John Gray reports on the first day of the strike:

Today was the first 24 hour period of strike action in Notting Hill Housing Trust. There was a fantastic picket and lots of active support for the Strike. We estimate that over 100 members came to join the protest outside Notting Hill headquarters alone.

Interestingly, the vast majority of the strikers were women who of course will tend to have by far the most to lose if these anti-family policies are scrapped.

Shame about the Notting Hill CMT member who tried to deliberately provoke the pickets by declaring loudly he was “very happy to cross the picket line!” with a big smirk on his face. No wonder the organisation is in such a mess with folk like him in charge!

There was plenty of press interest and messages of support from various trade unions and encouragement from other UNISON branches and trade councils. We were next to a busy street and spent a lot of time encouraging passing motorists to “toot” their horn in support. There was a very good atmosphere amongst the pickets. This being “Notting Hill” we even had a portable CD player blasting out Bob Marley songs.

This was a good first day and hopefully management will come to their senses and start to negotiate. If not – we will be back.

Check out “All Together Worse” for further information and pictures.

All the recent talk about whether or not British troops have been given the equipment they need reflects a fundamental problem in British politics: all of the main parties accept Britain’s intervention in Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. William Hague’s speech gives every indication that a Tory government will continue, and risk expanding, Britain’s military presence abroad.

Hague, unsurprisingly, also repeats the meme about Britain’s credit rating being a worry, citing the ‘recent’ Fitch warning about the loss of the triple-A rating. I say ‘recent’ because Fitch has been carping about this since last year, so a new press release about it is hardly serious news. What makes this interesting is that Hague is all about the deficit reduction…and yet continuously talks up “Britain’s role” abroad.

With what equipment, in this Tory-led deficit-free utopia? Spitballs and paper aeroplanes?

Far better, surely, that Britain does step back from foreign engagements. Getting rid of the new naval carriers and the nuclear deterrent are the first steps, but cutting back the armed forces drastically should be a high priority all across the board, not just with the latest toys.

Contra the moralising about what equipment the troops did and didn’t get in Afghanistan or Iraq, it isn’t spending issues which have caused problems. Ask the Americans, who have spent nearly US $1 trillion, compared to the piffling billions of the United Kingdom. It is being there in the first place, when the government was warned of the consequences, creating conditions that exacerbated ‘terrorism’ until now it threatens nearby states.

It’s not the contradiction of a pushy but low-spending Britain that makes the clearest impression, however. It’s the interpretation of economic performance as merely a gateway to Britain being able to punch its weight in ‘world affairs’, rather than both economic performance and that weight in world affairs being tools to securing jobs, homes, healthcare and education at home.

In essence, this is high politics at its worst – talk of leaders and prestige, of power and the military rather than jobs and homes. Interestingly, Hague insinuates a future Tory government is prepared to invest in the military, to build new industries…but what about investment in higher education and research for the same purposes?

At the Times Higher Education debate back in February, Tory David Willetts was all about the euphemistic “rebalancing” of higher education, with more focus on students, and no reversals of Labour’s cuts to the teaching block grants, capital budgets or research. Hence Labour won the vote, at the end of the day, on which party had the best policy.

So we return to a bonfire of regulations and taxes, to encourage private investment to come to the UK, to shoulder the burden which the Tory state wants to shed. But of course there’s no talk of retreating public services, and when there is, it’ll be blamed not on Tory economic orthodoxy but on the failures of the Labour government. Which, in this hypothetical, future rhetorical encounter, will no doubt have been ‘in hock to the unions’.

But hey, don’t worry! Though people may want for their basic needs, our army will still be free to kill johnny foreigner when he doesn’t do as ordered.

…and the first election leaflets to feature an inaccurately drawn graphs, the credit for which appears to be going [inevitably] to the Lib Dems in Camden for this delightful effort>

(Hat Tip: Ben Goldacre)

Obviously, the actual graph that Ben ran across is on the left with my own rather pointed commentary on the right.

So, what are we going to do about this kind of thing?

Rather than run through the usual exercise of taking the piss on a case by case basis, I thought we might try a bit of different approach in an effort to encourage political parties to be a bit more honest in their dealings with the y-axis.

So, today, I’d like to announce the official launch of Liberal Conspiracy’s own Graph-Fix service, which is open to all our readers of whatever political persuasion.

The way the service works is all pretty straightforward.

If you do receive an election leaflet that features a dodgy-looking graph, and it can be any kind of graph from any party, not just the LibDems, then all you need do is send a scan or digital photograph of the graph to me at talkpoliticsuk[at]gmail[dot]com along with the details of the party/candidate responsible and the constituency in which it was delivered.

For purely practical reasons, I would prefer that you only send General Election leaflets – unless you run across something particularly egregious in a local election leaflet – and because there are a fair number of boundary changes this time out, you should also include any information that the leaflet might contain about the source of the information contained in the graph.

I’ll then check the graph for accuracy and, if necessary, redo it so that it provides an accurate visual representation of the information it contains, after which I’ll contact the party in question and send them over a set of corrected image files for future use, including a high quality .eps file for use in their printed materials and jpeg and png files for use on their website.

If we get a few of these, then I’ll also produce a weekly round-up/rogue’s gallery post of the most egregious pieces of y-axis abuse I’ve received that week together with a few suitably sarcastic comments to keep you all entertained.

And that’s all there is to it…

Oh, and regardless of whether you do choose to make use of this service, I would still recommend that you take the time to scan and upload any leaflets you receive to the Straight Choice’s live election leaflet archive.

]]> http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/03/16/election-2010-tackling-graph-abuse/feed/ 37 http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/03/16/tax-dodger-moi/ http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/03/16/tax-dodger-moi/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:10:21 +0000 Chris Dillow http://liberalconspiracy.org/?p=12387 You don’t have to be a non-dom to avoid paying income tax. Over the last 12 months, I’ve paid less than 10% tax and national insurance on my income. This isn’t because I’m a non-dom – I haven’t been abroad for 15 years – or because I have a fancy accountant. It’s simply because I made a big contribution to my pension fund, which attracted tax relief.

