Leaders Bored: Syria, Corbyn and Foreign Affairs as Domestic Kudos

Syria has bubbled up to the top of the political agenda and news bulletins once again. Whether we act or not, it’s seemingly more interesting to us because of what it means for the leaders on either side of the UK political spectrum, rather than for what is happening – and what might happen – on the ground or in the air in Syria.

When it comes to our response, we’ve been here many abortive times before. The short version is, as a rule: yes, it’s terrible, yes, it’s been going on in mass, bloody daily civilian death tolls since, gosh, 2011 (back when people were self-immolating and we got all excited about an Arab spring), but it’s complicated. Yes it’s a 200k+ body count about now, yes Assad’s bad, but ISIS are worse (and also huge and complex – vaccinating and handing out aid with one hand and killing soldiers, journalists, civilians… with the other). Plus there’s all the other groups, and trying to decide if some, all, or any of them are preferable to Assad or Isis is too nuanced and verbose for anything that could be pitched to the nation prior to bombing the fuck out of shit. We would like Assad gone, worded carefully, but we don’t want Isis to take his place.

Westminster clocked up 2hrs 40 on the subject on the 26^th, though. Suddenly ISIS in Paris became ISIS in Syria.

“"That bomb in Paris, that could have been London. If they had their way, it would be London," said Mr Cameron.

[I hate to be inversely unpatriotic, but surely they did have their way, and they chose Paris].

"I can't stand here and say we are safe from all these threats. We are not. I can't stand here either and say we will remove the threat through the action that we take. 

"But do I stand here with advice behind me that taking action will reduce and degrade that threat over time? Absolutely and I have examined my conscience and that's what it is telling me."

Will this lens be enough to push a vote in for action?

2013 gave us demonstrations and a no vote in the commons for any action over Syria. Not another Iraq, we said, Libya 2011 airstrikes notwithstanding. Radio 4 would have weepy pieces about teachers who didn’t have to worry about their retarded pupils (they’d missed so much school from bombs/airstrikes they were mentally backward by preteen) any more (one last strike had blown up the school with the kids inside).

But that was then. Now we have a Labour leadership poised for self-destruction. So while there was a protest over the morality/effectiveness/motive behind Syrian intervention, the rights and wrongs of it are less interesting, it seems, than whether the Labour party agrees with Jeremy Corbyn about it all.

Who’s for and against action in Labour, who’s giving the juiciest quotes about dissention. Who’s namechecking Bolsheviks and dark ages and describing shadow cabinet meetings with all those words like brutal and bloodbath and hell and other things in all those disembodied quotes that always make for cracking news slots.

The former ministers are the ones who get to give the media what they really want. JC should resign! “How does Jeremy Corbyn and his small group of tiny Trots in the bunker think they've got the unique view on it all?” – mixed far left and right imagery there.

“BBC chief political correspondent Vicki Young said she was told Mr Corbyn was given a "thorough kicking" at the meeting with his shadow cabinet. 

“He had previously suggested he wanted to agree a united position within his shadow cabinet and for Labour to approach the question “as a party". The free vote means Labour MPs will not be ordered to vote with the leadership.”

Reading that back, stickler here, but I can’t help thinking that there’s either a ‘free vote’ or no vote at all.

But Corbyn was, it seems, bullied into the free vote, having thought to impose a three line whip to make sure the party toed the line. It seems a shadow cabinet meeting put paid to this:

“At an extraordinary meeting of Labour’s front bench team this afternoon, shadow ministers lined up to support David Cameron’s position and called for the party to vote with the Conservatives in favour of airstrikes. 

Those in favour of action are understood to include the shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, Mr Corbyn’s deputy, Tom Watson, as well as his Justice, Education and Health spokespeople. Only three shadow cabinet ministers out of 31 voiced opposition to air strikes at the meeting.”

And bullying apparently works both ways. Over eager left leaning supporters have been quite free with their angry encouragement/threats to airstrike supporters, including anti-war protestors sending a photo of a dead baby to an MP with a note to vote against the strikes - you know, like those illustrated, 250% opinions you get from certain contacts in your Facebook feed, when young, bright enthusiasm ends up hurting people, or at least their feelings.

Just because the youth and passion for your cause is pure and looks so winning and admirable (which is supposedly why the parties put people like this in charge of social media and smaller party/public interface roles), it doesn’t necessarily follow that the ways and means you come up with to express and act on that young (perhaps green) passion will be pure, or even particularly nice.

And on the other side there’s the rather unfortunate and hawkish: you’re either with us or with them. Once David Cameron says ‘terrorist sympathisers’ in a speech there’s no way of backing down or qualifying who was being referred to – if you use the term then you’ve allowed yourself the easy, mindless motivational soundbite and a disingenuous, fictional polarised rendering of the situation. If you object to military action against a terrorist group then you support the terrorist group. There’s another one of those 250 percent opinions. And see the ‘I’m a terrorist sympathiser’ social reaction.

It’s high stakes, though, isn’t it? David Cameron needs enough labour MPs to vote yes to cover his Tory dissenters. So the vote is to be timed for maximum support.

