The Ministry Of Truth

Yesterday in Eastbourne the (at least notionally) sole mainstream political party vaguely committed to social democracy - the Liberal Democrats, for those who may have forgotten they existed - turned bright blue, deciding that the best platform on which to fight the next election is “£20 billion of spending cuts and a couple of pence off income tax”.

This is on top of the party’s existing plan to cut £20 billion from public expenditure and take four pence off the basic rate of income tax.

So that’s £40 billion in spending cuts.  Can you imagine the reaction if the Tories threatened that?  (Actually, what am I talking about?  If the Tories threatened that, there would be complete apathy in the streets. Fuck me.)

Of course, nobody’s quite sure how any this is going to be funded, given that the party two years ago ditched its commitment to introduce a 50p tax rate for those earning £100,000 or more annually.

Vince Cable keeps going on about closing “immoral tax loopholes”, but it must be nice to be able to spout bollocks knowing you’ll never have to account for it.  (Which is why I’m a bit surprised Arrivederci Gordon isn’t making the most of his final days in office by announcing some initiatives based on the rejected drafts of David Sutch’s speeches from the Seventies.)

If only Labour would elect as leader a pudgy-faced, pasty posh boy who used to wank over posters of That Bloody Woman (is Mr. Tony still available…?) then I could conscionably stay at home at the next election, secure in the knowledge that my vote really won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the outcome.

If ever you wanted proof that the New Liberal Democrats are Tories by another name, here it is.

I can’t help think that Victoria Helyar-Cardwell has missed my point a little.

(For reference, Clegg had been on Today arguing aimlessly with Naughtie about whether or not his party would vote to “support” the Tories and “defeat” Labour in a Commons vote on a referendum over the recent EU Treaty.)

From: [The Minister]
Sent: 22 January 2008 21:24
To: CLEGG, Nick
Subject: Today programme

Dear Mr. Clegg,

Writing as a Lib Dem-inclined floating voter whose vote helped Stephen Williams win Bristol West in 2005, I was a little disappointed by your comments on the Today programme this morning.

Instead of being just another politician engaging in another pointless game of semantics with another puffed-up BBC presenter, it would have been refreshing to have heard you say, “Liberal Democrats don’t vote in Parliament to ’support’ or ‘defeat’ either of the other parties.  Liberal Democrat MPs vote in accordance with what they believe to be in the best interests of the United Kingdom.”

Yours sincerely,

[The Minister]

from    Libdemleader <LIBDEMLEADER@parliament.uk>
to    [The Minister]
date    Feb 7, 2008 3:14 PM
subject    RE: Today programme

Dear [Minister],

Many thanks for your email.  Nick has asked me to reply to you on his behalf.

Nick and the Liberal Democrat do vote according to what they believe is in the best interests of the people in the UK who they represent.

We have a record of being credible and honest on issues which are unpopular and difficult for the other parties to deal - tax, immigration, civil liberties, the environment and Iraq war as examples of such matters.

Thanks again for your comments.

All best wishes,
Victoria Helyar-Cardwell
Correspondence Manager
Office of the Leader of the Liberal Democrats

Apparently the new leader of the Liberal Democrats is Nick Clegg.

I thought it was Chris Huhne, so I clearly missed a meeting somewhere along the way.

Anyhow, I spent the last five minutes of my drive to work this morning listening to Today’s James Naughtie ask Nick Clegg repeatedly:

Will you vote with the government?  Will you support the government in this vote?  Will you help the government avoid a defeat?

And I spent the same five minutes listening to Nick Clegg refusing to answer the question, dangling in the wind like a pinata begging to be smacked across the head with a baseball bat.

Why didn’t he just say:

The Liberal Democrats do not vote in Parliament according to whether we are supporting the government or supporting the Conservatives.  The Liberal Democrats vote in Parliament according to whether or not the issue under consideration is what we believe to be the right thing for the United Kingdom.

We’ve got Posh Boy Dave insisting that it’s time to stop Punch & Judy politics while his nose outgrows Pinocchio’s and the Lib Dems bleating from the wings about how we need a new kind of politics but when push comes to shove they’re all a bunch of cocks.

At least That Bloody Woman had half-an-inch of spine.

Every day seems to bring with it another Most Depressing Story In The World… Ever! debacle.

Here’s today’s gem, courtesy of The Times:

BBC news and current affairs must be made more accessible to… viewers under a new series of performance measures against which the corporation will be judged. 