I could afford to make such a contribution because I sold my flat in London in 2008. But it’s possible that the profits from this were the result of policy-makers’ actions. I don’t just mean that the profits were tax-free, but that house prices rose at least in part in the 1990s and 00s because of easy monetary policy and loose regulation of the banking system that allowed massive mortgages.

There’s more. I put some of the proceeds of that flat sale into the stock market at various times in 2008 and 09. I’ve therefore benefited from the fact that policy support for the banking sector – loan guarantees, QE, low interest rates and government borrowing – has helped raise share prices.

In these ways, I have been a net beneficiary of government (and Bank of England) actions, not just in the last two years but possibly – depending on your view of how much policy contributed to rising house prices – in the preceding years as well. And this is not to mention the fact that the state gave me a good education; a degree in economics from Oxford in the 80s was pretty much a licence to print money.

I don’t say this to boast. Many people have profited from these measures by vastly more than I did. Instead, I say so for three reasons.

First, to show that the state is not necessarily a force for equality. Many quite wealthy people have been net beneficiaries of policy measures.

Secondly, the idea that it is only public sector workers who benefit from big government is just silly. I’ve worked in the private sector all my life.

Thirdly, this should put complaints about high taxes into perspective. It’s quite easy to dodge those taxes quite legally, if you arrange your affairs moderately well. Such complaints – at least if they come from someone around my age – tell us about how some people have an inflated sense of their entitlements, not about how onerous the tax system is.

Held in central London (sorry out-of-towners, hence the advance notice) – this event will be a forum of sorts for lefties to discuss, strategise and debate how we can build and push the Left. By that time we may have a Tory government, and so the event will be even more important.

We have space for about 100-120 people. The event will be free to attend but invite only (due to limited space) and focus on lefties who want to build a new left movement. I haven’t sent out any invites yet or even made any concrete plans other than confirm a venue for that date. Hence, this note. More details when I get back at the end of March.

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.

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. As late as 1997 every single one of 60 council seats were taken by Labour. But since then politics have caught up with economics and that de facto monopoly has been broken. Stoke heads into this year’s council election ruled by a coalition of Tories, independents, and LibDems. In addition to Labour’s 13 seats and the BNP’s eight, there are five groups of independents with 23 councillors between them. The council chamber is also home to the internet-based Libertarian Party’s single sitting councillor. In addition there are constantly shifting factional battles and fallings out among the various groups – the latest victim of which being the BNP, who lost their group leader after deputy fuhrer Simon Darby was parachuted into Stoke Central as their parliamentary candidate.

But by far the biggest victim of fratricidal disputes has been Labour. It’s been doing a good imitation of the most split-crazy elements of the Trotskyist left these last five years as councillors have walked out and been readmitted, broken away, and defied group discipline. There’s been plenty of action outside the chamber too. Labour mayor of the city, Mark Meredith, was deposed after a campaign led and supported by local Labour activists secured a successful referendum on the abolition of the mayoralty. And presently the regional and national party have banned three of the movers behind the campaign from standing for council on a Labour ticket, and have taken several measures against them. So bad have things got that last Saturday’s front page of local paper, The Sentinel, carried news that these long-standing members intend
to sue the party.On top of this Stoke Central CLP have been boycotting meetings of the city-wide Labour party in solidarity with the three, and held its AGM a few weeks ago in defiance of a ruling by the NEC.

And so the decision of sitting Stoke Central MP Mark Fisher to stand down could not have come at a worse time.

Mark has had a number of medical problems and is currently recovering from surgery that would see him out of action for most of the election period. But there’s suggestions from a number of quarters that he’s been leant on too. By who and why will reveal itself once the selection battle for his successor heats up. According to Stoke’s Pits n Pots blog, the powers that be are poised to draw up an all-woman shortlist for selection. I have heard from alternative sources that there will be an open selection, an 80-20 tilted selection (toward women applicants), and a direct imposition of a candidate. In other words, no one has a clue what’s going to happen. But I am encouraged by a few of the (local) names that have thrown their hats into the ring that we won’t get some Blairite clone.

It is clear that if Stoke Central suffers a fate similar to Ashfield, the constituency party will be damaged by a slew of resignations and/or activists deciding to campaign elsewhere. The possibility of a current party member trying to do a Blaenau Gwent cannot be discounted, nor can a significant collapse in Labour’s 9,770 majority. As I was writing the above, it was revealed that Stoke Central CLP has been suspended. This means it cannot hold any formal meetings until the suspension is lifted, which will be after the elections. What this means for the selection process is unclear.

Unfortunately, because of the fragmentation of Stoke’s politics and the decline of Labour it is the BNP and independent fascist, Alby Walker, who are best placed to make significant inroads into that majority.

What a sorry state of affairs.

The Socialist Party topped the poll with 29%, ahead of the Centre-Right UMP on 26%. The Green Party finished third with 12%, with the far-right National Front fourth with 11%.

In total, parties of the left gained more than 53% of the vote, the first time in decades that the Left has gained more than half the vote in the first round of any national elections.

In a fortnight, the top two candidates in each region will take part in a run off election, and it is likely that the Socialists will repeat their success in 2004 and retain control of 20 of France’s 22 regions.

More info here and here.

The next Presidential election in France will be in 2012. With recent opinion polls showing Angela Merkel losing popularity in Germany, election gains for the liberals and greens in the Netherlands, as well as the troubles that our Tories have been having, the signs are that the centre right is losing popularity all across Western Europe.

The new reasoning centres around access to public services. Many people, the poorest people, don’t have any form of identification at all: no passport, credit card, driving licence, or even household bills in their name. ID cards, says Hillier, will provide a solution for these people, guaranteeing that they can quickly access the public services they need. The idea that a robust and trusted form of identification can be a tool for empowerment is something that the liberal left, instinctively against ID cards, needs to consider.

The approach is not without problems. Hillier says that people may miss out on a job, because employers are legally required to check you have the right to work in the UK, and inadequate identification might hinder this process. Likewise, she says people may miss out on renting a flat, or be refused a bank account, due to lack of ID. This may be so, but the hurdles that ID cards are designed to solve are actually regulations put in place by the government! Why not lower the hurdles? Why not create a new, entry-level type of bank account, with less overdraft and laundering possibilities? That way, ID barriers and credit checks could be safely reduced (perhaps some economists amongst our readers could comment on the practicalities of this, or whether such accounts already exist).

