Anti-hunting group spends £150k slamming Cameron
A series of full-page adverts is being taken out in national newspapers tomorrow warning that a vote for David Cameron will risk the fox hunting ban being overturned.
The £150,000 campaign has been launched by the UK animal welfare group PAL (Political Animal Lobby) and its founder Welshman Brian Davies in a last minute bid to sway floating voters and draw attention to Cameron’s pro-hunting stance.
Davies said:
If anyone is undecided I implore them to not vote for a candidate whose leader lacks compassion. This election is too close to call and animal loving voters can have a real impact. Undecided voters have the power to decide the next government, so our campaign could be critical.
There is also every possibility of a hung parliament and incoming MPs should be aware that any attempt to reintroduce hunting with dogs will be a head on battle against the vast majority of the British public.
The advert will appear in seven national newspapers (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, Express, Mirror, Star) and the London Evening Standard.
It shows a fox with an election rosette that states ‘Help Me’. See the ad here
At the time public opinion polls showed that more than 70 per cent of the public supported the ban.
From a press release
Video & pics from anti-tabloid flashmob today
Today we held an impromptu flashmob in central London, on Parliament Square, to take a little stand against right-wing press smears.
Update: ITN News did a short piece on the flashmob too!
Here’s another video (with me looking very shabby and unshaved early on)
Thanks to John Innit for the video. Also at @johninnit
Here are some pictures I took. Thanks to all the people who turned up!
(don’t worry, the newspapers were recycled).
A picture by Paul Hilder:
Gerrymandering – change Tories can believe in
On Friday, I received an offer of a ‘contract’ from David Cameron – on which I think I’ll pass.
I don’t make a habit of agreeing to anything that doesn’t set out the payment terms in full and, as ‘contracts’ go, this one’s pretty risible, especially when it comes to the Tory’s offer to ‘change’ politics, which is desperately short on substance, if rather longer on blatant self-interest and gerrymandering:
If you elect a Conservative government on 6 May, we will:
1. Give you the right to sack your MP, so you don’t have to wait for an election to get rid of politicians who are guilty of misconduct.
2. Cut the number of MPs by ten per cent, and cut the subsidies and perks for politicians.
3. Cut ministers’ pay by five per cent, and freeze it for five years.
4. Give local communities the power to take charge of the local planning system and vote on excessive council tax rises.
5. Make government transparent, publishing every item of government spending over £25,000, all government contracts, and all local council spending over £500.
Okay, so let’s run through the list and give it a light fisking.
Recall elections… are, as promised here, a meaningless piece of political theatre.
To cut right through the bullshit, MPs aren’t going to back a system under which they could face a recall ballot for anything other than the most serious acts of misconduct – and if an MP behaves that badly then why fanny around with recall ballots when they could simply be impeached and barred from public office.
Recall ballots could be a good way of dealing MPs who turn out to be lazy, stupid and/or incompetent, but that’s not what’s on offer here, and that makes this a worthless proposal.
I’ll come back to the proposal to cut the number of MPs at the end and skip on to the plan to cut Ministerial pay by 5% and then freeze it for the next five years, which is a non-offer from the Tories when you consider that, back in 2008, the then-Shadow Cabinet were estimated to be worth almost £60 million – and that’s without taking into account the Cameron family’s future expectations and the sizeable inheritances to come from both sides of the family.
For some of the current Shadow Cabinet, particularly David Cameron, a Ministerial pay cut/freeze is loose change compared to what they’ll gain from their Inheritance Tax plans.
At first sight, giving local communities the “power to take charge of the local planning system” looks like a NIMBY’s charter. However, if you look at the detail of what’s actually in the Tory manifesto you’ll find that ‘offer’ includes a hefty dose of bait and switch.
Local people may get more of a say in the creation of local development plans but, because the Tories are also planning to amend the ‘Use Classes Order’ to allow buildings to be used for any purpose allowed in the local plan, they’ll also be losing most of their rights to object to specific business developments.
If you’re at all concerned that your local High Street is being overrun with charity shops, letting agents or fast food outlets then you can more or less forget about using the planning system to do anything about it, if the Tories get in, unless your prepared to spend days, if not weeks, drawing up local plans in the minutest and most exacting of details.
