“no compulsory ID cards and a manifesto commitment”.

He did not say that. He said they are compulsory for foreigners, and will not be comulsory for locals for a parliament. That aint the same thing

“and a manifesto commitment to electoral reform”

He did not say that, he proposed to put the AV system to a referendum. The AV system is the one electoral system that would have given Labour more MP’s in he last two elections. I cant imagine Liberals dying in the crush to vote for it, and you can guarantee it will not win the kind of cross party consensus to give it the legitamacy it needs to pass a referendum

Not only will the policy on workhouses for fallen women unravel, it will (to mix my metaphors) come back and bite him in the arse. He wants to portray the Tory Party as the Nasty Party and then does this? Adopts a BNP policy?

http://order-order.com/2009/09/29/exclusive-browns-gulags-for-slags-policy-taken-from-bnp/

I imagine its core themes would resonate with a broader public too

The themes, perhaps, but his delivery and ideas, his weasel words (see Dontmindme above), mealy-mouthedness played badly.Really quite poor. Won’t win back the legions who’ve left Labour, or been alienated by the capture of the party by the unprincipled, sharp-suited, cliquey,careerist NewLab cadre.

“a manifesto commitment to electoral reform – to appeal to liberals too”

Don’t fall for that. The AV proposal is a step back from the 1997 manifesto commitment. In the unlikely event that Labour win and this referendum happened, it would offer no option that would actually address the failure of representation. It would be like being offered a choice between a crock of shit and a really stinking crock of shit.

AV is not PR, it actually makes the situation worse – it is a deeply cynical & desperate step backwards, to try to defend and entrench the New Lab/Tory duopoly. It gives electoral reformers absolutely nothing of what we want – it will reduce the representation of alternative points of view in parliament, and pile up crazy impregnable parliamentary majorities for the big 2 parties on a minority of first choice votes. It is deliberately and cynically designed to ensure elections are limited to a choice between Pepsi and Coke forever.

The utter crapness of the policy and the fact that it is totally doomed anyway stand as a very fitting epitaph to the political careers of Jack Straw and Gordon Brown. Time to get rid of these dirty old men and look for a new generation that will deliver on real electoral reform.

The words ‘electoral reform’ were used. I have not said it is PR.

There was a v.lively fring about that last night. I will write more about it.

I recommend Lewis Baston’s electoral reform society booklet – which is very fair on AV pluses and minuses from a pro-PR perspective. And the disproportionality point is addressed in detail in Peter Kellner (who is pro-AV) submission to the Jenkins Commission.

Those links and others are here
http://www.labourlist.org/what_is_the_alternative_vote_sunder_katwala

I disagree about AV – anybody who thinks it worse than FPTP is talking nonsense. And I think its impact on the culture of politics and campaigning is much underestimated: by abolishing tactical voting, it makes a politics of cooperation and pluralism in campaigning essential, ending the ‘wasted vote’ arguments and spats between LDs, Greens, Labour (and indeed Tories/UKIP). Campaigning would be very diffeerent – and it would be a death to the Focus leaflet and “can’t win here” barchart: the campaign might have to be about issues, not the electoral position.

no compulsory ID cards and a manifesto commitment to electoral reform – to appeal to liberals too.

It’s the database behind the ID cards that doesn’t appeal to liberals as well as the cards themselves. FFS – that 80% of the population that has passports will be on the idiot’s database as we renew them.

Furthermore – regardless of the civil liberties concerns – it’s bizarre how a system for which there is no publicly available cost-benefit analysis, where there is a manifestly obvious underestimate of the costs, can appeal to anyone who’s not authoritarian or doesn’t have an interest in building this system (e.g. IT companies).

And didn’t Labour include a commitment to electoral reform in the ’97 manifesto?

Well if we’re dissecting individual statements and promises this particular one stood out for me as being either a promise made out of extreme ignorance or a deliberate misstatement of reality.

“our ambition is no less than to beat cancer in this generation”

This is a fundamentally unobtainable goal whether you say this generation or a 100 generations hence, as this cartoon neatly shows.

I just hope the statements in the rest of the speech were grounded in reality.

Please explain the bit about liberals, communitarians and ID cards. Are you saying that “communitarians” are in favour of ID cards? Or are you saying something else? It is far from clear.

@5 Thanks for the links, but sorry I’m not buying.

AV may or may not change the politics of campaigning but it won’t change the politics of the parliament that gets elected – which, funnily enough, is the purpose of electoral reform. It will in fact entrench the existing duopoly.

Which is precisely why outdated machine politics creeps like Brown, Straw and Mandelson support it. It’s a mechanism for prolonging the electoral dictatorship/ compliant whipped parliament system they like.

For God’s sake 10 years ago Jenkins recommended AV+, and a top-up seat system was introduced for the Scottish parl., Welsh and London assemblies. What has the last ten years proved? That such a system allows for alternatives to emerge and flower in the heartlands Labour used to be able to take for granted. Hence Brown’s rejection of it.

