The Kaminski questions Cameron didn’t answer
David Cameron yesterday said of the man the Conservatives have chosen to lead their new European grouping, Michal Kaminski:
“I see this as a totally politically-driven campaign and particular nonsense.
“In terms of Michal Kaminski, who I have met, he is not a homophobe, he’s not a racist, he’s not an anti-semite. When he came to the Conservative conference the one event I know of he had lunch with the Israeli ambassador.
But there remain many serious and contested questions about Kaminski.
Does David Cameron think Michal Kaminski told the truth about his political history when questioned about it before and after becoming leader of the ECR? If not, why not?
Following our earlier post, here is a recap on just some of the claims made since becoming leader of the ECR which have fallen apart.
continue reading… »
Whose Tory meritocracy is it anyway?
291 women and 4559 men have been elected to the House of Commons since women were enfranchised in 1918. So those shouting “not in my name” and “meritocracy” to argue against the possible means of all women shortlists do have a prima facie case to answer.
David Cameron’s claims that his party gets it enough to continue if he fell under a bus is rather challenged by the ferocity of the response from the Tory netroots. Aspiring candidate Iain Dale declares not in my name while the Isaby/Montgomerie co-premiership at ConservativeHome seems to think the sky might fall in. (Tory ppc Joanne Cash has offered a rare pro-leadership view).
By definition, meritocrats must share the goal of “fair chances and no unfair barriers”.
The simple question: what is the cause of the scale of under-representation? And what is the solution to deliver fair chances and equal representation?
2001 was the last General Election in which no party used an all women shortlist measure. How did we do on gender equity? Most noticed a small drop from 120 to 118 women in the Commons. The real story was missed. Just 9 out of 92 MPs elected in mainland Britain were women. Not quite 10%. The Conservative class of 2001 – 38 white men and 1 women (2.5%)- was well below the post-1918 historic Commons average.
So whose meritocracy is it anyway?
continue reading… »
Carter-Ruck:0 Guardian: 1… but what next?
It is a happy thought that the finest legal minds at Carter-Ruck solicitors will have spent most of today explaining to the equally well-renumerated suits at Trafigura why their tried and tested writ happy playbook has overnight caused the firm even more reputational damage even than dumping that waste off the Ivory Coast and trying to avoid making any settlement for ages did.
And given how blogosphere versus mainstream media debates so often go around in circles while missing the point, it is good to see us all working together on the side of the angels this time.
So I not sure whether it is Carter-Ruck 0 Guardian 1 (own goal; blogosphere assist) or Blogosphere 1 Trafigura 0 but its pretty clear that they are lucky to get nil.
Now, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweets:
Now support BBC Newsnight which is being sued by #Trafigura and #carterRuck over toxic waste expose.
Good thinking! Let’s get those writs flying again. But at least we’re all watching closely now. But, more broadly, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use this enjoyable moment of consciousness-raising to think about how we might sustain our attention and sort out a few deeper issues out too. Others may have a range of ideas. Here are three modest proposals of my own:
continue reading… »
Gordon Brown’s communitarian streak shines through
Gordon Brown’s speech seemed to me very effective in rallying the Labour party to fight the election like their lives depended on it. I imagine its core themes would resonate with a broader public too (though one can not judge from inside the bubble).
The speech showed how the challenges of presenting a sharper electoral choice and entrenching a Labour policy can be linked. The last 200 days of government ahead of the General Election and certainly going to be busy.
I think the symbolic aspects of this agenda are a good idea. Putting the UN 0.7% target for aid into law is a good way to ask the Conservatives to ‘ratify’ Labour’s enormous achievements in international development. And there was also good electoral sense in the moves on social care, on cancer (with a Jed Bartlett West Wing influence), on prioritising education, on free childcare for 250,000 2 year olds, and commitments to protect and increase the minimum wage and child benefit. There is good electoral segmentation. One experienced campaigner told me “there are a lot of issues here which, with a bit more detail, we can turn into good leaflets to campaign on.”
continue reading… »
How did Nazi admirer become a national treasure?
I enjoyed reading the Alan Clark diaries back in the 1990s. They merit their classic status, in capturing a political age, while the dramatic descriptions of the plotting in the final days of the Thatcher premiership mean they are a historical document which will endure.
As Robert Harris writes in his Sunday Times review, “the universal acclaim for the high literary quality of his diaries, transformed Clark’s reputation. From sinister, adulterous crypto-fascist he morphed into lovable, roguish national treasure”.
