Chris Grayling u-turns again, on home defence
It seem to have worked out for the cerebral and shy Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling, treading gingerly into the high profile area of the right to self-defence this week.
Perhaps a tiny amount of over-reach? Indeed Melanie Phillips thought Grayling had gone well over the top in ‘endorsing mob rule‘. David Blackburn of The Spectator thought it was populism at its worst, and The Times was equally unimpressed.
The Shadow Home Secretary may well have been angling for a Daily Mail headline. But Tories’ licence to kill a burglar may have been a little stark even for Grayling.
Rather predictably, all this meant that the Shadow Home Secretary in effect reversed his position within 24 hours.
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10 reasons why Daniel Hannan needs a new record on the EU
contribution by Left Outside
Tory MEP Dan Hannan has a dreadful top ten reasons to leave the EU (H/T Thomas Byrne). I hold no love for the EU but I hold Dan in even deeper disdain. This list has not changed my mind.
1. Since we joined the EEC in 1973, we have been in surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. Over those 27 years, we have run a trade deficit with the other member states that averages out at £30 million per day.
Correlation is not Causality. Perhaps, just perhaps, not being in a free trade area with other European states would have lead us to run a worse deficit with the rest of the world. Perhaps, just perhaps, allowing UK Governments to protect inefficient UK firms would have lead us to run smaller surpluses with other continents. I certainly don’t know; evidently neither does Dan Hannan.
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So, We Can Engineer a Mass Movement to Hack the Christmas Pop Charts, but We Can’t Agree on a Global Climate Change Treaty?
The schadenfreude becomes stale quite quickly, doesn’t it? No sooner had the whoops of glee at Simon Cowell’s failure to reach the Christmas Number 1 spot for the fifth consecutive year, and the many ironies of the Rage Against the Machine campaign were clear for all to see. First amongst these is the fact that R.A.t.M.’s angry Killing in the Name and Joe McElderry’s saccharine version of The Climb were Sony Music records: Joe is on Simco Records (i.e. Simon Cowell) “under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment UK Ltd” while Rage Against The Machine’s label is Epic, a subsidiary of Sony.
The campaign put a small dent into Simon Cowell’s sales figures. Last year, Alexandra Burke’s Hallelujah sold 576,000 copies in the week before Christmas, while this year Joe McElderry only managed 450,000. But this hardly suggests that Cowell’s business model is on the wane – Leon Jackson only sold 275,000 copies of his single, When You Believe in 2007. Cowell knows that a bit of controversy is good for his bottom line. He knows that the label ‘Christmas Number One’ is an entirely relative marketing concept anyway, and modern music history is littered with classic hits which never reached that false summit.
So although the Facebook campaigners for Rage Against the Machine were successful, I can’t help thinking that there is something confused about the campaign and its aims. They say:
… it’s given many others hope that the singles chart really is for everybody in this country of all ages, shapes, and sizes…and maybe re-ignited many people’s passion for the humble old single as well as THAT excitement again in actually tuning in to the chart countdown on a Sunday.
In taking this line, the campaigners seem to be endorsing the Singles Chart as an appropriate indicator of good and popular music, when it is manifestly nothing of the sort. Yes, they reclaimed the ‘excitement’ for a single week… but they did so with a seventeen year-old song which was chosen precisely for its contrast with its competitor. That is entirely different from what the campaigners have nostalgia for – new music from good bands, battling it out. Former chart battles were essentially a positive contest, with music fans buying their favourite record. The 2009 campaign had an entirely negative “anyone by Cowell” message, which is unsustainable.
False Metrics
Modern internet campaigns often seem to fall into the trap of chasing targets based on false metrics. The campaign for Gary McKinnon (the computer hacker in danger of extradition to the US) seems to be a victim:
lets make #mckinnonmonday ‘trend’ – TWEET4GARY NOW !!! please tweet ALL #american friends and ask them to help #FREEGARY #garyMckinnon
- @cliffsul
The aim of #mckinnonmonday is to make Gary McKinnon trend #garymckinnon Pls RT
- @dandelion101
Shouldn’t the aim be to generate anger and interest in the Gary McKinnon story? How helpful is all the constant RT’ing if it doesn’t translate to bodies at the protest, letters in the politician’s in-tray.
