One of the key marginal seats in the upcoming general election is my own constituency of Withington, in South Manchester, which is making national headlines for its too-close-to call battle between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Comprising a clutch of suburbs not far from Manchester city centre and Manchester University, Withington is home to a large student population. Traditionally safe Labour territory, in 2005 there was a stunning 17% swing to the Liberal Democrats who pulled off a surprise victory over Labour, winning by a mere 600 votes. This time around, Lib Dem MP John Leech is involved in an epic struggle with Labour, who have listed Withington as number 3 on their list of target seats. I met him two days after the first leaders’ debate and talked to him about the Nick Clegg effect, the coming hung parliament and the prospect of a Lib Dem-Tory coalition, tuition fees, dirty campaign tactics… and Eddie Izzard.
The big news in international diplomacy is that the Americans have managed to get the Chinese to come on board with potential sanctions against Iran. This is quite a coup, given that relations between the two countries have recently been about as warm as Pingu’s handshake. But if this article in the Guardian is true, then it seems that the bargaining chip the Americans used to get the Chinese to be so agreeable is the threat of the U.S. branding them a currency manipulator. China, who have been pursuing a cunning plan of devaluing their currency by buying up American dollars in order to boost their exports, do not want to be called out on their trickery. All of which means that America has a pretty high-value bargaining chip which they can use to extract some concessions from the Asian dragon.
What a pity, then, that they’ve chosen to waste it on an agreement over Iran sanctions, which, for reasons put more eloquently by an actual expert on the subject here, are a bad idea. In a more perfect world where the major powers weren’t so cockeyed on the subject of how to contain Iran, the bargaining chip could be used to get so many worthwhile concessions out of China. For example, if the Copenhagen Summit was anything to go by, the Chinese are going to be a real thorn in the side of any potential international treaty on climate change. Then there’s China’s alleged cyber-attacks and scary censorship of the internet, which has led to Google basically abandoning it. And of course there’s China’s awful human rights record and habit of sticking their fingers in their ears and going LALALA when it comes to the issue of Tibet, not to mention their habit of trading with and selling arms to the likes of Sudan, Zimbabwe and other friendly African dictatorships. The list goes on. And on.
So there are many useful concessions America could have squeezed out of China. Instead they wasted what is quite a potent threat on more pointless and counter-productive posturing on Iran. Great. Obama’s had a good couple of weeks on the domestic and international scene, but for me this hits a real sour note. China is going to be a big problem in the next few years and it seems America just threw away an excellent bargaining chip. The question is, how many more does it have up its sleeve?
In yesterday’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins complained that none of the major UK parties are attacking the Chancellor Alistair Darling’s decision to bail out the banks in 2008. After watching Tuesday’s Chancellors debate, Jenkins was left wishing for some “good old Labour blood and guts”, someone who could say to the would-be Chancellors:
“You blew it! When those petrified, knock-kneed smoothies from the City came pleading for help, you caved in and gave them the people’s money. You panicked, you bunch of creeps.”
Now I’m all for a bit of bank-hating, and I agree it’s important to stand up to any ”petrified, knock-kneed smoothies” that come your way (has there ever been a better description of bankers in the credit crunch?) and I definitely agree with Jenkins when he says that the better option would have been to nationalise the banks, not bail them out, but the idea that a better option would also have been to let the banks fail isn’t left wing, it’s just wrong. And it’s particularly wrong to say this:
Of course we shall never know what the world would be like today had Darling reacted differently in 2008. It could hardly have been worse. Some scenarios, such as just letting the banks fail, are undeniably hairy, though the global market in finance is astonishingly resilient and would, by now, probably be picking up the pieces and getting back to normal. America still eats and breathes, despite the failure of Lehman Brothers.
Wow. Saying that America still eats and breathes despite the failure of Lehman Brothers is like saying that Dick Cheney still lives and breathes after his heart attack. Technically true, but avoiding the minor detail of the triple-heart bypass in between. The crash of investment bank Lehman Brothers started the credit crunch proper and almost brought the world’s financial markets to their knees. Its collapse sent waves of panic through the markets, causing investors to try and dump all their dodgy financial products, which simply made the crisis worse. The mistake of the US government was to assume that the financial markets could cope with the failure of Lehman Brothers, and it learnt its lesson by bailing out all the other massive banks that needed help, and in doing so (narrowly) averted the complete collapse of America’s banking system
If Darling had let banks like RBS fail instead of bailing them out, then Britain might have had its own mini Lehman Brothers crisis. Jenkins says “it could have hardly have been worse”, but it really could have. At least we still have a functioning banking system. Obviously this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still be angry about the respective parties’ current approach to the banks - no-one seems to be willing to make the banks pay for the mess they created, and no-one is taking the steps necessary to stop it happening again - but venting this anger by wishing that we’d just told the bankers to, uh, go collapse themselves instead of bailing them out is not admirably Old Labour, it’s just silly.
