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In praise of Damian McBride

Mar 28

Posted by James in Westminster | Comments off

DamianMcBrideThe Telegraph is reporting that former Gordon Brown special advisor Damian McBride is about to publish a memoir. Going by his blog, this is likely to be the best warts-and-all peek behind the New Labour curtain to date.

He’s got plenty of warts himself, of course, and I’m certainly not praising his character (especially his “Admiral Byng” technique set out below, plus the Red Rag stuff) or his policies, merely his writing.

Anyone who has any interest in how Westminster works should read the blog (assuming it doesn’t get taken down) and the book, no doubt. Some highlights from the last twelve months or so follow:

How the Budget is scored: written in the aftermath of Osborne’s caravan and pasty tax fiasco, and surely rapidly forwarded around the Treasury.

Anyone can come up with an idea for the Budget: members of the public who write in; NGOs and Business groups; other government departments; officials in HMRC; Treasury staff, special advisers and ministers; and of course the Chancellor himself. It would be nice to say they are all given equal weight and consideration, but the order I’ve put them in usually corresponds to the amount of effort the Treasury will put into developing their ideas.

Five Years On….The day GB became PM

In hushed tones, I was shown the ‘stand-alone computer’ through which No10 staff could use personal email accounts which were otherwise blocked by the Downing Street servers. “We don’t discuss this publicly,” I was told, “we don’t want people going on about ‘second Downing Street email systems’”

5 Years On: 24 Hours of Crisis Micro-Management: on the start of the foot and mouth outbreak.

GB gestured me in, hand over the mouthpiece on the phone: ‘Foot & Mouth. Bloody Foot & Mouth’. ‘Fuck me’, I said helpfully.

The Seven Year Hitch: being with Gordon when Tony Blair announced he’d serve a full third term.

[Number 11’s discipline] was also due – and I take full credit/responsibility for this – to my Admiral Byng approach to leaks. If anything did appear in the papers that was not from X, Y or Z, I would instantly name a culprit. I’d try and choose someone who was a decent suspect, but their guilt didn’t really matter – it was the assertion of their guilt that mattered. They would be cut out of meetings, removed from the circulation list for emails, and wherever they walked in the Treasury, people would mutter about their demise. The effect of this was to make the actual guilty party feel guilty as hell, and put the fear of God into everyone else in the Treasury about doing any leaking themselves. As for the poor Admiral Byngs, they’d usually recover after a while, and some of them were probably guilty anyway.

5 Years On: The Election That Never Was

I asked him who he wanted me to talk up as potential future leaders when I briefed this out to the media. His eyes narrowed again, and he reeled off surnames like a football manager naming his First XI: “Purnell. Miliband. Kelly. Burnham. Cooper. Balls. Miliband.” I replied: “You’ve already said Miliband” GB: “Both of them.” Me: “Really? You want me to say Ed Miliband?” He looked surprised: “You need to watch Ed Miliband, he’s the one to watch.”

Whither the Grid and then Why Did The Grid Wither?

And the reality is, for all its success as an organisational tool under New Labour, the grid and the ‘Upcoming Business’ document were the source of many a leak. A whole journalistic phrasebook exists because of it: “busting the grid” or “a bit of gridology”, all code for using the headlines in the grid to decipher an upcoming announcement.

Going To The Mattresses: the art of surviving a coup*

Britain’s modern party leaders are not ousted by stalking horses; they are dragged from their beds in the dead of night, and shot in the courtyard with a Sky News helicopter overhead. So it would be extremely foolish for anyone in No10 to take the complex rules required to mount a leadership challenge as a reason to relax.

The Byrne Legacy: the messy reality of the workfare vote

Mar 20

Posted by Guest Blog in Parties, Westminster | 50 Comments

A wee guest this morning from Duncan Hothersall on the Westminster workfare vote. Duncan’s a Labour member who (he says) talks too much on Twitter. He used to be big in LGBT rights, now he dabbles in broader politics. He helps to run Scottish Fabians, a left-leaning members-led think tank, blogs less often than he’d like to for various sites including Labour Hame and Bella Caledonia, and eschews the description “unionist” despite favouring Scotland remaining within the UK. In real life he works in online education.