The introduction of a 90-second BBC One news bulletin at 8pm, presented by Kate Silverton, is seen as the model for attracting younger viewers who find the main bulletins too challenging.

But the BBC was told that it must maintain the “gold standard” of its news coverage and not “dumb down” its journalism in the battle for ratings…

The BBC published research which showed that “heartland” licence fee-payers, who tend to be older, are satisfied with news coverage. But “low-approvers”, often younger viewers, did not find the news “relevant and accessible”.

The flagship BBC bulletins have already been revamped…

Sir Michael [Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust] said that the BBC must maintain the “gold standard” but news and current affairs had to be meaningful for all audiences. The BBC was also urged not to use words such as “creative” and “challenging” to describe its programmes because they create confusion. Research found that viewers believe “ambitious” means “expensive”, “creative” is equated with “arty” and challenging requires “hard work”. Programmes should instead be described as “fresh”, “new” or “different”.

It beggars belief that anybody with a mental age of more than seven years old can possibly find BBC news bulletins (on BBC One, at least) “too challenging”.  “Hard work” stories – genocide in Darfur, oppression in Tibet, meltdown in Kosovo – are nowhere to be seen: they can’t get a look in because of puff pieces for Panorama, Rory Cellan-Jones And His Amazing Computer Graphics Package and Alagiah pleading for viewers to send in camphone footage of people dying on the pavement.

The BBC’s Six o’clock News is now about as “challenging” as Newsround was in John Craven’s day.  (As if to emphasise the point the Six padded itself out the other evening with a “report” by Newsround’s Overenunciater-in-Chief Lizo Mzimba about how fantastically brilliant J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter are.)  There have always been “And finally…” stories about skateboarding ducks, but really…

For good or ill (and I’m generally an enthusiast) the BBC plays a vital role in shaping Britain and its culture; the fact that it now treats viewers of its main news bulletins with barely-concealed contempt for their intellectual capacity is profoundly depressing and will, in time, mean that vast swathes of Britons know as little about the world and how it works as the average American.  How much contextualisation and analysis can you manage in 90 seconds?  By definition, the bulletin’s structure means that only simple, straightforward stories can possibly feature, and in the briefest of details.

Hi, I’m Kate!  The headlines tonight.  Hundreds dead in Africa – no Brits, though.  Lots of shouting in Parliament – boring!  Some monks were shot in Burma – that’s bad, we’re sad.  The FTSE fell, the pound rose, inflation’s up, house prices are down.  Men, kick, football – goal!  Paris Hilton ate a biscuit.  And there’s a funny clip of a hamster on YouTube you really must see.  It might rain tomorrow.  Please don’t turn over - here’s Holby City!

On the plane to New York at the start of the year, the Minister and his wife sat in front of a long-serving and distinguished BBC news correspondent.

As we were waiting at the baggage carousel at JFK I asked him if he too felt dirty after he watched the Six and Ten nowadays.  “They’re not the best, are they?” he said.  “But I tend to keep my head down because I don’t want to come across too much like a grumpy, out-of-touch dinosaur.”

It’s another manifestation of the arrogant, society-wide lack of respect for maturity and experience that has today seen another career politician (who has only just turned 40 and been in the Commons less than three years) take over the leadership of the Liberal Democrats at the expense of a man in – shock – his mid-sixties.

The BBC correspondent is old enough to be Kate Silverton’s grandfather but has precisely the journalistic experience, credibility and authority (including reporting on pre-historic events such as the Vietnam War) that should mean he is using the most valuable of the BBC’s resources – time and money – to explain and contextualise serious and often-complicated news to a confused public, not someone like Ms. Silverton who, at the ripe old age of 37, is already onto her second career and can barely have left the confines of a television studio during her inexplicably speedy ascent through such heavyweight news programmes as the Tyne Tees local bulletin, The Wright Stuff, The Heaven and Earth Show and – ahem – Big Strong Boys to network newsreader spluttering out news in 90-second bursts between EastEnders and Andrew Davies’s latest brainless Bronte or Eyre adaptation.

Peter Wilby has in today’s Guardian produced the most sensible column I have yet read on the state of the Brown administration’s current mauling at the hands of the meeja:

Personal data goes through the unregistered post every day. Bank statements contain sort codes and account numbers; notifications of pension increases include national insurance numbers. Almost certainly, many thousands go to the wrong addresses. In normal times, nobody thinks anything of it… [The British press] lacks a sense of proportion and its barbs are sometimes ill-directed… [Brown] may still win the next election, but the press will give him as rough a ride over the next few years as it gave John Major.

