The Telegraph has breathlessly flourished a new poll showing that the “feelgood factor” is worse than at any point since records began. In, er, 1981.

What this suggests is that the general public genuinely believes the current slowdown in the economy (note, not even a recession, just a reduction in growth) is a worst economic situation compared to the dole queues of the early 80s and the negative equity of the early 90s.

Now, I have my criticisms about the government and things could indeed get much, much worse than they are now. But I would humbly suggest that this illustrates how the public has become increasingly infantilised over the last 30 years, and arguably the uselessness of this measure, more than it says anything about the government’s handling of the economy. The fact that the Torygraph seems completely incapable of grasping that doesn’t say very much about its sense of proportion.

Share This

One thing that really bugs me is when people who clearly don’t know what they are talking about come up with fatuous excuses for not allowing reasonable requests. Nick Harvey MP, sadly, is a case in point. His response to Jo Swinson’s reasonable request for Parliament to allow video clips to be posted on YouTube and other websites was met by what can only be described as utter stupidity:

Mr Harvey, who is also a Lib Dem MP, replied that copyright of the pictures was an issue, as was the cost of filming.

He said the rules dated back to when cameras were first allowed into the chamber, in the 1980s.

MPs, he added, were allowed to use clips for their own website if they showed them speaking - or a reply from a minister to their own question.

They were not permitted to show clips on “any third-party hosting website”, however.

Mr Harvey said: “At the moment the rule is that the clips can be streamed to be viewed in real time, but not downloaded in such a way that they can be manipulated at a future point.”

How is this stupid? Oh let me count the ways. To start with, what is the precise difference between an MP’s website and a “third party hosting website”. Does that apply to ePolitix’s dreadful homepages for MPs? What about Prater-Raines, the hosting service most Lib Dems use for their own websites? What is the fundamental difference between them and a YouTube channel? I suspect you can count the number of MPs who host their own websites on the fingers of one hand.

Secondly, downloading footage on YouTube is the best way to prevent them from being “manipulated at a future point.” YouTube converts footage into flash files, which apart from usually being of low quality, cannot simply be imported into editing software in the way that windows media files and Quicktime files can be. If an MP hosts their own footage using these formats they are far more vulnerable to future manipulation. But it’s a daft reason anyway because if it is live streamed at any point, it can always be saved and manipulated in the future. Therefore, this is a reason to shut down BBC Parliament, not for disallowing films on YouTube.

What really bugs me about all this though is that we’ve already been through all this. Not long ago, Harvey’s committee was playing silly buggers over TheyWorkForYou and using very similar arguments for why this website should be shut down. The question over the use of footage could and should have been resolved then. They had another opportunity over the Puttnam Report. Three years down the line and they are still being obstructive. The House of Commons Commission was also where the dreadful Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill - happily defeated last year - came out of. And all this on the same day that the police rule out an inquiry over the Derek Conway scandal due to a “lack of systems in this case to account for MPs’ expenses.” Which committee is responsible for those systems? Step forward Mr Harvey.

In short, this committee consistently fights to defend the exclusive, clubable air of Parliament and blocks attempts at greater openness, transparency and accountability. It isn’t really Harvey’s fault that he is the unacceptable face of Parliament - it is the Commons as a whole that appoints this damnable committee. But after the last couple of months, it is perhaps time for a new broom. Such a shame that far from calling for this, Nick Clegg has been spending so much of his time of late defending the Speaker and thus the status quo. So much for being anti-establishment.

Share This

Poor old Andy Burnham. A few months ago I took him to task for aping the Tories and their proposed tax cuts for loveless marriages. Since then the boy has, improbably, gained a cabinet level post, but doesn’t appear to be doing any better.

His performance on the Today Programme (which doesn’t appear to be on listen again yet) this morning was probably the most lamentable I have ever heard from a cabinet minister. It was so clear he was not on top of his brief I almost felt sorry for him, were it not that it offended my sense of professionalism.

What is obvious is that these new proposals to force schools to provide pupils with five hours of “high culture” a week originated from his predecessor, not him. Purnell and Burnham could not be more different: the former - a bit of a dandy highwayman who was ushering in a new renaissance up until a couple of weeks ago - is Labour’s answer to Henry Conway. The latter more closely resembles Wayne Rooney.

Still, John Humphries doesn’t get away completely scot-free either. He was distinctly heard arguing that “creative reading” ought to be learned “by rote”. Uh?