Discussing the technicalities of the new card, Hillier mentioned the ubiquity of the iPhone and other modern gadgets that can run any number of applications. “Why not put a chip in the phone?” she asked. After all, it is the chip that is the important bit, not the waterproof plastic. Quite right… but the wags will soon ask why we can’t put chips in our foreheads, too.

During the Q&A, I made a point about the tension between efficiency (which Hillier was keen to trumpet) and privacy. Perhaps privacy lies somewhere in the inefficiency of systems talking to each other? If it is actually a bit inconvenient to check someone’s identity, then those in a position of power over us are less likely to do so on a whim or a prejudice. David Eastman has a beautiful short essay on this point:

If someone is trying to track me down, then someone must think I really am worth the effort. Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.

Unfortunately, the Minister said this view was “bonkers”. I fear this attitude has more to do with the inarticulacy of the person making the philosophical point, than with the underlying idea. Anti-ID card campaigners are genuinely concerned that the system will be abused by officious and power-hungry government officials. They are concerned that companies will start accepting only ID cards as suitable identification for giving people work. If I was refused entry to a nightclub because I wasn’t on Facebook, or if I was refused employment because I was not on LinkedIn, then I would be rightly indignant. If ID cards become so efficient as to be ubiquitous, and opting out becomes ever more impractical, then we do have a civil liberties issue on our hands. It is a very specific point, and pedantic, perhaps, so I can see why the Minister would get a bit exhasperated. But still, Meg, “bonkers” is not enough of an answer. Those arguing for ID cards need to address this issue, or risk the anti-card campaigners making this inference: That ID cards are designed to be ubiquitous, and designed to become so essential that opting out becomes a practical impossibility. If this is the underlying motive, then the government should at least be honest with us.

The other hardy perennial in the case for ID cards, is that since we already have Oyster Cards, Nectar Cards, PayPal and Amazon accounts, we have already surrendered a lot more information about ourselves than would be stored on a database. This argument is fundamentally weak – We can choose to completely opt-out of the Nectar card or Oyster system if we wish. Facebook has privacy issues of its own, of course, but you can delete all your friends, tags, apps and photos if you want. Can you opt out of the ID card system, once you have signed up for it?

“No” says The Minister. Once you’ve tied your finger prints to your name and identity, its on the system forever. This ensures that no-one else can put their finger-prints to your name and steal your identity, Jackal-style. This seems sensible… but it is nevertheless a fundamentally different process to signing up for any number of user accounts. Ministers should stop using the Nectar Card example as an argument for why ID cards are benign.

Hillier acknowledged throughout that the government has presented a “muddled message” on ID cards and that Labour should “take responsibility” for not putting out better arguments for the new system. A case made on empowering the poor is a much better approach than one based on fear and xenophobia… but the government needs to do more – a lot more – to convince skeptics that it is not trying to introduce something much more comprehensive and far-reaching in the long term.

Update 16th March 2010 – I am told the Minister spoke from notes, so there is no published version to link to. Y’all have to take my word for it that what I reported is an accurate reflection of what was said.

From Kerry McCarthy’s blog:

MPs were shocked today to learn of the sudden death of Dr Ashok Kumar MP. I didn’t really know him, and consequently was surprised – pleasantly surprised – to see this email from the BHA paying tribute to his brave work on humanist issues.

BHA mourns Dr Ashok Kumar MP (1956-2010), politician and distinguished supporter of Humanism

The British Humanist Association (BHA) has expressed its sorrow at the death of its Distinguished Supporter, Dr Ashok Kumar MP. Ashok Kumar was a great supporter of the BHA, a committed and active member of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, and a self-described life-long “liberal humanist”.

Andrew Copson, BHA Chief Executive, said, ‘Ashok was a long-standing supporter of Humanism and often went out of his way to get involved in and further humanist issues in Parliament. Ashok was especially interested in education, and was opposed to the divisive and discriminatory “faith schools” system, preferring inclusive schools and objective religious education, not religious instruction. In fact, Ashok spoke of the dangers of segregation and religious indoctrination consistently over the last decade, and in almost every Education Bill.’

‘Ashok also took the lead in Parliament in campaigning for a national holiday on the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, in honour of one of the fathers of modern science and one of Britain’s greatest scientific minds. The loss of Ashok’s commitment, good humour and humanist outlook will felt by many in and outside of Parliament.’

Speaking in a House of Commons debate called in 2006 by his fellow humanist MP, Dr Evan Harris MP, he commented on the failure of Alan Johnson to ensure that faith schools would take pupils of other backgrounds:

‘I am against segregation, and I think that in his great spirited way the Secretary of State was trying to break down barriers and avoid future segregation. For that he was slapped down by the whole religious lobby. I find that very sad, because the Secretary of State was thinking, as we say in new Labour, for the long term—not tomorrow or the day after but perhaps 15 or 20 years’ time. We do not want groups of people in society who believe that one religion is superior to another—a generation in which some believe that the only way is jihad and others believe it is Khalistan, and in which there are also Hindu fundamentalists. By the way, I am of Hindu and Sikh descent, and I am very happy to be so, although I am a non-believer. I was raised in both of those beliefs and went to a state school. I had no problem with learning about all faiths.’

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. Because diversity is, in fact, incompatible with equality.
In the world beyond Western liberal democracies, there are few societies that practice (or even believe in) equality and multiculturalism compels liberals to say that cultures where people are routinely discriminated against on grounds of gender, sexual orientation, and social caste are of equal value to our own.

Not only that but, to take diversity to its logical conclusion, these differences between cultures have not just to be tolerated by liberals, they have to be celebrated. To do otherwise would be “shockingly ethnocentric”. So a culture that is free, progressive and enlightened cannot be viewed as better than one that is not. All cultures are equal and to deny that is to invite allegations of racism or cultural imperialism.

