Annie Quick reports:

The campaign to target MPs standing in the way of reform started with a bang this week in Harrow with an open letter to Harrow East MP Tony McNulty which collected almost 3,000 signatures in a few days.

The letter highlighted McNulty’s record which shows him consistently protecting ‘the old top-down politics of command and control and against reform.’ He was a key offender in the expenses scandal, which ended in him resigning from government and paying back £13,837 which he had claimed for a second home. No wonder, then that he had voted against the Freedom of Information Act being applied to MPs. He is also a key champion of ID cards, and voted against a fully elected second chamber and for an appointed Lords.

McNulty was hit hard on Thursday with a full page ad in the Harrow Times and posters with ‘Wanted for crimes against democracy’ delivered to thousands of Swing voters in the constituency, many of which are now stuck up in windows around Harrow.

In case he hadn’t got the message yet, local volunteer residents and a Power2010 sheriff delivered the letter – and the name of every co-signer – direct to his constituency door. Sadly, no-one was there to receive them. McNulty has been rather quiet as the campaign has been building up these past few days and we’re waiting to see what defence, if any, he will offer on the accusations laid against him.

On Monday Power2010 will be adding five more MPs (taken from the public’s suggestions) to their Most Wanted list. Over the next few weeks, volunteers around the country will be making sure that the next parliament is a reforming one.

Guest post by luis enrique

I wish people spent more time looking at data and less time pontificating, so in theory I ought to love the flourishing of attention paid to household income data

But I don’t, because I think it’s being misused. It’s possible to misuse data like this in lots of ways, but I want to focus on just one. The household survey data offers a static snapshot of household incomes, but the right way to think about poverty, and wealth, is to look at lifetime income profiles.

Here’s what I mean. continue reading… »

Guest post by Tom Freeman

This month’s Prospect magazine has a section on neuroscience, and in particular its political implications.

One thing came up in their roundtable discussion that always gets my goat: the idea that neuroscience is going to be a good way of telling what effects on people different policies will have. Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge, says:

For years we changed our education system again and again, but these changes weren’t based on evidence about how we learned. Instead, wouldn’t it be useful if we thought about how the brain really works, and how children learn best, and in turn formulated educational policy based on that?

And the RSA’s Matthew Taylor adds, in a similar but more nakedly political vein:

I am confident that, as we find out more about our brains, it will strengthen the progressive case, in the sense that children learn best when they are actively involved, not being passive.

No, no, no.

Think about it: how could you use neuroscience to tell which teaching methods promote the best learning? continue reading… »

Guest post by Tom Freeman

Justin McKeating argues:

If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

I completely agreed with this until I thought of an even better idea.

The position of Prime Minister’s Spouse should be directly, and separately, elected. So we could pair Gordon with Samantha, Dave with Sarah, or maybe even Nick (Clegg) with Nick (Griffin). The possibilities are as endless as the attention span of an ITV early evening news viewer.

The morons would vote for the spouse, and the rest of us would vote for the actual government. Everyone gets to engage with the election on terms that they can understand.

Guest post by Phil BC

Once upon a time you would be hard pressed to find a more solid Labour stronghold than Stoke-on-Trent. The potteries, the mines, and the steel works gave birth to a close-knit working class that produced generations of Labour party activists who absolutely dominated the city’s politics. But all that began to change when the wind of deindustrialisation blew through North Staffordshire. The pits and steel mill are gone, and the ceramics industry is but a pale shadow of a former colossus. In their wake came call centres, casualised retail jobs, long term joblessness and bleak prospects.

The splintering of Stoke’s working class eventually found expression in its politics. continue reading… »

Guest post by pagar

The policy of multiculturalism is built on two theories.

Firstly, there is the idea that human beings need, at a very primal level, some sort of attachment to cultural heritage. Without such attachment, the argument goes, people are likely to be less fulfilled and lack personal foundation. Without our cultural reference points, we are but leaves blowing in the wind.

Secondly, multiculturalism demands that all cultures have equal value. Indeed, it says that the value of a culture cannot be empirically measured because there is no fair starting point. The person making the comparison and value judgment will necessarily do so from a position that is informed by their own culture.

When these two theories are put together, we are logically driven towards embracing diversity- where everyone is encouraged to celebrate and codify the differences between cultures. Divergence is seen as positive and homogeneity is outlawed. In this climate immigrants are not required to integrate into the host culture and it is considered wrong and regressive for anyone to ask or expect them to do so.

