What funny games appear to be going on in Westminster at the moment. First, Labour and the DUP redefine porkbarreling for the UK context (deny everything, smirk, smirk), then David Davis resigns - with Clegg’s backing.

In terms of the latter, I’m just confused by the whole business. It is a little moot about whether Clegg should have agreed to not field a candidate against the Tories or not on the basis that it is hard to see how Davis would have resigned if he hadn’t. I don’t think it makes the Lib Dems look particularly bad; by contrast it is the Tories who appear to be in danger of haemorrhaging over this.

But if I were Gordon Brown I wouldn’t even consider fielding a candidate. Davis is gaming the system - attempting to magic a mandate against 42 days out of a by-election. The only grounds on which he will be able to claim such a mandate is if Brown is foolish enough to fall for the trick. And of course Brown isn’t that stupid is he?

Is he?

It may simply be that Davis has calculated that Brown has now so completely lost it that he would fall for something like this. For myself, I’m not so confident.

With the BNP refusing to field a candidate and UKIP indicating they might not either, this could be the OMRLP’s defining moment. In such a situation, I have to admit I would be sorely tempted to make the trip up to Howden. It would be sweet revenge on the Tories getting Howling Laud Hope elected in exchange for Boris Johnson. LOOK AT HIS FUNNEEE HAT!!! LOL!!!!

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Madsen Pirie wrote the following on the Adam Smith Blog last week:

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has a real problem. Last week one of his MPs tabled a bill in Parliament to force pubs and bars to sell wine in small measures only, while one of his party’s MEPs called for a ban on patio heaters.

…

The result is that poor Nick Clegg has seen his party made to look stupid yet again. He needs to take a lesson from Peter Mandelson, who introduced tight controls over what initiatives individual Labour politicians might launch or pontificate about. It made him unpopular, but it made his party able to control its image. Nick Clegg will have to do something similar or risk seeing idiots and charlatans make his party a laughing stock week after week.

This being the ASI, I’m sure they don’t see the irony in calling for Clegg to ban something in the interest of not wanting to look as if he’s in favour of banning things, but actually they have a point. I’m not clear that the world will be much improved by either Hall’s or Mulholland’s proposals. The growth in patio heater demand was particularly predictable given we saw precisely this happen as soon as Ireland introduced their own smoking bans a few years ago. The law of unintended consequences is not quite the same thing as a law of unpredictable consequences. It’s horses for courses.

I happen to agree that Lib Dem MPs ought to be very, very cautious about banning things or imposing greater regulation, and to always look towards a non-statutory solution first. But with that said, I’m not convinced we’re any worse at it as a party than any other.

Take the Tories for instance. Jonathan Calder has already taken David Davis to task for his call to lock up every underage drinker he can get his mitts on. Meanwhile, at the end of this month Tory MP Julian Brazier will be seeking to get the British Board of Film Classification (Accountability to Parliament and Appeals) Bill through its second reading. BBFC, for all its faults, is an example of relatively successful self-regulation, until the Thatcher government made it a semi-QUANGO during the video nasty scare. Brazier however wants to go even further:

A Bill to make provision for parliamentary scrutiny of senior appointments to the British Board of Film Classification and of guildlines produced by it; to establish a body with powers to hear appeals against the release of videos and DVDs and the classification of works in prescribed circumstances; to make provision about penalties for the distribution of illegal works; and for connect purposes

In other words, Brazier is seeking Parliamentary powers to exert political pressure on the BBFC and effectively make it its puppet. A vice-like grip of state control over popular culture in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 1960s. Roy Jenkins must be spinning in his grave.

I’m not sure that anything any Lib Dem politician has proposed comes close to this, yet I don’t hear the ASI lecturing Cameron.

The other recent call to ban something has come from some teenagers in Corby, who have enlisted the Childrens Commissioner and Liberty in their mission to get the Mosquito banned. This is a much more difficult issue, since these devices are explicitly discriminatory against young people, yet at the same time totally indiscriminate in that they don’t distinguish between thugs and the vast majority of innocent teenagers. I’ve got enormous sympathy for the kids.