Secondly, the liberal is asked to accept that, because we all have a need for a cultural frame of reference, it is best if we get our attachments from the particular culture into which we are born. So to remove a starving orphan from a Haitian earthquake zone and have him brought up in an affluent Western country would be, to the cultural relativist, a major crime.

But to argue that we are culture dependent, that we are somehow indelibly tattooed with the values of the particular culture into which we are born, is to deny the possibility of change and transformation. Such an argument assumes that we cannot learn, progress, think and organise in different ways. It denies that we have the right, as individuals, to create, through reason, our own moral and political landscape.

Diversity is ultimately about denial of choice, and runs counter to the expression of individual aspiration. It is a conservative policy incompatible with liberalism.

Anyone interested in reading a longer and more erudite exposition of the above should have a look at this.

Trevor McDonald Meets David Cameron attracted nearly 1.7 million viewers on ITV1 last night, Sunday 14 March – less than half the audience for Gordon Brown’s interview with Piers Morgan on the same network last month.

The Conservative leader opted to submit to a fly-on-the-wall documentary rather than an interview, with McDonald and the cameras following him at work and at home.

ITV1’s resulting 60-minute documentary attracted 1.689 million viewers and a 10.8% share from 10.15pm, according to unofficial overnights.

This compared with Morgan’s interview with Brown, seen by 4.2 million viewers, a 22.7% share, when it screened in the same Sunday-night slot on 14 February.

If that weren’t bad enough, the Guardian are also reporting that Cameron was well beaten in the ratings by both Match of the Day 2, on which the featured games were Man Utd v Fulham and Sunderland v Man City, and by a repeat of episode three of Great British Railway Journeys, which saw Michael Portillo travelling from Todmorden to York with a trip on the Embsey and Bolton Abbey Steam Railway thrown in for good measure.

What else can you say but…

…Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Woooah! Did you see that? The prime minister failed to use an adverb of degree. Labour leadership split! Hold the front page!

Such is the underlying logic of what was at the time of writing the lead story on the Daily Telegraph website, which was running under the headline:  ‘Brown declines to criticise Unite over BA strike’.

I notice that the Torygraph piece runs under the triple by-line of Rosa Prince, Heidi Blake and Chris Irvine, so perhaps the publication’s sub-editors made some sort of slip in bolting three pieces of copy together. Or perhaps this really is plain and simple distortion of the truth, in line with the newspaper’s strident rightwing agenda.

The nub of the article is the alleged contrast between a speech over the weekend by the transport secretary, which bitterly attacked the Unite union for planning a stoppage at British Airways, and the PM’s remarks in a broadcast interview today, in which he, er, bitterly attacked the Unite union for planning a stoppage at British Airways.

Mr Brown was careful to avoid criticising the union on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this morning.

Asked about the strike, he said: “It’s the wrong time. It’s unjustifed. It’s deplorable.”

He added: “It’s not in the company’s interest, it’s not in the workers’ interest, it’s not in the national interest.”

He said that while the strike was “regrettable and not acceptable”, ministers should try to act as honest brokers between the company and the trade union, Unite. “It is worthy of effort to try to prevent it,” he said.

His words contast [sic] with the language used by the Transport Secretary described the seven days of planned walkouts by thousands of cabin crew as “deplorable” and “totally unjustified”.

If there is a contrast evident here, it totally escapes me. And if that’s ‘declining to criticise the strike’, one shudders to think what would Brown have had to say to make his disapproval clear to our trio of Telegraph hacks.

Indeed, these paragraphs get things so comprehensively arse about tit that they deserve to be immortalised in journo training textbooks, just to show young reporters how not to write up a political interview.

But the real target of the invective is clearly Britain’s biggest trade union, which has donated £11m to Labour over the last three years. This was the cue for more supreme silliness from the Tory front bench:

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said: ‘The Unite union is becoming Labour’s new militant tendency — buying influence, fixing candidate selections and ensuring its political director Charlie Whelan has an open access to Downing Street.

Yeah, because that’s just what the Millies were like, innit? Forever running out of Number Ten with suitcases full of cash, so that Labour politicians had to funds to carry out policies of which they disapproved.

Then again, I suppose it is quite easy for Old Etonians to get confused between trade unionists and Trotskyists. They are all oiks, after all.

They say Charlie has occasionally been known to relapse into profanity. Just this once, nobody could particularly blame him.

I’ve been reading the headlines on both Left Foot Forward and Next Left over the weekend, thinking, “They’re not going to take the personal allowance proposal in isolation are they? Surely, this analysis must purport to show how, contrary to all the evidence I’ve seen, equalising capital gains, equalising tax relief on pensions, closing various other loopholes and introducing a mansions tax will actually have a minimal impact on the incomes of the wealthiest on society? That’s got to be some pretty bloody impressive research.”

How wrong I was because taking the personal allowance policy in isolation, it transpires, is exactly what Tim Horton and Howard Reed have done. They even preface their report by emphasising how much they approve of the Lib Dems’ tax raising proposals.

The fact that raising the tax threshold helps people on higher incomes more than people on low incomes is not, believe it or not, a startling revelation. We know. The party has never tried selling this policy in isolation; we’d be mad to attempt to because people would rightly ask where we propose trying to find £17bn. The two are meant to balance each other; that’s why we are calling for a tax shift and not either a rise or reduction in taxes overall.

In fact, just to be clear, with the banking levy, the Lib Dems are going into the election calling for an overall increase in taxes. The general line being put out at conference was that Nick Clegg ‘misspoke’ in his Spectator interview by ruling out Lib Dem support for any further tax rises in future to tackle the deficit, although sadly Clegg himself neither confirmed nor denied this when I pressed him on this in the Q&A.

But there are three other reasons why the policy is not only defensible but progressive:

1. An increase in the tax threshold will reduce inflationary pressure on wages at the bottom end of the scale and reduce the deadweight cost of employment. Anything that discourages the outsourcing of employment to other countries is a good thing, particularly at a time when the economy is so fragile, is crucial. The difference in income between someone working and not working at all is significant.

2. The fact that people on middle incomes do well out of this tax shift is an entirely good thing because we need middle-class buy in – again, especially during this fragile period. Campaigning for a massive shift in income between rich and poor which leaves those on median income out in the cold might be a nice example of hairshirt politics but it is unlikely to inspire the public.