The right to vote against excessive council tax rises does nothing whatsoever to devolve any real power to local people. Central government will still determine the amount of formula grant given to local authorities, which makes up the vast bulk of their income, and will also decide what does and does not count as ‘excessive’ when it comes to council tax rises.
What this would actually do is hand the Tories, in government, a means of effectively rate-capping councils without getting their own hands dirty and taking the heat for the negative impact that has on local services.
Before going back to the proposal to cut the overall number of MPs in Westminster, we should deal with the proposal to publish “every item of government spending over £25,000, all government contracts, and all local council spending over £500″.
As good as this might sound on paper, the fact is that the Tories have been hawking this idea around for the last couple of years and yet, even now, appear incapable of putting any ballpark costs to the project let alone any real detail. That doesn’t inspire any confidence, least of all when you find that the Tories are still, hypocritically, pitching the line that they’ll publish everything despite having already admitted that defence and security service contracts will be excluded from the system.
If you’re going to put up proposals about transparency and open government, you really should make the effort to ensure that you communicate those proposals openly to the electorate without leaving out any important details.
Last, and definitely least in terms of offering any real political change, we come to the ‘offer’ to cut the number of MPs by ten per cent, which is being pitched as a cost-saving measure but which would also, conveniently, gerrymander the electoral system in the Tory’s favour.
The ‘how’ of this can be readily figured out if you take the time to read this paper by Johnson et al, which looks at the issues of disproportionality and bias in the results of the 2005 General Election, particularly if you pay close attention to its ultimate conclusion:
In sum, except for variations in constituency size, the workings of the FPTP system cannot be ‘blamed’ for delivering two landslide victories to Labour with less than 45 per cent of the votes in 1997 and 2001 and a third in 2005 when a 25 percentage points lead in seats over its main opponent emerged despite only a 3-point lead in vote share. Geography is key to those biases, but not the geography of constituency definition. Rather it is a combination of the geographies of party support, turnout and party campaigning within that geography which produces most of the bias, currently favouring Labour because of where its supporters live, where they turn out, and where it campaigns for their support. The geography of constituencies (i.e. the ‘system’) provides the template for this, but it is how voters and parties act within that template which generates the disproportionality and bias.
Voter distribution and behaviour are the major factors that bias the current system.
At the last three elections, Labour have gained significantly from having their core support concentrated in urban areas with a relatively high population density, not just in Inner London but across the North of England where, contrary to tabloid opinion, the North-West is still the second most densely populated region of England – after London – not the South-East.
The Lib Dems, on the other hand, consistenty lose out because the geographical distribution of much of their support is too diffuse, under FTPT, to deliver anything like the number of seats they’d get under a proportional voting system, even if they have some recent success in consolidating their support in specific areas of the South and South-West.
Cutting the number of MPs by 10% (64-65) would significantly reduce the advantage that Labour has had from way in which its core support is distributed, which might not sound so bad if you’re looking at this in a non-partisan way, until you realise that it would also screw the Lib Dems over as well and, just from a visual inspection of the current electoral map, go some considerable way towards wiping out most the gains that the Lib Dems have made over the last 10-15 years, especially in the seats they’ve taken from the Tories across Southern England.
The only party that would actually gain anything from a reduction in the number of MPs, under the current FPTP system, is the Tories.
That should really tell you everything you need to know about the kind of ‘change’ that the Tories really stand for – of the five numbered pledges put forward for reforming the political system, the only one likely to have any discernable impact is the one that would allow the Tories to gerrymander the current electoral system in their own favour.
Oh well, looking on the bright side, at least Cameron’s ‘contract’ offer send a very clear message to the electorate…
- if real political change is what you’re looking for, then don’t vote Tory.
Post-election scenarios: A Labour win still possible
contribution by Renard Sexton
In politics, a lot can change in just a few days, but at the same time, no one can change the fundamentals. If you have been behind at the 1 year mark, losing at the 6 month mark, and still about the same distance back a week before the election, the writing is on the wall.
Nonetheless, though we are pretty certain the Conservatives will prevail in the national popular vote, Labour and the Lib Dems are fully in contention for second place. However, given the advantages that the UK electoral system gives to the “incumbent” top two parties, Labour will far outstrip the Liberal Democrats in their MP haul. Indeed, with the Lib Dems ahead by a point, the FiveThirtyEight projection model still has Labour nearly doubling the Lib Dems seat totals.
