output, staff & board members etc. If I've made any howlers I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments.

As ever please flag anything worthy you think I might have missed...

Left \ Liberal Think Tanks

• The IPPR challenges a union \ left-wing shibboleth in highlighting that at least some of the problems we see in education can be attributed to poor teachers. "[I]n the last ten years teachers’ pay has improved and the number of people choosing teaching as a career has increased. But teaching is still not attracting the very best graduates and poor performing teachers are not being dealt with effectively"
• They also carry an worthwhile report on the complexity of UK migration numbers - half of those who've arrived from new EU members since May '04 have now left but I think the Daily Mail missed that story.
• "New Labour is now dead" - according to Compass who, to be fair, have been trying to administer last rights since about 1998. Last Thursday's results have boosted their confidence somewhat - "The strategy that saw the Party continually triangulate interests and concerns, tacking endlessly to the right, doing what the Tories would do only doing it first, fixating on a mythical middle England and denying that free market policies are having a damaging effect on society is now finished"
• Also on Compass Hilary Wainwright takes a pop at the impact triangulation has on traditional supporters and one of their regular 'thinkpieces' tackles 'Capitalism and Social Recession'.
• The Social Market Foundation have an interesting piece on individual behavioural change and the challenges policymakers face in linking that with broader cultural changes.
• CentreForum have a great (and timely) piece on whether Liberal Democrats and Conservatives can co-operate. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are "two declared liberals [who] share a vision of a new, ‘post-bureaucratic’ politics in which power is devolved, not just from central to local government, but from government at all levels to individuals, families and communities"

Right \ Libertarian Think Tanks

• The Social Market Foundation has an interesting piece on individual behavioural change and the challenges policymakers face in linking that with broader cultural changes.
• Reform carries an impressive report by Nick Bosanquet, Professor of Health Policy at Imperial College London on "the fundamental challenges that the NHS faces over the next decade, in particular changing demography, advances in medical technology and increased expectations on the part of patients."
• As part of their 'Invisible Nation' series Chris Skidmore at The Bow Group has a report on Labour's educational record: "The Failed Generation: The Real Cost of Education under Labour"
• The Adam Smith Institute are getting ready in plenty of time for this years 'Tax Freedom Day' - is it me or does that seem to getting later each year? (sorry, couldn't help that!)
• Also at ASI Nigel Hawkins calls for privatisation to take centre stage in government policy again and suggest a few likely targets - NATS, Channel4, Post Office and BBC Worldwide.
• The New Local Government Network (NLGN) has a very untimely call for the GLA to be abolished and Mayoral scrutiny to become the function of the London Leaders’ Council (LLC), the body made up of the 32 elected council leaders in Greater London. This might just have been a Thatcherite joke to really p**s off Ken (it rings a bell you see) and perhaps they feel differently after last week.
• A couple of weeks old now but Policy Exchange carried an interesting rebuttal to the regular claims of a 'spending arms race' when it comes to political parties and their funding. The report also highlights the already quite substantial state funding that goes on.
• The Civitas-affiliated 'Centre for Social Cohesion' blog reports on the launch event for the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD).
• At DEMOS Duncan O'Leary has an interesting take on the relationship between science and politics in the wake of the cannabis reclassification row.
• The Henry Jackson Society has a couple of good pieces too - one from Paul Hughes on why US hegemony is likely to continue in light of Europe's lack of 'hard power and demographic decline' and another from Roy Brown on their favourite theme, the inefficacy of the UNHRC

Just thought I'd bring this to everyones attention (Politicshome beat me to it) - Madame Tussauds are holding a public vote on whether or not to create a figure for Brown:

"When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair last year, for the first time in a 150 year history, Madame Tussauds took the decision not to immediately create a figure of the current Prime Minister. Instead we chose to wait for a General Election to confirm Gordon Brown’s status. Ten months later there is still no sign that Mr Brown intends to go to the polls – so Madame Tussauds is holding its own election to let YOU decide the question: Gordon Brown – in or out?"

You have until 5pm next Tuesday to vote and you can do so here. Do spread the word....

Gordon Brown & New Labour weren’t the only ones to have a bad week last week – a particular strain of Conservatism also entered its death throes and not before time.