Horton and Reed like to talk about deciles as keeping the argument abstract is helpful to them. Let’s try to move this a step or two into the real world though, shall we? According to the government’s latest equalities report (pdf), the weekly income at the 30th percentile (P30) is £292 while the income of the 70th percentile (P70) is £523, less than twice as much. There is actually a bigger gap between P70 and P90 than between P30 and P70. Individuals can shift between these abstract staging posts significantly during their working lives, and even within a few months. I’m a case in point, having gone from an income which put me in the top 70 percent to something approximating median income simply by shifting to a four day week to protect my job last summer.

So, am I concerned that our tax policies help people above average incomes? Not a bit of it, especially at a time when the average UK house price is, still, £160,000 (it wasn’t that long ago when a mortgage worth more than four times your income was considered the height of irresponsibility).

3. This policy represents a significant shift away from taxing income and onto taxing wealth. Shocked by the fact that there is a 4x income difference between P10 and P90? You should be, but you should be even more shocked that when it comes to wealth the difference is 100x. Any system which allows people at the bottom end of the scale a greater share of their own money whilst taxing the wealth at the top end of the scale will help to tackle that. It is, frankly, a greater priority.

None of this is to deny that the Lib Dems could go further. Personally, I would like to see a much bigger shift away from income taxes and onto wealth taxes. I’d be prepared to contemplate a flat tax and even the abolition of income tax altogether (although I have grave doubts about this being practical), which would almost certainly – in isolation – lead to a shift from low incomes to high. But crucially, I’d never want to see that happening without a corresponding increase in taxes on things like land. You could try to smear me as some kind of rabid, rightwing, Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian but frankly I don’t fancy your chances.

The Fabians’ own proposals in The Solidarity Society are very interesting and deserve a closer look. I have a lot of affection for the key commitment in the 1992 Lib Dem manifesto for a citizens’ income and would love the party to revisit it. But does anyone, least of all Sunder Katwala, Tim Horton or Howard Reed, believe that Gordon Brown is the man to implement a programme that even vaguely resembles universal welfarism?

In conclusion then, the Lib Dems’ proposed tax package would significantly reduce income inequality, go some way to addressing wealth inequality, would cut the deadweight cost of Labour and would benefit the middle classes as well during an extremely challenging economic period when solidarity between the poor and people on middle-incomes will be crucial.

A longer version of this post can be found here.

In a different world, this incredibly insightful piece of research by the housing and homelessness charity Shelter would be front page news.

Referring to 1971 as a starting date, Shelter discovered that if food and other essential items had gone up as fast as the average property price, a box of washing powder would now cost £28-53, a jar of coffee over £20 and a pint of milk £2-43.

Would you put up with that? Well, we certainly did with house prices.

Unaffordable housing has been one of the most neglected issues of the pre-election campaign.

The news is full of stuff like Nick Clegg wanting to join salsa classes with David Cameron rather than Gordon Brown. But in the meantime, homes cost way more than they ever did in history and the paradox is that if prices don’t keep ballooning, “financial experts” call it a tragedy.

Yet, the impact of inflated property prices has proven devastating.

There were 40,000 properties repossessed in 2008. Last year, the official number went up to 46,000 -an average of 126 repossessions a day. That’s around 200,000 people going through a heartbreaking ordeal of not knowing where they’re going to sleep the next day and where they’re going to put their things.

However, the figures don’t even show the full picture. Like some analysts noted, anti-downturn measures such as the Mortgage Pre-action Protocol have merely deferred the inevitable, meaning that repossessions that weren’t allowed to take place in 2009 will anyway within a year or so.

More importantly, no-one has taken into account the dodgy ‘Sale and Rent Back’ schemes, which the Financial Services Authority (FSA) only recently regulated. Their significance added an extra 25,000 lost homes to the 2009 figures (read more here).

Two months ago, it was revealed that around one million people had to rely on credit cards to help cover their mortgage or rent in 2009.

This Bill was introduced as a consequence of Liberia being brought before the courts in the UK. Greg Palast reported for Newsnight:

Liberia received debt relief worth $4bn from the international community in 2007 under the heavily indebted poor countries initiative, including $2bn from private-sector bondholders. Insiders to negotiations allege that two US financiers, Eric Hermann and Michael Straus, allowed other creditors to accept a low payout from Liberia, then quietly transferred their holdings to two other firms, which then sued in Britain for the debt in full.

The Bill would have protected the 40 countries helped by the heavily indebted poor countries initiative. It was also drafted to include measures to prevent assets being seized which are intended to help Liberia.

Three Tory members were in the house when the Bill was being discussed.As The Guardian makes clear, for some time no one knew which of Christopher Chope, Andrew Robathan or Simon Burns had raised this objection. This point should be reiterated, when challenged in Parliament the member who shouted, who we now know to be Christopher Chope, childishly refused to speak up.

I e-mailed the MPs involved in an attempt to find who had killed the BIll and received a single response. This was from Simon Burns making it abundantly clear that he whole heartedly backed the Bill. I am sure Christopher Chope has had a lot of explaining to do this weekend but he has still failed to even acknowledge my question.

Christopher Chope had concerns about the Bill, his objection was entirely within the rules of parliamentary protocol and he was also entitled to refuse to identify himself when challenged, but that does not mean what he did should not pass without condemnation.

This was a Bill introduced by a Labour MP, Andrew Gwynne, and supported by David Cameron and the Conservative front bench. I suspect that this is an example of an MP going rogue. Mr Chope spoke at inordinate length in previous debates hoping to stall the legislation.

As an “honourable” member objected to this Bill’s consideration a further vote must now be arranged for this to be passed into law. Since we are so close to an election, there does not appear to be time remaining in this parliamentary session to do so. The Bill is dead in the water and Christopher Chope killed it. Sadly, the consequences for him are likely to be minor compared to the damage which may now be visited on countries in the Developing world in this Bill’s absence.

If David Cameron cares about his party’s image and really is a compassionate conservative he will promise to reintroduce this Bill and help some of the world’s poorest people.