Liam ByrneYesterday evening the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party in Westminster followed instructions and abstained on a vote about the government’s widely disliked workfare scheme. Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne is not a popular figure on the left – or even in the centre – and if anything the list of rebels who voted against was smaller than might be expected.

After all, it is not hard to understand the principle that work without pay is immoral, anathema to Labour values, and Labour should oppose it at all costs.

And indeed the wailing and gnashing of teeth has been loud and long, and Byrne is probably only spared a more vicious bout of in-fighting by virtue of the fact that the budget will take over the headlines tomorrow.

But why would Labour fail to oppose workfare? Why would we abstain on a measure which is clearly an undermining of the fundamental right to fair pay? The answer, it seems to me, is that this vote was not about workfare or the right to fair pay. It was, as real life often is, far more complex, and messy, than a choice between right and wrong.

First of all, we need to remember that last month’s judgement by the Court of Appeal did not rule workfare to be forced labour, for all the rejoicing at the outcome. In fact the court ruled substantially in the government’s favour, only failing them on how they described the schemes in regulations. So far from welcoming this judgement, we should have been regretting it, because all the government needed to do was change the regulations – which they did the very same day – and then work out how to avoid repaying docked benefits, which was always going to be relatively easy for a government with a working majority.

And that solution – not workfare as a whole, not the principle of withholding benefits, just the issue of avoiding repaying previously docked benefits – was the subject of yesterday evening’s vote. So Labour did not abstain from a yes/no vote on workfare after all. Workfare is already in place, and the result of the vote would not have changed that.

Byrne has been criticised most vocally for asserting that Labour agrees with the principle that the DWP should have the power to impose sanctions. This has been painted as a shift to Tory ground. But in reality, Labour’s flagship programmes of recent decades – including the widely praised New Deal – had sanction provisions. This is no change in Labour policy, and those making hay out of it now must surely know that.

Messiest of all, Byrne believed he could, in return for abstention, secure concessions from IDS which flat-out opposition would not achieve. Among them, he sought a guarantee that wrongly sanctioned JSA claimants could still appeal that decision. And he asked for an independent review of the sanctions regime, to report to parliament quickly. Most significantly, he called for a Real Jobs Guarantee for young people, involving a paid job for six months, rather than unpaid workfare. It remains to be seen whether these concessions have been achieved, but they are surely worthy aims.

There is no question that yesterday evening’s vote didn’t look good, and those who want to will be able to make trouble within the party over it. And Liam Byrne may quite reasonably be unpopular for past choices. But if we are to debate the rights and wrongs, let us at least do so with reason. This was not a vote in favour of unpaid workfare; it was abstention on an issue the government would win anyway, in order to try to achieve a slightly better outcome for those affected.

That’s not a great soundbite, is it. But aren’t we always saying how much we hate soundbite politics? Here is politics in the raw. It’s an ugly thing and people get hurt by it. Let’s make sure we argue it honestly, and place the blame correctly.

Some carrots and sticks for the media

Mar 18

Posted by James in Holyrood, Media, Westminster | 9 Comments

8340743611_3d8f22e6e9_zAs a society, our substantial problems with the news media include these two. For one, large chunks of them have behaved irresponsibly and illegally with regard to phone hacking and other offences.

For another, they’re dying off, especially the broadsheets. The Scotsman and the Herald and their Sunday sister titles are now not even being treated as national titles anymore, at their own request.

The year-on-year figures are atrocious: by December last the Scotsman was down to just over 32,000, and almost twelve months ago the Sunday Herald was barely at 26,000 – not even half of one percent of Scots bought a copy. Less than 5% bought the Record. I won’t be forgiven if I don’t point out that the P&J is somewhat bucking the trend (and the i), but there’s not much comfort there.

The reasons for the decline are well understood, in broad terms, and the consequences of dwindling readership are bleaker than might be assumed. Dwindling numbers of titles will be even worse, should that start happening nationally. I made some arguments about the causes and the consequences back in 2009: #1, #2.

