The People, Our (Anti-)Politics, & Stella Creasy MP

The cover-page of my Esquire piece

Over a few months in the spring I followed Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow, around the houses for an interview-based profile that Esquire Weekly had kindly commissioned from me. (If you want to read the piece, published in issue #47 dated August 21 2014, you need to have an iPad or iPhone, but if so please look here.)

The piece was my idea, one in which I was encouraged by a few Labour-supporting friends who, like me, feel that Creasy is an impressively thoughtful and dynamic character who merits a position of prominence in any future configuration of the party’s front bench. But my editor at Esquire, Dan Davies, more broadly endorsed the idea that, over and above any specific debate about Labour’s fortunes, Creasy is of wider interest as a politician actively kicking back against the moody public malaise of ‘anti-politics’ that has been all around us like winter weather for so long now.

Creasy has a public profile and platform for which she has grafted steadfastly and knows how to use. It seems to help that she is a normal human being with musical and pop cultural interests. In the course of our chats I mentioned to her my strong memories of the NME putting Neil Kinnock on its cover prior to the 1987 election (a stroke I fondly imagined would win Labour, oh, millions of votes), and of The Face, the other bible of my 1980s adolescence, diagnosing that what Labour really needed to cure its electoral ailment was a ‘funky politician’. Creasy saw my insinuation coming and met it with a straight sceptical bat. ‘If I’m funky’, she replied, ‘we’re in trouble.’

Another highly significant aspect of Creasy’s profile is her vocal feminism. Esquire is of course a publication mainly focused on the leisure interests of men and when I asked Creasy if she was OK with that she laughed it off easily with a line about ‘manly magazines’, then segued (a special adeptness of hers) into some observations on certain sexually aggressive traits in our society, and how these manifest in young men and even schoolboys. (‘I had an 11-year-old boy tell me’, she recalled, ‘that the problem was that the girls wear all these revealing leggings...’)

So Creasy lacks for nothing in the straight-talking department. As my friend John Rentoul has noted, she possibly talks too fast for her own good, though this may also be the special lament of journalists lumbered with the job of transcribing her. (It could make for other issues, though. I noticed that in public speaking she always has good jokes but doesn’t always time them especially well – that is, in the haste to crack on she doesn’t routinely wait for the audience’s laugh then roll over it, a skill that most top pols quickly get themselves accustomed to.)

The big thing about Creasy, though, the thing that ought to stir Labour hearts, is that she is very much about the people – about forging opportunities for people, and demanding the reform of outmoded systems which obstruct that, and without being sanctimoniously utopian about it. ‘I came into politics to change the world,’ she told me. ‘People are starving now, we need stuff now. So just sitting on the sidelines waiting for perfection? Nah, it’s not going to happen.’ 

I followed Creasy along to three political outings, two of which were described in the Esquire piece. The first was a meeting for her Walthamstow constituents in an oak-panelled room within the Commons, a classic tea-and-biscuits get-together but one on which she put a twist. The aim was to address what she had taken away from surgeries as the most urgent local concerns – ’I can’t get a doctor’s appointment’ and ‘I’m being priced out of the area.’’ So attendees were invited to adorn huge sheets of paper with marker pens, listing their comments and complaints about healthcare and housing, and from the data thus gathered Creasy basically took a floor vote about which issues and suggestions should be acted upon. ('I need your help to challenge them', she told the assembled. 'This is going to work because of you, not us.’)

The second outing on which I observed her at work was at Keble College, Oxford, where she addressed a seminar of digital campaigners: passionate young people, in the main, just as adamant as her in their desire to ‘change the world.’

Ilford, May 2014: The campaign trail

An account of the third excursion had to be cut from what was an already generously sized piece, but this was a sunny May Sunday I spent with her in Ilford (together with the impressive local councillor and parliamentary candidate Wes Streeting) on a spot of local election campaigning - basically, following her down a succession of garden paths as she searched for someone who was indoors and willing to chat, the expending of shoe-leather being another great tradition of our politics. One woman, visibly shattered from working a night-shift, expressed to Creasy a polite indifference as to what voting has meant for her all her life: ‘Whoever’s in power, the same things don’t get done.’ Creasy nonetheless enquired patiently of the woman as to which local issues she rated as important, and persuaded her to have a word with Wes Streeting, too. ‘Turning up on someone’s doorstep is quite disruptive’, Creasy told me later.  ‘But if we can’t find a way to have a better conversation...’

This is really the nub of Creasy’s pitch. ‘You get the political process you deserve’, she told me. ‘If you want to change the world you have to get involved.’ That goes for MPs like her and for people like you and me. There wasn’t room in the piece for the following quote from her but it nicely sums up her thinking:

‘The left has always had within it a very well-meaning strand that says we are fighting injustice for people because they are vulnerable and can’t speak for themselves. My own experience is if you find a way to give a voice to those people they are ten times better at presenting themselves... I happen to think rather than saying, ‘Somebody ought to do something about that’, we should do it together... Our job can’t be just to manage the situation as it is. Otherwise I’m looking at my [MP] email inbox, which is a series of misery and pain, and thinking, ‘The most I can do is mitigate some of this.’ We’ve got to be a lot clearer about how we can work with the public, because that’s the best way Britain can succeed. It’s challenging to traditional politics and to the public too. In my experience it’s more positive and constructive, and it has good results. And it’s a more exciting way to work.’