But if you’re stil parrotting the line that voting doesn’t make a difference and politicians are all the same – implying that you’ve never actually looked too hard at John Redwood- there is now an alternative. You can give your vote to someone who does care, someone in another country affected by Britain’s policies on trade sanctions, climate change and military interventionism, someone who doesn’t have a voice in these elections, but who just might deserve one.

The Give Your Vote campaign is one of the maddest, most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas to come out of the internet age in Britain so far. The concept is simple: if you don’t see the point of using your vote yourself, as is the case for many Disaffected Yoofs, then you can sign up to recieve notification of how one real person in Ghana, Bangladesh or Afghanistan would vote in your place, if they could. And then you get off your arse and you cast that vote. Due to launch today, this drive to combat voter apathy and build international solidarity has already gained several hundred Facebook followers, many of whom appear to be more than caps-happy flamewar faff-merchants, and several of whom have already pledged to donate their unused votes to people in developing countries whose livelihoods, homes and families have been imperilled by the decisions of British governments.

The scheme seems to be surprisingly thought through, with manifestos and focus groups in each of the target countries and an open-source system based on the efforts of volunteers to co-ordinate the proxy votes on election day. I spoke to the Give Your Vote campaigns organiser, May Abdalla, who is evangelical about creating a climate of global democratic involvement in an age where politics is disconnected from the reality of young people’s lives:

“The internet means we can conceptualise communities that aren’t just geographical, and start imagining democracy that isn’t just limited to within borders,” she said. “Young people understand that our ‘neighborhood’ is now global, but the campaign is aimed at everyone who feels passionately that people should be allowed to be part of the decisions that affect them. And we’re not the first to have this idea. During the US election, people started questioning the breadth of US influence; when we see so many so-called international organisations dominated by a few countries, whilst at the same time ‘democracy’ is held up as something so valuable that our country will fight for another nation to get it, we have to question how there can be real responsibilty in their actions if those they affect can’t hold them to account.”

“Give Your Vote is the mobilising of a transnational civil society through new media,” Abdalla explained. “People in Ghana and Bangladesh have respnded so well to the idea that they can represent themselves, rather than acting through an NGO that has its own objectives or requirements. The internet has a capacity to be used as a democratising force – because we can allow that diversity of opinions without the need for gatekeepers and be active in that process.”

All very sweet and utopian. But aren’t they worried about being slung in jail for electoral fraud? “It’s entirely legal, because we are not forcing anyone to vote in a particular way – jut encouraging them to allow others to use their vote as a platform,” explained Abdalla. “Anyway, David Cameron tells us who to vote for all the time.”

Most media outlets I’ve spoken to have dismissed Give Your Vote as a deranged student movement, and that, more than anything, is what excites me about the scheme. As a rule, any idea that makes nice people from both sides of the bourgeois political spectrum immediately and furiously dismiss you as a mental person generally has currency, because it almost always threatens unexamined orthodoxies. Orthodoxies like geography as the sole organising force for solidarity and fellow feeling. Orthodoxies like the inalienable right of the West to operate for its own profit or pride in the third world without being held to account by citizens of developing countries. Orthodoxies like East and West – them and us – rich and poor.

I will not be taking part directly, because I’m already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead. But if you’re not planning to vote yourself, I absolutely encourage you to sign up to the Give Your Vote scheme. If you can’t be arsed to tick one box once every five years to hold your government to account, you now no longer have the option of whinging that it won’t make any difference, because if even a few hundred votes can be cast by proxy in this election by people in countries affected by British policymaking, that will send an important message about international solidarity. I say this as a British patriot – yes, I’m on the left, and I’m a patriot and I’m proud, a patriot who believes in no borders. I love the British, and I also love my planet, and I believe that global thinking and global policymaking are the only paradigms that will count in a world that is increasingly connected, facing more and more problems that cross international borders, and approaching the singularity threshold. I believe in an international struggle for the liberation of workers, of women, of the disposessed. And lots of other young people believe in it, too.

The Give Your Vote scheme is exciting because it’s a whole new way of thinking about politics and online democracy, and that’s frightening for the old people who are currently sitting on all the power and all the money in this country. It’s frightening enough that this time round, Give Your Vote’s impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.

Most of the people reading this blog only have rights today because someone, tens or hundreds of years ago, had the crazy idea that we deserved them, and was prepared to be dismissed as crazy and hounded as a dangerous freak because of that powerful, paradigm-bended idea. Someone always has to do it first. And maybe, just maybe, this is another one of those first times.

You can apply for their Summer Academy, an internship which involves working on campaigns such as helping marginalized workers get a Living wage; working in East London on the CitySafe campaign to tackle violence through rebuilding a community; working with migrants and asylum seekers as part of the Strangers into Citizens campaign.

Or you can study an M.A. in Community Organising at Queen Mary University.

More info on their website, here.

Tim Horton and Howard Reed argue:

“The Liberal Democrats’ proposed tax cut fails the fairness test.

Spending £17 billion on increasing the personal allowance is a very poor way to help those on low incomes. It could actually harm the welfare of low-income households by increasing inequality and relative poverty.

The measure would do nothing to help the very poorest, who don’t have income large enough to pay tax;

Only around £1 billion of the £17 billion cost (6 per cent) actually goes toward the stated aim of lifting low-income households out of tax;

Households in the second richest decile would gain on average four times the amount than those in the poorest decile; and

The policy would increase socially damaging inequalities between the bottom and middle.”

Alix Mortimer replies:

“These are what Ben Goldacre calls zombie arguments. No matter how many times you knock them down, they always get up again.
…
There are dozens of Lib Dem policies that “don’t help the very poorest who don’t earn enough to pay tax”, just like there are dozens of Labour policies that don’t – because they are about other things. This policy is about a fairer tax system. It does what it says on the tin. It will make the tax system fairer and flatter, and in the process it will offer the greatest proportional help to people who pay tax but are nonetheless on low pay.