And it’s a long old one, though. Wednesday is to be the debate and vote, running from 10:00am to 11:00pm and some. Just imagine all those thick papery Few Good Men case studies the young, up and coming and caffeinated backroom boys are preparing round the clock right now. A precedent for every eventuality. These are the leader quality politicians of ten years’ time or so – this is what Cameron, Osborne, Burnham, Miliband et al would have been doing 15-20 years ago, for the Majors and the Portillos and the John Smiths.

Though it is a shame that career paths and the fate of a country and its people have to be so intertwined. Why is a fusty crisis of cabinet aggravation with mildy annoyed complaints from hitherto unheard of MPs to the media more interesting than what happens on the ground in foreign affairs?

Maybe it’s a leadership/ election thing, maybe when we’re all excited about how our domestic politics is going to turn out we have to go for this angle. Any foreign policy stuff becomes about the policy makers, not the foreign situation. So American foreign policy is now rendered through the Obama-before-the-election lens. Sort of, ‘what does Donald Trump say about it?’

The leaden gravity of the situation and the bloody reality of life and death on the ground in Syria aside, it’s not as if it isn’t exciting as an international relations gig, either. We’ve got a ‘we’re next!’ approach to the Paris attacks, with DC putting us at the top of ISIS’s hit list, so we may as well defend ourselves. (C4)

“He said there was strong legal justification for extending the current military action in Iraq on grounds of self-defence, and insisted that the Government saw military action as part of a “comprehensive” strategy to bring peace to Syria.” 

Do we think it will go Cameron’s way? Which IS Cameron’s way, exactly? Is he using ISIS outrage to try and get through what failed the last time? The government and the people opposed military intervention in Syria in 2013. “I get that” Cameron said in immediate response, with clear anger and frustration.

Of course, as with Iraq, where a humanitarian crisis was trumped by terrorism concerns, only to become once again about a humanitarian crisis when the terrorism threat looked a bit weak in retrospect, Syria never quite cut it as a humanitarian crisis we should put a stop to. It took the threat of ISIS for a convincing case to hit Syria to appear. We’ll worry about their territory in Iraq and elsewhere another time, perhaps.

How to Create Merry Hell: An Informed Choice for Election 2015

In 2010 the UK budget deficit (also ‘UK net borrowing’) was around £148bn. It’s now at £90bn (the next highest (hm, ‘deficit’ …lowest?) figure from 1979 to pre-crash 2007 was £50bn). But that’s what’s chipping away year by year. We are still getting further into debt by an annual £90bn.

Total debt, the National debt, is rising and has been since 2003. It’s currently at £1.56 trillion. It goes up by £2bn a week. As a percentage of GDP it’s less scary – post war it reached nearly 250%; now it’s about 81%. It was about half that 10-15 years ago.

But back to the yearly budget deficit book balancing. At debatable levels of ‘need,’ we need £12bn of welfare cuts.

Pensions make up half of the welfare budget, and they are protected. So where are the cuts going to come from? Child benefits! At least we know where the leaks are going to come from – the Lib Dems.

Thursday Next

So what is it? Austerity and those shameless welfare cuts taken to yet more unprecedented levels under the Conservatives, ‘everything paid for without any more borrowing’ from Labour, just as long as you don’t expect a timetable, ‘everything paid for by leaving the EU’ from UKIP – or something,  ‘all the things Labour are scared of doing’ from the SNP,  Lib Dems in the middle, or no cutting at all from the Greens (spending and borrowing, in fact – working/earning our way out of debt).

What are the questions being bandied about? Are they, in all honesty, your questions, when it comes to voting – if you vote?

Why won’t they say what they are planning? Has the government been competent with the economy? Would Labour be any better? Is there any difference between what the parties are offering? Do you want an EU referendum? What does the NHS need? Coalition threats. Would Nicola Sturgeon really create a sort of American cholesterol affair – where everyone’s blocked by everyone else’s intransigence in the House/Senate?

View image | gettyimages.com

Will they/won’t they coalition options. Every leader and spokesperson’s giving love, hate and back again descriptions of their potential partners. Surely the oddest time to be making coalition threats is at the end of a five-year …coalition. In May 2010 the vibe of “no majority: it’s the end of the world and Jeremy Vine’s career as we know it” lasted right up to and through election night. Then the coalition started and we realized it’s more… ‘meh.’ We’re hardly milking fear of the unknown here.

But back then, because of all the apocalyptic wobbles and the tardy election outcome, the Lib Dems and Conservatives fought it out and, a year later, we got the compromise AV vote. That got a woeful response, with claims that everybody thought it was a terrible idea/was scared of it/couldn’t understand it. Though the BBC reckons it might have helped towards a Conservative victory next week had it gone through.

