Quaequam Blog!

7

Vote!

The proposal to hold a referendum on changing the electoral system to the Alternative Vote is Labour’s policy, so you would have thought they’d be delighted that the coalition government is going ahead with it, wouldn’t you? The problem is, a) Labour’s commitment to the policy is at least partly tactical (designed to appeal to Lib Dem voters – and Lib Dem MPs in the event of a hung parliament. Ironically, the effect was to make a Lib-Tory coalition more likely) and b) the Tories are insisting on implementing the policy alongside their own reforms of reducing the number of MPs by 10% and “equalising” constituency boundaries in order to remove a perceived bias in favour of the Labour Party. Labour politicians are up in arms at this and are threatening to bring down the whole bill.

To those of us outside the big two parties, this debate is somewhat baffling. They are throwing claims and counterclaims at each other regarding “gerrymandering” with seemingly no self-awareness at the fact that the current system (and even AV) gives both parties a tremendous inbuilt advantage that no other party enjoys. The sense of entitlement on both camps is eye-watering. But, that aside, can we legitimately accuse the Tory proposal as “gerrymandering”?

First of all, if you support single member constituencies, then you support in principle the idea that constituency boundaries should be drawn up in such a way that give different parties an advantage over another party. That is gerrymandering by another name. The reason for this is basic mathematics and gets to the heart of why no system which uses single member constituencies exclusively can be called proportional. It is best illustrated by what is known as the “gerrymander wheel“. The wheel shows how you can dramatically change the expected seat share each party gets simply by drawing the boundaries slightly differently. It is a problem with any electoral system with constituency boundaries, but the problem is greatly reduced even with two member constituencies with multi-member constituencies it rapidly becomes difficult to gerrymander.

But there is another factor, and this is something that both the Tories and Labour have got completely wrong. The fundamental problem the Tories have under FPTP is not the way the boundaries are drawn up but where their votes are. Simply put, Labour’s supporter base is spread across the country while the Tories tends to be concentrated in specific areas. This means that no matter how much you redraw the boundaries, Labour will still do better than the Tories nationwide while the Tories will always tend to have a concentration of safe seats (all things being equal).

The result is, any attempt to redraw the boundaries is unlikely to change very much, as two seperate academic studies have shown. So why is Labour getting so het up about it? Well, a factor is almost certainly the opposition party playing opposition games, but they do have one point: with millions of people not on the electoral register, some constituencies contain many more people than the election results suggest. This tends to be a particular problem in urban areas, which are typically more Labour than Tory. It is a problem that Labour had 13 years to sort out and refused to, so it would be nice if we heard a little more humility about it, but that isn’t the fault of the people affected, and I would agree that this should be taken into account.

What this can’t be used as however, is an excuse to not hold a boundary review, or an argument against equalisation. It certainly wasn’t during the two boundary reviews conducted under Labour and we certainly should not assume that those “missing” voters would all vote Labour given half a chance, no matter how great Labour’s capacity for self-delusion might be. With a census due to take place next year, this is in fact a good time to conduct a boundary review taking this fresh data into consideration. The Electoral Commission are already in the process of studying how complete and accurate registers are (pdf), and so long as the Boundary Commission are required to take this into consideration (in a transparent way), I can see no reason not to proceed at this point. The Electoral Reform Society have suggested that it might even be slightly beneficial to Labour; so be it. I suspect these details will all get thrashed out in committee in any case.

But there are two other objections to this agenda which are also being bandied about. One is that the combined effect of “reduction and equalise” will be to weaken the constituency link by ending the practice of having constituencies reflect local communities. The other is that reducing the number of MPs is itself undemocratic and bad for Parliament.

Superficially, there seems to be some truth to the first argument, which does make a bit of a nonsense out of the Tories’ claim to be the great defenders of the single member constituency link. How can you argue for that in principle, while reducing the degree to which constituencies reflect communities? And of course, I should include my own disclaimer that as far as I am concerned, anything that weakens the single member constituency link and results in MPs doing their job as legislators instead of their phoney job as social workers, is an entirely good thing. Bring it on.