And it is not just impoverished grassroots campaigners falling into this trap, either. Here is a recent tweet from a Cabinet Minister:
Support #welovetheNHS, add a #twibbon to your avatar now! – http://twibbon.com/join/welovetheNHS
Admittedly, sending the tweet is hardly a burden on Mr Milband’s resources, but its odd and disturbing that politicians and political campaigns have started to relate to us in this way. The idea that the NHS is something to love is presumed, and the campaign becomes about forming a huge group of people around a slogan for a fleeting moment only. Did anyone capture the e-mail addresses of those who tweeted #welovetheNHS? If not then it seems like a wasted moment.
And as for Twibbons? This innovation seems to me to be a hugely reductive exercise, shrinking political debate to a space 100 pixels wide.
Now, lest you assume I am engaging in pure snark, I should point out that I am as guilty of this hashtag chasing as the next person – perhaps more so. I helped the Burma Campaign devise their 64forSuu.org project, which was, frankly, all about the hashtag. And only today I’ve written a press release lauding the fact that PEN‘s Libel Reform petition has just reached 10,000 signatures, a figure that will something only if it serves to light a fire under either Jack Straw or Dominic Grieve.
Its very easy to raise ‘awareness’ of any given issue, but that’s not the same thing as establishing a consensus that what you are proposing is right. And in turn, that is not the same thing as actually motivating people to action. It would be a great shame if “taking action” became synonymous with simply sharing links and joining endless Facebook groups, because when that “action” fails to translate into meaningful change, we will only find that another generation have been turned off politics, disillusioned. The Obama campaign has been criticised recently for its rather top-down approach to twitter, which didn’t really engage in conversation with supporters. But nevertheless, he actually inspired people out of their houses and into the campaign HQs. Did some of us think that Twitter could start a revolution in Iran? Not quite (as Jay Rosen points out). While the #IranElection tag on Twitter has been a useful tool for the protesters and for those reporting on the crisis it is clearly the people on the ground that will really put that regime under pressure (and we hope that the passing of Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri will provide inspiration to renew that pressure).
All of which is to say that George Monbiot’s sanctimonious article this morning had the ring of truth about it:
For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you?
We’ve been tweeting #hashtags and adding #twibbons to our avatar, George. Get with the programme, yeah?
This is cross-posted on my own blog. I’ve also just added a counter-point to all this, ‘In praise of 100px Campaigns‘. It would be great to have comments on that side of the debate, too.
Election debates: the trouble with the new consensus
Serious political debate – in the sense of well-argued clashes between sharply opposing viewpoints – has been on the decline in this country since it was stifled by ideological consensus at some point in the 1980s.
The key problem is that once all sides share all the same essential premises, it becomes increasingly harder to achieve product differentiation. The rhetoric becomes ever more consensual, because underlying political anger cannot any longer be sustained.
So ignore the hype surrounding the three promised Brown/Cameron/Clegg talking heads shows coming to all major networks next year. Not only are the programmes unlikely to galvanise public interest in the electoral process, they may ultimately benefit the parties that like to present themselves as the radical alternative to the establishment.
Voters: Tories are a party for the rich
A ComRes poll out today illustrates that a majority of the public believe the Conservatives would govern for the well-off.
It highlights the fact that, as I said earlier, a class divide exists in the perceptions of people. And Labour has nothing to lose by exploiting that.
In a remarkable snapshot of national opinion just months ahead of the general election, a ComRes poll for The Independent found that people disagree with the statement that “the Conservative Party offers an appealing alternative to the Labour Party”, by a margin of 49 to 45 per cent.
Meanwhile, by 52 to 44 per cent, the public agrees with the statement that “a Conservative Government would mainly represent the interests of the well-off rather than ordinary people”.
The article also highlights the importance of reaching out to the base. Much of Labour’s recent recovery in the polls is down to the core vote coming back into the fold.
Labour appears to have clawed back some of its traditional support since this month’s pre-Budget report. The proportion of those who backed Labour in 2005 and who would stick with the party has risen from 66 to 76 per cent.