UPDATE: The interview is now up. Listening again, it’s even worse than I remembered.

Share This

Cringeworthy stuff from Gavin Whenman on the topic of positive discrimination again:

To elaborate: Discrimination, of any kind, on a criteria which bears no relation to your ability to do the job, is wrong. It is fair to award party posts, such as PPCs, on the basis of merit only. It is not fair to award it on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity. To say that black or other people aren’t good enough to be MPs unless they have help from the white man is possibly the most patronising, shameful position we can take on this issue, and I hope Nick Clegg sees sense soon.

None of which is particularly inaccurate or misleading (even if it is intemperate), but it doesn’t get us very far, leaves us with a woefully unrepresentative party and begs the question: what would you do then? Clegg hasn’t backed positive discrimination - in fact he’s called a moratorium on imposing such measures within the party for at least two parliaments. What he has done though is back a system of training and support that will receive significant funds, warn the party that if this isn’t made to work then the debate on positive discrimination will need to be revisited and, today, backed enabling legislation to allow political parties to introduce all-black shortlists if they wish (just as we already have enabling legislation to introduce all-women shortlists).

How political parties select their candidates ought to be by and large a matter for them surely? If people feel they are having a candidate imposed on them there will be a backlash, as Labour discovered in Blaenau Gwent. Surely deregulation is a good thing in principle? Why does Gavin feel white guys need such stringent protection?

By backing this legislation, Clegg is supporting deregulation in principle and making a political point about the importance of parties doing more to recruit ethnic minority activists and politicians. I’m amazed that either of these things are regarded within the party as being a bad thing.

The bottom line is party politics is looking alarmingly white, male and middle class these days. In many respects we appear to be going backwards. The Lib Dems have particular problems. We have a few Asian activists and I can probably mention a token member of most established UK ethnic minorities, but within the black community particularly we are a joke.

But its the anger this all provokes that irritates me. I’ve got quite worked up about this myself in the past, and the establishment of the Campaign for Gender Balance was a result of a number of us trying to come up with an alternative to all women shortlists. But at least we were talking about alternatives - and now CGB is regularly cited by some with no sense of history as part of the positive discrimination agenda it was established to bypass.

We shouldn’t be blind to the enormity of our task though. If the television industry struggles to recruit visible black faces, as Lenny Henry was bemoaning last week, what chance has politics got? Expecting it to sort itself out however is simply ludicrous.

Share This

I often lick and bite ice cream, that doesn’t make it my mother figure.

What about the Scottish Rabbit Protection League?

Share This

Two MPs have recently been turning the controversy surrounding their decision to insult their opponents as a way of progressing their agenda.

Daniel Hannan, an MEP who has achieved the remarkable distinction of managing to look even younger than his clearly low mental age, has implicitly compared one of his German colleagues to a Nazi and in the process used the publicity as a soapbox to advance the cause of swivel eyed lunacy:

I would almost be tempted to compare it to the Ermächtigungsgesetz law of 1933 but I think that would be disproportionate and perhaps a little rude to our president, who is a committed democrat and a decent man.

I have to say I would almost be tempted to call Young Master Hannan a shameless little cunt and a chinless wonder to boot, but I think that would be disproportionate and perhaps a little rude to someone who I am sure it nice to small animals and is kind to his mother (I could get to enjoy this). I’d call it a cunning stunt, but I’ve used that gag for someone else.

Meanwhile, our own Greg Mulholland has done effectively the same thing. I suspect his decision to call Ivan Lewis an “arsehole” (or as Jonny Wright has suggested elsewhere, possibly an aardvark - Hansard is rather vague on this point) was rather less calculated, but nonetheless he has managed to propel an otherwise forgotten debate about the hospice movement onto the news pages. Was Greg listening to Hannan on the Today Programme this morning and calculating that it he was onto a potentially good thing? Either way, it worked.

In fact, it is hard to deny that Greg is coming out of this better than Lewis, who does indeed come out of this incident sounding like a pompous arse:

“I hope Mr Mulholland will reflect on the fact that the use of such language is not only inappropriate but sends out a terrible message to young people about the importance of decency and civility.

“This is now a matter for the Liberal Democratic leadership.”

I’m sure Greg is quaking in his boots. The line about young people particularly made me laugh. If Labour ministers seriously believe that the only place where “young people” might get exposed to such mild swear words is by diligently reading Hansard or watching BBC Parliament, they truly are hopelessly out of touch.

