As a good social democrat, I think an employer has a duty of care to their employee, and while I have an opinion, I’m also aware I’m not in possession of all the facts. For example, if Johann Hari has been consistently honest with his employers about his working practices, the issue becomes as much a matter about their judgement as about his.

What has troubled me, however, is the sense among some on the left that those who raise questions about Johann Hari’s work have a right-wing, or catholic, or other somesuch agenda which devalues their concerns about his journalism.

This was most obvious in the initial reaction to allegations of plagiarism when the likes of Polly Toynbee leapt to his defence, but it is also a theme in the comments threads of posts like this one on Liberal Conspiracy last week.

Perhaps people do have such an agenda. I’ve no idea. But if they are right on the facts, that should be enough. But just in case it isn’t I want to focus on why, if Johann Hari’s journalism was shoddy and inaccurate, it should concern those you might call “progressives”. I will simply examine one of the articles Johann Hari submitted for the 2008 Orwell prize. It was an article in the Independent called “How Multi-Culturalism is betraying women”. It is, in large part lifted from an article which appeared in Spiegel a month earlier.

We know this because Johann Hari’s article only uses examples and cases from an article that appeared in Spiegel a month before his own. He uses the same quotes, the same cases, the same people. Every example that appears in Hari’s article also appears in the Spiegel piece. All but two of the quotes Johann uses are lifted, word for word, from the same Spiegel piece (of the remaining two, one is taken from a Nick Cohen book)

I want to be crystal clear. This is not, in my view, plagiarism. Instead, it shows that an article Johann Hari submitted for the Orwell prize was a third rate cuttings job, a piece lifted from a single article from Spiegel magazine, an article referenced in passing but which provides about eight tenth’s of the Hari article’s content..

Naturally, being a lazy journalist is not a crime. Where the real concern comes, though, is that in the process compressing and editing the work of others, Johann Hari allowed major errors to creep into his article, errors which leave the reader with a seriously inaccurate view of the events he reports .

Errors, in fact which mean that Hari must be deliberately misleading his readers about an important issue in order to make a polemical point.

The introduction of Johann Hari’s article is: “Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can’t back both. ” (emphasis mine).

It is the case of a woman who sought an expedited divorce from her abusive husband, and was initially denied by a judge in January 2007.

As Spiegel describes it:

the case brought before Frankfurt’s family court was that of a 26-year-old German woman of Moroccan origin who was terrified of her violent Moroccan husband, a man who had continued to threaten her despite having been ordered to stay away by the authorities. He had beaten his wife and he had allegedly threatened to kill her.
…
…Judge Christa Datz-Winter suddenly became inflexible. According to the judge, there was no evidence of “an unreasonable hardship” that would make it necessary to dissolve the marriage immediately. Instead, the judge argued, the woman should have “expected” that her husband, who had grown up in a country influenced by Islamic tradition, would exercise the “right to use corporal punishment” his religion grants him.

It was an outrageous and stupid decision and when it became public, it outraged almost everyone in Germany. For example, Spiegel quotes Lale Akgün, “a member of parliament of Turkish origin and the Social Democratic Party’s representative on Islamic issues”, saying that the ruling was “worse than some backyard decision by an Islamist imam.”

Hari does not mention any of this. Nor does he mention the fact that, as Spiegel says in the same article: “Judge Datz-Winter was removed from the case and the courts proved themselves capable of acting responsibly”.

Yet when you read the Speigel article, the cases Hari cites were spread over more than five years. This is misleading as it creates the sense of a sudden crisis. Worse, by ignoring the timescale, Hari also ignores the resolution of the cases, just as he does with the Datz-Winter case.

To take one of the examples, we learn from Spiegel :

In 2003 the Frankfurt District Court handed down a mild sentence against a Turkish-born man who had stabbed his German-born wife to death.
…
According to the court’s decision, the divorce would have violated “his family and male honor derived from his Anatolian moral concepts.” The Federal Constitutional Court reversed the decision in 2004.

In the hands of Johann Hari a month later this becomes :”A Turkish-German who stabbed his wife Zeynep to death in Frankfurt was given the lowest possible sentence, because, the judge said, the murdered woman had violated his “male honour, derived from his Anatolian moral concepts”. The bitch.”

As Johann Hari referenced Spiegel and used the exact same quote in describing the case as the Spiegel journalists, he must surely have noticed the date of the case. But he does not include it.

Nor does he include Spiegel’s very next sentence, which says that “The Federal Constitutional Court reversed the decision in 2004“. Again, nor does he include Spiegel’s more general disclaimer in the very next paragraph that “higher courts usually reverse these sorts of rulings”.