But let’s not fool ourselves that the current system does a good job at reflecting communities; it doesn’t. That is due to three reasons: there is no fixed size for a “community”, the average constituency size doesn’t come close to reflecting the typical community and the concept of community itself is more mutable than it was, say, 100 years ago.

Here, for example are all the constituencies I have ever lived in:

• Ravensbourne (Bromley), which incorportated the council wards of: Biggin Hill, Bromley Common & Keston, Darwin, Hayes, Martins Hill and Town, West Wickham North and West Wickham South. As a West Wickham resident, I considered my “area” to be West Wickham, Pickhurst, Hayes and Bromley. Biggin Hill might as well have been on the other side of the planet. I couldn’t even tell you where Martins Hill is.
• Manchester Gorton (Manchester), which incorporated the council wards of: Fallowfield, Gorton North, Gorton South, Levenshulme, Longsight and Rusholme. As a student, I identified with the Oxford Road corridor, which incorporated much of Manchester Central. Much of Rusholme was, in fact, in Moss Side ward (Manchester Central). Much of Fallowfield was, in fact, in Withington (Manchester Withington). I very occasionally saw people in Levenshulme. Gorton was a completely different place, both ethnically and in terms of student population (I also lived in Central and Withington at various times, the same basic pattern applied).
• Leeds Central (Leeds), which contained various wards in central Leeds, most of which had little in common other than that they were in Leeds itself. Leeds North West, where I was agent in 2001, was even more disparate. Shaped like an ice cream cone, it included the student-heavy Headingly at one end and the rural villages of Otley and Wharfedale at the other.
• Warwick and Leamington (Warwickshire): To the extent that this constituencies contained two distinct communities, I suppose it counts. But even then, it wasn’t entirely cut and dried, as at the time it also included half of Kenilworth.
• Hendon (Barnet), which currently includes Burnt Oak, Colindale, Edgware, Hale, Hendon, Mill Hill and West Hendon. Again, most of these places might as well not exist as far as I’m concerned. I live in Mill Hill and own a flat in Colindale. I’ve been to Edgware once in my life and Hendon not much more frequently. Finchley and Golders Green, where I lived shortly prior to now, was also two extremely distinct communities (if not more).

Looking at all these constituencies, a pattern quickly forms. The size of the constituency is such that as far as local identification is concerned they are neither fish nor fowl. You DO get identifiable communities at a council ward level, you can even make a case for a community at local authority level (although in both cases there will always be issues around boundaries), but constituencies are typically at such a size that they should be regarded, at best, as collections of multiple communties. Indeed, within London the boundaries have got even stranger since this election, with numberous constituencies crossing local authority boundaries (I am technically a member of Lewisham and Beckenham North Liberal Democrats for example, and Hampstead and Kilburn is an aggregate of Brent and Camden wards).

Reduction and equalisation won’t change that. The tighter equalisation rules might, around the edges, cause a few more odd boundaries through the middle of towns and villages, but for the vast majority of constituents, their constituency will be the same impersonal lump it was before the change. Equally, there will no doubt be some areas that become more coherent as a result of the boundary changes. One of the advantages of STV is that by creating larger multi-member constituencies, each one would conceivably represent a more meaningful piece of geography such as a county or a borough, but that is another matter.

Of course there is also the fact that people’s sense of place differs wildly depending on their lifestyle. As a public transport user for example, my bit of North London is effectively Mill Hill, Finchley and, to a lesser extent, Golders Green – i.e. the bits which I go to frequently because of my daily commute. I can’t even get to Hendon directly by bus or tube. If I used a car, I would no doubt have a different perspective. “My” Manchester involved both sides of Oxford Road, from the centre out to Fallowfield – but that was because I was a student. As we all become more mobile and more culturally diverse, talk of constituencies needing to represent distinct communities becomes increasingly bunk. So to get precious about the constituency sizes we have now is frankly silly.

The final objection is that reducing the number of MPs would be bad for democracy, yet the House of Commons is unusually large by international standards. ERS have included a comparative table here. The conclusion they invite the reader to draw is that the UK doesn’t have a particularly oversized Parliament after all, but I’m not convinced. After all, the statistics do indeed show that the UK House of Commons is large by global standards.