In any case, the polls aren’t predicting majorities any time soon. What is changing, exactly? Has the rise of the other parties taken votes away, preventing the snuggly, warm majorities the Conservatives and Labour once reached? Adding up the votes and seats for the ‘main two’ here:

1987: Con + Lab votes = 73.0% of the vote and 93.1% of seats (605/650)

1992: Con + Lab votes = 76.3% of the vote and 93.2% of seats (607/651)

1997: Con + Lab votes = 73.9% of the vote and 88.5% of seats (583/659)

2001: Con + Lab votes = 72.4% of the vote and 87.9% of seats (579/659)

2005: Con + Lab votes = 67.6% of the vote and 85.6% of seats (553/646)

2010: Con + Lab votes = 65.1% of the vote and 86.8% of seats (564/650)

[Guardian 30^th April]     2015: Con + Lab votes = 66.9% of the vote and 83.5% of seats (543/650)

Well, going down I guess (and they seem to have consistently shared 98% of the seats from the ‘40s to 1970 – before pretty Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals started to show promise and then naughty old Shirley Williams and her Social Democrats broke free). But see: Tony Blair got a majority when Labour and the Conservatives only had 85.6% of the seats to vie for in 2005, yet there was no majority in 2010 when the parties shared 86.8%.

Labour won with 35.2% of the popular vote in 2005; the Conservatives didn’t win with 36.1% in 2010. Welcome to statistics.

And those winning figures – looking a little low? Remember GCSE level history and politics lessons, folks – first past the post can all too often mean that most people in the country don’t vote for the winning party. Blair’s best: 43.2%; Thatcher’s best: 43.9%; Churchill’s best: 48.0%. Welcome to democracy.

View image | gettyimages.com

Have a seat. The possible loss of single party majorities here is not so much about the smaller parties leeching votes. Like it or not, it’s the number of seats that counts, rather than the percentage of the popular vote (it’s not like Strictly or X-Factor where things modulate with the judges’ scores/choices or whatever). 86% of the seats has been more than enough to generate a majority government before. 83.9% of seats was all there was to be had in 1931, but the Conservatives got in by a landslide.

It’s really about the lack of a clear winner/loser between the Conservatives and Labour. 1931 saw the Conservatives win 470 seats and Labour …46 (admittedly that marks the last outright majority in an election. 1931, kids – granny wasn’t even born). 2015 currently looks to be: Conservatives 276 and Labour 267. Welcome to symmetry.

Perhaps it’s the crucial swing seats that have gone over to the other parties and pwned the chance of a Conservative or Labour win – but then that’s what was wrong in the first place.

“Although there will be 650 individual contests in the 2015 general election, the outcome will be determined in a much smaller number. In 12 of the 17 general elections since 1950, fewer than one-in-ten seats changed hands from one party to another. Even in the massive Labour landslide of 1997, some 70% of seats stayed with the parties defending them.”

Because they haven’t changed much it means they won’t change. So we won’t bother electioneering or reporting politics there as much – that feedback loop where the current situation becomes the cause of the current situation.

It’s like people who don’t vote: the parties don’t rely on those peoples’ votes and don’t put their issues on the agenda, so then those people don’t vote, so…

Thursday Next

View image | gettyimages.com

Informed choice. That’s got to be democracy. Let’s face it, a handful of soundbites and bad jokes from the respective parties’ giggling speechwriting pools isn’t doing very much to help.

Apathy. No winning majorities. It’s not because they are all the same. It might be because, once in power, policy gets hammered and flattered by legislative issues, circumstances and all the things that can crop up over five years – so every government turns out to be the same.

But there are differences between these parties and their many, many members’ hearts and minds, differences both generous, clever, noble, disingenuous, cynical and degenerate, and these are evidenced when they plan their manifestos. If you want to make a choice at the box-ticking stage it’ll only be real if you know what the differences are.

It takes minutes. Just run through a couple of apps. They ask a few questions and then give you your leaning towards each party based on their policies. There’s VoteMatch. There’s ISideWith. There’s Who Shall I Vote For?

Locally you can check through your candidates. And if you want to see your current MP’s track record then type your postcode into They Work For You. It’s nice and concise, too.

The apps/quizzes are also useful for showing what’s making the agenda and the narratives and questions policy gets formed around.

Cutting the deficit? Public service cuts? HS2? Skilled migrants? Tuition fees? Free school meals/winter fuel allowance? NHS/privatisation? EU? Capping emissions? Foreign aid? Bedroom tax? Zero-hours? Tax rates for rich? Capping rents? Help to buy?

And there are, perhaps, some surprises separating the parties:

No one should be imprisoned for possession of drugs for personal use

Do you support the legalisation of same sex marriage?

Should terminally ill patients be allowed to end their lives via assisted suicide?

Should the UK reinstate the death penalty?

Should the British Monarchy be abolished?

Answering the questions and getting my recommended parties, I was surprised by the percentage difference between the parties I tend to consider and the ones I do not – they are poles apart. The parties are answering policy questions very differently in their manifestos at least.

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Davos Cameron

‘The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas’ …or something like that. It’s been running since 1971, and has an annual meeting at Davos in Switzerland - a meeting that David Cameron attended this year, his first attendance as prime minister.