To be sure, there is a real place for using restrained language in Parliamentary debates. The formality often in my view ensures that debates don’t get blown off course by ad hominem. But there’s also a place for raw emotion in politics and that is what Greg is guilty of here. Superficially, Mulholland and Hannan are guilty of the same thing here; scratch beneath the surface and they couldn’t be further apart.

Share This

Reading this sketch (ho, and indeed, hum) on the BBC website by Susan Hulme, I was struck by this thought: “why do so many bad sketch writers think that the way to do it is to impersonate Simon Hoggart’s personal writing style?”

It’s all there: the short sentences, the lame gags about individual’s physical characteristics, the “dear reader” asides. Is this what passes for a genre?

If I’m honest, I don’t even know if it stems from Hoggart himself originally - it’s just that I read his sketches more than anyone else’s. Certainly Simon Carrs are different. But then, Simon Carrs’ are rarely funny. Or about anything other than Simon Carr.

We should be asking this question: does the smug, self-satisfied political sketch still have a place in modern political discourse, or should it go the same way as those rude poems you read in old issues of punch?

What do you think dear reader?

Share This

Given that Martin Bright has made a very high profile attack on Ken Livingstone this week for, among other things, his links with Hugo Chavez, I have to say I find it very amusing that the magazine of which he is Political Editor, the New Statesman, is currently offering this to all new subscribers:

Pay just £14.99 UK (£26.00 Europe, £32.00 World) for 12 issues of the New Statesman and receive this special edition T-shirt worth £20.99 absolutely free. In addition New Statesman will donate £1 to Venezuela Information Centre UK.

Don’t worry if you aren’t sure about the ethics of all this however; as an alternative you can always get a book on Fidel Castro instead. They cover the whole broad range of left opinion, they do.

Share This

Credit where it’s due, when it comes to getting lies repeated as fact, Omar Salem is clearly a latter day Joseph Goebbels. Perhaps he’s been getting advice from his erstwhile colleague Miranda Grell. Andrew Grice at the Independent has regurgitated his press release all-but verbatim over on his blog, incredibly even painting this as “Clegg’s first rebellion.”

What’s interesting is that Grice has filed his article 24 hours after Salem put out his press release and has subsequently visited this website where all the facts have been corrected for him in easily digestible, bite-size chunks. Yet for some reason that hasn’t stopped him from blundering in. Modern news values, eh?

Share This

I’ve just been reading the two interviews that Iain Dale has just flagged up about his new Politico magazine. It’s an interesting business model - effectively The House Magazine with bite.

The House Magazine has to be one of the most interminable publications going. Ostensibly a way of hoovering up lobby cash in the form of advertising they rarely bother to make their content interesting at all. I was particularly outraged earlier this year at work to get a phonecall from one of its sister publications offering to “sell” us space for an article on one of our campaigns which they had got a government minister to write an article criticising. They were effectively blackmailing a small NGO and if we didn’t happen to be both better at communicating with MPs directly than them and keenly aware of that fact, we might have fallen for it (we won the campaign).

I don’t know any MPs who admit to avidly reading the House beyond the merest of occasional flickings through - God knows they shouldn’t have the time. But a slimmer, easier read might be more of a likely prospect.

The thing that I’m most keenly aware of with blogging is that although very few people read websites such as this, it tends to be political obsessives who, relatively speaking and with plenty of exceptions, are relatively high up the greasy poll compared with the average punter. It’s one of the reasons I can only laugh when people decide to lecture me about making this website more accessible “to the voter”. I don’t have any obligation to reach out to the voter and it isn’t my job to. Even Iain’s website with its 10x bigger readership is consumed by comparatively few “normal” people. With all due respect to the people out there who do indeed strive to use their blogs as a communications tool with their community (and I’m not saying that’s a wasted exercise as local communities have movers and shakers as much we have at a national level), blogging with an overt focus on trying to appeal to the average voter is doomed to failure.

But talking to the “right” people can be very effective indeed. If that’s Iain’s pitch, I can see him selling a lot of advertising space at the expense of Dod’s. Of course, that’s when the tricky part starts. Iain is very quick to emphasise that the magazine will be cross-party, but what will he be doing to ensure that the advertising tail doesn’t end up wagging the dog? If you don’t have a six-figure lobbying budget you don’t exist as far as Dod’s is concerned. One of the things I’ve liked most about 18DS is that it opened the door to a much wider range of voices. Will The Politico have a similar philosophy?

Share This