This originally appeared on Hagley Road to Ladywood’s pre-election series.

I voted for Labour in the last three General Elections. In ‘97 I did it with conviction and hope. Four years later, before the War on Terror and all that jazz, I voted Labour with quiet content. At the last election, despite my better judgement and deep anger at the party, I did so again.

I will not be voting Labour in the coming General Election.

The fact remains that some of my closest political friends are still deeply wedded to the party. They don’t have much love for Brown, and they’re not defenders of the Iraq War, but their loyalty is to the party, not the personalities of the current car-wreck of a government. I’ve always been a pragmatist, not a tribalist.

I toyed with voting, and campaigning for, the Lib Dems. But having ‘enjoyed’ many run-ins with leading Lib Dem bloggers, I found many of them to be insufferably self-righteous. I know Lib Dem bloggers who are great, but others seem to believe they have a monopoly on liberalism and a fabulous sense of their own importance.

So, I find myself without a natural home.

Recently I wrote encouraging voters to ignore the largely indistinguishable major parties and vote for the single issue that’s closest to their heart. For me, it is individual rights and the increasing illiberalism of our lawmakers. Following my own advice I’m inclined to vote for the Pirate Party UK. continue reading… »

A elected second chamber, where we would vote for the Parliamentarians who decide on our laws, could be a desirable democratic innovation.

However, a peerage remains a significant public honour which reflects an important measure of esteem in our political community. (This is why some trouble is supposed to be taken to ensure that peerages go only to fit and proper personages).

A certain Mr Michael Ashcroft, who was in his own words “totally serious about my desire to be known as Lord Ashcroft of Belize”, failed to meet the obligations which were made a condition of his becoming a Lord and which his peers expected him to observe as a matter of personal honour. (Ludicrously, the Lords appointments commission believes it has no power to look again at a process overseen by its now abolished predecessor).

What a shambles.

Yet, as Mr David Cameron reminds us often, social responsibility is not only and always the duty of the state.

So, as a small and symbolic mark of disrespect, this blog will henceforth refer to the non-dom billionaire as Not-Lord Ashcroft.

May we commend the practice to the blogosphere.

This post is part of Hagley Road to Ladywood’s series on the election.

As a voter who’s long felt left behind by Labour, who’s unimpressed by the wet flannel liberalism of Nick Clegg and who remains underwhelmed by parties on the electoral fringe, this election has often felt like a choice between “the lesser of who cares?”.

For me, the prospect of voting this May – a task I might have once grasped with enthusiasm – seems like a tawdry chore, with each party appearing like a cheap imitation of my own values.

Still, after a good few months of dismayed dithering and yawning, I finally came to a decision about how I’m going to vote in this election:

I won’t.

Here’s the thing: 6 years ago a British prisoner called John Hirst went to the European Court of Human Rights demanding that our government give him and his fellow inmates the right to vote. The court ruled that our blanket ban violated the Human Rights Act, and ordered the government to make the necessary changes.

Naturally, the government has deliberately dragged its feet ever since; issuing objections and obfuscations at every turn, and getting no closer to changing the law than the establishment of some weak-willed ‘consulation exercises’.

This was fine for the first five years, but now the election has brought the matter into sharp relief. After ignoring repeated warnings that the General Election must not take place without the ban being lifted, in December the Council of Europe suggested that the election may breach the European convention on human rights. The council repeated that claim last week, along with the notice that, unless the law is changed, tens of thousands of prisoners would be within their rights to sue the British government.

As it stands, the coming election promises to be the first in modern history where tens of thousands of British citizens have illegaly barred from casting a ballot. Whatever crimes these men & women may have committed, however dubious their character, can we really claim to be tough on those who break the law when we are happy for the state to break its own laws in order to punish them?

For me, the answer is an unequivocal ‘no’. I cannot, in good conscience, exercise my legally-guaranteed right to participate in the democratic process when tens of thousands of Britons are illegally deprived of theirs. For that reason, I will be staying at home come election day. Not out of apathy, nor out of a lack of available alternatives, but as a small protest against a big injustice.