And yet Ion Trewin’s authorised biography may be becoming the occasion for a reversal in reputations, with several reviewers focusing less on the personal infidelities for which Clark became renowned as on the extent of his fascist sympathies.
Dominic Lawson led the way, putting Clark bang to rights in a devastating Independent column last week. But this is also a theme followed up by Edwina Currie in The Times, and in Robert Harris’ Sunday Times review too.
This is the Alan Clark conundrum: how were literary talent, and a reputation as an entertaining and incorrigible rogue, enough to make a national treasure of a man who made little effort to hide his pro-fascist views? After all, Clark gained Ministerial Office, and was even able to return triumphantly to the House of Commons in 1997 before his death.
continue reading… »
Can Cameron meet his own “honesty” test on cuts?
Let me make it clear: they are not wrong to be planning cuts but they are wrong to try to cover up their plans for cuts. This is about honesty, it is about trust. This is about not taking people for fools.
So said David Cameron at his news conference yesterday, excitedly promoting leaked Treasury documents about possible spending cuts. Yet Cameron refused to offer any substantive answer to questions from Nick Robinson and others about what the Conservatives are planning, as Andrew Sparrow’s liveblog for The Guardian captures.
But what is sauce for the goose … especially if there are already secret Tory plans for cuts already under discussion in the Treasury too. The senior and well respected Daily Mail journalist Peter Oborne seemed pretty confident in his report that the Tories have asked the Treasury to officially investigate much deeper cuts of 30% of departmental spending, as Next Left noted on Saturday.
The truth is that Osborne will be forced to implement swingeing cuts after the election. Indeed, I can reveal he has ordered the Treasury’s permanent secretary, Nick Macpherson, to find savings of nearly 30 per cent in departmental budgets which would come into effect immediately if the Tories gain power.
Osborne’s immediate plan of 30% cuts
There is a potentially important revelation in Peter Oborne’s Daily Mail column today, which is mostly an entertainingly argued dismissal of the ‘push-me, pull-you ‘oxymoron’ of ‘progressive conservatism’, as a Blairesque ‘all things to all people’ project.
Oborne worries that about the mixed messages, but is confident that plans are being drawn up for the spending axe to fall more sharply
On the one hand Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has sent out the solid ‘conservative’ message to the City that he will enforce huge public spending cuts. Simultaneously, however, Cameron and other members of the Shadow Cabinet are keen to put out a more ‘progressive’ message …
The truth is that Osborne will be forced to implement swingeing cuts after the election. Indeed, I can reveal he has ordered the Treasury’s permanent secretary, Nick Macpherson, to find savings of nearly 30 per cent in departmental budgets which would come into effect immediately if the Tories gain power.
Oborne welcomes this approach but wants the Tories to come clean ahead of the election.
continue reading… »
We know Grayling’s Wire argument is ‘piffle’
Since Chris Grayling’s agenda is to get the Tory ‘broken society’ argument back up, somebody might tell David Simon (who wrote The Wire) that the correct British expression for Grayling’s speech is the rather politer piffle, as Boris Johnson previously said of his party’s broken society argument.
So it is certainly to be hoped that the Mayor of London will be pointing out why Grayling’s inaccurate stigmatising of “many parts of Britain’s cities’ is dangerous too.
Grayling’s pose is progressive – “when the Wire comes to Britain, it is the poor who suffer” – but the analysis is not: he has little to say about the causes of social breakdown.
Why are these problems greater in the United States of America? Why, in his view, are we witnesssing “cultural changes going back a generation or more”? David Willetts tells us the Conservatives are now convinced by Richard Wilkinson’s evidence about the importance of inequality in explaining the scale of social problems. There is no sense that Grayling has read it: there is not even a nod in the direction.
continue reading… »
Why we should take Hannan-ism seriously
Here are three reasons why Hannanism matters rather more than some of its slightly more moderate supporters will want to admit last weekend.
1. The big idea:
Hannan is both the most strident and the most feted contemporary British advocate of what has been the dominant idea in the Anglo-American right for the last thirty years. The idea is: “less state equals more freedom”.
There is still every reason to think that this remains the dominant ideological belief in the Conservative Party.
Listen carefully to debates on the right and objections to Hannanism are often matters of strategy and tactics. Many Conservatives disagree with the vehemence with which Hannan expresses his views. But these are usually differences of degree, rather than differences of directionality. Few want to go as far as Hannan in taking arguments to their logical conclusion.
