The Guardian is getting itself into a lather attacking the “Tories’ favourite thinktank” for suggesting that Northern towns are failures. What they don’t report is that the pamphlet in question is co-written by the Lib Dems’ own Tim Leunig.

The summary of the pamphlet does indeed sound quite provocative. The idea that people should simply follow the money and that national governments shouldn’t examine why northern towns have failed to get themselves out of a decades-long economic slump and should instead encourage people to follow the money down south seems entirely unworkable. Where are all these northern incomers to London, Cambridge and Oxford supposed to live for one thing? Isn’t the south under enough pressure as it is at the moment? And somehow I suspect that paying people from the north to move south while southerners themselves are priced out of their neighbourhoods is likely to go down like a bucket of cold sick. But I will suspend my judgement until I read what they are actually proposing rather than the Guardian spin.

UPDATE: I’ve just read the exec summary of this report and the Guardian spin is balls. I’m not necessarily saying I agree with all of it, but much of it is very welcome. Will blog more later.

I’ve written another piece for Comment is Free today, voicing concerns about Nick Clegg’s centralising tendencies:

I am reminded by the party’s stance on Iraq, and how it came about. Will Clegg’s COG enable the grassroots to drag the party leadership, kicking and screaming if need be, to where it needs to be, or is it purpose-built to ensure that such things can never happen again? My concern is that Clegg, with his antipathy at letting “a thousand flowers bloom,” thinks he can transform the Liberal Democrats into a point-and-click precision machine. We all stand to pay a heavy price while he learns this is a terrible mistake.

As ever however, Lord Bonkers has put it far more succinctly than me:

It is always a sign of danger when leaders get like this – and all do eventually, though it took even little Steel a few years. I recommend giving Clegg both volumes of The Open Society and its Enemies by my old friend Sir Karl Popper (he was Terribly Clever) to read.

And if that does not work we can always try hitting him over the head with them.

An interesting link made by Martin “son of Richard” Wainwright between the current Obama bandwagon and the Red Guard of the 60s:

Jo Grimond in particular enjoyed intellectual experiments and didn’t mind the excesses of youth. He sent Young Libs out all over the world to report back to him on Yugoslavian workers’ cooperatives, black power in the US and the first stirrings of free thinking behind the iron curtain.

There was also a much more significant model: John Kennedy. And that brings this period of history up to date and gives its experiences and lessons a relevance. Barack Obama appears to have captured a similar mood. His youthful volunteers are streaming out across the States at the moment, as confident as the YLs were that they can make a difference.

Article here.

I’ve written a piece on Our Kingdom about the government’s meaningless new party funding proposals:

Hencke asserts that “The Conservatives have been blocked from targeting Labour marginals with spending that can run to tens of thousands of pounds a year by legislation which will limit all parties’ candidates to spending a maximum of £12,000 from October until the general election.” Straw’s proposals do nothing of the sort. What they do is return us to the pre-2000 situation whereby party spending limits are only “triggered” when a candidate is formally adopted by their party or declares themselves (inadvertently or otherwise).

Full article here.

Seaumus Milne is one of my least favourite columnists, to the extent that I rarely bother reading more than the byline of his articles. I bit this week though, although I needn’t have bothered.

His article “A mania for tax cuts at any cost defies public opinion” gets the current political situation pretty much ass-backwards. His overall thesis, that the main political parties are all trying to outdo each other in cutting taxes at the expense of public services, simply isn’t true. Certainly both Clegg and Cameron have recently made speeches about cutting waste, but that is hardly new. Four years ago, all three parties were jumping on this particular bandwagon and it didn’t particularly go anywhere.

But then he outdoes himself by claiming that what the public want is fairer taxes, not lower taxes:

There’s a powerful case, backed by most voters, for taxes to be cut for the low paid and raised sharply on corporate profits and the wealthy. But all three major parties cower before the corporate elite, even as the financial edifice they have erected is crashing all around us, and instead are holding public services to ransom because of their refusal to countenance tax justice.

I’m not particularly disputing the claim that the public want fairer taxes, but it has to be said that Milne provides little actual evidence. What’s more, the public is notoriously contrary in this area. There were several reasons for the Lib Dems axing their 50p income tax rate on incomes over £100,000: one of them was that the policy was not as wildly popular as it had been assumed. Partly this is because it was perceived by some as a “tax on aspiration”. By contrast, the public lapped up George Osborne’s (now unfunded) pledge to cut inheritance tax, despite the fact that the only beneficiaries were the richest.