But for liberals, the multiculturalism agenda brings with it some difficulties. continue reading… »

This is a guest post by Tim Fenton

Crewe and Nantwich is only one of almost 650 constituencies on the political map of the UK. But the by-election there in May 2008 holds important lessons for the upcoming General Election.

Following the death of Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour were between the proverbial rock and hard place: whether they called a snap by-election, or played a longer game, the Government’s unpopularity put them at a disadvantage. Moreover, they needed to select a candidate, and quickly.

Both Tory and Lib Dem already had candidates in place. Edward Timpson was, apparently, not well regarded by Tory HQ, but the crucial and sensible decision was made by Eric Pickles, chosen to manage the campaign, to stand by him. The Lib Dems, seemingly in a moment of panic, ditched their man in favour of Elizabeth Shenton, who then had start over with local activists. This gave the Tories a head start.

Pickles then managed expectations well, the press were fed stories of a “rock solid working class seat”, which could be easily disproved by a trip out to Nantwich – solidly Tory – or to outlying villages, and those new housing developments full of potential swing voters. But during the campaign, most of the assembled hackery saw little more than the area between Crewe station and the town centre, and so bought into the Tories’ well crafted myth.

Surprisingly, the media did little analysis on past elections, which would have disproved the myth of the working class stronghold. The last time a majority Tory Government was returned – in 1992 – Dunwoody’s majority was under 2,700. There had been only one instance of a five figure majority, that in 1997: then, the Tories had been caught in a perfect storm, unpopular nationally and disliked locally after the rail sell-offs caused delays in new train orders and the Works had to lay off staff.

Labour selected Dunwoody’s daughter Tamsin to fight the seat. Was this a good or bad thing? My take is that it had no bearing on the outcome. I reckon she was the best candidate, but Timpson’s shortcomings – he’s not a natural talker and doesn’t do charisma – were managed by Pickles guiding and coaching him, making sure he got his talking points over. It would be different in a General Election campaign, where the luxury of a personal minder would be missing, but that would be to miss the point. The matter at hand was winning the by-election.

The Tories were allowed to make the running from the start, and their focus was incessantly negative, and personal towards the PM. They stuck to this tack and their discipline held firm. Labour’s attempts to show Tamsin Dunwoody in a positive light made little impact. Elsewhere, Elizabeth Shenton was having difficulty making herself heard, despite Vince Cable being ever present.

The saturation media coverage, and the dispatch of every well known politician to Crewe and Nantwich, also had little additional impact: on one Saturday in mid-campaign, Simon Hughes turned up to assist Ms Shenton, while earlier, Jack Straw had brought his soap box to Crewe town centre, and took questions from all comers, but they need not have bothered. The same could be said of the “love bombing” of often bewildered shoppers in Asda, who for a moment were considered important enough to have even “Dave” Cameron pack their shopping. The parties’ efforts cancelled each other out.

Was the “Tory Toff” line wrong? Maybe, given that Timpson, although part of the shoe repair dynasty, is not a man of ostentatious wealth. But Labour make Cameron visibly uncomfortable whenever he is the target of such attacks, so the idea that this contest going the way of the Tories would stop them is groundless.

One controversy was generated by a Labour campaign leaflet, which Pickles called out as “racist”. I saw the offending flyer – the contentious part was the policy of ID cards for foreign nationals – and sent it on its way. Was it racist? I think not. Clumsy maybe, and more likely a policy cut and paste job. But racist it had been called, and once more the Tory discipline held: all those from the party venturing an opinion on the matter toed the line. Pickles is supposedly known for his “anti racism”, but on this occasion it seemed more a case of “accusing the opposition of racism at a time likely to cause them maximum damage, and keeping up the attack in order to prevent them effectively rebutting the accusation”. Given his role in the upcoming General Election campaign, look for that one to be wheeled out again.

The Tories then completed their mission by keeping up the campaigning until polling day. Labour did not. On the last Saturday, I spoke with a Labour supporter who assured me that they would return to get out the vote, but later that same day, a conversation with the campaign HQ on Nantwich Road left me with the impression they had given up. So it was: the evening of polling day was a quiet one in what I call “Redbrick Crewe”, the area that returns Labour and Lib Dem councillors. Labour had already admitted defeat: the Tory majority therefore flattered Timpson.