Guest post by Tom Freeman

Justin McKeating argues:

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

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

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

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

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… »

Guest post by Adam Ramsay

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

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

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

This is a contribution to the Liberal Conspiracy Mission Series

Sunny wants to build Liberal Conspiracy with more political strategy, activism and news. But it is not just content that he is after. What Sunny is attempting is ambitious, important for British blogland and on-line publishing and for OurKingdom, as we prepare a relaunch. He’s written three posts. I commented briefly on the first.

Liberal Conspiracy is immensely creative and refreshing. As well as tackling issues and being smart and forthright, it goes about things in a different way from your average lefty or liberal blog. It looks outwards to what is happening not inwards to what ‘line’ it should be taking. With this new development Sunny is trying to get us all to think with a similarly fresh spirit about our methods and how we resource them in the coming era of citizen journalism. continue reading… »

Guest post by Richard Wilson

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

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

Guest post by Mark Reckons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post originally appeared at Mark’s blog

So The Observer really rained on New Labour’s parade, deflecting attention away from Saturday’s policy launch and onto whether Gordon Brown is a dominating, paranoid, near-psychopathic bully.

Let’s assume – on the grounds that Andrew Rawnsley is a serious journalist and The Obs continues to keep up the pretence of being a serious newspaper – that the allegations are broadly true.

I don’t disagree that there’s cynical political maneuvering gone on here. Nor that there are partisan interests at play. But nonetheless, it seems that if these allegations are true then now had to be the right time to bring them out.

This is because a significant difference exists between the office of the Prime Minister and ordinary bosses. Namely, a normal supervisor or manager can be sacked for their unacceptable bullying of staff, or an employer taken to court over a lengthy period on harassment charges. Often the process isn’t ideal, but it’s there.
continue reading… »

Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Ken Livingstone will be among the key speakers at TUC Congress House on Saturday, where Sinn Féin is organising a conference on Irish unity.

Both Adams and Livingstone have alluded to the roots of the event in the dialogue which began back in 1982, shortly after Sinn Féin won its first seats in that year’s Assembly elections.

As GLC leader, Livingstone invited the party’s leaders to London only for them to be banned by Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

That invitation has played a central role in the right’s charge sheet against Livingstone ever since, but it is often forgotten that on his subsequent visit to Belfast in February 1983, he told republicans that “every time a bomb goes off in London or innocent civilians are killed in Northern Ireland it visibly puts back the cause of a united Ireland.”

The contacts established then went on to play a significant role in the peace process, with Livingstone acting as a key intermediary between Sinn Fein and Mo Mowlam in the mid-1990s.

The debates about Ireland in the 1980s raised issues that have resonated in more recent conflicts.
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A detailed examination of expenses claims submitted by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, indicates that she submitted almost £70,000 in expenses claims for services provided by two public relations companies in the 2½ years from November 2006 to June 2009.

These claims include more £20,000 for services provided by a PR company, set-up by a former Tory spin doctor in 2004, relating to Dorries’ controversial anti-abortion campaign, which failed to secure a change in the law cutting the upper-time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.

Dorries has also claimed more than £30,000 for services provided by two other ‘research’ companies with close ties to the Conservative party since becoming an MP in 2005.

Dorries’ official MPs website has also been found to have cost the taxpayer almost £9,000 since 2005 despite it not having been updated at all in the last twelve months.

Responding to reports that his company, Media Intelligence Partners, had received more than £66,000 in payments claimed against MPs expenses, ex Tory spin doctor Nick Wood told the Telegraph that MPs would typically pay for research, and then received PR advice from his company free of charge.

There should be, at least, a full investigation into the use of these companies, on expenses, by Conservative MPs.
continue reading… »

If proof were ever needed of the utter political bankruptcy of the current system of appointing new members to the House of Lords, then this BBC report is it:

Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson nominated as ‘people’s peer’

Paralympic gold medalist Tanni Grey-Thompson is set to become a “people’s peer” after a recommendation from the House of Lords Appointments Commission.