In this capacity Cameron authoritatively mentioned the budget for growth that the government will be announcing in about eight weeks: ‘Those who argue that dealing with our deficit and promoting growth are somehow alternatives are wrong. You cannot put off the first in order to promote the second. Average government debt in the EU is almost eighty per cent of GDP.’ The nice thing about giving a speech is that you can put words into your hypothetical enemies’ mouths, and make those words much easier for yourself to knock down than in real life. What about those who aren’t actually arguing that tackling the deficit and promoting growth are alternatives, but suggest instead that they can solve each other – promoting growth to deal with the deficit?

The coalition’s method is to focus first on reducing the deficit, hopefully with the least amount of damage done to the potential for growth. Of course, while pitching for business interest at Davos it was growth that needed to be sold, rather than deficit reduction. Cameron’s sentences thus came out with the emphasis reversed. His government would prioritise growth through its choice of cuts - welfare is cut to pay for transport, and tax increases focus on what people spend, rather than hiking taxes on jobs. As for Europe, we should all cut back on regulations to small businesses: our entrepreneurs, our lifeblood.

Carefully deployed oxymorons-that-aren’t: budgets for growth, cutting back to invest in innovation – it’s not that Cameron’s saying every cloud has a silver lining, but rather he’s having every cloud labelled: ‘silver lining holder.’ It’s pruning a shrub so that it might grow more vigorously in the next season. Yes, a gardening metaphor for politics and the economy – Chauncey Gardiner and Being There. It’s the same thing: vacant man spouts political nous. Everything has its season, after the winter comes the spring. It’s tough but it will get better. Yes, thanks Dave.

Nick Clegg was in Switzerland too. While Cameron gave the Forum deep cuts, Clegg’s cuts were measured: ‘I understand that people, psychologically, when they hear about it, think it's already happened. The vast majority of cuts haven't been introduced yet... They will be imposed gradually over a four-and-a-half-year period.’ It was all about defending the cuts, and ensuring that we all know how confident the coalition is about sticking to them, and to their economic policy in general. On the Friday Chancellor George Osborne told the Forum that we must ignore the ‘siren voices’ urging against the cuts. This is the same phrase he used about a year ago at the Mais lecture at the Cass Business School, City University London. This at least proves that both Osborne and the sirens have been consistent up to now. Coupled with the cuts is an easing of the tax burden on businesses, or rather a promise to achieve the ‘lowest rates of business taxes in the western world.’ Inspiring stuff, though bare in mind Osborne’s audience at Davos.

The World Economic Forum affirms business, tells it that it does a good job, and that, in doing a more profitable, efficient job for itself, our respective populations will be better off materially and otherwise. Those speaking who are in politics are trying to sell their country’s attractiveness to international leaders in business and finance. Obviously the meeting was slightly more interesting this year because the pep talk and inspiring pro-business sound bites had to be reconciled with the ‘it’s a choppy road to recovery’ and ‘we can’t let bankers off the hook for this mess completely’ policy admissions of each country’s spokespersons. Cameron and Osborne confidently offered several explanations as to how the coalition’s cuts wouldn’t affect new investments or opportunities for business - those routes to successful and safer economies and societies.

This meant addressing the recent news-making finding that the economy contracted by 0.5% in the last three months of 2010. The bad weather was cited; it was the wrong type of Christmas shopper (pansies who stay indoors when it snows), and the recovery was always going to be choppy, as the prime mister said. If the downturn continues, however, the deficit reduction plan might be tweaked slightly, what former George Osborne advisor Ken Rogoff calls a ‘slower plan A.’ Channel 4 News’s Faisal Islam noted that. He interviewed Osborne at Davos on Friday, and pointed out that ‘Osborne is also a bit of an Austerity Pin-up for many Americans here who feel that the US government is not getting to grip with its ballooning deficit.’

In the great gamble on who’s in the right over tackling the economic situation those Americans may well be vindicated in their opinion of Osborne. For the moment, however, the British media use a different view of America to contrast with the coalition’s policies. The US government’s perceived reticence to cut, along with America’s superior growth figures for the close of 2010 prove too tempting to ignore. This from BBC journalist Olivia Lang’s live feed from the Forum on Friday (Lang had just wondered if Cameron’s confidence had rubbed off on US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner): ‘1100: But that's perhaps all he's picking up from Cameron. Making deep cuts in spending, Geithner says, "is not the responsible way" to bring down state deficits.’ Ooh, burn.

Whether or not Cameron, Clegg and Osborne did us proud at Davos remains to be seen. Actually, does anyone really care? Does it matter if our prime minister, deputy prime minister and Chancellor succeed or fail in apologising convincingly enough to the banks (for coming down so hard on them, in regulation and rhetoric, for their part in the economic downturn)? Did they really convince as to how humble and sorry we are for biting the hands that feed and drop us a few crumbs in the process? Did the message get across - that this tough economic climate and jobs market will be that much easier to bear if we know that banks and business are interested in coming to our country in droves, or more likely in unimaginative flat-pack office developments?

I’m sure business is capable of deciding for itself, without any governmental sales pitch, which countries to use or ditch in its operations.

Away from the banks, business and Bono crowd, the World Social Forum’s alternative, alter-globalisation discussions and answers will be heard in February, at Dakar.