Instead, he leads the reader to believe that this case is one of a group that have just happened, and which show that a multi-cultural state is incapable of dealing with such cases at all.

Indeed the entire thrust of Hari’s article is that “a hot hard logic” means we must choose between the rights of women and multi-culturalism. Evidence that judges can (and do) make stupid, ignorant, foolish judgements which are then corrected on appeal does not fit with that Manichean argument. So they are left out. That’s not mere hackery, it’s fundamentally dishonest writing.

But what’s worse, when dealing with an important subject like gender, religion and culture, is that Hari’s inaccuracy leads, I believe, to a serious misleading of the reader about the rights of Muslim women in Germany.

The Spiegel article quoted Ayten Köse, 42, who manages a women’s shelter. Like Johann Hari, she was infuriated by the Frankfurt case.

She is constantly reminding women that the German state will not let them down. “But what should I tell them now, after this Frankfurt ruling?” Köse asks furiously. “That it can happen sometimes?” Trust in the constitution and the hope that it will be enforced, says Köse, is sometimes the only thing Muslim women can rely on for encouragement.

Yet Johann Hari says “In Germany today, Muslim women have been reduced to third-class citizens stripped of core legal protections – because of the doctrine of multiculturalism, which says a society should be divided into separate cultures with different norms according to ethnic origin.”

Who should we believe? Ayten Kose, who was rightly furious with an idiotic judgement, and wanted the German constitution consistently upheld precisely because it represents a vital protection for Muslim women, or Johann, who distorted the facts to make a point and then claimed she has been reduced to a third class citizen, stripped of those same legal protections?

The woman at the heart of the case told Spiegel The worst thing is that the judge misinterpreted Islam. Our prophet said women are not to be beaten. The Prophet gave women rights and treats them as something special, not like a piece of shit. But the judge apparently sees something different.”

She seemed to want both German rights for women to be upheld, and to be a Muslim woman in Germany. Yet Johann Hari’s “hot, hard logic” claims she can’t have both.

I disagree with the premise of Johann’s 2007 article. I don’t think “multi-culturalism is betraying women”. Rather, I think that legal systems, often in cack-handed ways, are trying to come to terms with both the positive and negative consequences of multi-culturalism and seeking the balance between respecting differing cultures and of the fundamental rights of the individual.

This highlights major issues we must deal with – such as honour killings and forced marriages. These must be addressed with the same focus given to any crime of such seriousness, and we must not hide from them.

Personally, I feel that western countries have become better, healthier, more open societies as such subjects are exposed, debated and democratically resolved, as for example is happening with regard to Forced marriages.

What Johann Hari wrote was not fine journalism, but at best a third rate ctrl-C article. At worst, he seriously misled his readers about the details of an important, sensitive issue to make a polemical point. Frankly, that’s more Littlejohn than an Orwell.

Like many more qualified, I worry that the progress that Gadaffi has made in the last fortnight has been enough to secure his regime, and isolate the rebellion. the UN resolution allows the protection of civilians, but that task will be hard to enforce from the air alone, especially in areas under the control of the regime. The knock at the door, the midnight kidnappings, torture and death squads will continue. The regime must surely fall, but it may yet hurt many as it collapses.

For the moment, it looks like Benghazi is safe, but many other parts of Libya are now under the control of a vindictive, oppressive regime. Thank God that at least the Libyan government no longer have the means to deploy chemical weapons, so the fate of Halabja and Marsh Arabs will be avoided. As the New York Times said

“Today, with father and son preparing for a siege of Tripoli, the success of a joint American-British effort to eliminate Libya’s capability to make nuclear and chemical weapons has never, in retrospect, looked more important”

That said, however uncertain the future, or dangerous for those behind Libyan lines, this is still a moment of hope. The United Nations has set out clear language, with little of the complexity of the resolutions that so hampered the UN in Bosnia. Although this is only a beginning, and there are many horrors to avoid, this is the right thing to do.

So a word of praise for the Prime Minister. In his own government he was perhaps the clearest, earliest voice for a no fly zone. He has firmly cast aside his early rhetoric about the purpose of British foreign policy. A choice has been made, and it is the right one.

The consequences of that choice, which surely requires the protection of civilians in the West as well as the East and the manner of the eventual ending of the Libyan regime, may throw up many more challenges. The road ahead will be tough, and there will be challenges to our resolve both in Libya and far beyond. But the right road has been chosen. The Prime Minister deserves support and congratulation for that decision, both now and when far harder times come.

In that fight, The right of the Conservative party are the hidden and undeclared allies of Ed Miliband.

They don’t know it and would shudder at the thought, but in every action they take there is a brutal internal logic which strains the coalition to its limit, and in doing so, allows Ed Miliband to position himself in precisely the territory that would make most sense for the coalition.

