The first question can only be about one thing: that TV debate. The unanimous verdict is that your party Leader Nick Clegg was the winner, and yeaterday there were some shocking polls putting the Lib Dems ahead of Labour and just behind the tories. Assuming he continues to do as well in the debates, What kind of impact do you think this is going to have on marginal seats like yours?

 Well I think the impact is twofold. One is on the national picture, because the daily poll that came out yesterday put us on 30% in the polls, ahead of Labour. So clearly on a national scale it brings a whole new dimension into the election .We would argue the reason why we don’t do as a well as we should is because we don’t get a fair crack of the whip within the media, so we always felt that with the leader’s debates it would be an excellent opportunity for Nick to get his message across. So it gives us that national profile, which obviously gives us a local boost in an area where we’re normally already strong.  Everybody knows that around here it’s a straight fight between the Liberal Democrats and Labour because they see us on the ground – they see that it’s a fight between the two parties and the Tories are nowhere – but obviously having that national profile on top of the local campaign that we’re doing is obviously a great boost to the campaign.

Surely, given your tiny margin of victory at the last election, Nick Clegg’s performance in the debates is the difference between you and losing and winning?

 I don’t think the leader’s debates are going to dictate the outcome of the election here locally. Obviously any boost we get from that nationally will help, but I think where the leader’s debates will really be important is in those seats where we’ve got to bridge the credibility gap. We’ve already bridged the credibility gap here, but in those other seats where we’re fighting to break through that’s where the leader’s debates are really important.

Now, opinion polls are showing that there’s probably going to be a hung parliament and Nick Clegg has refused to rule out a coalition with either the Conservatives or Labour. But the Tories aren’t that popular in Withington…

Neither are Labour…

Well, you only beat Labour last time by 600 votes, while the Tories got hardly any.  Aren’t you worried that a lot of Lib Dem voters, who tend to dislike Conservatives, will think that if there’s a chance you’ll enter into a coalition with the Tories then a vote for you is a vote for David Cameron?

No, I don’t except that at all. I fundamentally disagree with that. Where we’re fighting Labour, Labour say we’ll get in bed with the Tories.  Where we’re fighting the conservatives, the Tories say we’re going to get in bed with Labour.

But there is a possibility that you’ll get in bed with the Tories, just as there is a possibility that you’ll get in bed with Labour. That’s the point – you’ve not ruled either option out.

Well, let me just finish… We’ve got Labour saying we’ll get in bed with the Tories, the Tories saying we’ll get in bed with Labour: the reality is we’re fighting on a Liberal Democrat ticket.  If people vote Liberal Democrat, for more Liberal Democrat MPs, then Liberal Democrats will have more influence in the next Parliament. Where I think there is a fundamental shift this time, compared to last time the outcome of the election was uncertain – which was 1992 – is that this time people actually see there are going to be some positive benefits about there being a balanced Parliament.

 In 1992 Labour and the Tories were both saying a hung Parliament will be bad for Britain. Well of course they’ll say that because it allows them to continue with their cosy two party state where we say it’s our turn this time and it’s our turn next time. Because let’s be honest, the two other parties like this cosy consensus that first Labour are in power, then the Tories then Labour, because that suits them fine. But when the Liberal Democrats are breaking through and breaking that stranglehold the two parties have on the political system, they get very upset about it so they try and scare people into thinking a balanced parliament will be bad for Britain. Well let’s look at Europe. Most of the better democracies around Western Europe usually have a balanced parliament – Germany, Holland, Belgium, those sorts of places; they’re used to having balanced Parliaments. The political system doesn’t cave in there when they have a balanced parliament. Every time politicians who don’t want to see a proportional system of government and don’t want to see parties working together for the good of a nation, they always talk about the example of Italy. Italy used to have PR, and it was a basketcase. Italy doesn’t have PR anymore, but it’s still a basketcase. So there are going to be some countries that are going to have a poor political system regardless, but all the evidence has suggested that having a parliament that is balanced where no one party has an overall majority creates better government.

I accept that there’s a lot of evidence that a hung parliament leads to effective government, but it’s still the case that for a lot of left-leaning Lib Dem voters there’s a massive difference between a hung Parliament with a Lib-Dem Labour coalition and a hung Parliament with a Lib Dem-Tory one.