The London tabs in particular are facing the first of two further sticks: existing court cases. That reflects the fact that newspapers are already regulated, in many senses, or at least circumscribed by law. Nothing that happens today could have stopped hacking, for instance, which entailed existing criminal acts for which jail terms are in some cases being served. Nor, as far as I can see, would it have brought longer sentences for such acts. Bribery of public officials, like the plod we also see going down in small numbers: that’s obviously also already an offence by both parties and should be enforced properly.

The second stick was actually two rods aimed at a broader target than just the miscreants: the Leveson/McCluskey proposals. To no-one’s great surprise, the latter of those rods has just been dropped by the SNP as quickly as they picked it up, not that that will resolve the political problems they face over media regulation.

As for Leveson, it’s a secondary question whether the system is voluntary or compulsory, by royal charter or statutory underpinning. The question should be will it deliver on the public interest here?

And putting the public interest first might point us in a different direction. The public have a legitimate interest in a whole number of “services” provided by newspapers, including those which provide the reasons for readers choosing to buy an individual paper (including entertainment and the reinforcement of readers’ own prejudices). Some of those interests are essentially only enough to justify individual purchases, but some of the “services” are genuinely socially beneficial, notably investigations.

Bare facts are free and easy to find. Analysis is freely available too, and sometimes better than the papers. For all that Lesley Riddoch, Iain McWhirter, Euan McColm, Alan Cochrane etc are first class, whether or not you agree with them, plenty of newspaper comment falls below the level set by bloggers like Kate Higgins, Peat Worrier or (for a bit of Westminster insight) former Labour spad Damian McBride.

But investigative work by the media generally is largely still with the papers, much as the quantity and quality could be much improved. And the benefits of the work that does get done are felt whether or not you buy a copy. You may never have bought a Telegraph in your life, but I am grateful to them for the comprehensive way they shed light on the casual greed and corruption of the MPs’ expenses system. God knows what the overall effect of Rob Edwards’ work is, closer to home, but you can bet it includes a cleaner Scottish environment and officials more afraid to act in secrecy and attempt to deceive the public. Free speech is both right in principle and an essential part of civic society’s autoimmune system.

So let’s start with a carrot. It’s not impossible to devise a kind of support system for a responsible media that might help protect both journalists’ jobs and that public interest in their work. The Norwegians have one system of both direct support and tax breaks, designed to protect their cities’ second papers from competition (h/t @thesocialforest). The French have supports too, briefly set out here.

It wouldn’t be beyond the wit of our legislators to devise a system that might work, although the Norway system costs more than £100m per annum, which would be a hard sell even with any self-interested media support that might be forthcoming.

You could set a rate for sold copies of papers plus a rate for page views – both have to be relatively accurately audited already to meet the needs of advertisers, so policing that shouldn’t be too hard. Freesheets are harder, admittedly. You could also make it proportional to each newspaper’s original non-paid-for content. You could make the funds available only for specific purposes or with specific conditions – the aim is to see journalism kept afloat, not the owner’s yacht.

It’s a big carrot, and I’d combine it with a very different and more limited stick, again guided by the public interest. There is such an interest in the good behaviour of the media, and it extends beyond that which can be constrained by the courts. Notably, we should be able to expect accuracy. Where a court (or even a semi-Leveson arbitration setup) finds that a paper has made a clear factual error to someone’s detriment, they should be required to print (and display online) the correction on the same page. Same page online means linked to just as prominently as the original piece, and for the same duration, on the front page (if appropriate) or whichever section pages the original featured on.

Another carrot to retain and enhance is the legally distinct status journalists enjoy – for example, qualified privilege, as discussed here. There are probably additional protections of this sort that could be considered, given again the public interest in papers being able to “publish and be damned” – with the caveat above about factual accuracy.