The following three scenarios are ranked by their relative likelihood overall.*
Scenario 1: Hung Parliament (minority government) to the Tories
If the current situation stands, the Conservatives will earn a minority win — the hung parliament scenario that has been bounced around as a possible outcome for some time.
However, from this point, things could slightly deteriorate for the Tories with them still pulling an MP plurality (assuming no Labour-LD coalition).
In this scenario, we posit that Tory support drops 4 points from it’s current position from a combination of high defection to minor parties like UKIP and the BNP (5 percent), 10 percent pulled away by the Lib Dems, and 10 percent of the Tories 2005 voters simply not voting. Nonetheless, they still walk away with a 8 seats plurality over Labour, though in a severely weakened position.
Scenario 2: Conservative Majority
On the other end of things, let us examine what might happen if Labour are not able to sufficiently rally in the closing week — instead losing big. A year ago, when the Tories were seeing polling leads over Labour of 15-20 points, a Conservative majority seemed a foregone conclusion. Of course, the race has tightened substantially, especially with the addition of a powerful Lib Dem showing.
If David Cameron can hold his defections to Labour and minor parties to an absolute minimum, turn out his base voters from 2005 (losing few to stay-home crowd), as well as keeping losses to the Lib Dems to the expected 5 percent, a bare majority is in store.
At the same time, let’s assume that Labour pull just 23 percent– the lowest figure they fell to in recent polling (courtesy of Angus Reid, though Harris had them on 24 during the same period) — while keeping the rest equal.
In the case that the majority of the lost Labour voters who still cast a ballot move to the Lib Dems, the Tories will see a substantial, but not enormous 12-seat majority (though nearly 200 seats above the next largest party.
However, if they were split evenly between the two, we would see a quite imposing Tory majority.
Scenario 3: Hung Parliament (minority government) to Labour
A long shot at this point, a Labour “win” is still possible. If we were to see Tory weakness along the lines we described in Scenario 1 (losses to minor parties, Lib Dems and non-voters), while Labour held the line against the Liberal Democrats — holding their losses to 10 percent of their 2005 voters — a Frankenstein win could be pulled off.
Until these conditions — relatively unlikely but still quite possible conditions, mind you — Labour could pull off a 13 seat plurality of seats, while sneaking in third place in the national popular vote.
Of course, these are just several of perhaps 15 or 20 endgame scenarios for the last week of this very exciting election campaign. We’ll introduce a few more in the coming days, as well as presented an updated projection with our prediction as to which one it will be.
On Wednesday evening, a final prediction will go up, and on Thursday the FiveThirtyEight team (Nate Silver, Dan Berman, Tom Dollar and myself) will keep you up to date with liveblog entries.
———
Reposted from FiveThirtyEight, where it was originally published.
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight’s international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com
Was it Brown’s finest moment yesterday?
Gordon Brown’s speech yesterday to Citizens UK.
A crackingly passionate speech by Brown yesterday. It lacked the necessary commitments on issues like amnesty and child detention, but it was certainly more passionate than anything else he’s said recently.
This is how the Tories plan to seize power in a Hung Parliament
Despite accusations of Conservative complacency in the run up to Thursday’s General Election, a great deal of effort has gone into what happens if the result is not a clear cut one but results in a Hung Parliament with the Tories some way short of an overall majority.
Here is what has now emerged as the Tory plan:
• Declare victory anyway.
• Have the party’s media allies strain every sinew to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Insist on being given the keys to number 10 without having to talk substantively to any other party first – to avoid a coalition or any substantive policy concessions.
• Make a partisan challenge to the civil service in seeking to overturn any existing constitutional convention or practice that might conceivably get in the way, or even slow this down a little.
• Threaten to drag the Monarchy into political controversy for partisan advantage, by challenging the conventions designed precisely to avoid this.
• Hold out against electoral reform, whatever the election result.
• Threaten apocalyptic political and financial meltdown if anybody disagrees.
