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Casting the net – Money talks

Today’s links didn’t take any money from questionable sources. Although such contributions are more than welcome…

Harman in the mire
As the political fallout from the David Abrahams scandal continues, Deputy Leader Harriet Harman has been reluctantly dragged into the story [Guardian], as it emerges she accepted £5,000 from Janet Kidd – a proxy for Mr. Abrahams – during the Deputy Leadership election. Harman denies any knowledge of any wrongdoing at the time, and has subsequently repaid the donation. Today, Harman’s future as Brown’s number two is in doubt, and predictions suggest Harman may be a sacrificial lamb to quell the story.

Paul Linford argues that Harman’s resignation, and another deputy leadership election, cannot be ruled out. Linford thinks that John Cruddas and Alan Johnson would both stand again, but that it’s unlikely that Hazel Blears, Hilary Benn and Peter Hain would put their names forward, “on the grounds of their disappointing performances in June.”

News emerges this morning that (possibly) Peter Watt was not the only Labour official aware of the deception. Nick Robinson claims that Jon Mendelson – a Gordon Brown appointment as chief fund-raiser – was told a month ago by Watt. Never one to miss a trick, the Tories have said that Mendelson “must go” if indeed the the stories are true. This will be no surprise to Dermot Rathbone, who yesterday poured scorn on suggestions Watt was the only person in the loop, calling the statements “frankly risible and an insult to the intelligence of us, the rank and file of the Party, plus the British People.” Mark Pack asks if two previous General Secretaries also knew?

Hopi Sen thinks the Tories should be careful about picking at Labour’s wound. Sen points at similar questions about Conservative funding. Sen believes Brown is handling things well – all things considered – and that “some journalists have let their inner loathing of Gordon Brown get the better of them.”

Andy Howell sums up the last couple of weeks with a sombre piece criticising Watt for what he calls his “little real understanding of the need to make the Party accountable to its membership.” Howell goes on: “he may just have dealt out [sic] electoral chances a fatal blow.” Howell also makes an insightful – and more general – point about our political culture: -

Sadly, there is a culture in our political machine of people who see it as their job to sail as close to the wind as is possible. They would argue, of course, that they need to seek maximum advantage whenever they can. They are there to push – to stretch – at every opportunity. There’s is a macho culture. It’s exciting an thrilling I’m sure, but ultimately it is in nobody’s best interests.

And finally… Conor Ryan thinks we should “Bite the bullet on state funding for parties.”

Elswhere…
OurKingdom/Jon Bright – Plans for EU wide data sharing
The Diary of Chris K – The stamping boot of the ‘anti-fascist’ Left
Campaigning for animals – Would drugs be safe for us without first being tested on animals?
Obsolete – Abrahams sacrifices Labour.
Eaten by missionaries\Iain Sharpe – When did choice become a dirty word for Liberals?
Skuds’ Sister’s Brother – Is Gordon our Steve McLaren?
openDemocracy 50/50 – Karama: women activists across the Middle East
Cassilis – Am I robbing the ‘fourth estate’?

Why we need to reform party financing

New Labour’s latest funding scandal is part of a bigger problem, and one that goes to the heart of why a strong liberal-left movement is needed now more than ever.

Since 1997 New Labour top brass have actively pursued a policy of occupying the centre ground and gradually discarding any notion of what the party stood for. Rather than specific ideals, marketing and positioning (aka spin) would be the way to ensure the Tories stayed out of power. It was no longer interested in or even needed the grass-roots, actively aiming to financially wean itself off trade-union support and money by courting rich businessmen. The unsurprising fall in membership has exacerbated this need to find alternatives.

Gordon Brown has pursued this aim of occupying the centre-ground on policies by enroaching on traditional Tory territory. He wants to build a “party of all talents” not only to imply the Tories were vacuous but because he has no alternative. The days of a leftist government supported and funded by grass-roots movements, standing up for its ideals and convincing the electorate of the viability of those ideas seems to be over. Following New Labour’s lead, they are all interested only in marketing and positioning themselves as the least worst option.

This raises several questions:
1) Is Labour still the vehicle for liberal-left ideals?
2) Or is that only because it is in power?
3) What should be the future for party financing?
4) How can any grass-roots liberal-left movement have impact?

Is the American example relevant here? The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 had a huge impact there, especially for the Democrats. The party, if you watch elections there closely, has since been forced to reach out to the grass-roots more than ever before and solicit small donations from people and spell out policies that their traditional base would support. [The Act also had other impact too but I won't go into it here].