For starters, the assertion that only countries with federal systems should have smaller Parliaments is a little dubious. Certainly, countries with legislative chambers at a sub-national level have fewer things for their legislatures to do, but it doesn’t follow that you therefore need more bodies to do it. MPs all have to vote on the same number of laws, no matter how many MPs there happen to be. And while, conceivably, more MPs means more people who can share the load in terms of scrutiny, in practice it doesn’t work that way.

For example, the Commons Select Committees have just been reduced in size from 18 members down to 11. Far from being about reducing the amount of scrutiny, this is actually about ensuring there is more. In the past, each select committee effectively consisted of a hardcore and a group of malleable part timers who would contribute very little and were more susceptable to influence from whips. Smaller committees are generally regarded as better in terms of building a consensus and doing the hard work.

I don’t have statistics, and would love to see them, but I would guess that public bill committees tend to be dominated by a bunch of usual suspects. Similarly, you either have an MP who reads things like papers on statutory instruments, or you don’t. It isn’t the number of MPs, or even the number of laws particularly that is the issue here, but the culture in Parliament that seems to reward citizens advice over and above legislating.

Either way, a reduction of MP numbers by 10% is unlikely to have much impact. A bigger reduction might do, for the simple fact that we have such a large payroll vote with our current system of government. But 10% is unlikely to have that much of an impact, and we should be reducing the payroll vote (if not seperating the legislature from the executive altogether) in any case. Another useful thing would be to increase the amount of research staff each party is entitled to employ, which would arguably do a far better job at ensuring there is more scrutiny than a handful of extra MPs at £100,000+ a throw.

Ultimately then, neither the “reduction” or the “equalise” part of these reforms are likely to make much of a difference, either to the political breakdown in the House of Commons or the nature of MP’s roles. Reforming the voting system to AV may be a modest reform, but compared to either of these tiny steps it is revolutionary. They are certainly a price I have no problem paying in order to keep the Tories happy (although it looks as if some backbenchers are determined to scupper the referendum bill in any case). What I find baffling is why Labour are claiming that some kind of massive point of principle is under threat here, when for the most part they are just totemic changes. Watching both parties scrap in this debate looks remarkably similar to two bald men fighting over a comb.

(9 votes, average: 4.11 out of 5)

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I wrote an article on Comment is Free yesterday about why people need to stop quibbling and start campaigning for AV.

Regardless of what might happen in five, 20 or 50 years time, at this precise moment you are faced with a choice between AV and the status quo. There can be no fence-sitters in the debate. I have to admit that initially I was quite uninspired by the prospect of fighting a referendum on such a modest, if meaningful, change. But two things have changed my mind…

Read it all here.

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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I guess we’ll be doing a lot of mythbusting over the next year or so, so I might as well start now.

Iain Dale has just issued a couple of posts about the Alternative Vote and Single Transferable Vote which contains assertions that simply can’t be sustained. Let’s go through them.

1. AV “is probably even less proportional than FPTP”

First of all, neither AV nor FPTP are proportional systems and the reason for introducing AV is not to make elections more proportional. Let’s by all means have that debate, but the referendum won’t be about that. So arguing which non-proportional system is more or less proportional is the world’s most pointless exercise.

We can of course talk about whether a particular election result would have been more or less proportional, but it is a pointless exercise as it involves making huge assumptions and in particular it assumes that the election is a one-off, not part of a series. So, for example, those famous bar charts that people moan about in elections are only used as an election tactic because under FPTP people have to rely on the past pattern of voting to decide how they might vote tactically – or whether to bother voting at all. Because tactical voting has become so common and that in some constituencies it has become ingrained (I am reminded of the various Cornish Labour supporters I’ve met over the years who take it for granted that they vote Lib Dem in general elections), we can’t really know how changing the voting system will change voting behaviour.

The example that is most frequently cited is 1997, in which it is generally believed that the anti-Tory swing would have had the effect of increasing the Labour majority at the expense of the Conservatives. That is probably true, but it wouldn’t have been if the 1992 election had been held using AV, in which case the pattern would have changed. And it is also the case that big swing elections like that happen less than once every general election. 2010 doesn’t compare and while the Labour and Tory seats may have changed slightly under AV this May, the main beneficiaries would have been the Lib Dems – thus it would have been slightly more proportional.