The key objective of this strategy is to use the vociferous campaigning of the press – no doubt amplifying interventions from friends in the City – to argue that any negotiations between parties would be democratically illegitimate, without first putting the Conservatives into power, even (or especially) if Labour and the Liberal Democrats could between them muster a majority of both votes and Commons seats.
See David Cameron’s interview with Monday’s Independent – in which the Tory leader says “there is convention and there is practice and they are not always quite the same thing”.
And now we have a more explicit outlining of an emerging new Tory constitutional doctrine in an extraordinary Guardian report on Tuesday – based on anonymous briefings from “senior shadow Cabinet members” – that the Conservatives intend to mount a partisan attack on existing constitutional conventions, and the Cabinet Secretary’s protocols for handling a hung Parliament, even though a primary motivation for these has been to protect the Monarchy from being dragged into party political controversy.
The Guardian reports that:
Senior shadow ministers are making it clear that Cameron, who intends to lead a minority government if the Tories fail to win a parliamentary majority, is prepared to ignore the rules. These are designed to allow for a week of discussions between the party leaders on forming a coalition.
This is an audacious attempt to rewrite, during election week, the established constitutional conventions for partisan gain.
It relies on a lack of public knowledge in the first hung Parliament for 35 years; a populist media challenge to established rules which could be portrayed as fusty and old fashioned; and Whitehall’s fear of offending a party which would be favourite to emerge in government anyway.
And it could well provide an apt occasion on which to reapply the title of Chris Mullin’s previous work of political fiction: the Tories appear to be advocating a very British coup, against the conventions and practices of our unwritten constitution at least.
Yet there are several fundamental contradictions and weaknesses in the partisan case which senior Conservatives are making for overturning existing understandings of our (uncodified) constitution so as to assume power before any substantial inter-party political negotiations take place.
First, it is surely quite unprecedented for a man who wants to be Prime Minister on Friday morning to have his senior frontbench colleagues launch a major – and anonymous – briefing effort to challenge the impartial Cabinet Secretary and the constitutional conventions 72 hours before the Election. The Cabinet Office guidelines were published in February, when the Cabinet Secretary gave evidence about them to a cross-party Commons Select Committee.
If the Leader of the Opposition wanted to challenge the referee over the rules, he had ample opportunity to do so publicly and formally well before the election campaign began. (This is particularly surprising, given that the offside rule is applied more strictly at Eton than elsewhere).
Secondly, Shadow Cabinet sources surely wreck their own case when they complain of a fear that so-called “new rules” would allow the Prime Minister to follow the precedent of the actions of the Conservative Prime Minister in the last hung parliament 35 years ago.
The Tories fear Brown will use the new rules to follow the example of Edward Heath, who tried to hang on after the February 1974 election to broker a deal with the Liberal party. Heath, who won the most votes but secured four fewer seats than Labour, resigned four days after the election, after the talks broke down.
This much weakens the Tory claim: it demonstrates that these so called “new rules” were in the main an attempt to set out clearly what the existing constitutional conventions have long been understood to be. (Indeed David Cameron told The Independent he had studied these during his PPE course at Oxford in the 1980s, which again rather explodes the absurd claim that they have been invented by Sir Gus O’Donnell since Christmas).
The Conservative proposal is to remove the power from Parliament – perhaps intending to place the constitutional power to call the election in the hands of their good friends, Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre instead.
There will be an enormous effort – shared between the Tory leadership and their press allies – to drive and frame the broadcast news “narrative”. Anybody who thinks that the right-wing newspapers have behaved in a hyperpartisan during the campaign itself may well find, by the morning after May 6th, that they ain’t seen nothing yet.
———-
A longer version is over at Next Left
The FT endorses the Tories
The impact of the endorsement is likely to be negligible, but it’s interesting that the FT did not even endorse Labour economic plans.
Until recently, many Tory bloggers attacked the newspaper for being too left-wing.
Here are the main chunks of their endorsement:
None of the parties has tackled head-on the question of how to restore Britain’s public finances. This year, the UK is expected to run a fiscal deficit of 11.1 per cent of national output – or £163bn. The parties have not been straight with the public about the austerity that lies ahead. Whoever enters Number 10 may suffer a form of winner’s curse.