Let me start by saying this: I’ve never been dismissive about the coalition. I’m less so now, as it seems to enter unpopularity. Merley by existing, and enjoying an existence of apparent stability, it has thrown a generation of British politics into a quiet tumult. Progressives find themselves alongside conservative radicals, tradional moralisers with metropolitan liberals, libertarians of various hues alongside the religious and the one nation conservatives.

Of course, all parties are coalitions in one sense or another, but this coalition is wide and broad and straining in many different directions. Not all of these are party political. Some Conservatives feel more fondness for Danny Alexander than Ken Clarke, and Lib Dems might warm to David Willietts as the fear for David Laws.

So yes, the Coalition upturns British politics, and yes, it contains many tensions. But there is no reason, within it’s own turns, why it might not work. Why those tensions might not be quietly resolved, and a common plan for governance agreed upon, one that edures past first signinginto a fusion not of manifesto, but of broad values. That is the great danger for Labour.

Of course, the obvious source for tension lie with the Liberal Democrats. I’ve recently been reading about the history of Coalition politics, and without doubt, it makes for grim reading for Liberals. Rivalries become fissures, fissures fractures, fractures, factions and factions in the end, become whole new parties.

Yet if the Coalition were under pressure only from one wing, their leaders could cope. Liberals become unhappy on regional policy? A tack can be made by the centre.

David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove know the need to accommodate their partners. Mostly, they are finding that the distances between them are not so great. They are economically liberal, socially liberal technocrats, with little interest in redistribution and a distaste for the state. Like Austen Chamberlain and Baldwin with Lloyd George, they find they can rub along reasonably well, cheered on by Times Leader writers and BBC news editors, who feel perfectly at home with this politics of national sentiment.

On top of that, the leadership of the Conservative party know that their problem for a generation has been an inability to get out of the box of core Conservative support. They know they haven’t spoken to enough of the great middle of British politics. White collar workers, non unionised metropolitans and rural non-comforists of the Celtic fringes make up key parts of that middle, and by embracing the Liberal Democrat agenda, the Conservatives can broaden their own support.

Without the Tory right, the inexorable logic of the Coalition is a move to the middle of politics, of somehow being above party, of high words about the national interest and common sacrifices.

I believe in the end the Liberal leadership would be gobbled up by the Conservatives, but in the act of consumption, the Conservatives too would be transformed. In fusing, they would change.

Thank god then, for the Tory right.

Every time I hear the drumbeat call for the rapid cutting of tax for the wealthy, the anger at Cameronion social liberalism, the hunger to rip up regulations and tear down the protecive shelters that the state offers to the weakest.

Whenever I hear a Tory demanding the preservation of the Constitution, or a stiffer line on Europe, I get the reassuring feeling that. like Austen Chamberlain, one day Mr Cameron will find golgotha at a Private Members club in Whitehall. The visions of a re-alignment of Britshi poliics will prove phantasms and he will be forced to retreat into the comforting embrace of the Conservatism that is never quite enough to reach the whole of the British people. In threatening that final reckoning, the Tory right will prevent Mr Cameron from doing what he knows he should.

If that is the case, the Coalition will in the end find it’s values and strands are incompatible. The hope of subtle consensus will be ended by the rancour of the neglected Tory backbenches, who will demand that once used, the Liberals be not subsumed to advantage, but tossed away with force.

If Labour is wise, a willingness to be open to the casualties of this coming tension, from disillussioned social liberals departing liberal orthodoxy, to public servics reformers who shrink at slashing at the state, could yeat play great dividends.

Yes, the old mould of politics has been broken. The stability the coalition now presents is an illusion. For the first time in generations political strands of thought, belief and loyalty are shifting. If we want to be, Labour is in a prime position to collect the vast majority of them, but to do so, requires from Labour the kind of willingness to compromise that the Conservative right will, in the end, not tolerate.

I say this, not because I agree with him (I don’t), but because this intelligent intervention is exactly what you would like from ex-ministers no longer burdened with concerns like getting the party they are a part of re-elected. No politician suggests decriminalising all drugs out of excesive concern for their future political prospects.

That said, if I were in Ed Miliband’s office, I would have drafted exactly the same statement that they issued.

Why? For three reasons.

First, what Bob has said is not, and will not be, the policy of the Labour party.

Second, the public massively disagree with Bob Ainsworth on this. Political parties have to take account of what the public thinks. (these are both the reasons why Bob was right not to speak out when in office. As a minister, you ask questions and debate internally, then accept the verdict of your colleagues or resign. You don’t get to have both power and freedom of speech, sadly)

Third, although there is some evidence of good outcomes from Drug decriminalisation, the experience in Portugal (where posession of more than 0.2g of cocaine or 2.5g of marijuana is still subject to criminal charge. People get the wrong idea about that) certainly doesn’t show any major reduction of drug use.