So the content of Hannanism – less state, less tax, less regulation, less Europe – remains the content of most Conservative public advocacy.
continue reading… »
Tories: you can’t have localism without postcode lotteries
If David Cameron’ were serious about localism and an enormous decentralisation of power being his big idea, then he would surely tell his frontbenchers never to throw around the phrase ‘postcode lottery’.
On the other hand, if Conservatives are serious about ending postcode lotteries and ensuring equity of provision across different places, they should admit that this would place significant limits on how far local choices can be allowed to result in any differences on anything that matters.
That latter anti-local variation and pro-equity view appears to be the view of Tory frontbencher Grant Shapps, who is energetically touring the broadcast studios to promote his report on the postcode lottery in IVF treatment.
IVF is just too important an issue for different provision.
continue reading… »
Blogosphere versus The Times: the outing of Night Jack
The Times is taking a lot of flak over its decision to out (and end) the Orwell-prize winning Night Jack blog.
Here is the ruling The Author of a Blog v Times Newspapers Limited.
But the legal ruling and The Times decision to out the blogger are separate issues.
This could turn into an ‘old versus new media’ debate. Or perhaps not, as the arguments about anonymous authors, sources and whistleblowers cut both ways. The Independent was among newspapers to know the blogger’s identity but to agree not to reveal it, in this interview with the author, in which he discussed the approach he has taken to blogging anonymously and the consequences of being outed.
What we can learn from football’s collapsed social mobility
You can learn a lot, growing up, from football. Local identities across Britain, European geography from club competition. The location of the cruciate ligament and other crucial medical science issues. Basic arithmetic, for league tables and goal difference, though also now an early introduction to highly leveraged debt finance. A weekly masterclass in cliche and mixed metaphors. Even, it was once rumoured, fraternity, solidarity and the character education to deal with victory and defeat: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”, wrote Albert Camus, the famous goalkeeper whose works appear to be mysteriously understudied in the Chelsea dressing room.
If we seem to be losing that battle, perhaps football could yet prove an important lens through which to study the big arguments about political ideas, outcomes and distributional fairness in society as well as sport. Our study of “football mobility”, by myself and Tom Stratton, published today on the Fabian website offers what we think may even be the first comprehensive study of social mobility in club football. We have called it ‘Sing When You’re Winning: What we can learn from football’s collapsed social mobility’
Mind your language, says the Mail
The Daily Mail is worried about needlessly offensive language in its front-page splash today
It charges the BAAF’s Pink Guide to adoption with thoughtless offensiveness in branding opponents of gay adoption as ‘retarded homophobes’. The Mail’s report quotes some rather reasonably voiced criticisms of why many might think this offensive, including Christian groups and disability campaigners.
The case for civility and respect – even or especially when we disagree deeply with each other – is a good one.
Just out of interest, what’s the Mail’s banner headline?
SLURRED BY THE ADOPTION NAZIS
Shurely shome mishtake?
What should liberalism say about equality?
A New Hampshire man won a Supreme Court case in the 1970s, successfully challenging the obligation to display the state motto ‘Live Free or Die’ on his car numberplate. Faced with the choice of death or a life in servitude, he would rather live, believing on both religious and political grounds that life is more precious than liberty.
Even if Richard Reeves and Phil Collins would be disappointed by his choice, they would strongly promote his autonomy to make it.
And their own new Demos pamphlet ‘The Liberal Republic’ is a considerable improvement on their own ‘Liberalise or Die‘ injunction to Labour and the left published in a controversial Prospect article a couple of years ago. The article cast a caricatured Fabianism as a ‘poisoned well’ and the source of all of the left’s intellectual difficulties, yet its weakest argument was a purist and strangely anti-pluralist dismissal of the idea that the liberal-left might seek to fuse the insights of liberalism and social democracy.
It is not just that the authors are in less combative mood. Their substantive position now appears to me to be a different, rather deeper and more attractive one. (And I think Sunny Hundal may be rather too quick to suggest it repositions Demos to the centre-right, even if much of the media mood music might suggest that).
Is Boris worrying about his Downing Street timetable?
Did Boris Johnson today make one of the first moves, however prematurely, to prepare for the next Conservative Party leadership contest?
His Evening Standard interview takes care to position himself against the party leadership and with the party’s right-wing activist base on the hot button issue of the 50p top rate, and acknowledges that he may choose to only run one term as Mayor.