My point is this. Surely the best liberal-left position here is a campaign for a party financing reform that forces them to rely on small donations from individuals for their income. They would once again be forced to build and appeal to grass-roots organisations and people, and have to spell out their policies more strongly. It may not make our politics wonderful but I think it will go a long way in connecting the parties with their rightful constituencies again. I don’t want a party of all talents. I want a party that will stand up for my ideals and be able to vote for them. What say fellow Conspirators?
Update: Dave Cole also weighs in.

Mob rule at Oxford university

The disgraceful scenes at the Oxford Union last night are a salutary reminder of the decay of free speech in this country. Not only the illiberal ‘hard Left’ [what a misnomer!], Islamist and Zionist protesters – a curious coalition – and their rowdy hangers-on, but the mainstream political parties and the various semi-official organs of Political Correctness such as the ludicrously titled ‘Equality and Human Rights Commission’, pay lip-service to freedom of speech as in duty bound; but in practice they attack and undermine it wherever it clashes with their own opinions and prejudices.

If we are to continue to be in any sense an open democracy and a pluralistic society, free speech should be sacrosanct and indivisible. But it is far from being so in the mealy-mouthed Britain of today, where unpopular and obnoxious opinions are not merely frowned upon and derailed from public expression – increasingly and ominously by scenes such as last night’s gratuitous violence at Oxford – but are curbed by an ever growing array of new laws against ‘hate speech’ deemed offensive to those criticised.

This attempt to shelter the allegedly ‘vulnerable’ from honest criticism as well as from poisonous prejudice strikes me as totally undemocratic and wrong.
continue reading… »

Campaign alert – Miliband webchat scheduled

Apropos of Dan Hardie’s latest update on the conditions facing current and former Iraqi employees of UK forces in the Basra area, I’ve been informed that the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, will be taking part in a live web chat on Friday 30th November, starting at 13:45.

This is an obvious chance to raise questions about the government’s hitherto poor response to this issue – they’ve, so far, offered these people nothing they wouldn’t be entitled to if recognised as a refugee by UNHCR – with one of Ministers responsible and challenge the government to do better – or should I say live up to their moral responsibilities and do the right thing.
continue reading… »

Casting the net – More woes for the government

Welcome to Casting the net, Liberal Conspiracy’s daily blog review.

More woes for the government
Gordon Brown would have hoped that the funding scandals that marred the latter days of Blair’s tenure would be over. Sadly for the brooding Scot, this is not the case. Peter Watt resigned as the party’s General Secretary last night [Guardian], after admitting that he knew a millionaire was using intermediaries to secretly funnel cash to the party. This is the latest blow to land on a government fighting desperately to retain its credibility.

Labour blogger Jon Worth asks if it can “get any worse?”, adding: “It feels like there is some sort of tornado blowing through the corridors of Westminster, relentlessly tearing into the conventions and traditions.” Paul Burgin is depressed. But the Herts-based Labour activist says we shouldn’t forget “the good work we have done and the hard work of many decent MP’s who could lose their seats over this fiasco.”

Peter Kenyon, another Labour blogger, believes that plans for the state-funding of political parties are “being dusted down by Jack Straw MP in the wake of yet another momumental Labour Party blunder over party funding.” This will delight councillor Cllr Andrew Burns who believes that unless some ‘enhanced’ form of public funding is established, the situation “will only get worse, not better.”

Steve Webb MP thinks it’s “time for a severe cap on donations – people should indeed be able to support a party of their choice if they wish, but no-one should be in a position either to buy influence or to appear to buy influence.” Other Lib Dem’rs have some questions: Duncan Borrowman asks if Peter Watt is an “idiot or liar?” and Mike Smithson wants to know just “How dangerous is the ‘sleaze’ tag for Labour?”

Blogs on the BNP/David Irving Oxford Union Debate
Antonia Bance – Frontline
Hug A Hoodie – BNP debate at the Oxford Union: an eyewitness account
Andy Mayer – Hate-campaigners in Oxford
Mike’s Little Red Page – Fascists – and facists’ pandars – out of Oxford!

Elsewhere…
The Poor Mouth – Oh so she was an adulterer, well that’s alright then…
bowblog – Cynical? Moi?
Disgruntled Radical – Annapolis – the long view
Spy Blog – Biometrics – Labour Government are still clueless about the technology

If you would like your blog or site to be considered as source material for future reviews, drop me an email at aaronh [at] liberalconspiracy [dot] org with the relevant url. I can then enter it into my RSS reader and monitor it for suitable content to be included. Likewise, if you have a specific article/post you feel deserves a little more traffic, get in touch.