But more to the point, there is a party that is not only committed to tax justice but has spelt out how it would do so: the Liberal Democrats. Whichever way you look at it, lowering income tax by 4p in the pound while raising tax allowance, and paying for it by a combination of environmental taxes and raising taxes on the rich, is an example of tax justice. Milne knows this is our policy because he has read (or has purported to have read), Clegg’s Policy Exchange speech a couple of weeks ago. So why is he misrepresenting the party in this way? Is it too much to expect a bit of honesty from columnists? Or should we simply accept that the facts should never be permitted to get in the way of a good old fashioned leftist rant?

My suspicion is that tax justice is about to become the latest bandwagon that all parties are going to jump on, with varying degrees of genuine commitment. The cutting waste froth will come and go, as it always does (which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to cut waste; just that the civil service will always make it as difficult as possible for us to do so). So Milne will get his wish, but I doubt his efforts this week will have had much to do with it.

Nicolas Blincoe’s profile on Comment is Free used to describe him as a “volunteer advisor to Nick Clegg’s leadership campaign”. It now reads:

Nicholas Blincoe is an author, critic and screenwriter. He is a former advisor to Nick Clegg MP.

As people know, I’ve now come out as a Nick Clegg supporter (indeed I’ve already voted for him). Speaking therefore in the spirit of collegiality, could Team Clegg please lean on their “advisor” Nicolas Blincoe and get him to shut the fuck up?

Apart from anything else, his latest intervention is a week out of date. We’d actually nipped this one in the bud; surely the last thing that either campaign team needs right now is to turn the temperature up again?

That he is one of the people who before last week’s Politics Show was actively trying to lower the tone of debate is one thing; for him to suggest that Huhne is a liar is quite another. I would personally gain no small amount of personal satisfaction in seeing Huhne go on to sue him for libel (I’m surprised the Guardian is confident enough of his claims to publish).

If blinking idiots like this are the brains behind the Clegg campaign, it is no surprise that it has been widely criticised for its ineptitude. Definitely time to Move On, folks.

The relevance of me posting this video may (or may not) become apparent later:

Answer here.

(argh! this post was meant to go out yesterday! why does Ming have to bloody resign during a heavy work week?)

Question: if you write an article about the Lib Dem leadership contest specifically on the issue of diversity and the fact that Huhne and Clegg are both white, middle-class males, should you a) talk to the various groupings within the party concerned with diversity such as the Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats, the Woman Liberal Democrats, the Campaign for Gender Balance and possibly even the party’s “diversity Tsar”? Or b) a couple of white, middle-class guys?

If your answer is (b), I suggest you’re doing something wrong. Okay, both Ben Ramm (yes, that Ben Ramm) and Lembit Opik have non-visible minority ethnicities, but then so does Clegg (and Huhne as well for that matter IIRC). What does it say about a journalist that he professes that such issues are important but can’t be bothered to reflect them in any meaningful way in his own article?

It’s not as if I disagree with his fundamental point, after all it is the subject of one of my standard-issue rants. But the ill-informed mudslinging of as partisan a journalist as John Harris won’t actually change anything, which is possibly his intention.

Bottom line, the reason there doesn’t seem to be any choice other than Huhne or Clegg is that both are bloody strong candidates. Last time around, until Huhne threw his hat in the ring I was in despair. I was torn between voting for Campbell as the anyone-but-Hughes candidate or Campbell as the anyone-but-Oaten candidate. A lot of other people agreed with me. While I have no doubt this campaign will become more bad tempered as time goes on, neither of the candidates, as far as I know, evoke that visceral sense that if he wins the party will go straight down the toilet in anyone. It’s just possible that we had a poor choice paradoxically because we have such a good choice.

And we don’t actually do too badly when it comes to not being lead by toffs. Neither Campbell or Kennedy came from arisocratic or even upper-middle-class backgrounds. The last Etonian to stand for party leader was David Rendel (a man, I hasten to add, I have a lot of time for) in 1999. He came fifth out of five.

Harris also presses another of my buttons, which I’ve only just blogged about, by referring to ‘meritocracy’ as an idea. Parliament is a meritocracy - that’s the problem. It is batshit crazy talk, the sort of batshit crazy talk that I thought Harris hated about people like Tony Blair, to suggest that you need a meritocracy to achieve equality of outcome. So why is he now stealing their rhetorical clothes?

If you want to write a serious article about the Lib Dems’ failure to internalise diversity and equality issues, John, you’re going to need to dig a lot deeper than simply having a quick chat with a celebrity boyfriend and the editor of a literary magazine.

Twice in one day, this is getting to be a habit. And I hate the headline for this one even more than the last one!

We’ve had the ’safe pair of hands’. What must follow Ming is a leader bold enough to redefine what the Liberal Democrats stand for.