Calling time on the WhyNoBlogathon
Just over three hours after Alastair Darling sat down after delivering his budget, Iain Dale’s Daily Dozen round-up noted the lack of a budget reaction post by Tom Harris, something Dale also twittered about. (Harris’ budget reaction post appeared about ten minutes after that).
continue reading… »
Statement: Our ethic of progressive blogging
This post speaks for those who have signed it, and not every contributor to Liberal Conspiracy.
We are a group of Labour party members and supporters who believe that blogging can make an increasingly important contribution to progressive politics. We are seeking, in different ways, to make our own individual contributions to that, and wish to set out the ethic which informs our blogging and the broader politics we are working for within the Labour Party and beyond it.
Many of these are truths which should be self-evident. We are well aware that the broad spirit which we seek to articulate has long informed what most Labour bloggers do, as it also does most of those who blog in other parties and in non-partisan civic activism.
So we do not claim any particular originality; still less do we seek to impose our views as a new regulatory code, or to attempt to police others.
continue reading… »
A closer examination of Daniel Hannan’s favourite think-tank
It is worth looking more closely at the work of ‘Progressive Vision‘, the “campaigning liberal think-tank” to which Daniel Hannan sources his questionable expertise on the NHS.
It has a great deal to advocate and likes to be heard. But it is very difficult to find the basis on which it is advocated.
continue reading… »
Why doesn’t the Mail understand the Constitution?
I know the Daily Mail is very proud of our constitution but – once again – that doesn’t necessarily seem to guarantee any particular knowledge of the content of it. At the risk of this becoming habit-forming, I have sent another letter to the editor.
—
Steve Doughty offered a flawed analysis (page 2, 27th March 2009) of sensible reforms to the Royal succession laws which have support in principle from all three major parties.
Firstly, there is no serious proposal to repeal the Act of Settlement, but rather to reform it. Evan Harris MP (LibDem) has brought forward the current Bill. Lord Dubs (Labour) proposed similar reforms, recommended by the Fabian Monarchy Commission report. Doughty claims this is a “left-wing” campaign, so why on earth did Jeffrey Archer promote a Lords bill to reform male primogeniture in 1998? There is nothing in these changes which ought to be an issue of party political controversy.
Secondly, the idea that ending the rule against heirs marrying Catholics would threaten the establishment of the Church is another red herring. There is currently no bar to an heir marrying a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic or atheist. Removing the specific anti-Catholic discrimination has no effect on Establishment.
Thirdly, the idea that ending male primogeniture would threaten the Monarchy is bizarre and suggests a lack of confidence in it. Sensible monarchists would support reform now (while the heir and his two sons are male). There would be a considerable and damaging public outcry, in the event that Prince William were to marry and have a daughter before a son, at the line of succession putting the second-born son ahead of his elder sister.
Changing the law retrospectively (as was done in Sweden) would be more controversial, once individuals at the head of the line of succession were directly affected. Presumably no Monarchist would dream of insulting the Queen by suggesting that women can not do as good a job as men on the throne?
Sunder Katwala
General Secretary
Fabian Society
Taxpayers Alliance exposed!
Are the Taxpayers’ Alliance a politically motivated, right-wing conservative group? Anybody applying the duck test knows the answer. But not the Taxpayers’ Alliance themselves.
It is “outrageous” to claim they are on the right, or that they prefer any political party, their campaign manager Susie Squire spluttered on LBC Radio, when host Nick Ferrarri described them as across “the party political divide” from Labour, and when Chuka Umunna challenged Squire’s claim that “we don’t have a party preference”.
Given their insistence on non-partisan independence, logically, how outraged the Taxpayers Alliance to find themselves traduced by their inclusion in Tim Montgomerie’s post, intended to dramatically illustrate the “growth of Britain’s conservative movement“, with two very pretty PowerPoint slides showing a sparse lack of activity in 1997 and a crowded market of ideas in 2009.
continue reading… »
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
|
66 Comments 20 Comments 13 Comments 10 Comments 18 Comments 4 Comments 25 Comments 49 Comments 31 Comments 16 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » damon posted on Complete tits » Sunny Hundal posted on Complete tits » Lee Griffin posted on The Labour leadership's token contender.. and it's not Diane Abbott » dan posted on Defend the urban fox! » Richard W posted on Boris rise for Living Wage left of Labour » Julian Swainson posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » sally posted on Complete tits » Joanne Dunn posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » Lovely Lynnette Peck posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » Nick posted on Why don't MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours? » Bob B posted on Complete tits » Nick posted on Complete tits » Mike Killingworth posted on Complete tits » Mr S. Pill posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Complete tits |