Australian AV elections are generally more proportional than UK FPTP ones but ultimately that’s irrelevant because AV is not a proportional voting system. The reason for introducing it is to give voters more choice and more competition within each constituency.

2. The winner in a FPTP election must get 50%+1 of the vote

Yes indeed, Iain Dale did indeed write that. Just for the record (I guess most politicos know this but a lot of others don’t): under FPTP you don’t need 50% of the vote or indeed any minimum number of votes. In Scottish four way marginals – and even in ones currently regarded as ’safe’ – the winning threshold can be very low indeed.

The example Dale cites of the 1979 Scottish Parliament referendum where the threshold was set ridiculously high was one of the most undemocratic acts of thwarting the will of the people we’ve ever seen in the UK (thanks, Labour!).

3. STV “weakens the constituency link”

I’ve argued before that the single member constituency link is one of the most pernicious aspects of UK democracy, and stand by it. I’ve never heard a coherent defence of it – it just gets invoked by people as if it means something inherently profound (ironically, often by individuals like Iain Dale who are more than partial to a bit of carpetbagging themselves). But does STV, my preferred system, actually weaken the constituency link? The short answer is, it depends.

Ask any Irishman and they’ll tell you that it certainly doesn’t. Indeed, the effect of STV is to make politics in the Republic ultra-parochial. Iain Dale ought to talk to David Trimble if he doesn’t believe me.

That said, there is no question that making constituencies larger and having multiple MPs represent them will have some effect of dilution. The constituency link between MEPs and their regions is very weak indeed, although that link would be strengthened by replacing the current list system with STV. But no-one is seriously suggesting STV constituencies for the House of Commons with more than six members maximum. In Scottish local government, all constituencies have three members, although that is generally regarded as too inflexible. Personally, I don’t think it would be sensible for constituencies to, on average, be larger than four members (I would settle for three members on average, while recognising that it would not be especially proportional).

Furthermore, the flexibility of STV is such that ultralocalist candidates will still emerge if there is a genuine (as opposed for forced) demand for them. A candidate could campaign on a platform of wanting to represent a specific town within the constituency and still win, for example. It would be up to the voter to decide how localist they wanted their MPs, not the boundary commission.

There is also the question of political representation. Whether he thinks he does or not, my MP does not represent me. He is very unlikely to ever reflect my views in Parliament and he certainly can’t represent my views and my Tory neighbour’s at the same time. So where is my constituency link? By contrast, in a multi-member constituency I would have a much better chance of having my views represented.

And finally there is the matter of competition. Where STV is used, the effect is that elected representatives are under much greater pressure to champion local issues than they are under FPTP. The effect is that a local campaign will often find it has three champions in Parliament where under a different system it would only have one.

Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves if the people of Manchester (for example) are better served by 4-5 MPs representing the city as a whole and coming from across the political spectrum, or carving the city up into 4-5 artificial constituencies. I think the former, but that isn’t a debate we will be having for the foreseeable future. And it is deeply ironic that one of the things the Tories are insisting upon at the moment is to redraw the constituency map so that MPs represent larger areas and that their constituencies are based on even more artificial boundaries. If they care so much about the constituency link, they should do the exact opposite.

4. The Jenkins proposal of AV+ is proportional

The Jenkins proposal included just a 17% top up of MPs elected proportionately. While that would mitigate the most extreme effects of using unproportional systems, its impact would be strictly limited. You could describe it as semi-proportional, but not proportional.

5. Under STV, the party has even more power and influence over candidate selection

This is the exact opposite of the truth. When it comes to candidate selection, there are two basic types of electoral system: there are ones in which the party chooses the candidates (however democratically) and there are ones in which the party chooses a shortlist of candidates from which the electorate chooses. Single Transferable Vote and open list systems do the latter. Closed list systems, of which first past the post is one, is in the former category.

It really is one of the most monstrous lies of the Tories to condemn proportional systems for using closed lists when that is a different issue to whether the system is proportional or not, and that they endorse closed lists themselves.