Well it’s impossible to say at this stage what the British public will decide on May 6^th. Before they had this debate, the Tories and Labour were saying don’t vote Lib Dem because it will either be a vote for the Tories or a vote for Labour depending on what side you’re on. After the debate, all bets are off. In the poll yesterday, the Labour have gone into third place. We wait to see what happens over the next few days and what impact the future debates will have, but the reality is that people who choose to vote Liberal Democrat will get more Liberal Democrat Mps. Nick Clegg was seen as a breath of fresh air by a lot of people – 44% of young people who watched the debate said they’re going to vote Liberal Democrat, which is a phenomenal amount of younger voters.  A vote for Lib Dems is not a vote for Labour or a vote for the Tories, it’s a vote for Liberal Democrats.

Ok, fair enough. Yes or no, then: if it came to a vote of Lib Dem MPs, would you vote for a coalition with the Tories? If it came down to that, would you vote yes or no?

Well, as we’ve already made very clear, there is no discussion, no debates, no decision before the general election. All we’re doing is fighting on a Liberal Democrat agenda and intending to get as many Liberal Democrats elected as possible. In the Yougov poll yesterday it said that Labour were going to come third in the national vote, now whether or not that will transpire into other polls is a another matter, who knows, but it said that Labour were going to get 28% and still get the largest number of seats. It said that we were going to get 30% of the vote and only get 104 seats. So at this stage we can’t say what the electorate are going to decide on May 6^th.  If we keep at 30% in the polls or increase we could reach the tipping point where win an enormous amount of seats both from Labour and the Conservatives. Interestingly, of course, that poll showed that we were taking more votes off the Conservatives than Labour: Labour were down 3, Tories were down 4, others were down 1, so we are attracting voters from all other parties because people see that a Lib Dem agenda will actually be good for Britain.

Moving on ,the issue of tuition fees is a massive topic in Withington  due to the large amount of students living in the area. On your campaign leaflets, you’ve got quotes from students complimenting the Lib Dem commitment to abolishing tuition fees…

Not all students agree with us. Some students actually support tuition fees. I come across Labour students fairly regularly who tell me time and time again that they support tuition fees. I was very fortunate to go to university in the early 90s and I was one of the last people to benefit from a grant – I benefited from being only two thousand pounds in debt when I left university. Having benefited from a free education and not being saddled with enormous debts, I’m not going to turn round and say “what was OK for me isn’t okay for students today”…

However, although your party wants to abolish tuition fees, Nick Clegg has said you can’t afford it at the moment.

That’s not what he’s said. What he said was, it will take six years to abolish top-up fees…

But that’s a massive shift from what your policy  used to be, which was to abolish them straight away…

Well, we will begin the process to abolish fees from day one, but it will actually be phased in over a six year period, frankly because Gordon Brown has left the economy in such a poor state that we’re almost bankrupt. And just as we want to introduce free child care for children from 18 months -that’s on hold as well until the economy is in a better state. But that’s not a manifesto pledge whereas abolishing tuition fees is one of our manifesto pledges and it’s frustrating that Labour (well and the Tories, but mainly Labour in this constituency) have tried to twist and discredit our policy by saying that there isn’t a manifesto commitment.  There is a manifesto commitment and we worked very hard to ensure money was set aside to ensure that it could be in the manifesto to abolish tuition fees.

Now the Withington Labour candidate Lucy Powell has said that if she is elected she would vote against the Labour whips on raising the cap on tuition fees.  This could eat into your student vote, couldn’t it?

There is absolutely no doubt that both Labour and the Tories will raise tuition fees if they ger back in government. We will not, we will abolish them. So there’s a very clear dividing line between our policy and the Tories’ policy. Now which one of the parties will suggest that the fees will rise the most? I don’t know. But there is absolutely no doubt that both parties will raise tuition fees. I can’t sit here and say to you that Lucy Powell if she gets elected will rebel against her party or not, but what I can tell you is that if we’re in power it won’t happen. Tuition fees won’t rise, they’ll be abolished over a six-year period. The electorate has got a very clear choice between fees being raised whether or not their local Labour MP votes for a rise, or for fees being not raised but abolished. And I’ve signed a pledge months ago, because why wouldn’t I sign a pledge when we’re going to abolish them rather than raise them?