We can skip the next couple of paragraphs, which are just the usual puff about Grey-Thompson’s personal achievments, and move straight on to the punchline:

She will be one of four new non-party-political peers recommended to the Prime Minister by the commission.

The others are Design Council chair and former Whitehall mandarin Sir Michael Bichard, Royal Opera House chief executive and former BBC journalist Tony Hall, and eminent surgeon Professor Ajay Kakkar.

So, our other three ‘people’s peers’ are:-

- A career civil servant and Companion of the Order of the Bath.

- The Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House who’s role and achievements at the BBC are being woefully underplayed to give him a bit of the common touch.

Hall was not just a BBC journalist. He’s a former editor of the Nine O’Clock News, Director of News and Current Affairs Television, Director of News and, in 1999, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the job of Director General. Not uncoincidentally, the achievements section of his CV includes both the launch of Radio 5 Live and, somewhat more relevantly, the launch of BBC Parliament.

As for Professor Ajay Kakkar, my first reaction was ‘who?’, but on looking him up, he’s:-

Professor and Chairman of the Centre for Surgical Sciences at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary College University of London. Surgeon St Bartholomews Hospital and The Royal London Hospital and Director-Designate Thrombosis Research Institute, London, UK.

Its an impressive looking CV and it appears to come (although its not mentioned) with the obligatory Harley Street practice.

In all, this sheds a bit of interesting light on the appointments process undertaken by the House of Lord Appointments Commission.

On this evidence that appears one of picking a name that people will have heard of, for the sake of a nice headline, and then shoving three other well-stuffed members of the establishment in the behind in the hope that no one will notice just how obvious a piece of utter bullshit this whole ‘people’s peers’ business has been from start to finish.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to have a bit of a rant about for a while, and after listening George Galloway’s verbal excrescences on tonight’s Question Time I can hold back no longer.

If you live in England and you genuinely think that there is something deeply and desperately wrong with the idea of judges making law then you are, without question, an ignorant, mouth-breathing moron who knows nothing of this country’s history and even less about its legal and judicial system.

There, I’ve said it. That feels so much better.

I am thoroughly sick and tired of listening to people whining about so-called ‘judicial activism’, especially when their ritual whining incorporates a shit-load of banal maundering about how Parliament hasn’t done this, or said that or passed a law to the effect of the other as if this somehow invalidates anything and everything the judiciary does that they just don’t like.

If that’s you – and I do appreciate that such a view is not one that widely held by our regular visitors – then just this once I want you to listen up, numb-nuts.

‘Judicial activism’, the whole business of judges making law, is not flaw or a fault in our legal system. It is a feature of that system. continue reading… »

contribution by Lisa Harker

Most of the reaction to today’s speech to the Prime Minister’s ippr speech on constitutional reform has taken the view that it was an exercise in political manoeuvring.

Far from ‘new politics’ it is old Gordon, out to ‘wrong foot’ and create ‘dividing lines’ between Labour and its opponents. Even those more sympathetic to the need for reform, have adopted a weary tone that these ideas, coming so late in the day, are going to make very little difference.

Some of this is fair enough. Laying out a new ‘constitutional settlement’ would have had much more moral force if the Prime Minister had made it when he was new to office and secure in power. Coming now, in the dog days of this parliament with the public still fuming at the expenses scandal, it smacks of expediency.

Of course, the real pity is that when he took over at Number Ten, Gordon Brown did have constitutional reform at the top of his agenda for change. The problem was that he didn’t act on it.
continue reading… »

For months, the right wing newspapers have been inventing horror stories about what the consequences of what they call ‘Harriet Harman’s equalities bill’ will be. None, however, have managed to come up with as ludicrous a suggestion as that of Polly Toynbee.

She wrote today in the Guardian that she thinks that providing free personal care for elderly people might contravene the government’s Equalities bill, which expects public bodies to consider the effect of their policies on inequality.

Presumably, by the same logic, the NHS, schools, child benefit, free bus passes and every other popular and effective public service which reduces inequality should be changed so they are free only for the poorest, with everyone else having to pay.