That core vote is more likely to be attracted by highlighting traditional divides between Labour and Conservative voters.
Gordon Brown flirted with highlighting these differences today in an interview with the Daily Mirror.
If you can’t afford these things yourself – and that is the vast majority of middle and low income people in this country – then these services really matter.
I sometimes think the Conservatives do not understand that people on middle and low incomes cannot rely on private health, cannot rely on private education, cannot rely on private security.
People need these services. And they need these services provided by the government which is on their side.
Stop supermarkets from wasting food on our behalf
contribution by Claire Spencer
Summits like Copenhagen can be frustrating because, by necessity, they place all the cards for positive (and negative) change in the hands of world leaders and delegates. The rest of us can only watch as our path to the future is pulled apart, rearranged and stuck back together. And when it all goes wrong, we feel more disenfranchised and powerless than ever.
But we do have power – and furthermore, we have the capacity to make meaningful change on an international level. Recently, I was inspired to act by Tristram Stuart’s Waste, an amazing narrative that uses reams of data to put our food wastage in a global context.
In the West, 10 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from producing food that is never eaten. In the UK, 752,290 tonnes of CO2 is used to produce our waste food, and 87,767 hectares of our land.
Personal profligacy is obviously a factor, and it clearly never hurts to keep an eye on how we all purchase, store and consume food. But it is a drop in the ocean compared to the waste generated by our major supermarkets.
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Iain Dale, Climate Crock…
The last few weeks have produced more than their fair share of idiotic ramblings on the subject of climate change and climate science but surely none worse than Iain Dale’s latest pathetic effort:
From one of my readers, Victor NW Kent…
The Met Office has released all of its stored temperature readings “confident that they will prove its prediction of global warming”. Useful.
Purely at random I chose a Midlands city – Oxford, which has recorded data going back to 1853.
Yes, Iain Dale (2:1 in German, Linguistics and TEFL from the University of East Anglia) really is suggesting that his readers check the evidence for climate change in the Met Office’s data using a method posted in comments on his blog by one of his semi-house trained comment-box chimps.
This is obviously an accident waiting to happen but in the interests of humouring him, for the moment, lets look at the method proposed by Victor:
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Happy anniversary Nick Clegg?
Nick Clegg celebrated his second anniversary as Liberal Democrat leader on the 18th of December. It was an occasion barely marked in the wider press which is probably a little strange given recent opinion polls have at least pointed to the possibility of a hung-parliament and thus increased Clegg’s potential relevance as a kingmaker.
So, what state does the third party find itself in?
In the polls the Liberal Democrats are hovering around the 20% mark but that barely tells the story of a year that has seen some problems most notably over our ‘narrative’ and policy wrangles like the one over tuition fees which brought Clegg into direct conflict with the leading policy making body; the Federal Policy Committee.
It was a conflict that Clegg lost eventually although he did win the concession that fees will be ‘phased-out’ over 6 years.
Clegg’s ambition is outlined in his pamphlet The Liberal Moment in which he argues the time is neigh for the Lib Dems to overtake Labour. However, in my experience there is no evidence that this collapse is anything more than cyclical disillusionment with a government that has been in power for a long time.
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Investigation demanded into TPA linked charity
A charity linked to the TaxPayers’ Alliance is being called into question over its charitable status.
The Guardian today shows that the Politics and Economics Research Trust has charitable status and is being used as a vehicle to claim tax relief for donations to the TaxPayers’ Alliance.
The TPA has very close links with the Conservative Party. According to the Guardian, Midlands businessmen said they channelled funds through the Politics and Economics Research Trust at the request of the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
The Charity Commission’s guidelines state that trustees must not allow the charity to be used as a vehicle for the expression of the political views of any individual trustee or staff member.
Former Deputy PM John Prescott has sent a letter to the Charity Commission calling for an investigation.
He wrote:
Dame Suzi Leather,
Chair,
Charity Commission,
30 Millbank,
London,
SW1P 4DUDecember 21 2009
Dear Dame Suzi,
I’m writing to formally request that the Charity Commission launches an investigation into the Politics and Economics Research Trust.