AV offers a lifeline to a half-dead Labour Party and absolutely nothing to the voter. A referendum offering a two way choice between FPTP and pure AV would be a scandal, a farce. Let’s tell it like it is.

So where’s this “communitarian streak” been hiding for the last 15 years then?

I have a simple rule – where ever possible, judge people by their past actions, not their professed future intentions. As we should all know by now, a politician will promise green snow on Christmas Day if they think anyone will vote for them as a result. Call Me Dave has made some lovely speeches too, but I don’t believe a word of them either. Talk is cheap.

Good article and lots of interesting points for a foreigner like me to mull over.

Good luck with the campaign. I am kind of glad that I won’t be able to be involved.

“I disagree about AV – anybody who thinks it worse than FPTP is talking nonsense.”

It would have given Labour an even bigger majority in 97 and would probably give the Tories an even bigger majority next year. FPTP may not be perfect but it strikes me as better than AV.

I can’t believe you are all so relaxed about the BNP streak to Brown’s Brave New World as exposed by the second poster above.

“It does throw up images of the Victorian workhouse or of single mothers being packed off to nunneries.”

This one’s been dead in the water since the phrase “Gulags for Slags” (Alex Massie I think?) was coined. Doesn’t matter how good or bad the practice is, you couldn’t get people to support Mother Theresa with the moniker slapped on to her.

A pity rather, for it could have (note, please, could) been a decent policy.

As above: it’s the database that matters, not the ID cards.

The ID cards are a distraction. I’ve always suspected the govt only proposed them so they can withdraw them at a later date to appear mor ‘liberal’.

And why should my entitlement to go ABROAD be depentant upon registering for a database HERE?

New Campaign

Send an underdog a dog collar

Aopparently Labour will reduce the deficit because they will “cut costs, have realistic public sector pay settlements, make savings we know we can”, but the evil Tories would “cut spending”.

And if these costs can indeed be cut, what costs is Labour cutting already?

And why weren’t they cut before?

“Gordon Brown is a communitarian”

Is that anything like all that Third Way stuff we had in 1998 from Tony Blair and his acolytes in academia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Giddens

I was personally amazed when I read online in 1998 the claim that the provenance of the Third Way went back to Mussolini. Surely, that cannot be, I thought, but better to check.

The second book I picked up was Martin Clark on: Modern Italy 1871-1995 (Longman 2nd ed. (1996)), which has an illuminating section (p.250) on the policies of Mussolini’s fascist government : “They seemed to offer ‘a third way’, between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression. …”

As Martin Clark is an academic historian at Edinburgh Uni and the second edition of the book on Modern Italy was published in 1996, a year before Blair became PM, this connection had to be beyond coincidence. Suddenly it all began to fit with Blair’s “strong leadership”, his appetite for engaging in wars and his enthusiasm for joining the Euro.

Then I came across this:

“However it was with the idea of a state planning agency that [Stuart] Holland [Labour MP for Lambeth, Vauxhall 1979-89, political assistant in Downing St to the PM 1967/8, and shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1987-9] hoped to show the new possibilities open to a more just economy. He looked to the Italian example of the IRI (the Industrial Reconstruction Institute), set up by Mussolini and used by subsequent Italian governments to develop the economy. This had, of course, already been tried through the IRC (the Industrial Reorganization Corporation) set up as part of the National Plan in 1966, but the IRC had been too small to have much effect on the British economy. A revamped IRC in the form of a National Enterprise Board would, however, have a major effect in stimulating the private sector through an active policy of state intervention and direction.”
Geoffrey Foote: The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (Palgrave, 1997) p.311.

“It would have given Labour an even bigger majority in 97 and would probably give the Tories an even bigger majority next year. FPTP may not be perfect but it strikes me as better than AV.”

AV is more proportional, thus would give a fairer representation of the actual opinion share in the country. To say this isn’t better because it provides results YOU are less favourable to is to kind of miss the point of reform.

The fact is that AV provides a better result locally, giving people the MP that they want in their constituency more often than is currently the case, and nationally shifts the power further away from the “safe seat” culture as swathes of them that were safe would be winnable by the second place party.

Proportional to the letter? No, but without serious constitutional reform it would be suicide for this country to jump to STV on a national scale. Given that the Tories and Labour are never going to offer serious constitutional reform we should take AV.

As long as the reformers change their narrative appropriately it’s not like it can be claimed that “You got the reform you wanted, why are you asking for more?”, as we are asking for wholesale reform of the entire system, including how we vote, not just for how we vote and nothing else like this referendum (if it even happens) would provide.

Sunder: my question at no. 8 was a serious one. Despite being a social scientist, I have difficulty understanding the way that you use categories such as liberal and communitarian. Opposition to ID cards and giant databases doesn’t just come from people who identify themselves as liberal, though that seems to be waht you are suggesting. please elaborate.