STV gives the party dramatically less control over candidates. Indeed, the candidates of each party effectively compete with one another, and that can cause tensions. That’s why people like John Prescott fought tooth and nail against it being introduced for the European Elections in 1998. That’s one of the reasons why politicians are wary of it in Ireland – and why the voters in Ireland like it so much. There is an issue that parties have the option of only fielding one candidate if they want to, but that is no worse than under first past the post, and it is more likely in small constituencies – which is what Iain Dale endorses.

We’re going to see a lot more of this forked tongue bufoonery over the coming months – especially since the debate on which electoral system we should use for the House of Lords will be sparking off soon. It is going to really try my patience.

(7 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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In honour of Nick Clegg’s visit to Forgemasters today, I thought I would go back and see what Ed Miliband was saying about nuclear power before the election. On 9 November 2009, he told the House:

“We are not going to provide public subsidy for the construction, operation and decommissioning of nuclear power stations.”

(Hat tip: Left Foot Forward)

In response to the announced withdrawal of the Forgemasters loan, Ed went on to say:

“I am horrified by the Tory-Liberal coalition’s decision to withdraw the support promised to Sheffield Forgemasters by the Labour government. It is a sign of a government with a destructive industrial strategy and threatens the timetable for new nuclear in the UK.

…

“Yesterday Chris Huhne called for an ‘energy revolution’ while Danny Alexander was stopping investment in a British company that is central to producing the infrastructure for nuclear power that we need for a clean energy revolution. The government needs to say how Liberal Democrat opposition to nuclear power led them to target Sheffield Forgemasters.”

I hope that clears his position up in time for the leadership ballot.

Sorry, terribly tribal of me I know to point this out. But it does highlight quite how silly the Labour leadership contenders are behaving at the moment. At what point are they going to start taking more responsibilty?

(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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As the implications of what it appears that the coalition is about to do in the upcoming budget sinks in, I have to admit to growing increasingly concerned. No-one – outside of the Labour leadership contest anyway – denies that the structural deficit needs to be tackled or that we don’t face some unpleasant spending cuts over the next few years. But I’m mystified by the economic strategy behind what the government apparently has planned.

If the government does have a game plan, thus far it has not been spelled out. Nick Clegg’s speech on Monday was remarkably void of much of an argument, resting as it did on two points:

1. There is no alternative: “to do anything else would not only be irresponsible, it would be a betrayal of our progressive values”.

2. It is a matter of intergenerational equity: “There is nothing progressive about condemning ourselves and our children to decades of debt, higher interest rates, fewer jobs.”

Nick Clegg and company keep emphasising how shocked they were by the state of the country’s finances, but thus far – despite all the welcome transparency – they have offered nothing to explain why they were quite as shocked as they were. The report of the Office of Budget Responsibility was mixed: it suggested that the structural deficit was worse than we’d thought but that public spending was actually under better control. Clegg himself keeps talking about this meeting he had with Mervyn King and how it made him see the light; it is almost as if he has come back from Mount Sinai carrying tablets of stone. But Mervyn King is just one man, and not one whose prognostications in the past have proven to be infallible. What is King saying in private that he can’t tell us in public? Why wasn’t it being said before the election? And how has it shattered Clegg’s and Cable’s own views of economic policy so irrevocably? I always knew that both of them were fiscally conservative, but this is radical neo-liberalism. It is the most spectacular policy volte-face I’ve ever seen.

More to the point, why does no-one else in the world appear to be pursuing a similar strategy. The UK is not in the mess that Greece is in, yet the coalition government is behaving as if it is. We know why the Tories want to do this: they’re Tories. I’ve yet to hear a single, coherent Liberal Democrat argument for why we should be going along with this.

The thing is, we do have choices here; lots of them. The government have made two fundamental choices which, on the face of it, contradict the advice of a very large number of economists and thus urgently need to be explained. Firstly, they are seeking to tackle the whole structural deficit within five years (something which the Lib Dems denounced during the election). Secondly, they are seeking to do this overwhelmingly by cutting rather than taxing (something which, to be brutally frank, the Lib Dems fudged during the election). I can see nothing in the OBR figures which suggest that such a strategy would be madness; quite the opposite. If the structural deficit is larger than we imagined, then surely there is a case for tackling it over the longer period of time, and an even greater scope for tax increases? To do otherwise would just risk damaging the economy, surely?