Indeed, there appear to have increases in drug use. So you’d be unlikely to see an end to drug supply, or a reduction in drug cultivation.

The advantage apears to come dmestically, in the pressure on prison places, treatment and death rates – and certainly there, the data is at best inconclusive. It looks like drugs are cheaper, slightly more used, and fewer drug users are in prison.

But, for example, the decline in drug users with HIV, often lauded as a result of decriminalisation, is just as notable in Spain, where drugs are still illegal but treatment programmes are widely spread, while the death rate data seems more related to Heroin usage than criminalisation in most nations.

So, as I say, I think Bob is wrong, and I understand why his political leadership is condemning him.

At the same time, I’m glad he’s spoken out, and I’m glad we get to have the debate.

I’ve one final reason to be glad Bob Ainsworth is speaking out. He’s been unfairly characterised in the media and amongst bloggers as a bit of a dolt. His moustache, his glasses, his accent, all count against him in the sneering world of the grubbier street hack. They make him a perfect target for the Letts and the Hoggarts. Part of me is simply pleased that such pundits have missed the measure of the man.

—
cross-posted

Kennedy, with a hint of Obama, by way of Macmillan. Not bad rhetorical reference points.

More seriously, it was an excellent speech.

Ed stuck to the centre ground on Economics, made it clear he understood people frustrations with political culture and decisions of the past, and setting out a new direction on civil liberties and laying a real stress on fairness for those who work hard and would like the government to be on their side.

There are areas that will draw critical attention – Iraq and Civil Liberties most notably, but whatever I may think of the first it’s clearly the view of the majority of the country, and one thing Labour needs to grasp is that a belief in civil liberties and being tough on crime are not incompatible.

More broadly, the Labour party has to be about fairness, and providing a clear definition was the task of the speech. In that he succeeded, help for working families, a belief in a more even spread of wealth, and a defence of community- against the powerful forces of the market and the unreformed state. All of this will resonate powerfully.

There’s one danger- that in being so strongly for a new generation, optimism and change, what are real changes for the Labour movement become lost in a miasma of traditional rhetorical platitudes.

I am by nature a bit of a contrarian, and at one point I began to long for a defence of the Elderly Pessimists who distrust change.

But that minor quibble aside, Ed did what he needed and more. The test is whether people at home will be impressed. I think quite a few of them will be nodding along.

Gary Gibbon – Channel 4 news, yesterday.

Elsewhere in the Whitehall jungle I hear that IDS is having a rough time of it at DWP. The Treasury isn’t buying any of his expensive proposals, carefully worked out in opposition. He’s baulking at even bigger, straight, old-fashioned cuts to benefits than those already announced. The perpetual conflict between tighter means-testing and disincentives to work is at the heart of all this.

Some Whitehall old hands say IDS is the senior civil servants’ top tip as “minister most likely to walk”…

Of course, this was all foretold.

By me.
(and in much more detail, but in a round the houses way, here too.)

IDS’s dream is dead. It’s just a question of whether he’s smart enough to know it or foolish enough to stick it out while it decays.

Welfare reform is expensive. Lifting people out of poverty is expensive. Who-ever does it, however you budget for it.

If the Treasury isn’t prepared to write the cheques, it won’t happen except in a deformed, sickly, poverty causing way. Sadly, that’s where we’re going.

When IDS himself says he had to argue with the Treasury to stop a freeze on all welfare payments, the signs are terminal.

She’s right.

There’s no good reason why Labour’s shadow cabinet should be male dominated.

If the issue is that there aren’t enough “Brilliant/ Talented/Experienced/whatever women” that’s a fault of the system we’ve employed, not a reflection on the abilities of Labour women.

In the short term, a more “woman-led” shadow cabinet will provide a strong contrast to the government. In the medium term, forcing a leader to have a strong top team of women will give them an incentive to promote, develop and encourage strong women candidates, MPs and frontbenchers.

Nor should we worry about a few bruised egos amongst ambitious younger men. Those of us who survived in politics without patronage have dealt with AWS for a while, so it’s right that the golden children who comprise the younger end of the Shadow cabinet shouldn’t be excepted either.

Of course, having a fifty per cent women shadow cabinet will make the shadow cabinet elections even more ludicrous than they are at the moment, but that’s no bad thing.

A situation where a woman MP gets 70 votes while a male colleague gets 110 and is not elected will make it abundantly clear the Shadow cabinet elections fail as a test of PLP popularity.