What will happen at the General Election? Well, unless the Tories score a substantial swing, Timpson will be unseated. David Williams, his next Labour opponent, has the presence and the patter: he is a natural politician. Edward Timpson will have served his purpose.

Guest post by Giles Wilkes

As a liberal it came as quite a shock to read this from John Stuart Mill, railing against the devaluation of money:

There are at this day numerous persons who can read and write, and some who think themselves oracles of wisdom, who see no harm in emancipating a paper currency from the restraint of convertibility … there are writers of pretension … who think it the duty of the legislature periodically to degrade the standard (or to authorize an increase of inconvertible paper exactly equivalent) in proportion as the progress of industry creates an increase of productions and a multiplication of pecuniary transactions.

He goes on to say “a pound (precisely as stated by Sir Robert Peel) should mean a fixed quantity of gold of a given fineness”.

Given the havoc that had been wrought by proliferating paper currency, from the time of Sung China through the Mississippi Bubble and beyond, one might understand Mill’s concern. Inflation disorders commerce, and transfers wealth from the saver to the debtor, something that must have appalled any right-thinking Victorian. More pragmatically, it raises the cost of capital, which ultimately hurts us all.

But an overly fond adherence to the solidity of currency has cost society dear in the past, and threatens to again. In the 1930s, it was the countries that left gold first that recovered first. The really stubborn ones like France had worse Depressions. With the ascendance of Keynes, more people began to understand that what matters in economics is how much is produced and consumed, and not just how much ‘gold of a given fineness’ a unit of currency can get you.

When last year the economy tumbled ever further, and the Bank of England introduced ‘quantitative easing’, some Victorian ghosts arose from the grave, in the form of various hysterics shouting about Zimbabwe, the Weimar republic and the threat of hyperinflation.

They were wrong in two ways continue reading… »

The “Fear Factory” is a new film about the criminal justice system. Watch the trailer or find out more here. This is a guest post by Joanna Natasegara.

On releasing “The Fear Factory” at a closed screening in Central London last week, the Bulger case was history – the hair-trigger cause of the youth justice crisis which the film shows unfolding over the past two decades. This weeks events have shown it’s more real, more relevant than ever – and more worryingly, that we’ve learnt little from the past.

Despite knowing full well that a punitive climate, stoked by a distorted fear of crime has lead to a doubling of our prison population and rates of re-offending as high as 90%, our educated friends in Westminster have done nothing to change this. So why not? Could it be because fear actually helps them… ? continue reading… »

Guest post by Giles Wilkes

Given there is no sign at all that the Conservative’s disastrous 2010 campaign is likely to improve, this question of the economy’s performance with a minority government will continue.

A note from CitiGroup puts the case for the prosecution:

There is no consensus across the parties on fiscal policy, while Lib Dem voters disagree with the Conservatives on fiscal policy and prefer Labour’s policies on most other key political issues. Lib Dem voters would rather go into coalition with Labour than the Conservatives. We suspect that a hung parliament would only be able to implement and sustain major fiscal consolidation if boxed in by a market crisis. Gilts and sterling remain vulnerable.

The author acknowledges Nick Clegg’s recent vow ‘not to take any risk with UK plc’, and suspects that they LibDems will not cooperate unless given the Holy Grail of electoral reform in return. Which the Conservatives will never grant.

Clegg is getting annoyed:

“David Cameron and George Osborne are stoking up fears in the markets, actively trying to destabilise the pound and reduce the government’s ability to borrow. It’s like a protection racket: vote for us or our friends in the City will lay waste to your economy, your savings and your job.”

Too right. Chris Cook in the FT has a more nuanced summary of how things might pan out:

The threat of the LibDems pulling the plug on a government is overstated. The third party would, very quickly, be seen as co-culprits for the administration’s programme. So the LibDems would be stuck with them. If they then caused the fall of the government, they would be blamed for the chaos that follows … So the path of short-term naked self interest – the most powerful force in politics – would almost always be for the LibDems to back the administration.

The Lib Dems have the most to gain and the most to lose from the hung parliament situation. Their incentives are unambigiously in the direction of fiscal responsibility. No-ones goes around thinking “I can’t vote Lib Dem – they are too serious about the deficit”. A period where the LibDems hold the sensible middle of the debate: between diehard romantic deniers on the Labour benches, and blinkered trapped-in-the-1980s CutNowCutHarders on the other side, could gain them real credibility with a public worried about the difficult, um, balancing act that needs to be performed.