It is one thing to cut £6 billion this year: frankly I was pretty unfazed by that. But the numbers the government has started talking about really will risk – if not guarantee – a double dip recession. Withdraw the amount of money from the economy that we are talking about, and it is hard to see how the outcome will be anything other than negative growth. It actually looks as if, despite all the reassurances a few weeks ago, the government’s agenda is to actually engineer a new recession, seeing it as a necessary bit of pain with a view to long term benefits.

The last time that was done was the early 80s, under Thatcher. The result? In some parts of the country a whole generation was left on the scrapheap. Far from tackling the structural deficit, we’re still paying for it. That shocking welfare bill that Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith have been given the task of slashing? A large proportion of it is due to the government plonking a large proportion of ex-miners onto incapacity benefit. The price has not just been financial; lives were shorn of value overnight; communities were destroyed; the following generation grew up with no hope and no aspiration. Social mobility fell. This is what shock doctrine economics does to a country and even the Tories pledged we would never return to it.

This brings into question the claims that such a hard and fast approach is progressive from an intergenerational perspective, and also causes us to consider some other worrying trends emerging from the government. Leaving aside David Willetts’ extraordinary views that higher education is an intolerable burden on the taxpayer, we have the fact that one of the main things the government has slashed over the past month has been youth employment schemes. Clegg’s argument that it is progressive to cut now to ensure that future generations don’t end up paying for our mistakes are only actually convincing if the future of those generations are not being curtailed by the same economic policies. Deny a graduate or teenager a chance of either employment or training now, and it won’t matter to them how high taxes are in the future because their own earning potential will go through the floor.

All of this flatly contradicts Clegg’s emphasis on social mobility, or does it? Because when he talks about social mobility, as he did on Thursday, Clegg’s emphasis is all on children. We can all agree that the most effective time in a person’s life to invest in is their early years, but this truism appears to have fallen victim to doctrinal reductionism. Simply put, it makes no sense whatsoever to invest in early years and schools while having nothing to offer people once they hit 16. What is the value in the government creating the most aspirational dole queue in history?

All of this adds up to an emerging picture of futures of the current crop of teenagers and young adults being sacrificed in the name of their younger and older generations. You’ve got to ask what they’ve done to deserve it? Equally, you’ve got to wonder if Clegg and Cameron would be quite as ready to do this if Antonio, Alberto, Miguel, Nancy and Arthur were a little older.

No-one else seems to be taking as much of a hit. Wealth taxes have been almost entirely ruled out, despite the fact that taxes on property values (or, better yet, land values) would have the least negative economic impact. And yet, far from being an economic burden, it is the 14-22 generation that we will largely depend on to make our economic recovery over the next decade a swift one. I am completely mystified; it makes no sense to me whatsoever. It seems to have been concocted by a bunch of people more concerned with sounding tough and being seen to make grown up decisions than actually steering the country down a fair and economically sustainable path. In short, it screams of groupthink; I pray that I’m wrong.

Late last week I spoke to someone on the “inside” and painted them a rosy picture. I speculated that all this doom and gloom that had been coming out of the Treasury and Downing Street over the past fortnight was a shadow play designed to placate the Tory headbangers and that what would emerge would be something surprisingly progressive and far-sighted; people like me all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

I still like to think that is a distinct possibility, but my source didn’t seem to find my theory anything more than charmingly off the ball. If they would at least offer us an actual economic argument, it would be something. Instead we just get echoes of Thatcher’s There Is No Alternative.

(10 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I really am starting to wonder if the Tories get economics at all (on a related note, see my latest article on the Social Liberal Forum). In a fascinatingly revealing intemperate rant to the Guardian, David Willetts has described students as a “burden on the taxpayer” and that “the so-called debt [students] have is more like an obligation to pay higher income tax”.