But PLP popularity is no guide to good performance in shadow cabinet. So why should we care? Good relations with colleagues is an important element of being a frontbencher, but other skills, from forensic questioning ability to campaigning strength, to being good with the media are also valuable.

As is being a diverse, representative group.

So if we must have elections for the shadow cabinet (and I personally think it’s a relic of a failed era of Labour politics) then the PLP should elect perhaps ten people, half men and half women, with the leader able to appoint another ten (again, half men and half women).

You might argue for a slight further gender flexibility (because a degree of flexibility is always useful, as recent selections have shown!), but the principle should be clear. More gender equality, more variety in routes to leadership positions.

1. Why is a pledge on cutting inheritence tax for millionaires a higher national priority than reducing the deficit or tax cuts for low income single parents?

2. Where will savings in Education budget come from, given you are spending BSF money on setting up “Free Schools”?

3. You have promised to offer referendums on Council Tax. What will you do if a Council loses a referendum, cannot raise funds, so closes vital services to save money, as has happened in California? Will the Government accept Council plans to close schools and sell of parks in such a case?

4. If you are to cap non-EU immigration but at what level – Press reports suggest 40,000 a year. Is this correct? If so, what impact do you expect this will have on UK Universities and Business?

5. The Marriage tax allowance mostly goes to married couples where one partner doesn’t work. Why won’t married couples with two earners on the same income (like a nurse and a teacher, living together) get any help?

6. You have explicitly protected NHS, defence and DfID spending, promised not to reduce fuel allowances or pensions, offered tax breaks to the wealthy, married couples and business, Who are you asking to make sacrifices to reduce the deficit?

7. The Conservative party has explicitly attacked the “Postcode lottery” in the past. Under your plans we will see very different services in parts of the country as local providers make different decisions about everything from class sizes to MRI scanners.

8. Do you now that a short term “postcode lottery” is an acceptable consequence of devolving power, and if not, how will the Government intervene in failing “independent” schools, hospitals, and police forces?

9. You want everyone to “Pull together” to sort out the deficit. What will you ask Lord Ash… (OK, fair enough, cheap shot!)

Rather than being mouth achingly stupid, it was merely utterly unrealistic and impossible as a platform for governing, which puts it with oooh, 99.9999% of articles written for political magazines.

Mind you, Blond didn’t make one mistake – a firm proposal that a Tory government should mutalise BA. (“Cameron should push a radical economic policy — mutualising British Airways…” ran the email I got promoting the piece). With what? I thought, Jellybeans? BA’s Market Cap is what, three billion. I can think of a few things we should be doing with three billion quid other than buying companies and turning their shares over to their workforce.

Anyway, turns out Blond doesn’t quite say this. Instead he just says mutuality provides a model for energy companies and BA, and leaves the thought hanging there, with no suggestion about what should be done with such a lovely model.

This is the tenor of the whole piece. Blond proposes a whole series of rather vague things that the Conservatives are never going to do, because they would cost a fortune (“a living wage for every familiy”), be incredibly impractical (“localise the banks”), would anger the city (“break up Tesco”) or totally self defeating (“extra tax raising powers to councils”).

The only plausible suggestion is using the bank capital gains we get when we sell our stake to support
entrepeneurship. Which would be fine, except for the fact that George Osborne has already committed the Conservative party to selling cut price shares in the Banks to private investors, so there wouldn’t be much capital gain.

The Osborne approach is more a Tell Sid policy than a Red Tory policy, whatever the populist window dressing. Do you remember the urban poor getting a particularly big stake in BT?

Anyway, reading Blond’s piece, you get the sense that this is a man who on being taken for a ride in a flashy sportscar by a new friend, notices that the brakes are failing and a cliff-edge is coming up. He glances nervously over at the driver and wonders if he can really trust him.

This article reeks of someone preparing to detach himself from upcoming disaster, but is jettisoning himself quite yet, just in case the brakes will be OK. Which reminded me of someone on my own side. Someone who rose by asssociating himself with the language and style of New labour, then continued to rise by turning on it when it became unpopular, thus ensuring a never ending stream of plaudits from comment editors and those whose tactical interest co-incided with his rhetoric.

So, I have worked it all out.

Phillip Blond is the Tory Neal Lawson, and I claim my five pounds.

While the stamp duty holiday will benefit me personally and (given the age and salary profile of most journalists and editors), get a lot of headlines, it is essentially a measure designed to ensure housing values stay steady. Fair, enough – but not where the real action is.

Instead, I’m more excited by what Alistair Darling talked about, in his understated way, as the Growth Agenda.

Let me put it this way: the prime political challenge of the centre left for the next decade has to be the creation of around two million jobs. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to pay down debt. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to fund public services. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to fund the research, development and technology that is needed for long term growth.