In the current euphoria it’s easy to forget team Cameron haven’t always had it easy from certain elements in the Tory party. Cameron’s brand of modern compassionate conservatism* is, for some, capitulation to leftish assumptions that some old guard Tories have never accepted. The need for serious investment in public services, the validity of same-sex relationships and the importance of relative poverty are all welcome realisations that the old guard rejected - they continued to fetishise tax cuts beyond all reason, dismiss any recognition of homophobia or racism as PC nonsense and rejected outright the idea that inequalities in wealth distribution were any concern of politicians. In particular the call for tax cuts gained some serious momentum and was still getting attention until very recently - Iain Dale and Donal Blaney both having a pop at Francis Maude’s cautious Telegraph interview rejecting the clamour for tax cuts, Heffer casting doubt on Cameron’s leadership and again banging on about tax cuts and ConservativeHome on the same theme. To their credit Cameron, Osbourne et al held their nerve.

The point here isn’t the substance or otherwise of those arguments - it’s the line those dissenters took that Cameron’s refusal to engage with old-style Tory shibboleths would forestall electoral success, that Cameron would continue to have a paltry lead at best and would never break Labour’s political dominance unless he followed their line. After last week that argument is in tatters.

Some will contest that making this point is disloyal or somehow dangerous when the Tories are as well positioned as they are now. It’s not. The point here is that those who foresaw disaster clearly have a faulty political compass – their judgement about what the electorate want or don’t want has been found wanting. Last week’s results don’t mean people on that side of the argument can forever be dismissed but it does mean they’re considerably diminished and not before time.

* these words are easily & frequently mocked but some of us invest tremendous hope in them.

Were it not for this little blog the only other political debate yours truly would ever see would be courtesy of a friend & colleague who sits a little to my left. Although he doesn't blog himself he is a regular reader here and elsewhere and hit apon the great idea of a regular audio roundup of the best of British blogging.

For obvious reasons one topic dominates this week and yours truly, Iain Dale & Bob Piper all get a mention. Polly also touches on the English media's ignorance of Scottish affairs and the media's general misrepresentation of immigration. Do please have a listen below (it's only 10mins) and leave any thoughts / comments / feedback in the comments. Likewise if you have any suggestions for posts & topics for Polly to cover in his next piece...

A few weeks back Labour blogger Hopi Sen posted an anti-Boris video someone had sent him and mentioned how refreshing it is that campaigning on the internet can be a lot more creative - being "freed from the dead hand of the party machine" means people can say & do things the parties never could. I share his excitement about that and occasionally try my own hand at mock campaign posters. As with the blog I try and be as balanced and fair as possible but the Brown problems lately have made that difficult - about a week ago I posted the image below to capture the 'car-crash' feel that was starting to surround him.

In light of what we've seen over the last 24 hours I though I'd be magnanimous and do something (above) that might capture how Labour loyalist feel about the likely Mayoral results. Lest anyone misunderstand my own position I'm absolutely delighted that it looks as though Boris has won - for me the ferocity and sheer wilful misrepresentation of the Labour attack machine over the last week or so makes his victory, if it comes, a just one as well as the right one. Zoe Williams was particularly awful in Wednesday's Guardian with one of the most mendacious and dirty pieces of journalism I’ve encountered in a long time - apparently Boris 'genuinely despises gays and africans'. She must have ran out of space to remind us that he eats babies too...

So premptive congratulations to Boris and commiserations to all my readers on the left - hopefully the image above will make you smile on a day when there's not much for you to smile about

Exchanging emails with a friend and found myself in full flow - the result was a better explanation than I've ever put up here on why I dislike Gordon Brown.

I liked Blair and trusted his judgement - not because I agreed with everything but I trusted his instincts and his capacity to reason things out in the country's best interests. He didn't have a lot of time for partisan stuff or ideology and was primarily interested in what actually happened to people - he distrusted creeds as dangerous and recognised that social advance becomes more likely when people rise above them and work together - it was never about one side 'winning' all the arguments. His father was a Tory and he was resolutely middle-class. I think as late as 1980 he didn't know if he wanted to be in politics and it's that old joke about anyone who wants to be PM being unsuitable for the job. I'm still not entirely sure but Cameron seems to be the same sort of individual - again, don't agree with everything but it's about character and outlook.