These moves might be combined in various ways: commit to correcting factual errors in that way and get the subsidy, for example. However, there is another problem of under-regulation, too, one which is being studiously ignored. Media ownership remains concentrated in the hands of a narrow elite of rich conservative men, with the odd honourable exception, and the print media continues to be used to promote the interests of rich conservative men. Even in these days of dwindling circulation, this matters. Papers do continue to set the agenda, amplified in many cases by social media.

This has to end. This form of ownership may even contribute to declining circulation – although many people enjoy reading papers which continually argue against their readers’ economic and political interests, others do not. The opportunities for that same elite to bend the laws in their favour are greater, yet the nature of the ownership class militates against their journalistic employees investigating them or their editorial employees running those stories – just think how long Robert Maxwell got away with it. What’s more, it’s the newsroom front-line that’s doing time for hacking and corruption offences: why not make owners accountable for criminal acts at their titles, too?

And it’s still extremely hard for newcomers to get into the sector. We need a return to tougher quotas for media ownership. It’s a problem that’s interrelated with hacking, as this great piece by Justin Schlosberg sets out. That won’t necessarily do more than divide the papers amongst a wider set of rich conservative men, so, more radically, Dave Boyle’s ideas on cooperative media ownership probably deserve proper consideration (declaration: he’s a mate).

So, in short, here’s a different model of media regulation and support, driven by the public’s legitimate interest in papers’ operations: support by circulation, compulsory fair corrections, protection for journalists’ legitimate investigative and reporting activities, and moves to tackle the distorting problem of papers being treated as rich men’s playthings.

Much of this, especially on ownership, would be seriously popular too, at least until the editorial special pleading began. The status quo looks like managed decline, at best, and these ideas may seem absurd. Let me have others, if you think that, or tell me why you think the survival of the papers doesn’t matter, wrong-headed as I’m convinced that is.

Gender balance and liberalism

Feb 28

Posted by James in Gender, Holyrood, Parties, Westminster | Comments off

Screen Shot 2013-02-28 at 11.39.08Some are surprised that the Lib Dems (“of all people”) are having problems with gendered abuse of power and under-representation of women. But the signs were there.

They’re the only party other than the SNP never to have had female leadership in Scotland or UK-wide (and the SNP would almost certainly choose Nicola if a vacancy appeared just now). Between 2007 and 2011, the Lib Dems elected just two female MSPs from a group of sixteen, an even worse ratio than their current tally of one woman amongst the diminished group of five.

If you look at the betting for the next leader of the Lib Dems UK-wide, you have to go past eight men to find the first woman on the list – Jo Swinson, as it happens – then Lynne Featherstone is the next to feature, many places later. The bookies deem that a less likely outcome even than the return of Charles Kennedy.

But will they do anything about it? No, because it’s a top-down solution, they say. No, because, we’re told by as senior a figure as Paddy Ashdown, gender-balanced selection would be illiberal, although he did say it’d be worth doing if Rennard’s “leadership programme” didn’t succeed, which is one question that’s surely been answered.

The Scottish Greens had a similar problem, albeit on a smaller scale, during our first Holyrood heyday. We elected seven MSPs, much to our surprise: five men and two women. And as a result, we decided to introduce gender balanced selection principles. We, in this case, means the membership. Not the leadership. One member one vote at Conference – that’s where gender balance was won. There was nothing top-down about it whatsoever. It was the will of the party, and it would have been undemocratic not to move in that direction.

Given the number of Green incumbents in 2007, those principles were first tested nationally in 2011. Sure, it’s easy with two MSPs, you might say, and other factors come into play, but more or less however large a group we’d elected in 2011 it’d have been roughly gender balanced. And the effect has been clear, as discussed in 2009: more women are coming forward for selection, and that is definitely at least in part because they see other women being selected and winning.

Is it suspicious of me to think that the reasons the Lib Dems oppose this as “top-down” is because the party rank and file are either impotent to bring it into effect or because they couldn’t be trusted to vote for it? Either way, surely they have to change now.

It’d be wrong to sneer at proper programmes designed to support women candidates and prospective candidates, though, obviously provided such schemes are not run by unaccountable men for their own benefit. Those are something the Greens have only had limited capacity to establish, and there’s definitely more we could be doing here.