For people who don’t earn enough to pay tax, we have a little thing called a welfare state. And, coincidentally, the welfare state as constructed by Labour currently includes so-called “tax credits” paid over to households earning up to about £70k in some cases. As I’m sure you know another Lib Dem policy is to taper those tax credits. High-minded claims about Labour’s opponents failing to concentrate funds on the poorest are not well-founded.
…
You have reinterpreted the “stated aim” to suit your purposes. The stated aim is to make the tax system fairer. This has the *effect* of lifting low-earners out of poverty. Two, you are implicitly assuming that absolute gain is more important than proportionate gain. This can pretty easily be knocked on the head. £300 per year will make far more of a difference to someone earning £12k than someone earning £30k. And *everybody* earning £12k will feel that difference. Ignoring this simple truth suggests a disturbing lack of interest in people’s actual circumstances.
…
There *is* a debate to be had about the only point in which actual figures are quoted, i.e. point 2. This debate is largely about principle. The two questions are “Does absolute gain matter as much as proportionate gain?” and also “Should the tax system be fairer and flatter as a matter of principle?”. To which my answers are of course no and yes respectively, and accordingly, I don’t mind that the tax cut goes to everyone. It’s just a fairer tax system. I like fair tax systems. Your respective answers are yes and don’t care, so far as I can see.”

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.

A recent report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee examined the provision of homeopathy through the NHS and called for funding by the NHS to be stopped. The Committee did recognise that many users derive benefit from its use and did not argue that such treatments should be banned.

When it comes to NHS provision, we support a review by NICE into the cost effectiveness of Complementary and Alternative (CAMs) therapies, including homeopathy; as well as expanding the work of NICE to look at the cost-effectiveness of existing conventional treatments.

The Liberal Democrats believe that, as a basic principle, individuals should have maximum freedom about how they choose to get treated, so long as the therapy is safe. We know that many complementary therapies are popular with the public. The NHS budget is limited and we want to make sure that NHS funding is focused on treatments which are efficacious and cost-effective. NICE reviews of all existing treatments would give us the best possible basis for future decisions over funding.

An important correction needs to be made right from the outset because what the committee actually concluded in regards to patient benefit was:

16. We do not doubt that homeopathy makes some patients feel better. However, patient satisfaction can occur through a placebo effect alone and therefore does not prove the efficacy of homeopathic interventions.

Homeopathy has no medicinal value beyond that of the placebo effect, and that because the sugar pills and magic water dispensed by homeopaths are nothing more than placebos that contain no active medicinal ingredients. Once you understand that simple fact then you quickly come to appreciate that everything that follows in the Lib Dem’s position statement is a complete and utter nonsense.

Asking NICE to review the cost effectiveness of homeopathy is about as sensible a use of time and public money as asking the Ordinance Survey to conduct a review of the evidence base collated by the Flat Earth Society.

Calls for more research and for expensive and time-consuming NICE reviews are nothing more than a delaying tactic; a last desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable by a branch of pseudoscience that has had two hundred years to come with credible evidence for its efficacy and failed miserably at every turn. There is no particular shortage of research evidence relating to homeopathy. The problem that its supporters face is the fact that the only trials that purport to show that homeopathy has any effect beyond that of a placebo are uniformly poor in quality and wholly unreliable as evidence where properly conducted systematic reviews and meta-analyses of existing research have failed to find any evidence to support the view that homeopathy is at all efficacious.

Knowing that to be the case, why should we continue to throw good money after bad?

We don’t use public money to fund researchers to look for evidence of the existence of phlogiston or luminiferous aether nor do we send archaeologists on expeditions in search of Shangri-La, Lemuria or Atlantis, so why should we continue to piss public money down the drain on homeopathy?

We shouldn’t – it’s as simple as that.

As for making an appeal to personal liberty and patient choice, don’t make me laugh!

If you genuinely want NHS patients to have a real choice, an informed choice, then you have to start out by telling them them truth and explaining to them that what they’re going to get, if they visit a homeopath, is a bunch of bullshit and voodoo with a sugar pill at the end of it and nothing more. Of course, the problem with telling patients the truth is that placebos don’t work anything like as well if the patient knows that what they’re getting a placebo.

Patient choice is a self-negating concept when it comes to homeopathy, one that raises a number of significant ethical questions for the NHS in regards to the legitimacy of using placebos to treat patients.

The only credible policy that the Lib Dems, or indeed any other party, can adopt on this issue is that of accepting the recommendations made by the Science and Technology Committee in full and without equivocation:

33. By providing homeopathy on the NHS and allowing MHRA licensing of products which subsequently appear on pharmacy shelves, the Government runs the risk of endorsing homeopathy as an efficacious system of medicine. To maintain patient trust, choice and safety, the Government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments, including homeopathy. Homeopathy should not be funded on the NHS and the MHRA should stop licensing homeopathic products.

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.

This is a good opportunity to test out a piece of the liberal-left infrastructure that Sunny talks about trying to build. In the past, we have had to go through particularly bad articles, such as this one, and take the arguments to pieces line-by-line. This can be time consuming and after a while gets kind of tedious.

Wouldn’t it be useful if there were a website which had already anticipated terrible arguments like this, and mocked and rebutted them for us?

To test this out, I used the Decentpedia, which has an extensive catalogue of arguments made by supporters of the Iraq war.

Biggar’s argument is summarised point-by-point below, with Decentpedia definitions beneath each point in italics.

Biggar’s article has already won praise as “bravely takes on those who think it is axiomatic that the Iraq war was evil”.

Moral courage: “1. Selfless, heroic commitment to supporting the dominant political consensus of the ruling elites of the world’s most powerful nations.”

Biggar starts with a condemnation of the coverage of the Iraq inquiry, claiming that the “surfeit of moral certainty among the commentators is suspect.”

Arrogance: “1. Disgusting anti-war groupthink of sniffy left wingers, contending that there were no good reasons for supporting an insane, half-arsed, ill-defined and transparently doomed militaristic clusterfuck led by morons with support from the undead cast of Iran/Contra: The Musical.”

Biggar concedes that “For sure, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was morally flawed. The US administration’s motivation was hubristic and preparation for postwar reconstruction was woefully inadequate”.

Failures in the Reconstruction Process: “One’s policies cannot have failed because they were wildly unrealistic or contingent upon basic fallacies, but have been undermined by one’s ally’s failure to invade on a Tuesday instead.”