Brown on the other hand has wanted this job since he was a teenager. He was knee-deep in student politics, wrote books on Maxton etc. and is basically a socialist who's had to moderate that to get where he is. He fundamentally believes that the Tories aren't interested in social justice and refuses to accept that other political traditions have merit or anything to add. He's combative, closed-minded and deeply, deeply partisan. His primary focus isn't helping people or running the country - it's keeping the Tories from power and then doing those things (and that's because he has such a partisan view of the Tories that he thinks that's the right order).The Blair \ Cameron ordinariness was \ is often derided as a facade or piece of spin but that's not entirely fair - it's just a more common, grounded view of what politics is about and it's the way most punters think about politics. That's completely alien to Brown because he's such a partisan at heart. And because this attitude colours everything he does he makes more mistakes - the election debacle was about his survival not the democratic process, the 10p row couldn't possibly be genuine concern about impact it must be Tories making trouble, almost everyone in the know rejects the need for 42 days but this has to be about Brown's determination.

This aspect of Brown's character is often given a positive spin by supporters - it's 'conviction' or 'passion' they say and our Gord has it in spades unlike his predecessor or Cameron (his successor?) But that's not how I see it - for politicians like Blair and Cameron the dense fog of party politics is actually an obstacle to overcome in getting things done, something you have to navigate your way through but that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. For Brown that partisan fog is the very lifeblood of everything he does - it's why he got into politics, it factors in every decision he makes and defines the man's character and outlook.

It also explains why he so poor at his job.

"Of course, if commitment to virtue was more financially rewarded than commercial acumen, then priests would be paid greater sums than the most successful entrepreneurs – and the Church of England's bishops might be even able to pay for the palaces they only occupy as Grace and Favour mansions." Ouch!
Dominic Lawson in The Independent (link)

And worth quoting at length Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post on 'Ken v Boris':

"The candidates haven't exactly gone out of their way to discourage this kind of commentary, either. Though he's been more staid than usual during the campaign, Boris can't stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of " drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs"). Adjectives such as "mop-haired," "blustering" and "old Etonian" appear in just about every profile of him. So does his most famous quotation-- "If you vote for the Conservatives, your wife will get bigger breasts and your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase" -- though that line is misleading, as his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. "Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon," he once remarked, "there lurks a blithering buffoon."

Ken, by contrast, isn't funny or self-deprecating. His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro's dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. Like Boris, Ken often offends people, though his insults are less likely to have started out as jokes. He once called the American ambassador to Britain a "chiseling little crook" and informed a Jewish journalist that he was behaving "like a concentration camp guard." I'm told he sometimes makes good decisions about transportation, though traffic in central London still seems pretty bad to me."

Labels: Quotes

Regular readers will now I'm not easily riled or provoked. A commenter once described me as 'irritatingly centrist' and while I'm sure it wasn't intended as a compliment I happily took it as such. Indeed the only thing that does really anger me is blatantly tribal and partisan politics that ignores the issues in favour of baiting and abusing your opponents.

There's a perfect example of that silly adolescent approach to politics over on LC today - Dave Osler takes exception to the news that the left-leaning Smith Institute and the IDS-linked Centre for Social Justice are to publish a joint strategy on how to get children out of poverty. Dave thinks this is evidence of a political 'cartel' and 'further ideological capitulation' on the part of Labour. He seems outraged that anyone might want to address the issue rather than play politics and then gives a wonderful example of insight & wisdom he might bring were he to be invited to the table:

"After all, it is not as if the Tories – who throughout their history have upheld but one unrelenting purpose, namely to represent the minority of wealthy people that control society - have become converted to anything even vaguely resembling social democracy"

Perhaps because I am on the centre-right my frustrations with partisanship are usually with exaggerated Tory claims about the evils of the Blair / Brown years. But my hatred for it cuts both ways and Dave's attack on the Tories is so laughably over the top that I don't know where to begin. I could trot out all the stuff about Tories legislating for trade unions and public health and education projects a generation before the Labour party was formed, I could point out the massive increases in standards of living over the last century during which Tory administration were in office more than 70% of the time. In short I could throw a tonne of statistics his way but there isn't any evidence that Dave is sufficiently open-minded to pay any heed. Red badge good, blue badge bad. He does concede that it's 'legitimate to argue about the relative merits of different anti-poverty approaches' but his ignorance of the fact that free-markets and centre-right politics have made massive in-roads on global poverty over the last 100 years is astonishing. Crucially of course those 100 years have also seen massive improvements in social provision and employement protections etc. and it's the political left we have to thank for that - and yes, often the right were on the wrong side of those arguments.

But the wider point is that economic and social progress is a function of the interaction of different political creeds, not the prediodic victories of one over the other. The irony is that the creed Dave now expounds, Social Democracy (and that's a presumption based on the quote above) is quite a distance from the one he used to favour - Trotskyism. Having been on such an ideological journey of his own you'd think he'd be more understanding of others doing the same thing.