People have long snickered at the Lib Dems, and even now the phrase “Rennard wielded complete power” sounds absurd. He’s a Lib Dem, for goodness sake. But the boys’ club is in power now, or at least they put the Tories into power and themselves into office. The idea that women intrinsically make better or more progressive decisions is sexist bunk, but a party where women are just as able to progress would undoubtedly be one with a healthier political atmosphere.

Does the General Election hold an unexpected result?

Feb 27

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, International, Westminster | 9 Comments

A wee Italy-via-Eastleigh guest today from Scotland’s super-punter Ross McCafferty, who’s got previous here with us. Thanks Ross! Oh, and the picture choice isn’t his fault. Apologies to anyone scrubbing their eyes.

Beppe and his laptopBritain is not Ireland. Nor is it Italy, but the respective hammerings of largely centrist Parties in austerity governments should terrify David Cameron. In the 2011 election to the Dail, Fianna Fail, who had dominated Irish politics since the inception of the Republic, were beaten into a distant third, going from over 40% of the vote to 17. In an onimous sign for Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems, the junior coalition partners, the Irish Green Party, saw their vote share halved and they lost all of their seats. In Italy, incumbent parties who saw themselves as the guarantors of belt tightening economic credibility fared little better. Technocrat Mario Monti’s austerity coalition was beaten into a distant 4th, to have little or no say in the future governance of the country.

Having staked their economic credibility to both the elimination of the deficit, the strength of the pound, and Britain’s international power, David Cameron’s Tories are in dire straits as we come to the halfway stage of this five year term. Indeed, as we get closer to the 2015 election than we are from the 2010 election, the “Last Labour government” line stops having any credence. Where Labour could move into landslide territory, for me, is two fold. 1) Sacking Ed Balls, a man with a reputation for being pure poison, not to mention being an unfortunate relic – despite his weepy conversion and revisionist approach to his own role in Blair/Brown conflicts – of a bygone era in Labour history. 2) Stepping up attacks on Tories. There was little between Labour and the Tories in macro economic terms in 97-2010. They should press Cameron on what money he wouldn’t have spent in the New Labour years he derides as being so profligate.

But, despite cruising in the polls, Ed’s appeal thus far has been limited. He came to Scotland plenty in 2011 to support Labour, and lent his voice  to the AV campaign, both of which were soundly beaten. He lost battles in formerly fertile Labour ground in Bradford and the London mayoral election.  His best hope in tomorrow’s Eastleigh by election is now a UKIP win, which would focus attention on the coalition parties, and divert comment and introspection away from his parties now seemingly  inevitable distant fourth.

My central question is: does the UK have a Beppe Grillo? The satirist and comedians anti political rallies saw him propelled from non existence to 3rd place and the position of kingmaker. Could we see this in the UK? On the face of it, it doesn’t appear so, our two and occasionally three, and if you believe Farage barely 4 party system is pretty deeply embedded. But I bet if you asked Mario Monti who his main danger was halfway through his term, a wild haired comedian convicted of manslaughter would not feature on the list. That’s not to say such an insurgent campaign would be the preserve of the left in Britain. A free speech, Englishman’s home is his castle, wheelie bin hating Jeremy Clarkson esque figure is  just as likely as a Charlie Booker (who has fictional form) or a David Mitchell.

Sadly, what might make this unlikely is that the British electorate have had their fingers burnt before. Before he was merely looking glum and slightly ill over David Cameron’s right hand shoulder, Nick Clegg was the new face of British Politics, reinvigorating the scene with his talk of breaking from the two main parties. Friends who used to roll their eyes when I mentioned politics declared they were voting for Clegg, someone who understood their disdain at the same old politics. Naturally, true to form, at the first sniff  he sold out his principles and went back on everything he had said. One thing is for sure, the 2015 General Election result isn’t guaranteed.

P.S. It wouldn’t be a guest post from me without some betting tips. You can get any other party to win most seats at 113/1 with Betfair. Ukip to win the election is 200/1 with Coral. And the Government to be ‘other’ is 8/1 with William Hill.