Entangled Alliances

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: 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: 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.

It is a weak point in the theory of representative government as now organized and administered, that a large portion of the voting people are permanently disenfranchised.

So said U.S. President James Garfield, back in 1881. At the time, he was talking about an American voting system that had only recently been opened up to African-Americans and was still denied to women. But if Garfield was alive today, he might well feel compelled to say the same thing about the effects of  the first-past-the-post system on the majority of voters in the United Kingdom. In Part One of this in-depth look at electoral reform, I examined why Britain’s current system is so bad and also tackled some of the criticisms frequently directed at the main alternative: proportional representation. Now I want to take a close look at what kind of electoral reform the UK could have and in doing so answer the question: just how proportional do we want our representation, anyway?

(By the way, as I was was almost finished writing this Gordon Brown announced (admittedly not unsurprisingly) that  he was planning a consultation on voting reform. Thus this post is transformed from a look at a complex, brain-achingly dense topic into a hot-off-the-press must-read. No, really!)

Read more…

photo credit: amanky

Shortly after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gave the following advice: “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.” He was referring to the global economic meltdown, but he may as well have been talking about the current crisis in the UK surrounding MPs expenses. With Parliament in a state of disarray unseen since the time of Cromwell and the public demanding sweeping change, it looks like the door has finally been opened to the kind of major constitutional reforms that have been talked about for years but never acted on.

Chief among the major reforms now being seriously discussed by Parliament is electoral reform – specifically embracing a system of proportional representation. Ever since Labour swept into power twelve years ago, they’ve been promising to change the way we vote.  However, these promises have never materialised; changing the electoral system is a lot less appealing when you’re sitting on a nice big Parliamentary majority. But now that everything’s on the table bar the kitchen sink, (which some MP has already claimed for, boom boom) it looks like the death knell might finally be sounding for our much maligned first-past-the-post system.

It isn’t surprising that Britain’s current system should be facing extinction, since first past the post is, in terms of representing the will of the votes, awful. It allows MPs and governments to be elected with minority support – support that is often no more than a third of votes cast. It leads to swathes of safe seats, where those who vote against their MP do so knowing their party has no chance of winning. In summary, it renders millions of voters powerless and allows the winning party to make a healthy, powerful parliamentary majority from a minority of votes. But is P.R. any better? And what kind of P.R should we have? The answers to these questions may determine Britain’s political landscape for decades to come…

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photo credit: HM Treasury

Last Wednesday, amidst the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling stood up in the House of Commons and announced the the UK’s budget for 2009. If  the reactions of his fellow MPs are to be believed, it was a bit like watching a horror film; albeit one where the crazed axe murderer has been replaced with a boring Scotsman reading out numbers. The ranks of Labour sat in stunned silence, while the Conservatives reacted with a series of  theatrical shocked gasps that accompanied the announcement of each new gruesome piece of economic news.  Meanwhile the media, who had known most of what was in the budget days in advance, had a lot of fun being shocked all over again by the poor state of the government’s finances and the woeful growth predictions for the UK.

Thanks to the current economic maelstrom, this budget was arguably like no other in living memory. It was certainly like no other in recent living memory. The usual budget questions – “how much do I have to pay for my cigs and beer now?” and “why did my national insurance just go up?” – are out and a new set of much more, uh, exciting questions are in:  “Is Britain going to default on its debt” “now their taxes have gone up, will those rich city bastards find some new ways to avoid paying them?” and “is that the average winter temperature in Iceland, or Britain’s growth estimate for this year?”

But what exactly was in the budget, what does it mean for Britain and can we make an incredibly complicated topic really simple in order to give the Chancellor a pointless high-school style grade? Find out over the fold!

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photo credit: HM Treasury

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling will present the UK’s budget on Wednesday. I think it’s fair to say that in the current depression-era climate this will be a fairly difficult task for Darling, akin to playing Scrabble in Aramaic or amputating a leg with a pair of scissors. As if his problems weren’t bad enough, his challenge is compounded, as we shall see, by the fact that he’s well and truly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, the latest figures on growth make alarming reading.  Despite Darling’s predictions in last November’s pre-budget report of a contraction of Gross Domestic Product this year of 1%, the Bank of England now forecasts contraction of 3-4%. Given that private investment has all but seized up, this means that the case is extremely strong for a significantly large fiscal stimulus – a Keynesian style government spending spree aimed at creating thousands of new jobs and bringing the economy back to life. That’s the rock.

However, along with the latest figures on growth come equally depressing figures on government borrowing. Over the next two years the government is set to borrow around £170 billion, or around 12% of GDP.  The Institute of Fiscal Studies thinks that government debt could be a whopping 82% of GDP by 2015, or about the same amount of debt as your average teenager with a credit card. That’s the hard place. And it’s really, really hard.