Guest post by Jennifer O’Mahony

On March 1st in France, immigrants were encouraged to stay at home, protest, and spend nothing as a nationwide protest against the country’s latent problems with immigration and national identity.

Peggy Derder, Nadir Dendoune and Nadia Lamarkbi, three French professionals in their thirties, hit upon the idea of la journée sans immigrés, or the day without immigrants, after years of endless police checks and discrimination. The trio were encouraging anyone who is an immigrant, of immigrant origin, or who feels solidarity with immigrants and wanted to contest their treatment to take these three simple measures for just one day. In a political system where there are no black or Arab representatives, despite the fact that these minorities make up 10% of the population, people of immigrant origin wanted to make their invisibility and silence symbolically evident in workplaces around France.

Their aim was to make their compatriots see how different their country would look and sound if France’s minorities did not exist. The demonstration also sought to highlight the economic contribution that minorities make, and the range of industries they operate within France. Demonstrators were hoping to empty offices, stop public transport and close stores. The idea quickly spread and similar demonstrations were seen in Spain, Italy, and Greece. continue reading… »

Guest post by Richard blogger

Andrew Lansley has recently written about the main Conservative health policies. He justifies his policy to privatise parts of the NHS using the following statement about productivity:

“we can not go on seeing productivity fall in our public services, just as it rises in the private sector”

But if we look at productivity in healthcare, the NHS is actually more efficient than the private sector. continue reading… »

Guest post by Adam Ramsay

Last week, around 7000 students voted in their union elections at Southampton. This broke the UK student union turnout record set at Edinburgh last year. Not to be outdone, Edinburgh students came back on Thursday night, and re-broke the record. Around 7,200 cast ballots – four times as many as eight years ago.

This trend has continued in the other campus elections that have taken place so far this term: both Reading and Queens Belfast have broken their own records.

This time last year, I wrote a piece for The Herald pointing out how university after university had smashed turnout records, how Britain had seen the first wave of lecture theatre occupations in 30 years, how students were fast becoming the backbone of many of Britain’s progressive movements: how politicians should take notice. continue reading… »

Guest post by Richard Wilson

Every month, in pubs and bars from Edinburgh to Bristol, hundreds gather to discuss unashamedly nerdy issues – from the resurgence of quack medicines like homeopathy, to the flaccid state of science reporting in the UK media. Every week, thousands more download the ’skeptic’ podcasts Little Atoms and the Pod Delusion, while many others visit skeptically-minded blogs and websites.

Whether this reflects a growth in the number of people interested in these issues, or simply better organisation (helped along, doubtless, by the internet), skeptics today seem more vocal and visible than at any time that I can remember. continue reading… »

Guest post by Mark Reckons

Iain Dale has a post recently entitled: “Why Don’t the LibDems Select BME Candidates in Winnable Seats?”. He makes the argument that the Conservatives have BME candidates in a number of winnable seats and estimates they will have between 11 and 16 BME MPs after the next election. He suggests there will be none on the Lib Dem benches.

In the comments, a number of people have taken him to task about his assumptions. LibCync points out that Operation Black Vote has identified 3 potentially winnable seats for the Lib Dems with BME candidates. He also points out that Nick Clegg has taken action to try and resolve this issue.

Iain has rebutted this by suggesting that privately Lib Dem friends of his have expressed concern about the lack of BME representation and that the 3 seats identified are unlikely to be won.

I don’t know if the seats cited will or will not be won by the Lib Dems but it is in the nature of the third party within our current electoral system to struggle to win seats. We have very few “safe” seats compared to the Tories who (certainly this year) will expect to have over 300 seats following the election. So comparing the raw numbers is pretty unfair. It strikes me that 16 BME candidates who have a shot at becoming an MP would be roughly 5% of the Parliamentary Conservative Party were they elected. 3 for the Lib Dems assuming we end up with roughly 60 seats again would also be 5% were they elected. Seems about the same to me and hardly a crisis situation.

But taking Iain directly up on his point about the chances of the 3 candidates OBV identified being quite low. That may be the case but it is not the Lib Dems fault that the electoral system is so stacked against it. We want to reform the electoral system to STV with multi-member constituencies. From the Electoral Reform Society, here is the second point from their website on advantages of STV:

With STV and multi-member constituencies, parties have a powerful electoral incentive to present a balanced team of candidates in order to maximise the number of higher preferences that would go to their sponsored candidates. This helps the advancement of women and ethnic-minority candidates, who are often overlooked in favour of a ’safer’ looking candidate.