There may be a lot of meeja froth about at the moment, but I’m all in favour of anything that gets Vinny ‘Light Fandango’ Cable on the telly most nights: I’ve often wondered what happened to Penfold once Danger Mouse ended.

The BNP’s performance in yesterday’s Sedgefield by-election seems to have drawn little comment.

In fact the BNP candidate, Andrew Spence, took 9% of the vote.

It was a by-election.  The turnout was risible.  None of the main parties gave the constituency half as much attention as they did Ealing Southall.

All true.  But it’s equally true that, outside of some ethnically charged parts of the East End/Essex and Greater Manchester/Lancashire, this is the BNP’s best electoral showing for some time.

And it happened in an overwhelmingly white constituency, a rock solid Labour seat with comparatively little immigration or problems with racism.

I don’t wish to give those contemptible gimps publicity but does someone, somewhere within the major party machines not feel it worth lending a little bit of thought and energy to the question why nasty racists can pick up almost a tenth of the vote in the bright and sunny Britain of the 21st century?

Mind you, if Cameron continues to do as badly as this (the Tories have now not gained a seat at a by-election for A QUARTER OF A CENTURY - hahahaha!) it can only be a matter of time before the Bullingdon Buffoon straps on his jackboots and dusts off Michael Howard’s seminal handbook, How To Insinuate Despicable Views In Election Campaigns Without Ever Actually Saying What Everyone Knows You’re Saying.

The furious posturing of the Liberal Democrats following their refusal to join Gordon Brown’s first administration is risible.

Their shouting about snubbing Brown because he supposedly acted duplicitously by going over Ming Campbell’s head straight to Paddy Ashdown is an attempt to spin their way out of the fact that they have spurned an opportunity that might have kept the Conservatives (and that dangerous bastard Cameron) out of power indefinitely.

Mouthing weakly from the back of the Commons chamber will not win the Liberal Democrats any General Election anytime soon: getting some Liberal Democrat bums on ministerial seats might at least have helped deflect the accusation that they had never experienced power and could not be trusted in office.

To see their increasingly right-wing frontbenchers doing the rounds of television news studios proclaiming the independence of their party and their refusal to deal with any of the SNP, Conservatives or Labour is pathetic. The party has spent the 25+ years I’ve followed British politics rightly decrying this country’s party tribalism and the yah-boo-sucks approach to politics it engenders. So the biggest hypocrites tonight are the ones who have just wallowed in 24 hours of pointlessly partisan nose-thumbing themselves. Sad buffoons.

By refusing to countenance the offer, Campbell has also demonstrated his lack of understanding of the way British voters feel. For all his other faults, the criticism of being out of touch could never be levelled against Charlie Kennedy. This is an opportunity for change that he would not have missed. By taking up the offer, the LibDems had nothing to lose and an enormous amount of credibility to gain. It speaks volumes for an increasingly directionless party that it managed to shoot itself in the foot so spectacularly.

In damaging themselves, they have also made Brown look like a benevolent uncle - quite some feat. If Brown’s got any fucking sense at all he should tonight be asking Portillo or Letwin or some other not-entirely-despicable Tory if they want the Lib Dems’ proposed briefs instead to rub in the fact that he’s the first Prime Minister (in all but name) to demonstrate any true bipartisanship instinct since VE Day. (Pedants please note that the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977-8 had fuck all to do with bipartisanship and everything to do with practical political expediency.)

This episode has demonstrated everything that is wrong with British politics and British politicians.

I have very limited internet access at the moment as I transfer my broadband supply (why does it take so bloody long to flick a switch?). This means that (a) I’m in a bad mood as I can’t spend my time surfing for animal porn, and (b) I have too much time to think in between the short windows of opportunity when the wind drops enough for me to piggyback on The Bloke Over The Road’s unsecured wireless network if I half-hang my laptop out of the attic window.

British politicians have been wringing their hands for years about the seemingly inexorable decline in voter participation. While there are many reasons for this decline, I have been saying for a decade that a significant part - in recent years, at least - is a consequence of the homogenisation of the political options on offer. The rise within Britain of identikit professional politicians without any discernible personalities, coupled with the main parties vying ever more risibly to crowd out the others in the centre ground (which itself has been shifting ever right-wards) means, I believe, that the many millions of people in the UK who are (broadly speaking) Social Democrats have been effectively disenfranchised. The Liberal Democrats were, for a while, a refuge but now they have ditched the ‘democrat’ element in favour of more ‘liberalism’, many Liberal Democrat MPs could comfortably sit within “Dave” Cameron’s “new” Conservative Party.