So the Chancellor is caught between the need for a stimulus and the need to avoid adding to the current levels of government borrowing. Now, many economists would argue that the need for a significant stimulus is more important than the risk of growing government debt. After all, if you don’t get the economy growing again then public borrowing will increase anyway. This argument  is fairly sound, especially when you consider that when compared to other major countries Britain’s current debt level isn’t quite as scary as many like to claim (while ours is 48% of GDP, Germany’s is 65% and Japan’s is a stunning 170% of GDP, which is approaching two teenagers with a credit card).  In fairness, however, it’s worth pointing out  that Britain can’t afford to do the massive, pile-on-the-deficits stimulus package of the United States, who are able to sell endless amounts of their debt to China.

Indeed, Britain’s problem is this:  in order to sustain its borrowing levels, it needs investors to keep buying government debt. If borrowing gets too high – or to be more accurate, if it appears to investors that it might get too high, then those same investors get scared and stop buying the government’s debt, which then has the knock on effect of raising the interest rate (or yield) which has to be paid on the debt it’s already sold. So the government ends up paying more for their debt they have and unable to sell any more. Bummer.

As far as I can see, this leaves the Chancellor with three options, none of them safe and none of them pleasant:

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This week, two memos were released by the Obama Adminsitration, detailing torture techniques used under Bush. This is Sullivan’s response

photo credit: Nils Geylen

I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years.

As Sullivan argues, it’s the bureacratic element that is the most chilling, a faceless largely unaccountable bureaucracy clinically eliminating civil liberties and perpetrating brutalities.  It makes it so much harder to rally against this than against a visible leader such as Bush or Cheney. Although less grave, in the UK the recent story of a council spying on a family for three weeks, because they didn’t believe the family was in the right school zone is actually terrifying, in its sheer pointlessness and in the capacity for something we consider so benign to be spying.

About two years ago, I remember debating with Ed, whether the UK should have a constitution and subsequently a supreme court, at the time I felt we’d done fine without one, but now a full means of redress beyond a mini-media storm seems more than reasonable. Perhaps more critically it’s time we started,  shining the light on bureacracies and demanding transparency from them.

Gathering at Bethnal Green police station

I went to the demonstration for justice for Ian Tomlinson, as I mentioned in this post yesterday. I just felt like, you know, I had to do something. And I guessed in that sense it would be rather more cathartic – for my own benefit, to set my mind at rest – than because I thought it would actually achieve anything in particular.

The statement by the family at Bethnal Green police station, the start of the march, really was very moving, and I’m glad I took part. We needed to make a statement.

However, I think I was right on the second part – the demonstration measured (I guess) 500-600 people at most. Thankfully it got a fairly good (brief) report on the BBC News website.

But on the first part, I was wrong. It didn’t lead to a sense of catharsis for me, just a sense of hopelessness, as the demo was hijacked by various people trying to push their respective political agendas. In this case it was largely the SWP who plastered their logo and website across their banners stating “Who killed Ian Tomlinson?”. There were plenty of others there hawking their Socialist Workers and various other hard left newspapers, and several large banners were on the march for the Union of Servicemen (?), the Socialist Workers and the Stop The War Coalition.

Using this event – a solemn march to demand justice for a man who had died – to push any sort of other agenda just seems to me to be incredibly tasteless.

Marching towards Bank

This wasn’t about “the system”, or about capitalism. It was about a man who died, at least partly due to police tactics. How is that partisan? How could anyone think it appropriate to make it exclusive to their political creed?

Perhaps I am just expecting too precise a message than is possible in a group of several hundred people, and perhaps this protest was extraordinary. But it at least made me reconsider the final paragraph of this comment I wrote on Ed’s G20 post. Do protests work? (Obviously, they do sometimes.)

I’m now watching Persepolis, a really brilliant film – the original French version – apparently the English version isn’t as good (Marjane really can’t sing though.). In the Iranian Revolution, protests against the Shah’s pretty awful regime, only partly down to religious concerns, were hijacked and used to justify wholehearted support for the new theocracy.

Obviously the parallels aren’t direct (er, at all), but it’s an interesting contrast, perhaps.

Maybe I’ll feel better about it all tomorrow.

(Penny Red has another report from a different perspective and highlights an incident I had forgotten)

When did “Law and Order” become just “Order”?

Nine days have now passed since the death of Ian Tomlinson, and in that time, one thing has become very clear: he did not simply die of ‘natural causes’, as the police at the time suggested. In fact, his death was a very unnatural one indeed – and the police are directly responsible.