Bunnies can and will eat humble pie

#99048614 / gettyimages.com

I often think it's comical How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little liberal Or else a little conservative

Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘When all night long a chap remains,’ Iolanthe, 1882

We are two weeks into our coalition government, and it is very refreshing; the weather is scorching, the children are playing and the Dailies are printing pro-government cartoons again (“If Cameron says ‘I told you so’ one more time…” say the cartoon European leaders on a sinking 1 euro coin. Sunday Express, 23^rd May). The coalition’s Programme for Government came out last week, and yesterday our new Chancellor George Osborne faced his albatross of debt, introducing the cuts to be made across government. Finally, the Queen opened the new session of parliament today, and made her speech outlining the government’s plans.

The sun is not quite shining out of the backsides of our new government, but equally they have yet to be compared with the stuff that more commonly comes out of that area. The coalition seems to be a corrective government at present, with the country set to make its difficult recovery under their careful helm. But to get here required a fascinating, if dismally reported, mess of politics and base level human behaviour.

I was genuinely intrigued about the uncertain consequences for our country’s government, now that the most recent batch of traditional ‘bad as each other’ complaints about the main parties had resulted in nobody winning hearts and minds at the election. Instead of exploring this, I had to watch election night coverage that was poised to examine the swings, clearly refusing to allow the already mooted hung parliament to deter the normal practice of analysing patterns.

Irrelevance isn’t irredeemable though. Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night might not have offered the satirized results coverage I had hoped for, but the BBC rose to the challenge with its wonderful, self-parodying boat party. The satire was so spot on that some viewers complained, imagining that the banter barge was a genuine segment of the Election 2010 programming. Bruce Forsyth’s offering was so so bad, it’s funny that it appeared on the next day’s Have I Got News For You (but not, it seems, the clip of Ian Hislop, well into the early hours, with his hair looking pwned.)

Channel 4’s show had some excellent Charlie Brooker comments, ‘Gordon Brown played by a haunted elephant’ for one, but the programme had much more of Jimmy Carr (admittedly I chuckled at something he added to a point about Geoff Hoon: ‘And traditionally voters have been put off by total fucking cunts’). As it turned out, much of the programme’s political humour was kept to laboured one-liners, all with about as much political savvy as a balding toothbrush.

In fairness, political savvy wasn’t abounding that night. The BBC’s Nick Robinson valiantly forwent sleep to do what he always does - telling us what the party leaders were likely to be doing, and likely to be thinking about while they might be doing it. He noted how interesting it was that Peter Mandelson had chosen that particular word in the interview we’d just seen - perhaps it meant that something Nick had surmised earlier might possibly have been likely at some point after all.

The BBC’s trump cards were actually Peter Hennessey and Vernon Bogdanor, historian and professor of government respectively (David Cameron is a former student of Bogdanor’s). They added more detail - and qualifiers - to the oft-touted precedents for this election: hung Parliament in 1974, and what Ted Heath/Jeremy Thorpe/Harold Wilson were doing at the equivalent of this moment back then. David Dimbleby was wry in places, clearly nonplussed by what his earpiece was telling him to announce: ‘oh look, Nick Clegg’s Leylandii,’ ‘and we’ve got to cut to another shot of David Cameron’s car going along the motorway.’

The night was a void in both politics and political coverage. A media that over-analyses the parties’ daily doings - and the electorate’s opinions of the same - sets too much store by trends in voter intentions and perceived perceptions of the parties. Neither parties nor media could explain why our votes hadn’t produced a majority. Surely that is more of a real change to the country’s recent politics than any presidential copies, like leaders’ debates or the bottom up, grassroots makeovers that the parties’ upper echelons have only a half-arsed awareness of.

Over the weekend there were official Liberal Democrat-Conservative meetings, and unofficial Liberal Democrat-Labour meetings. Old passageways - the footprints of Henry VIII’s reign and the Palace of Whitehall - afforded discreet exits and entrances from Downing Street via the Cabinet Office, and made for cracking titbits for Radio Four political features. With little else to go on, the media got even more over-imaginative during all of this:

Don't stitch us up, Tory MPs warn Cameron... but Osborne may have to be sacrificed to seal the deal

General election 2010: I'm still expecting a Conservative minority government

The secret of Dimbleby’s 16-hour stint? Honey

The lack of reportable action temporarily broke the regular 24-hour news cycle treatment of politics. The rushed, controversy-seeking news bulletins that normally scrutinize political stories – where party spokespersons have to deny everything that is happening - were replaced by nothing: standby reporters outside on the grass. The key figures - the party leaders and ‘their people’ - could convene out of view, daring the media to find a scandal to report.

After Gordon Brown nearly stood down on the Monday, we had a further 24 hours of the exciting possibility that the four-day stale election outcome was still up in the air. Then all alternatives and speculative combinations were forgotten as Gordon Brown left Downing Street to go to the palace. The cars of Brown and then Cameron were followed around London in bird’s eye view like the earlier generation of GTA games. Cameron goes to see the Queen, some wag takes a picture and iZaps it to the media – much to the dismay/awe of Peter Hennessey (unprecedented look at a meeting no one has ever been privy to), GTA back to Downing Street, speech, off sod, over.