And yet… despite the fact that for any public body to use such a device would be a clear breach of the HRA in my view, I’m not sure anything much would be gained by banning it altogether. I’m not convinced we should treat this as a zero-sum game between youths and shopkeepers. I can understand why shopkeepers in some places may be at their wits’ end and resort to such measures. I can’t help but feel this is endemic of a wider social problem. Just as the Mosquitoes don’t solve anti-social behaviour as much as move it on, banning them wouldn’t tackle the underlying issue either.

It seems to me we need to take a more constructive approach, and that the solution is best left to people locally to sort out for themselves. Broadly then, much as it pains me to say it, I think the government line is the right one.

Just in case you thought I was being too nice to the government though, let’s focus on its plans to block prostitute’s telephone lines. How wrong is this? Let me count the ways:

1. Assuming it could be made to work, it would force prostitutes out onto the street and in a more dangerous environment.
2. It costs £10 £1.99 to buy a new phone number these days in the form of a sim card. Assuming these are not summary police powers the government is proposing, they would go through costly legal procedures to ban a number, only to find the same prostitute working with a new number within a matter of hours.
3. Even if the government did give the police summary powers here and all the civil liberty implications that would entail, the prostitutes could simply switch over to email accounts.

This sounds less like a crackdown on prostitution and more like an elaborate and expensive game of cat-and-mouse.

The impulse to ban things is rooted in our desire for symbolism but even in the case of unambiguously bad things it is rarely a simple, cut and dried matter. We should always be wary of doing so - and that applies to all parties.

UPDATE: Some great background on the BBFC on Edis Bevan’s blog.

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It’s okay! The police aren’t racist any more! Dave says so!

Erm…

(Photo credit: Evening Standard.)

Or, to put it another way:

“We didn’t ask him to leave because whether we like it or not we live in a democracy.”

More rantiness.

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I’ve just been reminded by Martin Tod of the NO2ID pledge to refuse to register for an ID card. It turns out I was the very first signatory. [smug]

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I find this quite perplexing:

‘Gordon is trying to build up a systematic argument in a slow burn,’ one cabinet minister said. ‘If you talk about Britain’s, and his, commitment to liberty, then you provide a context for further debates about issues such as 90 days [for detention without charge.] It is a new approach. Under Tony, the 90-day idea came out of nowhere.’ A change on detention without charge - doubling the current limit of 28 days to 56 - is likely to be signalled in the Queen’s Speech once Brown’s message on liberty has been digested.

So, basically, Brown is paying lip service to Britain’s deep commitment to liberty in order to destroy it? And this is presented by an unnamed cabinet minister as clever politics? Where has Labour’s moral compass gone?

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It’s fascinating to speculate the psychology behind Alan Duncan’s decision to publicly call Jo Swinson MP a “shit” for inconveniently pointing out the Tories’ lamentable record on gay rights.

As I pointed out a couple of months ago, the Conservative Parliamentary Party response to Cameron calling for his party to support the Sexual Orientation Regulations was to do the opposite. This isn’t a dead issue, it is a very much live one - particularly at a time when Cameron, via his predecessor Iain Duncan Smith, is reintroducing Back to Basics. With the appointment of Sayeeda Warsi, the fact is that when it comes to gay rights, a vote for the Tories is a vote for a pig in a poke. As we’ve seen over the last ten years, civil liberties won hundreds of years ago can be removed by a government with minimal debate - who knows what would happen to comparatively recent civil liberties outlawing discrimination on the basis of homosexuality if people like Eric Pickles were in charge?

It isn’t just legitimate for the Lib Dems to point out their voting record; as the only overtly liberal party in the UK, it is incumbent on them.

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A plea for help: as I’ve mentioned before, I’m sitting on the Lib Dems’ Better Governance Working Group. I’ve been tasked with coming up with some detailed policy on what the Lib Dems would do on the thorny issue of privacy. Specifically: would we reform data protection? What is our response to the Regulatory of Investigative Powers Act? Should we legislate for a privacy law and thus potentially subject the media to a regulatory regime? How do we protect privacy in an internet age when anyone can violate an individual’s privacy within seconds by revealing personal information on a blog or forwarding an email? How do we roll back the ever encroaching state while being mindful of security issues?