With friends like this…

This kind of imbecility is merely an extreme example of a set of beliefs which are widely held amongst the political elite, which can be summarised thus:
continue reading… »

The 26th British Social Attitudes Survey has just been published, and has some interesting findings.

They show strong support for liberal social values, a decline in support for redistribution and traditional left-wing economic intervention to help the worse off, and overwhelming opposition to spending cuts in health and education.

It has prompted a mixture of gloating about how Britain is shifting to the right and whining about evil librulses not “tolerating” homophobia from our friends in the conservative movement, so let’s have a look at what it really says:

On social attitudes, Britain is becoming more liberal, except for when it comes to drugs:
continue reading… »

Say someone of Basque extraction, working in London, hangs behind his desk a flag obviously based on the Union Jack, save that the crosses are white and green and the background red.

Just for clarification, we’ll add here that all his colleagues know that to refer to him even casually as ‘Spanish’ is making a one heck of a mistake. And when the story breaks that Euskadi ta Askatasuna tried three times to assassinate Jose Maria Aznar, failing on each occasion, our hypothetical friend maintains in conversation that they were right to do so, and that he hopes that they have better luck next time.

Alternatively, anyone old enough to remember the days of lock ins at Irish pubs may have found themselves standing to attention at some point in the small hours, as the show band played a passable version of Amhrán na bhFiann and the buckets started passing round and filling up with cash.
continue reading… »

It’s difficult not to feel the sensation of deja vu when you see Alastair Campbell once again holding forth, defiantly as ever, before a cringing committee of the great and good tasked with supposedly wringing the truth out of him.

That they’d have more chance of draining red viscous fluid from a hard inanimate object is ever the unspoken reality.

It is also touching though, almost heart-warming to see just how loyal Blair’s ever faithful spin doctor remains to his former boss. Blair after all feels no such compunction to keep up the pretence that Iraq was all about the weapons of mass destruction and not the re-ordering of things while the pieces were still in flux, admitting as he did to that noted Rottweiler Fern Britton that he would have invaded even if he had known that there were no WMDs.

Christopher Meyer, the ambassador to Washington at the time, made clear in his evidence that he felt the government never resisted the march to war once it was clear that the US was going to take action regardless of anything or anyone else.

At various points, Campbell’s evidence made you wonder whether his stubbornness to admit almost any mistake is not in fact borne of his continuing loyalty to Blair, but in fact that he has to keep telling both himself and the world how he got everything right while everyone else has repeatedly got it wrong in order to convince himself that he is still on the side of the angels.

Hence he’ll defend “every single word” of the dossier and almost anything which contradicts his evidence is a conspiracy theory, like the Guardian report of yesterday which suggested that he changed a part of the dossier to bring it into line with a claim made by Dick Cheney.

It is though perhaps instructive to compare how we conduct inquiries with the Dutch. Previously the government of the Netherlands resigned after a damning report into the Dutch military’s failures at Srebrenica.

By coincidence, their own inquiry today into their role in the Iraq war has concluded that it was illegal, as UN resolution 1441 could not be used as a mandate for armed conflict.

Back here, we’re still regarding Alastair Campbell as though he’s a reliable witness. One suspects that the Chilcott inquiry’s conclusions won’t be anywhere near as incisive.

Over the weekend I was invited to observe the campaign group Power2010’s “Deliberative Democracy” event in London.

Chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy, it was billed as drawing upon the work of Stanford Professor James Fishkin to pioneer methods in which ordinary people might “set priorities for electoral reform, MPs expenses and political scandals.”

My usual cynicism about these sorts of things was initially over-ridden by how impressed I was with the democratic process at the Power2010 weekend.

There was something actually inspiring about watching ordinary people debate on equal terms, get enthused about their political system and work in a sense of reforming solidarity.

But the more I reflect, the more my usual scepticism returns. Because it seems highly unlikely that Power2010 can bring about the reforms (whatever they turn out to be) it champions.
(Channel 4 report at the end)
continue reading… »