This is clearly an important issue and I am glad Iain is raising it. I wonder though if he might take another look at the benefits of electoral reform (that he has often been quick to dismiss in the past) and how it could help improve the chances of BME candidates for all parties.

Sunder Katwala has also done a very detailed piece in response to both Iain and my posts here.

This post originally appeared at Mark’s blog

Guest post by Giles Wilkes

Los Angeles, a city of some 4 million inhabitants, is enjoying a blindingly good few years for crime. It looks like LA might have only 230 murders this year. Less than one per day! They may have to outsource their dramatic reality cop shows. Nirvanna, for the Los Angelenos. Which means a murder rate of only 6 per 100,000.

This trend has been widespread in the US since the mid 1990s, so that now one or two cities even seem to have a rate as low as the UK. Yes, after a couple of decades of improvement, the USA might aspire to having a murder rate in one or two of its many cities as low as the UK as a whole.

Incidentally, this question naturally leads to another one: if the UK is so much more murder-free than its Anglo Saxon cousin, why is it apparently so much more violent? continue reading… »

Guest post by Ellie Gellard

The Labour Party has lost a true hero. Michael Foot was a parliamentarian held in the highest regard. One of the most outstanding orators this country has ever known and a man who defined the notion of principled politics. Tributes have been pouring in, from Gordon Brown, Tony Benn and a fitting tribute was made in the House of Commons by Jack Straw after a frankly embarrassing Prime Ministers Questions, the depressing nature of which was put into sharp focus by the news of Foot’s passing. But more on that in a moment.

Foot was the mind of the Labour Party. A remarkably intelligent writer who went from Fleet Street to Westminster with the same principles and values underpinning all his endeavours, values which were unashamedly, unapologetically socialist. Without a doubt Foot was a visionary politician, to some extent an idealist, but was one who admired, if not idolised, as perhaps the greatest pragmatist British Politics has ever known.

Reading Foot’s biography of Aneurin Bevan will have influenced, I hope, the rest of my life. It is for this, perhaps monumental impression on my future, that I am truly grateful to Michael Foot. His bringing to life of Bevan’s spirit, character and politics inspired a love of socialism and the Labour party that I would find, now, impossible to shake off. Foot was a master of the written word which framed the life of his idol, and now mine, beautifully. I would urge anyone with a political interest to devote a weekend to reading it, it will not disappoint.

Amongst the tributes that have poured in for Foot I have, however, noticed a worrying trend. continue reading… »

contribution by Sarah Morrison

“Save Whittington A&E, Save Whittington Maternity,” demanded demonstrators the Saturday just gone.

Thousands marched from Highbury Corner to Whittington Hospital in North London on Saturday to protest against the possible closure of A&E departments across North Central London and rally against what they see as a systematic downgrading of public health services in the capital city.

Whittington Hospital serves 250,000 people in the boroughs of Islington and Haringey. It faces being downsized to a “local” hospital under plans put forward by the North Central London NHS – the anger amongst the crowd became clear.

“Everyone in this community relies on this hospital, millions have been spent on doing it up and we now have a top-notch, first-rate local hospital, and we are going to keep it this way,” said MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.
continue reading… »

contribution by 5 Chinese Crackers

On the back of my article last week, I started looking for the evidence behind the idea that the government was involved in a dastardly sercet plot to increase immigration ‘for social reasons’.

That is of course code for ‘increasing multiculturalism’ or worse still ‘importing people who will vote Labour’.

The first set of reports in the press were apparently based on an early draft of the Executive Summary of a document produced by Civil Servants from the Home Office and Cabinet Office.  We were treated to nice little snippets in the Mail showing us exactly what had been removed. 

Imagine the dishonesty of taking things out of a document.   There’s definitely a secret plot if someone does that.
continue reading… »

contribution by Andy Wimbush

On Monday, the Financial Times ran an article revealing that the EU were planning to increase maternity pay, boosting “the minimum statutory benefits for new mothers, which vary markedly between the European Union’s 27 member states.”

The other papers have since picked it up, and have done the rounds of various business lobby groups, asking for quotes that condemn the EU plans and warn of the burden that the increased costs would place on businesses and the economy.

I’ll examine some of the claims made by lobby groups and see whether they stand up to the evidence.
continue reading… »