In the last election you promised to protect Christie’s Hospital (renowned Cancer Hospital) against alleged Labour cuts and received a lot of support by doing so. But in this election, whereas both Labour and the Tories have promised to ringfence the NHS from public spending cuts, your party has in fact outlined plans to cut health spending…

Well I’ll give you an example. We’ll scrap the strategic health authority, which is a band of bureaucracy that’s a waste of time. I was talking to a doctor on the doorstep on Burton Road yesterday; she’s just finished her medical degree and I said one of our plans is to abolish the strategic health authority. I said “What’s it for?” and as a medic she had no idea – it’s not something that’s necessary. Her idea was: sack half the managers in the NHS. Now they’re the budget cuts you can make without impacting on frontline services. It’s frankly dishonest of Labour and the Tories to suggest that there’s no way any health budget could be impacted because given the size of the NHS budgets and the amount of bureaucracy and management that could be easily taken away without impacting services, to suggest that you don’t touch anything in the health budget just means that your cuts elsewhere are deeper. So compare the budget for transport, which is my area of responsibility in the party, in comparison with Health:  if you’re not going to impact the health budget it means that any impact on the transport budget is going to be so, so much worse because as a proportion it gets so much less money.

Okay, so you’ve talked about cutting bureaucracy, but it’s not at all clear that there’s an easy distinction between cutting wasteful bureaucracy and cutting the important stuff. Can you give a stone-cold guarantee that frontline services in Withington won’t be affected?

Absolutely. As far as health services are concerned we’ve made a firm commitment that we need additional investment in mental health services, for instance, and it’s invest to save as far as mental health care services are concerned, because what’s happened over successive decades is that far too many people have not got the support they need when they’re out of hospital meaning that they end up in hospitalised care, which is far more expensive.

On a more general note, what’s the main difference been for you between fighting your last campaign, where you were the challenger riding to an unexpected victory, and fighting this one, where you’re the sitting MP in a key marginal?

Well I suppose in some ways there’s no difference to last time, because last time we were fighting a campaign to win – not saying we were expecting to win – but we were fighting to win; this time we’re still fighting to win. Now I suppose there’s an additional pressure because as the incumbent I’ve got a lot more to lose this time, but I think the main difference is that in 2005 we had a lazy complacent Labour party but this time they’re running a pretty vile, nasty vicious campaign against me.

That’s quite strong language. Can you give a specific example of something they’ve done that’s been vile?

Well I’ll give you an example. Letters being sent to our supporters purporting to be from a concerned resident whose name is the wife of a former Labour councillor, who’s written to residents saying that I lied about Labour cuts to Christie Hospital and she was a cancer patient and she’s appalled…

I got one of those…

First of all it’s not written by her, it looks very suspiciously like Lucy Powell’s handwriting. The letter is simply a lie, and the number of people who’ve come to me and said I’m disgusted that I received this letter, because they know what’s in that letter is simply not true. They say that I was roundly condemned by the Manchester Evening News when it was the MEN that ran the story in the first place and we picked up the campaign to support the Christie after the MEN ran the story about Labour cuts. It’s just simply not true, it’s lies and we’ve had to put up with more and more of that: Labour’s dodgy bar chart claiming that we’re in third place. It’s just simple lies. It’s just desperate campaigning…

So you’d say it’s been a very negative campaign?

It’s been a  very negative campaign, but my campaign is about standing up for local services. Everyone knows that there will be cuts after this election, whether it’s the health service or transport or whatever, everyone knows that there will be cuts. The question that people need to ask themselves is who will stand up for local services. I’ll just give you a few examples. When the Labour council decided to close Ewing School, it was the Liberal Democrats who were campaigning with local residents: teachers, governors, parents of the school to avoid closure. If we take control of the council this May, it will overturn that decision and it will stay open. When Burnage walk-in centre was under threat of closure, who was it who was campaigning outside the walk-in centre to keep it open? Who’s campaigning now to get it re-opened? Labour have said nothing. They talk about helping protect local services, but they said nothing about it, absolutely nothing. When Labour tried to sell off part of Marie-Louise gardens for development, who was it who stopped that from happening? It was the Liberal Democrats. We’ve got a record of standing up for local services, Labour have got a record of just letting the Labour council close things and saying nothing. I think I’ve got a decent record of standing up for local services over the last five years and before that as a councillor. At a time when there are going to be cuts we’re the only party that are being honest about the level of the cuts. And at a time when there are going to be cuts we need to ensure that we have an MP who is going to stand up for local people.

Finally, Labour has Eddie Izzard out on the streets of Withington… who have you got?

I’ve got local people campaigning on local issues. They can bring all the celebrities they like, but people actually want to know what the issues are and who’s going to deliver for them in their area, so… Bring it on!

photo credit: imedagoze

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?

photo credit: hitthatswitch

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!

photo credit: openDemocracy

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.

photo credit: Stewf

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.

photo credit: Gage Skidmore

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.

photo credit: martcatnoc

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.

photo credit: bfraz

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.)

photo credit: fabbriciuse

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.