Doing that won’t be easy. People talk about export led growth, and that’s important. But everyone will want to export their way to growth. People talk about public works spending, but such projects can only do so much.

So, perhaps paradoxically for a left winger, it was the Treasury approach on supporting industry that most caught my eye: the bits of the budgets I got excited by were the tax relief for industrial investment being doubled, so it will be more cost-effective for companies to buy new machinery; the recognition that small businesses need help with their Business rates and flexibility on tax repayments; the focus on supporting commercial lending; the willingness to encourage entrepeneurs to build companies by reducing their capital gains tax.

This agenda can make a real difference – especially when allied to government and private sector investment in new technologies, a protected science budget, backing of industries like the video game sector and major infrastucture projects designed to boost private sector capability and compeitiveness – like Cross rail, Heathrow, High Speed rail, road investment and the Thames tunnel sewerage system (Don’t laugh. Sewers matter for growth. Ask a Victorian. Or a Mexico citian, or a New Delhian, or anyone else who lives in an emerging megalopolis).

Of course, most of these measures won’t make a huge difference to next years growth figures, but they have the potential to make a difference to job creation and GDP growth for years to come, which is what really matters for the economy.

Now there’s more we could do. I’d like to see areas like the North East be offered the chance to become a “special economic zone” for green technologies, with special tax breaks to encourage overseas investment. I’d like to see bigger programmes of support for FDI generally – especially in regions with high public sector workforces. I’d also like to see even more emphasis of industrial research, on skills and on ways to drive up private sector R&D.

Each of these moves would have a cost, and the cost would have to be met from within the current spending envelope. Choices have consequences. These aren’t easy. In fact, twenty years ago, anyone in the Labour party who took this sort of position would be assailed as a dangerous Thatcherite. Now, I wouldn’t be suprised if Jon Cruddas led the charge. These are interesting times on the left.

But wherever I’d like to go further, this was a Budget in the right direction on all of those issues.

What was remarkable, to me at least, was the Conservative response to the challenge of how to deliver growth.

Or rather, the lack of response. David Cameron uploaded a bucket of rhetorical manure on Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. Fair enough, that’s his job. But that’s basically all he did.

Cameron’s policy agenda seemed to be two fold – first saying that a Conservative would deliver a lower deficit much faster than Labour would, while simultaneously pledging to “ease the tax burden” via tax cuts for the corporate sector. (No employers NI increase, cut in corp Tax*, etc etc).

How can he possibly hope to do both? He’s not really suggesting that corporation Tax is on the wrong side of the near-mythical Laffer Curve, is he? Even if he does have some secret plan that will allow him to painlessly reduce the deficit more quickly than Labour, while also protecting spending on the NHS and reducing corporate taxes, it’s simply stunning to me that a Conservative party has almost nothing more to say about how we deliver economic growth.

Sure, we got the odd grass-roots friendly soundbite about unleashing the spirit of enterprise, but little or nothing about how – aside from the aforementioned corporate tax rate cut (which in my view is a anti-growth step as it increases the tax burden on businesses investing for the future while reducing the burden businesses taking profits)*.

What else was there? The bank levy Cameron announced on Saturday disappeared from his speech today. The National Loan Guarantee scheme is presumably still policy, but is more or less irrelevant in the face of changing events. HSR? Heathrow? Business rate? Investment funding for future growth? Nothing.

Even the Tories own Dyson report, which was vague but essentially benign, didn’t rate a mention from the Tory leader.

If you listened hard to the leader of the Conservative party today, you’d have learnt a lot about how much he despises the Labour front bench, but almost nothing about what a Conservative Government would do to help people back to work.

There was only one party today with an agenda for economic growth via expanding the potential of our private industrial and manufacturing sector. It was the Labour party.

*Originally this was to be by a tax increase on manufacturers via abolition of Investment allowances and R&D Tax credits – since they’ve now reversed their policy on the R&D tax credit, it isn’t fully funded.

* Oh, and NICs. But NIC increase in 2011 won’t limit new employment anywhere near as much as the tories seem to think. It only starts at the £20k level, which is a lot below the level of most new hires, and even above that, you can do salary sacrifice for pensions which would neutralise costs for employers.

I disagree with them – not because I think the economy is roaring along fine, but because I believe that a widening of the short run deficit at the moment would be recieved negatively by both the markets and the media, and end up being an expensive and politically disastrous mistake, with little economic benefit.

Yet, on reading the “stimulus” letter again, I’m not sure that the letter writers are talking about a “stimulus package”, as I understand it.

When I think about a stimulus package, I think of it as being like an emergency adrenalin shot, designed to get a stalled economic heart beating again.