The last time British electors had the opportunity to vote for a viable Socialist/Social Democratic Labour Party (1992), the turnout was almost 78% (close to the average for post-War General Elections). When faced with “New” Labour’s quasi-Thatcherism in 1997, 2001 and 2005, turnout was just 71%, 59% and 61%. “Voter apathy”, I contend, is actually voter antipathy towards the lack of choice: if it doesn’t actually make any difference which of the two parties wins, why bother to go out to vote on a Thursday evening when you could be doing something else instead - like eating a microwave ready meal while watching EastEnders, for instance? (The same argument can be made using General Election statistics from the United States, where it is often impossible to differentiate between Republicans and Democrats.)

As my (reasonably politicised) 80something-year-old Socialist grandmother says, “There’s nobody for me to vote for.”
While the result of last week’s French Presidential Election is deeply depressing for anybody with half-an-inch of brain, at least the French electorate had a real choice to make between two distinct programmes built around two distinct political philosophies. This result would matter France’s future. The consequence of this distinct ideological battle? An 85% turnout.

I hate to say, ‘I told you so,’ but…

Needless to say, Gordon Brown is laying the foundations for his administration to provide a few years of More Of The Same.  Can’t wait to see the 2008/9 turnout figures.

First, a warning: this post concerns A Julie Birchill Column.

The Minister is no fan of Julie Birchill. Although she still produces the occasional paragraph infused with panache, she has barely spoken a sensible word in the past 20 years. She must now be nudging 50 but her writing often still resembles that of a teenager - too many exclamation marks and wink, nudge references to how very clever she is for taking drugs. And the whole ’sleeping with Brother and Sister Raven’ thing is just deeply weird - even for a Bristolian.

That said, I forced myself on a train journey at the start of this week to read an extract from her most recent book that appeared in last week’s Guardian Weekend magazine. The book, I believe, chronicles her decade as a resident of Brighton. As premises for books go, that’s pretty flimsy. Nonetheless I persevered.

I don’t know whether or not I am (a) ill, (b) confused, or (c) becoming a Tory, but I have to admit I agreed with a large part of what she wrote. For instance:

All the people of this country want from the government, via their taxes, are decent public services: schools, hospitals and transport; this is the covenant that has served us well, in our modest way, since the end of the war. But even as taxes continue to rise, a lower proportion than ever goes on these essentials. Instead, it goes on bailing out the private companies that screw up our utilities and on lame “initiatives”…

Government By Gameshow, you could call it; the rubbish lies uncollected and the trains won’t work when the weather is “wrong”, but look on the bright side: you can always divert yourself with a council-lent camcorder for a few weeks…

What is it with New Labour and privatisation? Even Mrs Thatcher would not touch the post office and the railways, let alone start dicking around with the prison system. And at least in her case privatisation was about ideology, so understandable if misguided. With Labour, getting rid of public utilities or, in the case of local Labour councils, farming out contracts to private companies, seems like some sort of bizarre obsessive-compulsive disorder (”Eww, trains… dirty!”), like with those weird women who have one thing surgically altered then can’t stop until everything’s been renovated. If this country looked like a person right now, it would be Michael Jackson; a perfectly decent specimen to start with which for some reason convinced itself it would look a lot better with everything taken off and put back on inside out and upside down.

It works both ways: half the country couldn’t be bothered to vote because the election was like a really dull gameshow in which you know who’s going to win and don’t like any of them anyway. And that being so, gimmicky initiatives are the last thing that will win them over. It’s a bit of a joke that politicians are meant to be the serious-minded grown-ups and the electorate the frivolous thrill-seeking types; voters have never, to my knowledge, expressed an actual desire for prizes and makeovers among the political options offered to them. No, all we generally want is to have our loved ones educated decently when young, treated decently when sick and old, and to be able to get from London to Manchester in slightly less time and for marginally less money than it takes to get from Montreal to London…

OK, so she’s criticising New Labour from the right; I’m criticising it from the left. She’s saying (I think) that it’s OK to privatise everything if it’s done for ideological means; I’m saying that privatisation is, for the large part, a social experiment that borders on evil. Nevertheless, I have to agree with her. New Labour is a risible exercise in style over substance and its fetish for privatisation is inexplicable and inexcusable.