The annual school league tables confusion

The silly season is almost upon us. Soon the likes of the Daily Mail will be publishing a list of the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ secondary schools in the country. Local papers will be naming and shaming those schools in their area that come at the bottom of the league tables and the letters pages will be full of indignant parents either defending the school their child attends or calling for the head and the governors to go.

So if we have to have school results published (sadly I think this is a Genie that is well and truly out of the bottle) can we at least agree on the format in which these results should be published. At present the DCFS publishes GCSE results in three different ways: raw results, value-added results and contextual value-added results (CVA). Confused?

Well you might well be if, as a parent, you were trying to judge whether school X is successful, complacent or under-achieving.
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Politics and the web

<shameless plug>on Sunday, Radio 4′s Westminster Hour had a special supplement on Power and the Web, presented by Spectator editor Matthew D’ancona. Though I briefly feature near the end, the programme is worth listening to despite the damage I may do to your ears. The second part goes out Sunday December 2 at 10.45pm and will mention Liberal Conspiracy.</shameless plug>

Will Sajjad Karim backfire?

Although Iain Dale and his lapdog are faithfully playing the party line that Sajjad Karim’s defection from the Libdems to the Tories is great news, I think it will backfire because of this. I said the same during the Southall by-election when the Tories trumped the defection of 5 Labour councillors and I was proven right. Wait for tomorrow’s headlines. The Tories want brown people not because they’re good but because they’re brown, it seems. Why not recruit ethnic minorities from the ground up instead?

We cannot let them die

I’ve had emails from three people who claim to be – and who almost certainly are- Iraqi former employees of the British Government. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still at risk of death for their ‘collaboration’.

We’ll call the first man Employee One. He worked for the British for three years: “I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU)”. His British friends knew him as Chris. The British Government has announced that he can apply for help if he can transport himself to the British base outside Basra, or to the Embassies in Syria or Jordan. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be problems with this.

I can email and telephone this man: so can any Foreign Office official. It should not be impossible to verify his story and then send him the funds he needs to get to a less unsafe Arab country. But that is not happening. Here’s an email exchange we had the other day.

1) Are you still in Iraq?
“Yes, I’m still hidden in somewhere in the hell of Basra.”
continue reading… »

Talking About Freedom

I’ve long had certain misgivings about boarding the civil liberties freedom train. It’s not that I object to its destination, more that the tone and emphasis of many of the arguments made for opposing the great gamut of dubious developments under Labour, from Asbos to ID cards to the proposed (or not) extension of pre-charge detention beyond 28 days, seem to be missing something.

Henry Porter’s campaigning pieces in The Observer have been a good example. The extended thread applause they unfailingly receive seems to me to be won too easily. Henry’s doggedness is admirable but his unfortunate joining in with the government’s crass campaign of last year to tick off veiled women for not being British properly exemplified how he sometimes comes at his subject in the manner of an affronted Tory, in this case seemingly unimpressed by the inconvenient assertion by some Muslim women at the time that to be veiled is be liberated rather than downtrodden. Similarly, it’s one thing to be appalled that Big Brother is everywhere but it will take more than quoting Voltaire to persuade a lot of people living on crime-riddled council estates that they’d be freer without CCTV than they, rightly or wrongly, feel with it.

Robert’s piece here earlier today argued that resistance to ID cards should major on the moral case against the state hoarding information about us rather than the practical one that it’s not safe or reliable, as demonstrated by those disappearing CDs. “The political relationship between citizen and state does not change when the state buys a better computer system,” he wrote. I agree. But might it not also be true that unless we are able to show that the various monitoring and “database state” schemes are unlikely to solve the problems the government claims they will, we risk coming over like high-minded, even scare-mongering idealists and leave ourselves susceptible to the predictable charge of not respecting the fears of real people about crime, terrorism and so on?

The only part of this vast territory I’ve ventured into has been the so-called Children’s Index, now repackaged as Contact Point. This is the database intended to hold personal details – some of them very personal – about all 11 million children in England. The government claims that this aspect of its Every Child Matters strategy will help protect children “at risk” of harm, but some very good judges have serious doubts. Their arguments are about practicalities insofar as they claim that the scheme is unsound both technologically and administratively. But they are also about efficacy – moral efficacy –in that they seek to show that Contact Point will make it harder rather than easier to detect and protect the vulnerable.

This is a genuinely liberal-left pro-civil liberties position demonstrating that the welfare of the weak – and hence the health of society at large – is more likely to be enhanced if there is less computer-based sharing of personal information by state agencies rather than more. It connects the defence of individual privacy to the pursuit of the common good by way of everyday issues people care about. The more connections of this kind we can make in relation to all civil liberty erosions, the more support we will secure for our opposition to them.