That means major incentives for consumers to consume -lower taxes, zero interest rates, discounts on key purchases, easier flows of lending, all combined with direct mechanisms to increase demand – from increasing benefits, to protecting people in jobs, to leaving pots of money at the bottom of filled in mineshafts so companies are formed to dig them out, buying a lot of spades in the process. *

All of these are designed to get people to go out and buy things, sell things and generally pay each other to do stuff ASAP. this creates employment, which creates demand, which gets the ol’ heart beating again, whatever terrible abuses were haped on it in the past.

What the Guardian letter writers seem to be talking about is something quite different to this sort of stimulus programme. They seem to be demanding more of a long term change to a healthy nourishing low fat diet than an urgent adrenalin shock to a stalled heart.

They say “we encourage the chancellor to use the forthcoming budget to announce a second fiscal stimulus – especially in housing and transport, where investment has fallen most, and with a focus on developing a low-carbon economy – which would both help to secure economic recovery and create much needed jobs.”

Now, High speed rail and building new motorways and housing estates are a jolly good ideas- but they won’t do much fiscal stimulutin’ for the next couple of years – unless you’re a planning lawyer.

As for low carbon – well, the fiscal stimulus effect depends on the measure embraced – research into battery times won’t impact demand much, but ordering a few thousand new busses probably would make a difference in Belfast.

In other words, I don’t think what the letter writers are calling for is much of a stimulus programme at all. It’s a medium term investment programme – and here, we’re much closer in desire.

So what sort of programme could we agree on?

I’d argue that the challenge for the left is to campaign for an increase in UK investment over the next few years.

This isn’t a about short run stimulus programme in the traditional sense, as I don’t think we can go to that well again, but about supporting a shift of national resources towards drivers of long term growth – whether via investing in wind turbine technology and nuclear power, increasing transport infrastructure, or supporting a substantial increase in UK private sector R&D and Foreign investment.

To butcher the arguments of Martin Woolf and Giles Wilkes – we need a German stimulus package, but a British medium term investment plan.

What we can’t do, on the left, is pretend that this will all be easy for us. Calling for “Stimulus” falls into that trap, I fear.

To focus national resources on investment will mean shifting resources away from favoured spending projects and even deliberately restraining consumer demand. That will hurt some of our key constituencies.

It will also mean a recognition that will we need the private sector to do much of the heavy lifting of delivering this investment- and that we need to make it attractive for them to do so. That will often feel counter intuitive in an era of public spending restraint. Increasing Tax incentives for inward investors, for example will feel like an odd priority as we hold down police and nurse pay.

So while I probably agree with the Guardian letter writers more than I suspect, I worry that simply calling for a National Investment programme under the banner of “stimulus” ignores the strategic choices we’ll need to make on the left if we are to deliver a change in the allocation of resources over the next two decades or so.

* Yes, there is a role for “shovel-ready” public works programmes in such stimulus programmes, but whether it’s been the Roosevelt era Public Works Adminstration, or the rather less lovable KdF/DAF programmes of the pre war Nazi period, public works investment has generally played a second or even third fiddle to bigger economic forces.

They get overstated, because they’re easier to think of and better to propagandise about, but from employing artists to do mosaics or building Beetles, such programmes have had little to do with short run economic gains.

So a woman porn director wants to be an MP? Good for her. I’m sure the voters will be much more sensible about it than the political classes.

Anyway, from her wiki entry (I suspect parliamentary computers will prevent going much beyond wiki) she seems like someone with a real belief in personal freedom and choice rather than some sorry mens mag sleazoid, like, well, the owner of the Daily Express.

When I talk to serious people in badly cut suits, they are unanimous in their opinions. “Oooh, the deficit is troubling”. They say, grimacing in fiscal sympathy. “It’s all very serious” they add, stroking their chins in deficit based peturbation. “Sacrifices must be made” all concur, gazing steely eyed towards a future of budget balances and restraint.

You know what? I agree with them.

I sit alongside, in my own badly cut suit, grimacing and chin stroking and gazing sternly at the dissolute world with the best of them. I nod along solemnly when, to quote Benedict Brogan, we hear the regular call for a “politics, not of them and us, but of “we” “.

But I have to respond, “Who exactly is this “we”?”

Because when it comes to asking people who have done very well out of prosperity and asset growth to contribute towards last and this years current economic rescue operation, I’m all for it. Go right ahead, I say.

But apparently this is class war and would negatively impact the entrepeneurial spirit.

To which I have to ask- What, do only the asset rich or people on over £100,000 a year people have an enterprising spirit then?