Let’s leave to one side for one moment the idea that investment in HE is little more than a “burden” (so much for the learning economy), or the fact that Willetts is the author of, um, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And How They Can Give it Back. What is fascinating here is that he seems to think that it is news to people that tuition fees are a tax on students. That’s what the Lib Dems have been saying consistently since they were introduced in 1997!

If we are finally now allowed to start calling a spade a spade without being accused of scaremongering, then great. If tuition fees are a tax, they aren’t a particularly progressive one. People who land into profitable jobs in the private sector will comfortably pay off their fees quickly and subsequently cheaply. Meanwhile, people who choose to do more socially responsible jobs end up paying off the fee for years. In short, the less of a “burden” you are to society, the more you pay. How can Willett’s support that logic?

Since, despite Willetts’ ill-judged comments, it is unlikely the Tories will accept the argument that the best way to pay for higher education is to simply raise the higher rate of income tax itself, it is perhaps time the Lib Dems bit the bullet and accepted that if scrapping the regressive tuition fee system is ever to be affordable we will have to accept the case for a graduate tax. That would ensure that all graduates earning above a certain amount would make a contribution throughout their working lives with the ones who gain the most benefit making the greatest contribution. No longer would graduates start off in life with a mountain of debt to pay off and the wider benefits of the higher education system to society would be better reflected.

In retrospect I fear that my generation botched the chance to change HE funding for the better in the late 90s, getting distracted as we did by tuition fees at the expense of maintenance. Is there a chance we might learn from that mistake now?

(4 votes, average: 2.75 out of 5)

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Back in September last year, I wrote about Chippenham Tory candidate Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones and specifically about his claim that the Lib Dems’ criticism of him not being local had racist undertones (declaration: his rival Duncan Hames is a friend of mine).

I suggested that this was a case of the Tories getting their excuses in early. All the local indications suggested that Chippenham, notionally Lib Dem, was going to stay Lib Dem, and that the “not local” card would have been played just as strongly regardless of his race. And so it proved to be.

It is a shame that Emmanuel-Jones is now choosing to continue with this line of attack, especially given the fact that he spent the election campaign making a big issue out of the fact that Hames himself was not local. But he spectacularly missed the point. Hames was not local in the sense that he was not born in the constituency and had lived elsewhere. That he had lived in the constituency since 2002 and contested the last election in one of its predecessor constituencies was not in doubt. Even his business was called Chippenham Consultants (and had been established before the constituency even existed).

By contrast, the criticisms of Emmanuel-Jones were that he didn’t live locally and that his business and family home were located in Devon. He was the very definition of a candidate who had a vested interest elsewhere. If his opponent had not raised questions about that, they would have been utterly foolish, regardless of skin colour. Either Emmanuel-Jones doesn’t want special favours on account of his race or he does; which is it?

I’m really sorry that even now Emmanuel-Jones still doesn’t see that this is a perfectly valid concern for a potential constituent to have. Even then, he didn’t exactly get wiped out. In fact, he actually increased his share of the vote. The bizarre thing about this racism claim is that, unfortunately, it suggests more than a little sense of entitlement. It is one thing to suggest that Conservative supporters didn’t vote for him because of his skin colour (in fact they did); it is quite another to suggest that Lib Dem and Labour supporters are racist for not voting for him.

I feel sorry for Emmanuel-Jones. Under any fair electoral system, he would be an MP right now I have no doubt. But accusations of racism without foundation are simply smears. I hope that in time he will come to regret making them.

(5 votes, average: 4.40 out of 5)

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I was a bit disappointed by Andy Beckett’s article on the future of the Lib Dems in the Guardian today. It is not that I have been misquoted – although I seem to recall saying that the number of Lib Dem MPs after the next election could be as low as 30 rather than probably 30 (a small but distinct difference). It is just that some of the potshots he makes are rather lazy ones.

I’m annoyed that he repeats the great Orange Book fallacy, that being that the book in question was written by a bunch of right wing idealogues with a specific agenda in mind. In fact, as anyone who has read the book cover to cover can testify, it is a mish mash of chapters which don’t particularly hang together. The only authentically economic liberal chapter is David Laws’ chapter on the NHS – even his chapter on liberalism is more of an overview than anything else. The rest of the book is written by people from all over the Lib Dem political spectrum. Still, the legend is more interesting than the fact, so print the legend. You can’t fault David Laws’ genius for giving his political movement a name simply by publishing a book and shouting about it six months before an election in a way that really annoyed people. At the time it looked reckless and foolish; now it looks inspired (if more than a little devious).