All tricky issues. I have some idea about what to right, but I have an open mind here and would appreciate input. Please email me at semajmaharg@gmail.com or just post a comment below.

Thanks!

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It has to be said, David Davis’ article today opposing detention without trial is good, liberal stuff. Just a few things:

• Is this the same David Davis who was on the radio last week claiming that the government should build a limitless number of new prisons (obviously, it isn’t the same David Davies who said much the same thing on the radio yesterday)?
• Why has he taken so long to make up his mind?
• If you were to write an article defending civil liberties, would you write admiringly a swivel eyed loon like the Archbishop of York, who has dedicated himself to fighting the very secular liberal democracy on which they are founded?

The problem with this article is not what it says, but the fact that it does match up with the person apparently saying it. As with the Tories’ newfound posturing on ID cards, David Davis has never opposed this before in principle, merely on detail. It doesn’t convince, and having read some of the liberal-sounding pronouncements of Messrs Blair & co before 1997, people would do well to subject Cameron’s little gang with a bit more scepticism.

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I suppose the obvious (nerd) joke is that all blogs already abide by code in order to get read (wakka wakka). Seriously though for a second, I don’t have a particular problem with a voluntary code (so long as it doesn’t stipulate a minimum number of posts per month which I would no doubt fail to abide by), but I can’t see what good it will do. Responsible people will continue to behave responsibly, while irresponsible people won’t sign up to it in the first place. And it’s not as if readers will be particularly bothered who is or isn’t signed up.

There is, no doubt, a lot of offensive stuff out there, but so what? What tangible harm does it do that isn’t already covered by existing legislation?

I can’t help but feel that talk about voluntary codes is code for something quite involuntary. And it isn’t as if the Press Complaints Commission are the paradigm of self-regulation.

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Writing this post later than I would have liked, I’m surprised that there has been so little commentary today about the launch today of the New Generation Network, founded by Pickled Politics‘ Sunny Hundal.

I think Sunny has hit on something here, something not all that dissimilar to my own contributions on the subject recently. In my own view, what we seem to have seen over the last five or so years, is an importation of the worst kind of multicultural politics that we see at a local (particularly Northern metropolitan) level into the national stage.

When I first got involved in Lib Dem politics, I’m ashamed to say that the first campaign I worked on was a blatant and cynical attempt to court the Pakistani vote in Rusholme, Manchester. In my defense, I was young and naive, but we were also inheriting a situation exacerbated by Labour’s own approach.

I would imagine that most people who have had a similar background would recognise the technique. Find a few ‘community leaders’ from the Pakistani or Bangladeshi community, beef up their egos and work on the assumption that they can single-handedly deliver you thousands of votes, simply through talking to the right clerics and family leaders. The fact that we weren’t particularly adept at it in the mid-90s was simply because Labour had got in there first, something which held firm until the Iraq War in 2003. This wasn’t about representation, dealing with basic needs such as housing and crime, it was about buying off the ‘right’ people with things like money for religion-based community centres and ‘partnerships’ with schools in Kashmir. And it has only helped to increase tensions and divisions.

This all should have reached its nadir with the 2001 riots. Much of the reportage at the time reflected on the complete failure of both ‘community leaders’ and mainstream politics to connect with the second- and third-generation of black and Asian communities. But 911 seemed to end what looked like the beginning of a sensible national conversation about race, religion and identity. Since then, national government seems to have treated ethnic communities in a remarkably similar way to what we’ve seen on the streets on Rochdale and Bradford. And the result seems to have lead to even greater tension and lunacy such as Trevor Phillips’ monthly predictions of race riots.

So I welcome NGN, its manifesto and its unequivocal call against prejudice, for equality and for freedom of speech (in light of some of the rows I’ve had in recent months I particularly welcome the line “we reject the idea that representation should mean ‘ethnic faces for ethnic areas’, which would ghettoise minority representation.”). I would urge my fellow bloggers and Lib Dems to sign up.

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