The Labour council that took power over [Brighton] in the mid-90s and still has power today is a very New Labour council, led by thwarted idealists, among others, who in the political wilderness of the Thatcher years mutated into strange, free-falling beings to whom power was not a means to an end, but an end in itself. In short, they became Pod Politicians: like their big brothers in government proper, they still went on about social justice and the brotherhood of man, but inside they’d gone all cold and creepy. Peter Mandelson is the greatest example, and in his irresistible rise from Lambeth councillor to Chief European Commissioner for Straight Bananas he serves as a lesson to all ambitious local bean-counters. They say politics is show business for ugly people, and in not one word or deed of Randy Mandy’s have I ever been able to discern exactly why he chose to be in politics, apart from the fact that he isn’t personable enough to make it in showbiz, which is obviously his first love. Every time I see Dale Winton I want to shout, “You’ve got Peter Mandelson’s life - give it back to him!”

More and more I’m starting to believe that politicians - contrary to common wisdom - are generally less mature than most of us. And that this is because they missed out on the giddiness of youth when they had it, and are seeking instead to have their silly, show-offy salad days now. Swanking wallflowers, the lot of them - those horrible brats who used to simper, “Go on, then, muck about! But I’m going to be rich and powerful one day, and then I’ll show you all!” Now, true to their collective word, on quangos and committees and local councils up and down the country, they’re making us pay, hitting us in the pocket, where it hurts, for their vile vanity projects galore. The dome, the city bids, the United States of Europe: we held their heads down the toilets a beat too long, and now it’s our turn to suffer…

The comparison of Peter Mandelson with Dale Winton genuinely made me laugh out loud: absolutely spot on.

Birchill criticises New Labour for chasing power for power’s sake rather than for ideological principle: I agree wholeheartedly. I, however, recognise that that’s precisely what the Conservative Party did under Winston Churchill in the late 1940s. By adopting wholesale the interventionist policies that proved so alluring to the electorate in 1945, the Tories regained power in 1951 and stayed there for 13 years. (There was no ideological battle within Britain during the height of the Cold War: both Tories and Labour alike agreed with the principles of state education, state ownership of utilities, state planning, state-provided healthcare and the welfare state - the political debate then surrounded who could best manage the services the state should provide. Ideology did not begin to play a major role in post-War British politics until the mid-1970s when the two parties began to diverge, that divergence reaching its widest point at the 1983 General Election.)

Blair simply repeated Churchill’s trick and adopted Maggie’s Mantras - our politicians are now back to the 1950s position of really only arguing about the style of management by which public services should be provided. Ironically, Thatcherism truly took hold AFTER Thatcher was ejected from Number 10, when the Labour Party turned its back on everything that could be termed loosely as ’socialist’ in outlook. I contend that the reason why a lot of people are not voting in the 21st century is because a lot of people have simply been disenfranchised by Labour’s embrace of Thatcherite policies. (It’s getting even worse now that the Liberal Democrats are becoming more ‘liberal’ than ’social democrat’ in their outlook.)

Towards the end of the extract, Birchill turns her attention to Brighton Council’s attempts to flog off its social housing. This is where the ground begins to erode beneath her feet.

Even when council housing stays in the hands of housing “trusts”, evictions of tenants rises by more than a third, rents are more than a quarter higher and management costs around 40% higher. As the chief executive of one such organisation helpfully put it, “We’re a business and our divisions are expected to make a surplus.”

Last spring, Defend Council Housing Brighton reported that, not content with spending millions of pounds of public money trying to con council house tenants, some among the pro-privatisation lobby were going round tearing down the anti-privatisation posters tenants put up in their own blocks. Oh, and to sweeten the pill, these charmers were planning to spend another £25,000 of public money on a video telling tenants to lie back and enjoy it - the latest incidence of government, both local and national, robbing Peter the Pauper to pay Paul the PR man.

So, having spent the first 80% of the article bigging up those who truly believe in supply side economics and free markets, she then criticises private housing trusts for, er, running themselves as profit centres. That’s the law, Julie; that’s what they have to do. The overarching obligation for a limited company is to seek to increase shareholder value to the exclusion of all other considerations bar the law. If the managers of a limited company fail to do that, they commit an offence. Birchill’s argument, if she has one, should not be against the behaviour of the private housing trusts but against those who believe that social services should be provided by the private sector.

Still she probably can’t waste her valuable time following her thoughts through to a conclusion; there are more episodes of Sugar Rush to write, I guess.  Bless…