It’s easy to get very angry about this sort of thing and descend into hyperbole. But two things have become clear:

1) Police tactics are at fault

The police tactic of ‘kettling’ is unnecessary, counter-productive, and unacceptable. Last year the House of Lords ruled that the practice of ‘kettling’, deployed in the May Day protests of 2001 (where thousands of protesters were held for SEVEN HOURS at Oxford Circus) was compatible with the ECHR Article 5(1), as “the sole purpose of the cordon was to maintain public order, that it was proportionate to that need and that those within the cordon were not deprived of their freedom of movement arbitrarily”.

Let’s hope this senseless policy gets overturned at the European Court of Human Rights. When 3000 people are held in an area of less than 2000 square metres for 7 hours, until 21:30, with no food, water, or sanitary provisions, how can that possibly be justified?

Similarly, with the G20 protests, how can it be justified to hold people for such a long period of time, and only allow them to leave if they agree to provide their details and be photographed?

And how can the police get away with smacking people on the head with truncheons, cordoning off and then baton-charging peaceful climate camp demonstrators (who hours earlier had been pitching tents, playing music, and selling flapjack) and setting dogs on people who had been posing no threat at all?

If there’s one video you watch today – assuming you’ve watched the videos of the police beating Ian Tomlinson (1, 2)- watch this one. Riot police march in to beat unarmed, peaceful protesters, with their hands in the air. Then watch this one from the film Goodbye Lenin, which depicts the Stasi’s tactics of violently breaking up demonstrations. That there is any resemblance between the two at all is appalling.

How can these things not be seen as a deterrent to future protest, and a breach of Article 5?

2) The policeman responsible for Ian Tomlinson’s death should go to prison – and for a long time. But he’s not the only one.

I’m afraid, not for the first time, that I am going to have to disagree with the charming commentator on this (very good) Daily Mail article (via) who said:

“Ian Tomlinson, drunk and out for trouble, decided to deliberately walk into a riot situation and blatantly obstruct the police. He was pushed out of the way. He died because he was a chronic alcoholic and was likely on his last legs anyway. The police did nothing wrong and, compared to other European countries, acted in a very restrained manner. This whole media frenzy is pathetic, transparent and more to the point, very boring. Nobody cared about this man when he was alive, not the media, not the readers of this column and certainly not his family, so let’s have less of the crocodile tears and public lamenting now he’s dead. If people want to criticise the police then do so, but don’t assume everyone is of such low intelligence that putting a bit of spin about a story of a drunk having a heart attack will prompt any right-thinking person into outrage and anarchy.”

- Dom, UK, 10/4/2009 10:40

Ian Tomlinson wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was a bystander, making his way home from selling newspapers. The video clearly shows him shuffling away from the police with his hands in his pockets.

But even if he was doing something wrong, that is obviously no excuse for smacking him in the legs and violently throwing him to the ground. The policeman actually lunged at his back. The only threat to public order was from that policeman himself.

As others have pointed out, this particular piece of brutality which led to Ian Tomlinson’s death was not exceptional; there were countless examples of this on the day. So yes, this stupid thug should go to prison, and for a very long time, both for what he did and to set an example to others thinking of going the same way. But this goes much higher than that.

The Met is not only responsible for the police tactics, it’s also responsible for the disgraceful way that it responded to Ian Tomlinson’s death, briefing that it was “of natural causes” and that demonstrators threw bricks, bottles, etc. while police were trying to save his life. And the media’s responsible for unquestioningly lapping it up. It’s since “emerged” that he was an alcoholic Milwall fan staying in a bail hostel. Oh, well that’s ok then.

So what’s going to happen now?

Well it’s clear that IPCC inquiry is not going to be sufficient. As the Guardian’s editorial on Thursday noted,

“And what kind of independent body is it whose first reaction to the Guardian’s evidence on Tuesday night was to call at our offices (accompanied by a City of London policeman) and ask for it to be taken off the website?”

Surprise! The CCTV cameras “weren’t working”. Sorry, that must have come as a shock. And from that Channel 4 News interview, the chairman of the IPCC is clearly an idiot.

We need a full judicial inquiry, and the only way we’re going to get that is if sufficient pressure is placed on those who can make it happen. Protests might not help much, but it’s better than nothing.

Join the protest against police brutality, tomorrow (Saturday 11th April) at 11:30, at Bethnal Green police station.

I want to have confidence in my police service again. I want to trust them, and to believe that they’re there to protect me. How can I do that when nine days ago, a man died at their hands, and they don’t seem all that bothered?

Some more coverage:

• Liberal Conspiracy: Who’s to blame for this accidental death?
• Liberal Conspiracy: So who will excuse police brutality now? (includes lots of other links)
• Liberal Conspiracy: I still blame police brutality (2nd April)
• Chicken Yoghurt: Ian Tomlinson: video reveals G20 police assault on man who died
• Bloggerheads – Why aren’t these people working to protect us?
• Laurie Penny – Fuck.