(£100,000 a year, I note, represents the top 1 percent of the population, but only the top 50 per cent of Telegraph columnists. Some regard two and a half times that as chicken feed. Now that’s the spirit of enterprise our country needs. )

To get the economy growing, I think we need to see businesses started by parents on middle incomes – people on twenty or thirty thousand a year – and help given to families who need tax credits to help them if they find work, and support given to those who have young children.

I think it’s their prosperity that is going to help us drive growth, and I don’t quite see what reducing corporation tax for companies that earn over £1.5 million in profit each year will do for them, or why the assets of the very rich are more sacrosanct than the VAT rates paid by the poorest.

Yet apparently this is class war. Gosh. We’re setting the bar a bit low for that, now aren’t we?

So I want to ask my comrades in the single colour ties a question.

If we’re all in this together, how come it’s only the poor and middle incomes who get told they have to pay the price – whether through worse public services, higher taxes or an attack on their ability to create wealth?

You know, I might look like just another centrist wonk, but underneath this M&S suit apparently lurks the heart of a class warrior.

It’s oddly thrilling. Like suddenly discovering you’re spiderman. My friends. I pass, like night, from think-tank to tank, and have acquired, like the mariner, a strange power of speech.

Let the fight begin.

Anyway, whenever someone perfectly sensible tries to get their head arounds this stuff, they end up writing a thousand words on the complex inner contradictions and fuzzyness on specifics inherent in the “Red Tory” project, which is a polite Thinktank way of saying it’s a load of old toss.

I have a simpler version. It’s toss, with the sole interesting feature being that it is fashionable toss. Why it is fashionable is a far more interesting a question than what Philip Blond is actually saying.*

I mean read this stuff:

“A new power of association could be delivered to all citizens so that if they are indeed in an area that receives public services in a form that can be identified both by sector and by type and if area specific budgetary transparency is delivered such that each place knows what is being spent on it, then if those services are less than they should be in terms of quality, design or applicability, then there should be a new civil power of pre-emptory budgetary challenge that is given to any associative group that claims to represent those in its area”

Why is it such waffle? Because if it wasn’t, if it was clear and you knew anything about housing, you’d probably say something like, “ah, like a Tenant management organisation you mean? But hold on, arent’ they part of the state that’s destroying society a paragraph ago…” and then you’d go, “ah, this is all toss”.

Which it is. So don’t bother yourselves with it.

(BTW, If the transcript of the launch is to be believed, the one thing that can be said about red Toryism is that it is resolutely, indefatigably opposed to commas. This is not good.)

As someone once said to me – Many things that are provocative are not worth arguing with. Red Toryism is one such.

I have nothing against the people behind politicshome, and if they think they can make money out of collecting together the outpourings of all the pontificators and savants of British political journalism, fair play to them. It might make it easier for me to be irritated by Simon Jenkins smug, self satisfied banalities.

That said, my immediate sensation on seeing their collection of top ten columns to read, plus another ten “if you have more time” (After reading ten thousand words of verbiage already? How much time do we have to spare here?), their collection of 100 political observers, their tracking of the top blogs, their aggregation of well, everything… was to want it all to go away.

When confronted by such a dense barrage of opinion, reaction, comment and views, my response was “Please, shut up already”. When concentrated like this, distilled into its essence of assertion and prognostication, it becomes clear that collecting together political commentary just increases the noise to value ratio to an unbearable extent.*

I’m biased perhaps, because I’m just finishing ‘Black Swan’, the book on probablity by  Nassim Nicholas Taleb. At one point in the book he says he refuses to read newspapers, insisting that they merely give the illussion of understanding current events, when in actuality they merely work as any other self confirming, self propagating organism (like hedge fund managers, or movie reviewers, all pulling each other in the same direction, until some completely unexpected event causes them to change direction together).

Seeing politicshome made me realise that Taleb is right. There’s little actual value in trying to absorb all the views out there, because you can do better things with your time. Most of what politicshome will collect (Maybe even this blog, if it ever becomes a “top 100? blog- another century of waffle right there!) will be of almost nil value.

Now, that doesn’t mean politicshome is a bad site, or that you shouldn’t visit it. I suspect it’ll be useful as a way of seeing what the conventional wisdom of the day is. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that knowing the conventional wisdom is in any way helpful in anticipating events. It’ll only help you understand the way the market is moving, not what will happen next. For that, you have to think for yourself.

In the end, you’re better off trying to develop your own theories. After all, if there’s one thing the cacophony of opinion should make easy to hear, it’s that your voice is as valuable as that of anyone else.

* PH say thay have a “dedicated team of professional political observers paying constant attention from 730am to midnight every day… …an intelligent filter, picking out everything that is newsworthy, provoking controversy or of long term significance“. The poor sods have my sympathy.