In UK election news, the Liberal Democrats have a clever new campaign that’s attacking both Labour and the Conservatives through the use of fake ads for a fake party, the “Labservatives”. From the Guardian:
The Labservatives use the slogan “For more of the same”, and has a logo of a scribbled tree sitting on top of a rose stem.
The outdoor ads feature a number of different headlines placed on a purple background, which merges Labour’s red and Conservative’s blue.
Headlines include: “Scandal. Recession. War. There’s no substitute for experience,” “You might not trust us but at least you know us,” and “We’ve had 65 years to get it right. So what’s another five?”
This is quirky and inventive and it’s no surprise that the Ad agency behind it is claiming to have been inspired by the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that Barack Obama used in his campaign stateside. But is it effective? I don’t think so. It suffers from the one thing you don’t want in an election campaign: too many messages. Look at all the points it’s trying to get across: Labour are the same as the Conservatives… They are both rubbish… Together, they’ve been in power for ages… They have a lot of experience, but since they’re rubbish this experience is actually a bad thing… They’ve had ages to get it right, but have only given us war and recession instead…
Great for a speech, not so good for a poster campaign. But to be fair, this isn’t really a creative fault. It’s a result of the ridiculously tricky situation that the Lib Dems, as the third party in a two-and-a-half party system, find themself in. On the one hand, they obviously need to attack the government, but they also have to make sure that those attacks don’t send voters into the arms of the Tories. In electoral terms, they are hindered by our brain-meltingly mental first-past-the-post voting system which means that while their candidates face mostly Labour opposition in the North of England, in the South they are mainly up against Tories. This means they are having to attack two flanks at the same time, and it makes electoral messaging very difficult.
Nice idea though!
On BBC’s Question Time this week the former editor of The Sun, Kalvin MacKenzie, made reference to a decision he didn’t like by the European Court of Human Rights, and noted that “if there wasn’t a good enough reason for leaving Europe, that was a good enough reason for me.”
All well and good, but as the Chairman David Dimbleby pointed out the ECHR is a completely separate entity from the European Union. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The European Court of Human Rights is the court that rules on the European Convention of Human Rights, which is a treaty that was signed by most European Countries in 1953, before the forerunner to the EU even existed. Norway, for example, is a signatory to the Convention, even though Norway is not and never has been in the EU.
Now most people in Britain would probably make the same mistake as Kalvin. And that’s not surprising; very few people in Britain know anything about the basic structure of the EU. We just don’t give a shit. But most people aren’t Kalvin MacKenzie. I find it pretty scary that the ex-editor of Britain’s biggest tabloid doesn’t know the difference between the the ECHR and the EU. No wonder tabloid coverage of Europe sounds like it comes from a bizarre parallel dimension.
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that Iran has its own agenda in Afghanistan, but U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates seems to be cross about it anyway. From the Guardian:
It must have felt very uncomfortable for President Hamid Karzai to have his guest and “brother”, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, use a press conference in Kabul to attack Afghanistan’s main donor and ally, the United States. “They themselves created terrorists and now they’re saying that they are fighting terrorists,” said Ahmadinejad, accusing the US of playing a “double game” in Afghanistan.
Ahmadinejad was in fact returning a compliment by the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, who only hours earlier had accused Tehran of “playing a double game” of offering friendship to the Afghan government while at the same time giving “low-level support” and money to the Taliban.
Of course Iran is playing a double game, though as the article points out it’s not actually the Taliban that Iran are likely to be funding but instead anti-Taliban warlords. But in any event Iran shares a border with Afghanistan – a fact that someone should remind Robert Gates of – so obviously Iran are going to want to fund the various factions that might at some point take control of the country, so that whatever the future holds for its government Iran has some influence over it. An even more obvious point is that Iran are hardly going to ignore the fact that there are American soldiers prowling round the Iran-Afghahnistan border and since the relationship between Iran and America is not exactly tip-top, they’re probably going to want to make sure they have some connections in that area.
One lesson from this is that U.S. Defence Secretaries say silly things. The more important point though is that so many of the clashes the U.S. has with Iran are a result of the deep fear and suspicion of what America has in store for it in terms of military intervention. If you’re going to sort out the relationship between the two countries, you’ve got to do something about that.
Glenn Beck is a popular right-wing TV show host on America’s Fox News Network. Geert Wilders is an increasingly popular right-wing Dutch politician who’s been making waves in the UK recently. Beck should be praising Wilders, right? Wrong! Here’s what Beck said on his show the other day:
Also, you have far right Dutch M.P. Geert Wilders. Last year, he was banned from the U.K. They said his presence could threaten community harmony and therefore public safety. Last week, not only was he allowed into England, he was at the House of Lords, where he screened a film on the Quran.
The right and left are growing again in Europe. The left — listen carefully — the left in Europe is communism. The right is fascism, in Europe.
What’s particularly strange about Beck attacking Wilders is that the controversy Beck is referring to has caused the Dutch M.P to become, in his eyes at least, a cause celebre for freedom of speech. And since part of Beck’s whole schtick is standing up for American freedom – government is bad etc – he should be all about free speech.