The Independent noted Nick Clegg’s stated surprise at the abruptness of Gordon Brown’s resignation. Aides had apparently described several calls between the two, where Clegg had urged Brown to delay his departure: ‘Eventually, an exasperated Mr Brown told him: ‘Nick, Nick, I can't hold on any longer. I've got to go to the Palace. The country expects me to do that. I can't hold on any longer. Whatever happens, I'm going to the Palace.’ The suggestion is that the Liberal Democrats wanted Labour to hold on to power, because - with Labour still an alternative - the Conservatives would be more obliging to Lib Dem conditions for a coalition. The Indy was keen to point out that Clegg’s current surprise clashes with his previous comments about seeking a deal with the party with the most votes. ‘It would be preposterous for Gordon Brown to end up like some squatter in No 10’, he had said back then.

Juicy stuff, but slightly in competition with all of the current juicy stuff about Liberal and Conservative MPs being upset anyway - because of the compromises already made. Presumably, if Clegg had had Labour as a threatening rival bidder for a bit longer, the Conservatives would have ceded so much – practically turning into Liberals themselves - that call me Dave would have ended up assassinated (and perhaps not just politically) by disenchanted, embittered and deranged party right-wingers. Now we are supposed to be waiting for the coalition government to tear itself apart – watch those backbenchers.

But then David Cameron and (according to Cameron) Nick Clegg can and will eat humble pie over comments said about each other prior to the election. Well why not -it’s easier to be humble when you’re the PM or Deputy PM; you’ve got a far bigger sense of self-worth to endure a denting than lesser beings, whose self-esteem might be rubbed out completely by a similar eating of own words.

Personally, instead of fragmentation I’m waiting for a good, pun-inducing policy hash up, which is surely far more likely. For instance, the coalition’s programme says: ‘We will stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution’ [1]. I can already see the stock picture of Dick Emery or Are You Being Served’s Mr. Humphries grinning back at me from the Daily Excess - illustrations for a statistically dubious article about LGBT immigrants camping out in the nation’s beauty spots.

==============================================================================
[1] HM Government, The Coalition: Our programme for government, (London; Cabinet Office, 2010) p.18.

You Swinge if You Want to

Shadow chancellor George Osborne gave a speech at the British Museum today. The Conservatives have heeded the calls to clarify their economic policies after they toned down their public spending cuts a couple of days ago. David Cameron told the BBC that no ‘swingeing cuts’ [the interviewer’s words] would be made in 2010/11, while Osborne had promised early cuts. Really this was just a bad choice of phrase in an interview, with others deciding to soup it up to the level of a Conservative crisis. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun with it though. Certainly something Osborne said the other day is worth picking up on.

Appearing on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, shadow chancellor George Osborne said "early action" was needed on the deficit to avoid a "Greek-style budget crisis".

He insisted that it would be a "mistake" to wait until next year to begin tackling the "albatross of debt", as the government was planning to do [1].h
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George and the Albatross of Debt

George was a confident, hardworking little boy. He edited and contributed to the school magazine Nigella, named after the Ancient Egyptian domestic goddess. Despite this talent for writing and his outward contentment, he was always looking up to David Cameraman, or Dave the big C for short.

One day George was walking back to the station following his after-school pedestrian practice when he saw an enormous bird perched on a garden wall. This bird did something rather strange upon seeing George; it spoke to him.

‘George. I am the Albatross of Debt, and I bring you…’
‘Wait!’ Said George excitedly, ‘did you just say the Albatross of Debt? Don’t you mean death?’
The albatross let its wings drop to the floor, slapping the pavement with claps of despair. ‘Look child, if I had meant death I would have said death. But I did not. I’m the physical realization of a metaphor for the nation’s economy.’
‘You just look like an albatross. Where’s the debt?’
‘And just what does debt look like exactly?’
George shrugged, he neither knew nor cared; Blue Peter was on in 20 minutes.
‘You can’t see debt because it’s precisely the thing you don’t have, it’s what you owe.’
‘Couldn’t you be like a newspaper cartoon and have a sash with ‘debt’ written on it or something?’
‘Ah, the sash.’ The Albatross thought for a moment. ‘Well, it blew off me when I was flying in. Landed on a guide dog, so now there’s a guide dog of debt walking around too.’
‘Ok. Nice to meet you.’

With the seabird calling after him George hurried off down a back alley, the likes of which he had never seen before (living—as he did—in a house, a very big house in the country). At least the albatross, with its wingspan of 3-3.5 metres, couldn’t follow him too closely now. ‘Oh I wish David Cameraman were here’ George thought to himself. He started; up ahead in the shadows he could see someone in a hoody and tracky b’s (as the stable boy called them). George slowed. He couldn’t go back, and the person was coming towards him now, hands in pockets—well, George hoped they were pockets; they looked closer in than pockets usually are.