Today’s Guardian says the trust, which has charitable status, is being used as a vehicle to claim tax relief for donations to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a pressure group with strong political links to the Conservative Party.
The paper states the Charity Commission’s records show the charitable arm was established as the Taxpayers’ Alliance Research Trust in 2007, before changing its name to the Politics and Economics Research Trust.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance Chief Executive Matthew Elliott is named as its main contact and the trustees include leading Taxpayers’ Alliance supporter Patrick Barbour, the founder of Reform, a free-market think-tank, which advocates lower tax and public spending.
Your Charity Commission’s guidelines on campaigning and political activity state, “an organisation will not be charitable if its purposes are political”.
Your guidelines also state that trustees must not allow the charity to be used as a vehicle for the expression of the political views of any individual trustee or staff member.
According to the Guardian, Midlands businessmen said they channelled funds through the Politics and Economics Research Trust at the request of the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
The links between the Conservatives and the TaxPayers’ Alliance are very strong. Major Tory Party donors are also funding the TPA. According to the Guardian, they include Sir Anthony Bamford, the owner of the JCB digger company, and Tony Gallagher, the owner of Gallagher Estates, both Conservative donors, who with 32 other businessmen have donated about £80,000 to the TaxPayers’ Alliance through the Midlands Industrial Council. The MIC has also made donations to the TPA’s charitable arm Politics and Economics Research Trust.
David Wall, the secretary of the Midlands Industrial Council, told the Guardian: “The charitable arm is where specific projects are being researched on specific topics.
“We donated for work they were doing predominantly on congestion charging. When there was talk of it coming to Birmingham, we asked them to look into road charging to see what the likely effect would be on the haulage industry.
“We were asked for funding to the charity, which means they can benefit from gift aid. I know that some industrialists made donations through the charitable arm.”
The Tory links to the TPA’s and the Politics and Economics Research Trust don’t stop with donations.
At their monthly meetings, speakers have included Eric Pickles, the Conservative party chairman, Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, and Daniel Hannan, the Tory Eurosceptic MEP who we exposed as claiming the NHS was “a 60-year mistake.”
The TaxPayers’ Alliance has also launched a campaign called “Big Brother Watch” to, and I quote, “fight injustice and protect personal liberties.” According to the Guardian it is being led by David Cameron’s former Chief of Staff Alex Deane.
The purposes of the TaxPayers’s Alliance – and its charitable trust – are quite overtly political, making the Political and Economics Research Trust in clear breach of the Charity Commission’s guidelines.
I therefore call upon the Charity Commission to launch an immediate formal investigation into the Politics and Economics Research Trust and suspend its charitable status forthwith.
I look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely
John Prescott MP
via LabourList
Will Boris really run against Cameron?
Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who I have to admit has much better Tory connections than I do, writes that “I gather that Boris is highly unlikely to stand for a second term: he has his eyes on the No.10 prize and would need to get back into Parliament somehow”.
This will fuel speculation about whether it is part of a long softening up exercise, so that a final Boris decision not to run does not come as a political bombshell.
I looked at the case for Boris wanting to get out for Liberal Conspiracy at the time of the Standard interview. The fear is not only the damage that a political defeat in 2012 could do to brand Boris; it is also that being in City Hall until 2016, aged 52, would mean missing a return to the Commons at a 2014/15 General Election, and so a good chance of not being an MP during the next Tory leadership contest.
Boris no doubt relishes the image of a man willing to tear up the political rulebook.
But there are three reasons why I don’t think he will duck out of the 2012 race – and why not running again does not really seem to be as smart as those promoting the “one term strategy” may think.
continue reading… »
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» Even by economic standards Hester’s £1m bonus is unworthy
» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
» To win London, Ken Livingstone has to step outside his comfort zone
» This trade agreement with India will destroy thousands of lives
» UK debt hasn’t hit £1 trillion – mostly because of QE
» The benefits of being a “burden” on society
» Today’s economic figures will simply confirm UK’s “lost decade”
» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
» Want a more responsible capitalism? Reform how pensions work
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