The Financial Times has no fixed political allegiances. We stand for a liberal agenda: a small state, social justice and open international markets. But we do have a vision of the changes needed for economic and political renewal. It is on this basis that we judge the fitness of the contenders for power.
….
At home, the case for political renewal is unanswerable. Westminster must be reformed. The sovereignty of parliament has degraded into the sovereignty of government. We need an elected House of Lords and a Commons that can challenge the executive. The country should be made freer. Civil liberties, eroded as part of a misguided “war” on terror, must be restored.
How do the parties measure up to this prospectus? Labour has spent billions raising the quality of public services, a necessary if sometimes ill-directed investment. As a crisis manager, Gordon Brown has been a better premier than his critics claim. But after 13 years, Labour needs a spell in opposition to rejuvenate itself. As the architect of the state’s expansion, Mr Brown is not the man to shrink it. Too often he has been tepid or hostile to public sector reform.
The Liberal Democrats are more attractive. Their instincts are right on civil liberties and they are internationalist, albeit with the odd whiff of anti-Americanism. They would champion political reform, having fewer vested interests at Westminster to protect. It is on the economy that doubts creep in. Their policy is an uneasy mix of sanctimony and populism.
This leaves the Conservatives. They are not a perfect fit, but their instincts are sound. Their fiscal plans, while vague, suggest they would do most to reduce the size of the state – cutting more and taxing less than their opponents. They would create the best environment for enterprise and wealth creation. David Cameron has emphasised educational reform, a welcome aspiration so long as it is acted upon.
This newspaper still has questions about Mr Cameron and his party. The Tories’ reflexive hostility to Europe, for instance, is worrying, whatever his protestations that he wants a constructive relationship with Brussels. His team is young and for the most part untested.
Their dismissal of the Libdems is odd, given that the party is closer to what the FT stands for than the Conservatives: who are terrible on the international stage and have a much worse agenda on civil liberties and social reform. Marriage tax allowance anyone?
A shoddy endorsement to be honest.
Labour still doesn’t have a line on Libdems
In an interview for the this week’s New Statesman, out tomorrow, Ed Balls tells Mehdi Hasan:
“PR leads to a politics of behind-closed-doors deals after elections. It makes it harder to make long-term decisions and it gives more power to small parties . . . and I don’t believe as a matter of principle that coalition governments are better. That doesn’t make me hostile to the Lib Dems or unable to work with them. On education, I could work with the Lib Dems very easily. On most things, we agree . . . but I also recognise that the Lib Dem coalition with the Conservatives in Leeds, for example, has done a terrible job.”
….
For Balls, defeating the Tories is the top priority. Given this, what is his advice to Lib Dem supporters in the 100 or so Tory-Labour marginals? “I urge Lib Dem voters to bite their lip and back us.” But what about Labour supporters in Tory-Lib Dem marginals? “I always want the Labour candidate to win, but I recognise there’s an issue in places like North Norfolk, where my family live, where Norman Lamb [the Lib Dem candidate and sitting MP] is fighting the Tories, who are in second place. And I want to keep the Tories out.”
In other words Ed Balls endorses tactical voting.
This chimes with Gordon Brown telling the Independent last week that he wanted to see a “progressive alliance”
He criticised Mr Clegg’s party for “unfair” policies such as cutting Labour’s tax credits and child trust funds for newborn babies, noting that the Tories were proposing the same. But he pointed up the shared Lib-Lab agenda on reform. “There is some common ground on the constitutional issues. It is up to the Liberals to respond,” he said. “A new politics demands a new House of Commons and new House of Lords. The Conservatives are against a new politics.”
Although he stopped short of actually endorsing tactical voting.
But then there was this in the Observer yesterday:
“I mean, you know, when you actually look at their economic policy, these regional caps on immigration, this amnesty for illegal immigrants, this tax policy that’s built on £4.5bn coming from tax avoidance,” he said, “it’s the sort of stuff that you do when you’re at a dinner party looking at your policies and writing them on the back of an envelope.”
“We’re talking about the future of our country. We’re not talking about who’s going to be the next presenter of a TV gameshow. We’re talking about the future of our economy.”
Not only is the campaign a mess, but they don’t even know how to deal with the Libdems.