‘Aite.’ The voice was familiar to George.
'Dave Cameraman!'
'Give us a hug, blud.'
‘Dave we can’t go on like this…there’s a talking albatross following me.’
David thought to himself for a moment, ‘ah that’s well easy, just cut off its deficit.’
‘Come here and try it you little twat.’ The albatross twittered from above.
‘That’s a deeply offensive word in some parts!’ George rightly pointed out.
‘Is it?’ David looked thoughtful. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that then. I’ll have you know all that rugby put hairs on my chest.’

It turned out that David’s upturned hood was remarkably good at catching a full load of albatross droppings, and so he ran off home to get changed. Suddenly disenchanted with his idol, George decided to sort things out for himself. He looked up at the seabird.

‘Albatross! From the ashes of the debt boom we will build a saving society. I defeat you with a new economic model for growth, with eight benchmarks:

• To cut the deficit more quickly to safeguard Britain's credit rating.
• To create a more balanced economy.
• To get Britain working.
• To make sure that Britain is open for business.
• To ensure that the whole country shares in rising prosperity.
• To reform public services to deliver better value for money.
• To create a safer banking system that serves the needs of the economy.

We see higher emissions than 1997 - and Britain has just 5% of the global market for green goods and services. So our eighth benchmark is to turn both of these things around. [Britain has just 5% of the global market for green goods and services - and we see higher emissions than 1997?]

These are the Benchmarks for Britain. Judge us by these benchmarks. Hold us to account. We will be accountable [2].

The albatross stared down at George, ‘From the ashes of the debt boom we will build a saving society?’ It appeared to be thinking this over for a moment or so before continuing. ‘Are you trying to say that a phoenix is going to rise from the ashes of an albatross?’

‘Oh shut up’ said George. ‘I’m going home to proof read that.’

Ah nightmares, this thing could run on and on if we let it. Free enterprise is looking noble again it seems—less taxation and stuffy regulation of people that would make us richer if only we let them. We should encourage an innovation nation, support rather than strangle our businesses and welcome foreign investors instead of driving them elsewhere to cheaper lands. Bettering that we could all go into business ourselves. If we all aspire the country will get richer as a result of all our individual successes. Mind you, if absolutely everybody aspired to that Alan Sugary dream there wouldn’t be anybody to serve us at the till when we tried to spend our new wealth. Hooray for employees I say, and I hope George Osborne thinks like that too.

============================================================================
[1] ‘No swingeing cuts in first year, says David Cameron’, BBC, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8490024.stm> 31^st January 2010

[2] George Osborne, ‘A New Economic Model’, Conservatives, <http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2010/02/George_Osborne_A_New_Economic_Model.aspx> 2^nd February 2010

Presenting: the Balfour Beatty Barbie doll

'David Cameron' - Conservatives on Flickr

The room of measured thoughts once again
Bears paper trails of defeated whims upon the floor
Let this not be another

I can’t remember the first time I thought about blogging. I think it was reading Paul Carr that convinced me of the potential, but before then I had thought of writing and blogging as two very different things. I was happy as a writer. Writing is of course that thing that some people do when something has happened to anger or embarrass them. We write a narrative and describe our own part in it with far less culpability, and far more cool, than we actually had. Blogging is that thing that some people do. That’s all you’re getting from me for the moment. Here I intend to merge the two, or something; the aforementioned difference was little more than a conceit, deployed to acknowledge that you are reading my first blog post.

David Cameron. I felt the time was right for me to tackle the subject in some form or other. Though only after passing on the opinion of Jonathan Meades, whose three-part series on Scotland seemed more explicitly grounded in current affairs than is usual for him. His narration is unrelentingly sublime, though the details of his parlance are usually, and frustratingly, absent from your mind the minute the programme ends. Struck by the impracticality of regurgitating quotes from the programme, quotes with which one would have otherwise impressed one’s colleagues or perhaps the odd, fecklessly hip onsite manager of a large-scale public works project, one finds oneself instead mimicking Meades’ habitual, or rather knowingly habitual, use of run-ons in his sentences. But enough of that; Meades was discussing the possible implications for British politics (or rather English politics) should the Conservatives win next year’s election and support Scottish secession:

‘Newly independent England might lose oil revenue; it would definitely lose Scotland’s thitherto-disenfranchised MPs, two-thirds of them Labour, including the Right Honourable Gordon Brown. The demography of the Commons would be changed overnight. Call Me Dave would thereby ensure his party a yawningly long mandate. This tantalising prospectus is less fantastical then it might seem. Of course, Call Me Dave might himself get Boris-ed in the back or Gove-ed in the front…we shall see.' (Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter, episode three, BBC4, September 2009)

Conservatives: now and forever, a yawningly long mandate—what a thought. I remember John Major of course. I can remember him getting a brand new energy saving bulb in his desk lamp, an event filmed for Newsround. That was the extent of my politics then and I was happier for it. In my innocence John Major was The Permanent Prime Minister, like mum was mum and dad was dad; now and forever. But…David Cameron: when he was in his mid-twenties he was briefing John Major for Prime Minister’s Questions, he has a rich heritage, or rather he has rich ancestors, his silver and black Scott bicycle has been nicked twice, and he could very well be the next Prime Minister. That possibility, if fulfilled, would make him the ‘first Eton and Oxford Prime Minister’ since Alec Douglas-Home (1963-1964), as noted on Radio Four’s Broadcasting House of 4^th October.

