This afternoon, I attended a speech by the Minister for Identity, Meg Hillier MP, hosted by the Social Market Foundation. The address was titled “Building a national identity service for all” and presented much softer casefor identity cards, compared to the terror-focused arguments of a few years back. (I will link to the full text of the speech when it is published).

The new reasoning centres around access to public services. Many people, the poorest people, do 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.
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Guest post by pagar

The policy of multiculturalism is built on two theories.

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

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

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

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

Lord Adonis says the British Airways strike is ‘deplorable’, and Gordon Brown says the British Airways strike is ‘deplorable’. Adonis calls the impending walkout ‘totally unjustified’, but Brown holds back and simply designates it ‘unjustified’.

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.

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I’ve been itching to get my paws on the latest Left Foot Forward report on the Lib Dem proposal to raise the income tax threshold to £10,000. “Think Again, Nick!” (pdf) purports to show that, far from being the most redistributive policy on offer in this general election, it is in fact deeply regressive and a hallmark of the Lib Dems’ rightward shift.

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 continue reading… »

The rising number of repossessions is the forgotten issue of the pre-election campaign.

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. continue reading… »

I can absolutely understand why many people around my age don’t want to vote in the upcoming elections, as long as they can understand why they deserve a smack and a dose of Susan B Anthony: suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.

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. continue reading… »

Some of the “big names” of the Labour/Left Blogosphere, (Including Will Straw, Sunder Katawala, Alex Smith and Ellie Gellard) joined MPs and journalists on the left of politics in signing a letter to the Guardian on Thursday calling for further fiscal stimulus.

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. continue reading… »

A couple of weeks ago James Graham helpfully documented one of the more rapid reverse ferrets in recent political history; the rapid withdrawal of a wholly idiotic Lib Dem statement made in response to the Science and Technology Committee’s recently published evidence check report on homeopathy. This week, James is back with a revised Lib Dem statement on homeopathy which he bizarrely describes as ’sensible and measured’. Frankly, ‘disingenuous and weaselling’ would be a rather more apt description of the new statement, which reads as follows:

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.

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This is a guest post by Tim Fenton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nigel Biggar, professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, has written an article in the Financial Times arguing that the Iraq war was necessary to stop or prevent a sufficiently great evil.

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. continue reading… »

I’ve spotted a couple of references recently to the ‘perfect memory’ of the Internet and how it can come back to haunt you in later life. It breeds a peculiar form of self-censorship. First, the now-outed Girl With A One Track Mind says:

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. continue reading… »

God, politics can be a bit depressing sometimes. Someone comes along with an unusual background wanting to be an MP, and what happens? All of us in the club smirk and nudge each other and roll out a series of pathetic double entendres, her party leader has to declaim her career, and an assembled phalanx of politicians and journalists act as if they’ve never so much seen a naked ankle. Bunch of hypocrites, the lot of us.

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.

For some, relativism has always been the turf of the left, particularly on the subject of poverty. Emerging ideas from within the Tory right are now trying to claim relativitism as more important to Conservatism than it currently is. One such development is the Progressive Conservative project at Demos. Their latest essay, entitled Everyday Equality, deals exclusively with trying to demonstrate the importance of inequality and the wealth gap and how this can be important to the future of Conservatism.

According to the document, Thatcher in her last Question Time of her period in office said to one of her Labour questioners that she didn’t care about the gap between the rich and poor, but simply cared about the wealth of the latter. Acording to the authors, this is not true to the real values of Conservatism at all, but rather neo-liberalism without an evidence base. continue reading… »

Guest post by Giles Wilkes

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were wrong in two ways continue reading… »

Is Alan Johnson right to accuse the Tories of deceit over their recent claim that violent crime has risen by 44% since 1998?

Of course he is, in fact he doesn’t go anything like far enough in his accusations. Not only are the Tories wilfully misrepresenting the evidence provided by the police recorded crime statistics, but they are also pursuing a deliberate and wholly mendacious strategy of seeking to undermine public confidence in the British Crime Survey, a point that Johnson has, as yet, failed to put over forcefully enough.