One minute they’re love-bombing the Libdems and talking of possible coalitions, the next minute they’re hitting the Libdems so hard that any chance of coalition looks highly unlikely. What is up with that?
One senior minister is endorsing tactical voting the other is slamming any such talk. The least they could have done is sat down together and figured out what their approach would be?
Libdem flashmobs across UK today afternoon
Libdems are organising flashmobs across the UK today, with the main one planned for Trafalgar Square at 3:05pm.
The plan:
15:00 – Wear yellow, but cover it. Arrive at the square.
15:05 – One person will shout “I agree with Nick!” REALLY LOUD and tear off their jacket to reveal their yellow clothing. Another person will join in. And another and another, until we are all chanting “I agree with Nick!”
Balloons will be handed out for you to blow up afterwards and stickers should be available.
15:25 – Crowd disperses, taking any litter with it so as not to give the tabloids something to moan about.
(100 yellow balloons and 500 Lib Dem stickers currently on order – feel free to bring your own yellow paraphernalia!)
More details of the London event, and flashmobs across the country on this Facebook page
A different flashmob is planned for Tuesday afternoon: against the right-wing press and for a Hung Parliament!
How I learned to stop worrying and love VAT (sort of)
contribution by Dan Harkin
It is possible that the Tories are planning to put up VAT to a whopping 20 per cent. But VAT is widely seen as a tax that impacts the poor far more than the well-off.
Does that make it an unfair tax that we should rule out on the grounds of social justice?
Left Foot Forward recently did some number-crunching to demonstrate that this would hit the least-advantaged much harder than any other income group.
And that’s true. A flat rate consumption tax will be regressive in the way it hits groups, taking a higher slice of a poor individual’s income than it will take of a rich individual’s income.
It’s just this. Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark – the so-called Nordic Model countries – all have VAT rates higher than 20 per cent. In Denmark it is 25 per cent – the highest rate. Yet these countries score much better on equality and social mobility.
So what’s the lesson from this? You can have a regressive tax system but you can spend it in ways that bestow the greatest benefit on the least-advantaged. Sweden, Finland and Denmark are all characterised by high levels of social spending, much higher than the UK.
These countries are also characterised by relatively high levels of personal income taxation. Indeed the bulk of public revenue comes from income tax and VAT (like in the UK) but at higher rates.
The lowest income groups will pay a much larger proportion of their income to VAT, but there are net consumers of public welfare compared to the highest income groups – so this still counts as a social transfer.
Public services are pro-poor because poorer households are more likely to have children or older people, who are more intensive consumers of public services like health and education.
We have a tendency to ignore the interaction of the way revenues are raised and the way we are spent. People tend to see taxes as income taken away. For example headline tax rates have fallen in the UK since 1979, but so have overall benefit rates alongside increases in indirect taxes. So the overall income after the state has taxed and spent has remained pretty much the same for those on average incomes.
The story with indirect taxes, however, is that between 1979 and 1997 there has been an erosion of the level of social transfer so the overall effect was regressive: those on low incomes did worse. The changes brought in by Labour since 1997 have hugely improved the situation, but not enough to counter-act the regressive tax and spend policies between 1979 and 1997.*
There are plenty of reasons to love VAT: compliance is easy to ensure and it is relatively cheap to administer. There is also a major reason to hate VAT: as a tax instrument it is hugely regressive.
But if it is a tax policy used to support a generous welfare state and redistributive policies then it is not necessarily going to have regressive effects once everything is taken into account.
If we compare the two graphs we can see that whilst VAT hits the bottom quintile group the most, the bottom two quintiles enjoy a bias towards them when it comes to social welfare. I believe that is the evidence from Scandinavia. The group that still does worse is comprised of those of working age with no children.
Therefore if you are concerned about social justice, you shouldn’t be easily scared by claims that one party is going to hike up VAT. Instead we should be concerned about what effect that party’s other policies will have on the worst-off; that is to look at the total sum package.
The Tories still do worst on this measure, especially with their other tax and benefit plans, but just because they are more likely to raise VAT is not, by itself, grounds to reject them.
—–
* Evans, M., Williams, L., A generation of change, a lifetime of difference? Social policy in Britain since 1979, The Policy Press (ISBN 9781847423047, price £24.99 paperback and £65.00 hardback)
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