But that is not so important; Professor Byron Criddle, who noted that Cameron fact, was arguing that Cameron’s social background can no more explain his election as party leader (most of today’s Conservatives have never been anywhere near Eton) than it can predict the nature of his possible tenure as PM. Cameron was elected, Criddle said, ‘because he is a rather effective public relations man, which is what he will be as Prime Minister.’ Call Me Dave: the PR man. While I would not want to repeat that description to Paul Weller, I do tend to agree with it. David Cameron would not, I suspect, be one to turn the public against itself. He would not want to divide us through his policymaking, and so his rhetoric would always seek to offer solace to his government’s critics and sceptics within the electorate rather than alienate them from the non-complainers.

This pleasing appeasement has not always been the case. The Conservative bookends of the 1970s—the energetic little puppy that was Ted Heath (1970-1974), and the adjective and metaphor inviting premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990)—were boat rocking. Their terms in office bore witness to huge political events and consequent tough (tough: difficult and tough: harsh) decision-making. Those decisions were packaged in such extremely polarizing rhetoric, one-sided PR, that those who disagreed and/or lost homes, money or employment in the wake of it all maintain epically murderous thoughts to this day, thoughts in some cases passed on to their children and grandchildren. Ted Heath, miners’ strikes, Northern Ireland, the Three-Day Week and the UK’s entry into the EEC: bit of a row. Margaret Thatcher, the Miner’s Strike, unions, Poll Tax: res ipsa loquitur. John Major never quite managed to goad the public in the same way (whether the political and economic events that fell on his watch justified this calm or not). Neither, it seems, would David Cameron: happy daze, bi-lateral PR, closet Conservatives in the industrial heartland coming out.

This is not a criticism; there is much to be said for the ability of a leader to speak to the working man, particularly if that leader is willing to acknowledge that, by ‘the working man,’ they refer to the working woman, the working non white person, the working non British-born person, and the working non heterosexual person alongside any Collins Gem British masculinity. Working people do have a tendency to be ‘vanished’ from political discourse; if they can be inferred from the promises on education, health, infrastructure etc. they do not need to be perceived as anything other than a user of these services. Workers then have no individual needs or ‘special interests’ separate from the rest of the voting population, and will certainly not have any particular hold over government policy that might be a concern to employers, investors, and, ironically enough, workers when they think of themselves as taxpayers.

The school of thought here might be: why dwell on the gritty imagery, or reality, of the factory floor or retail outlet carpet when you can play on universal aspirations for traditional family values, nice homes with cat-swinging gaps between them, and not dying of terrorism before you can achieve all of the above. Would David Cameron spark the PR solution to such misdirection: Hug a steelworker? High-visibility jacketed Balfour Beatty Barbie dolls? —Probably not. That said, workers are often in the media now, particularly those who are newly ex-workers. As political issues presented to the nation, workers’ grievances and union affiliations are currently sympathised with more than they are condemned, so there is a chance.

Of course, those not working aren’t the same as those who have been freshly laid-off. For a start they do not fit the model of PR appeasement above; few will complain if a government pits the working nation against its long-term unemployed. The latter also have quite a high media profile at the moment, if not all that glamorous: ‘This is George, he earns three times as much as you and watches a 50-inch plasma screen TV, and he has claimed Incapacity Benefit ever since he left school…in 1987.’ (The reporter, in respect of objectivity, comments no further, merely raising eyebrows and overworking their intonation during the entire segment. Only natural, really, considering how disgusting George’s attitude and burden on the hard working taxpayer is). Now the Conservatives and Labour are complementing each other in being tough (tough: hard hitting) in cutting benefits of those who won’t, rather than can’t, work.

In the media narrative of Cameron he becomes the more predisposed to be doing this. He’s an old Etonian, an elitist Tory: of course the unemployed need a firm hand. The populism of invoking public anger at benefit cheats also fits the other image of Cameron as style over substance. But benefit dependants have long been knitted into a neat little layabout narrative, alongside ASBO kids: ‘talk to the middle finger ‘cos the giro-drawing adolescent ain’t listening, yeah?’ They are all part of the same problem. Cut off the benefits to them and their sofa-beached parents and you strike at the medulla of teenage pregnancy, knife crime, booze culture, and anti-social behaviour. The genius of this isn’t whether or not it works, but that combining benefit cheats and anti-social behaviour takes two highly recognisable indicators of national disgrace and baits the populace with them, prior to pacifying us all through corrective policy announcements.

Many are worried that David Cameron and his Notting Hill set of Cameroons (his press officer, his director of strategy, etc) would, if elected, run around like spoilt, grab-assing public schoolboy toffs, partying with the richest, jeering at the poorest, and setting everyone in between on a path of simultaneous aspiration towards the higher and rage towards the lower. Well, Cameron and the Cameroons may or may not live and breathe that creed in the comfort of their own homes or private clubs (for all I know so might you, dear reader), but they would not be likely to express it in their speeches or policies, at least no more than new Labour.