Biggar goes on to point out that, “Yes, the occupying powers were obliged to maintain law and order, and failed initially. But the insurgents were obliged not to send suicide bombers into crowded market places, and they have failed persistently.”

Terrorists are Bad: Terrorists Are Bad (also, Cohen’s Law) is a free-standing justification suitable for almost any occasion. Most commonly utilised while refusing to apologise for one’s agitation for catastrophic foreign policy blunders or in defending the bombing of military targets.

He adds that, “The invasion would be harder to defend were the country’s new regime to fail. But that has not happened yet, and those critics who care more for Iraqis than they hate the former US and UK leaders George W. Bush and Mr Blair will hope it never does.”

Mea Culpa Sed Tu Quoque Ad Maximum: “Idiotically ungrammatical Latin bastardisation, roughly “I may be guilty, but you are considerably more guilty.”"

A brief discussion of the legality of the war follows, in which Biggar argues that, “However, even if we grant that the invasion was illegal, we still have to grapple with the fact that so was Nato’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, which is now widely regarded as legitimate.”

Intervention: “an intervention begins when several hundred thousand heavily-armed friends drop by, before relieving ones psychotic ruler of his non-existent nuclear weapons programs and settling down to sell ones natural resources to their friends at super-bonanza knock-down prices. Used explicitly to disambiguate an intervention – a righteous moral crusade for freedom, truth and justice – from a deliberate war of aggression. The difference is vital in law, since one is awarded Nobel prizes for the first, and hung like a common cutthroat for the second.”

He asks, “Is the coalition to be condemned for filling the vacuum? Yes, there have been similar vacuums that it (and others) have failed to fill – Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Darfur. But is it not better to be inconsistently responsible than consistently irresponsible?”

Liberate: “The act of invading, bombing and occupying a dictatorship, before dictating the terms on which the nation’s resources shall be sold to one’s business associates at super-bonanza knock-down rates.”

Biggar points out that “there was good reason to withhold benefit of doubt and to suppose that Iraq was developing WMDs”.

No One Could Have Predicted: “Risky yet potentially fruitful rhetorical gambit, whereby one asserts that the failures of certain foreign policy clusterfucks have been caused by astonishing, unforseeable acts of barbarity and random chance.”

And he concludes by posing a hypothetical: “Maybe critics of the war view with equanimity what might have happened without the 2003 invasion.”

Alternative Iraq: “Diabolical, imaginary country not liberated by the Republicans, in which the daily horrors and atrocities are so vicious, extreme and barbaric that it makes the real misery of actually existing Iraqis look like a three-ring circus replete with clowns, jolly music and popcorn. A hellish land existing entirely within a parallel universe, invoked to scold realists and pro-fascists for their maniacal desire to retrospectively subject Alternative Iraqis to hideous, agonising, and entirely fictional deaths for political purposes.”

I wish my blog wouldn’t continue to bite me on the arse (not in the good way); I’ve held my finger over “Delete Blog?” button so many times.

I can understand why Zoe might want to start afresh, but this sentiment feels wrong and offensive – like book burning.

The other worry is for those who might want to start a political career. James Joyner at the Outside the Beltway blog discusses Philosopher Kings and the potential for a blogger-turned politician.

It seems to me that the chief barrier to bloggers getting elected to public office isn’t so much their typically introverted personalities or lack of access to money but the mere fact that we’ve accumulated a long paper (pixel?) trail of recording every fool thought that’s passed through our minds over the last several years. Even bright, thoughtful, decent types like [Ross] Douthat and [Ezra] Klein — and Lord knows, [Mickey] Kaus and [James] Joyner — have written things that would kill a campaign dead, dead, dead if it showed up in an attack ad.

We could certainly add Sri Hundal and the rest of the Liberal Conspiracy team to that list.

However, Joyner’s underlying attitude is defeatest. I prefer the alternative model, whereby blogging your thoughts allows you to spot holes, inconsistencies and hypocrisy in your own logic. This is Andrew Sullivan’s stated creed and I think it is this principle which sustains him as one of the most read blogs, both in the USA and internationally.

In UK, the political ‘attack ad’ is still a concept in its infancy. That may change during the forthcoming election campaign, but the parties still seem above that sort of thing. In any case, attack adverts posted on YouTube, can be instantly countered with an ‘reply’ video which links to the context from which the offending paragraph had been pulled. Anyone who blogs is likely to have the skills to do this within the hour. I think that anyone who tried to smear someone with quotes from their own blog at, say, a public hustings, could be easily discredited. A politician who knew what he or she had written (and it is suprisingly easy to remember your arguments, once they have been typed and posted) could easily call-out such a smear or ‘gotcha’ question for what it really is – pathetic and lazy political opportunism.

However, this sort of approach only really works if you engage properly with comments and corrections on the blog. Selective deafness to criticisms only makes the problem worse. I know this is the frustration of people like Justin and Tim when trying to hold Iain to account.

Indeed, it is via Iain Dale that another example of The-Internet-Coming-Back-To-Bite-You emerges. Anna Arrowsmith is a Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, and a director of porn films. Since the Lib Dems tend to espouse “live and let live” style policies, I think this is relatively uncontroversial, but the BBC did a story on it anyway. Iain notes that Arrowsmith’s website also says something far more damaging:

Anna is liberal and open-minded but politically she supports The Labour Party, for all its sins.

Scandal!

Only, not really. The website is clearly several years old (it has plenty of <table> tags for layout, an archeological relic in web design terms) and a quick peak at the Internet Archive shows the biography was written in 2004. Likely poor Ms Arrowsmith forgot to update her biography when she switched parties, which doesn’t make it any less awkward. A more practiced blogger would have remembered when and where they endorsed piolitical parties, and made a correction to the internet record at the right time. Nonetheless, its another example of how the Internet’s perfect memory often foils our best laid plans. Hopi has more on the Arrowsmith story.

Ultimately though, I think that the wisdom of XKCD should see us through. Zoe Margolis, James Joyner and Anna Arrowsmith should all print this out and pin it to the wall above their computer screens. Then, stop worrying, and get on with being themselves as best they can.

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.