It would be easy to dismiss this as Beck being, well, Beck. This is after all a guy who boiled a frog alive on TV. But there’s a deeper point here, which is that American right-wing pundits like Beck really have a problem nailing down their belief system. Basially their dilemma is this: they hate government, and so like to compare any government action to socialism. To make socialism even scarier it gets slandered with comparisons to the Nazis (National Socialism and all that). But the Nazis were also fascists. So, in Beck’s addled mind, any European who’s been labelled with the “fascist” title has to be criticised in order to support the whole “we don’t want America to become all scary socialist like Europe” theme.
Ideological incoherence at its very, very worst.
With the UK’s general election less than two months away, it’s looking pretty likely that the winning party won’t get an overall majority, which will result in a “hung parliament”. Now the conventional wisdom on hung parliaments is that they lead to either a weak minority government or a weak coalition majority, which is bad for the country and leads to very scary things.
But putting aside the argument that Thatcher’s and Blair’s huge majorities haven’t exactly been a massive boon to the country, how do other nations with “weak” government fare? The following are the some of the countries that are above the UK in terms of GDP per capita, alongside the type of government they currently have:
- Denmark - Three party coalition
- Sweden - Four party coalition
- Norway – Three party coalition
- Canada- Minority government
- Austria – Two party coalition
- Ireland – Two party coalition
- Switzerland- Four party coalition
- Netherlands – Three party coalition
- Belgium- Billion party coalition
Now, there are some problems with my use of “GDP per capita” as a measurement of how well a country’s government is doing. But it does show that a hung parliament is not an inherently disastrous thing for a country. And the fact is that you can take almost any general measure of a country’s success – income equality, living standards, happiness levels, life expectancy – and almost all of the above countries would still give the UK a good thrashing.
But the conventional wisdom is that a hung parliament is a BAD thing, so, you know, whatever.
The Parliamentary Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport – a body in dire need of a good acronym- has just released its eagerly awaited (by me, anyway) report on the press. The report is making headlines for its conclusion that senior executives at the News of the World concealed the truth over the paper’s illegal-phone-hacking scandal, something which could spell serious trouble for Rupert Murdoch’s paper if a judicial inquiry is launched. But just as important,though not as sexy, is its condemnation of the Press Complaints Commission as “toothless”.
The PCC is the watchdog of the press, and it’s really not very good. It’s not very good because it’s a rare example of self-regulation. In other words, it’s funded by the press, staffed by the press and the code of behaviour with which it judges complaints is one the press voluntarily agrees to abide by. It has no legal powers to punish anyone, which doesn’t really matter anyway since with the amount of powerful paper editors it has on its various boards, it rarely makes a damning judgement on the press.
So it was no surprise when the PCC concluded back in November that, despite new evidence to the contrary produced by The Guardian over the summer, there had been no further phone hacking at the News of the World other than the “rotten apple” Clive Goodman, who was jailed back in 2007. The Select Committee hammers the PCC for this report, calling its conclusions “simplistic and surprising” which is committee-speak for bloody useless. It would be nice to think that this will spur some action to give the watchdog a new set of teeth. The only way to do this is to scrap it and make it a statutory body, like Ofcom or the BBC trust. Still independent, but with a functioning pair of cojones.
But the truth is that no-one wants to reform the Press Complaints Commission, so it won’t get reformed. The press don’t want to reform it because they don’t want a system that interferes with their ability to make as much money as possible. Parliament don’t want to reform it because they are terrified by the press. Both main party leaders have too much invested in their relationship with Rupert Murdoch to try and do anything about it.
See how it all works? Today’s report might make Murdoch take a hit, but it won’t do a thing to Britain’s worst watchdog.
(The full report can be found here.)
David Davis, ex Conservative MP, was on the Andrew Marr Show this morning and had this to say about the Tories’ chances at the upcoming general election:
“If we’re coming up to the election and we don’t show a clear lead, the financial markets are going to respond. The pound will fall, people will talk about our credit rating… The biggest financial wake up call to the electorate you’re ever likely to see.
The markets hate indecision. And it is said… I’m not in a position to judge… but it is said that they’ve already allowed for a tory victory in our credit rating. We wouldn’t have our credit rating if the markets didn’t think there was going to be a tory victory.”
Now, just like David Davis, I’m not in a position to judge the calculations of the bond markets, though I will say that this idea that the people investing in our debt are a group of all-knowing political sages ready to punish us if we commit to anything other than Tory-style severe cuts is getting a little wearisome.
But it seems to me pretty obvious that this kind of thing is pretty offensive and not the kind of theory that you’d want to parade around too much. I mean, think about it. What Davis is essentially saying is that the public should base their vote not on the unemployment rate or the state of the economy or the respective parties’ manifestos but on the beliefs of a group of people effectively holding a gun to the UK’s head. And let’s not forget that these are the same people (hedge funds etc) who until recently were busy helping to flush the global economy down the toilet.
When you’re being held hostage, it’s probably best not to gloat about it.