I’m irritated by his quoting of a comment by Joe Edwards on the Social Liberal Forum website. I don’t know Joe Edwards from Adam but if the irate text message from a reliable source I got this morning is correct he is not a Lib Dem member, resigning from the party before the election. He certainly has no association whatsoever with the Social Liberal Forum, and the biography on his blog makes no mention of party membership. Yet the article invites you to infer that he is somehow an SLFer. I thought the practice of quoting comments from blogs had been discredited by the West Wing?

Finally, just to clarify my position about the “long game” and the “short game”. I do see the Lib Dems taking a hit in popularity at the next election (assuming neither the Tories nor Labour self-destruct, which isn’t entirely impossible), but I wasn’t merely arguing that the party would crawl back in the long run. My point was that this government’s political reforms, if fully implemented, will transform UK politics for the long term and that in the long run the Lib Dems will get credit for that. And even if the party doesn’t get the credit, those reforms should be worth the hit.

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I’ve written an opinion piece on the Social Liberal Forum website about why the Labour Party is making a major strategic blunder by embracing the “Con-Dem” narrative. This is a theme I expect to return to a lot over the next few weeks and months, at least until saner voices within Labour start to prevail.

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If there is one thing the media seem to agree on, it is that Nick somewhat over-Clegged it today by claiming that the package of proposals he announced today represent the biggest political reform since 1832. The BBC have compared it unfavourably to Tony Hancock’s famously ignorant quip about Magna Carta (or the unstopable sex machine as it isn’t rather better known). C4 News’ Cathy Newman has branded it as “fiction” (it has been factchecked, so it must be true). Meanwhile the increasingly vituperative and bonkers Mehdi Hasan (what has he been on? His performance on Question Time last week was just embarrassing) has branded it, originally enough, as a “Con-Dem con“.

I feel the need to slightly back Clegg up here a little for the simple reason that universal suffrage was a process not an event, and that the watermark was in 1832. In terms of the UK constitution, electing the second chamber and changing the electoral system of the first is a big deal.

But yes, you certainly could claim that the reform is no more earth shattering than the 1997 parliament (the programme of which was drawn up in the Cook-Maclennan agreement and indeed initially resisted by Labour), or the various staging posts along the road to universal suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries.

However, if the biggest criticism of the proposals (leaving aside the noto55 nonsense) is that it isn’t all that radical, then that’s fine with me. Clearly we can just rubber stamp it all and move on then?

There is two other criticisms of the proposals doing the rounds: the first is over these rumoured plans to create 170 new peers as an interim measure. The problem for people like Mehdi Hasan is that Nick Clegg explicitly ruled this out in the Q&A after his speech today. I’m sure the Lib Dems and Tories will create new peers over the next few years and in my view they shouldn’t, but after the hundreds created by Labour over the previous 13 years (and let’s not forget the loans for Lordships debacle) that is hardly something its supporters can claim any moral high ground over.

The other one is over these Tory plans to cut the number of MPs and ensure that the new boundaries are more equal in size. We are told this is gerrymandering on the basis that, um, it might remove some of the inbuilt Labour advantage inherent in the first past the post system. Both Labour and Tory politicians seem to be remarkably excited by this prospect, especially given the fact that most academics seem to agree that its impact will be marginal.

We are also to understand that it will weaken the constituency link and lead to MP being less able to handle individual bits of casework. The answer to that is: good. The notion of MP-as-caseworker is a toxic one which has undermined our political system over the past few decades. It is being done at the same time as bolstering local government, meaning that people will have fewer issues to go to their MP over. If you believe in fair votes – and thus a further dilution of the constituency link – and you believe in stronger local government. Both these things are entirely welcome.

If the Tories want to sow the seeds for the destruction of single-member constituencies in this way, I’m all for it. And if all the other reforms are so insignificant that we can just get on with them, I’m all for that too.

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