As evidence, let’s refer back to an article by the Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, which was published by the Telegraph in January 2009 under the title ‘Fiddling statistics is no way to restore public confidence”.  In the article, Grieve makes the following claims about the British Crime Survey.

The BCS is an obviously poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicide offences, rape and multiple assaults. It also excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including: the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and – until this year – all children. In fact, we know that police recorded violent crime has nearly doubled since 1997.

Grieve’s suggestion that the BCS is an ‘obviously poor measure of violent crime’ because it does not count homicide offences is as risible as it is boneheaded. The clue here is in the name, British Crime Survey, which explains precisely why it doesn’t count homicide offences – you need to be alive in order to complete the survey form. In any case, homicides accounted for only 662 of the 2.1 million violent offences that the BCS estimated as having taken place in 2008/9, a mere 0.03 percent of the total number of offences. continue reading… »

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

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

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

Lurch, according to my dictionary, is an archaic or dialect intransitive verb, which means ‘to prowl or steal about suspiciously’. Seemingly its sole use in twenty-first century English is to provide Tories with an all-purpose pejorative designation for any identifiable outbreak of milquetoast social democracy inside the Labour Party.

Labour, you see, never moves to the left in a cautious and considered manner after a period of due ideological reflection and deliberation. Nor does it ever hop, skip and jump in a general westerly direction, or veer to port in the wake of demonstrable justification for setting just such a course. Oh no. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, Labour is perpetually ‘lurching towards the left’, even when it is idling in neutral.

You can find a classic example of the genre on conservativehome.com, which warns its readership that Labour is lurching leftwards after … get this … selecting trade union officials for winnable seats. The piece is based on an article in The Times, headlined ‘Safe seats for union backers prompt fears that Labour will turn Left after election’. Seduce my aged footwear.

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This originally appeared on ‘Though Cowards Flinch’, here and here

It has come to our attention that the magazine ‘Total Politics’ is planning to publish an interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the British National Party.

Yesterday, we made an initial call to bloggers to consider a boycott of this year’s ‘Total Politics Blog Awards’, in the event that this magazine chooses to publish as planned an extended interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the BNP.

The initial call was greeted favourably by some bloggers who saw it, and we are therefore seeking to extend the call. continue reading… »

Fraser Nelson previews The Spectator’s interview with Nick Clegg, in which the LibDem leader has “put his heart into showing his hidden Tory side” according to the Speccy editor, who awards him a blue rose in noting his bid for a heir to Thatcher accolade.

It sounds as though it could be a major talking point at the LibDem spring conference in Birmingham this weekend, where it may not meet with universal acclaim among party members.

The LibDem leader is back in “savage cuts” territory, by arguing that the deficit should be dealt with only by spending cuts and no tax rises, which outflanks Cameron and Osborne on the right. (Nelson contrasts that with a Tory approach of 80% cuts to 20% tax rises ratio, and Labour 66% to 33%).

Age, he claims, has taught him the point of Maggie Thatcher. And, apparently, he now seems to see her as something of an inspiration, praising her for her victory over the trade unions.

Clegg may well be decisively outflanking the voters on their right too. continue reading… »

When the Metropolitan Police shot the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes in the head, seven times, we didn’t get the truth. We got anonymous sources briefing the media that de Menezes had run away from police, that he’d leaped the barriers at Stockwell tube, that he’d been wearing a heavy coat thought to be concealing a suicide bomb. It was all spin – or as it used to be called, lies.

Luckily for the police it distracted the press for a long time – at least until an inquest was finally able to white-wash the case.

When a Met officer struck newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson with a baton and pushed him to the ground without provocation, we didn’t get the truth. After Tomlinson collapsed and died, the police briefed the media that Tomlinson was a rowdy protestor, that he suffered a heart attack, and that G20 protestors pelted an ambulance with bottles as it struggled to reach the dying man.

It was all lies – but almost all the MSM swallowed it, at least until The Guardian obtained damaging video evidence to the contrary.

So we know that the police lie when they mess up. By now, you’d hope the media would be alive to their tricks. Sadly not. continue reading… »