Creasy is associated strongly with the political use of social media and online rallying cf. the Sharkstoppers campaign to cap the rates of 'payday lenders.' But as the journalist Matthew d’Ancona has put it, ‘Representative democracy is not an app.’ And Creasy is entirely aware of the inherent problems of e-petitions and ‘hashtag activism’ where a pious click or retweet, however felt, becomes the sum of the citizen’s investment in the cause, and so leads precisely nowhere. On that she told me this:

'The payday loans campaign was successful not because we said ‘Payday loans are a problem’ but because it said ‘Capping the cost of credit is a solution.’ It was offering not just an anger but an action that would make a difference. Online communications allow you to have conversations about what are the actions that will make a difference and how do we get there much quicker and have a broader group of people with us. But you have to have a sense of purpose and not just say, ‘Right, who’s angry? Who can make a great joke about Wonga?'

On this form Creasy could remind one of Tony Blair’s injunction that Labour should be ‘the seekers after answers, not the repository for people’s anger.’ Lazily, perhaps, I am also reminded of someone else about whom I write regularly. Back in 2010 when I was speaking to Sean Penn about his humanitarian efforts in Haiti, and his not unrelated disdain for the internet, he gave me a candid opinion of our wireless society and its capacity for change. 'There are too many people out there doing this' – he mimicked fingers dancing over laptop keys – 'and thinking that they're doing something. And they're not.'

In brief, so as to not be on the fence, as it's no sort of a place to be, I should say that I would be quite content to see Stella Creasy lead the Labour Party at any appropriate point in the future (such as tomorrow, for instance), and lead it into government. But, clearly, an awful lot of anti-politics, well-meaning strands and same old things not getting done would have to be waded through first. At any rate, this is how I ended the Esquire piece:

'Rather than her exit from politics, most journalists who have written about Stella Creasy have been more concerned with her prospects for advancement. But I wonder if the highest office would necessarily be the most progressive outcome of her political mission. She might just as vitally be a lightning-rod for luring new talents into politics – both female and male, within Labour or maybe even without, but people who are on the side of people, and don’t seek power for personal gain but, rather, in order to give it away.'

Osborne's narrow choices, and ours

I look at David Cameron and see someone who strikes me as passable. This is mainly – and, I concede, a tad worryingly – on account of his dignified, principled bearing on occasions when he has handled matters related to HM Armed Forces: most strikingly, the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and, last week, the issue of deployment of British forces over Libya to enforce UN 1973.
The Libya question, it’s been widely noted, proposes more strongly than ever that Cameron is the ‘heir to Blair’. – a perilous mantle to hold, but you would count on Cameron not to be fazed by it. Even now one hears familiar critiques of his character – that he is a glib and shallow PR man, an aloof and pampered toff, merely Thatcher’s bastard offspring, i.e. one of the ‘same old Tories’, to use the lumbering terms of Labour’s current and hopeless leader. At times it seems to me that observers might as well resort to the analytical method of Harry and Paul’s old club buffers in this celebrated sketch.

Of course, Cameron is patently not a politician who could have been slotted (even by time machine) into one of Thatcher’s 1980s cabinets; and while he is undoubtedly several leagues more posh than me he looks (from my myopia-ridden remove) to be one who mixes well and without condescension (other than in his ripostes to the aforementioned Hopeless Labour Leader, who doesn’t even ‘speak human’ on what I’ve heard, for all that his fan club boasted otherwise those 7 long months ago.)
What does Cameron believe in? To quote from Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, I think ‘he believes in himself.’ That, too, can be dangerous, a vulnerably Blair-esque distinction. But it certainly suggests someone who will not run into any of the nervous-wreck hazards of leadership, i.e. unlike the excruciating personal style of the now-invisible man whom Cameron replaced.
Approving Cameron to that degree, I find it easier to speak of all the things that are disagreeable about George Osborne, whom I doubt mixes well at all and, worse (as Martin Kettle argues here) seems to be trapped in some hellish mirror-image homage to the wiles of Gordon Brown. John Rentoul did no messing in describing Osborne's Budget speech of yesterday as “the most appallingly crafted, third-rate peroration of any parliamentary set piece I have had the misfortune to witness.”
You can probably trust the view of a Tory who trashes the first routinely scheduled Budget of a Conservative chancellor in 14 years: thus Fraser Nelson, today poring over the Office for Budget Responsibility's report, seeing no authentic pro-growth measures, only creeping inflation, steadily ahead of wages, until possibly mid-2013. (“Result: real wage falls, real drop in living standards and real misery.”) Nelson is avowedly a hardcore tax-cutter and deficit-slasher, believing too that the former aids the latter, and he criticises Osborne for insufficient zeal on the controversial issue of The Cuts (“In 2011-12, the estimated bill for debt interest will be £48.6 billion — a staggering £4.7 billion more than the estimate in the November forecast.”) This may be in part why John Rentoul, however scornful of Osborne's presentation, concludes that “overall, the Cameron-Osborne judgement on public finances seems more right than the Miliband-Balls one, so far as that can be defined.” Or as Martin Wolf puts it in the FT, "The UK is caught between a chancellor who insists his policies are perfect now and a shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who insists that policy was perfect under Labour" - or, at least, Labour under the glorious leadership of Balls' padrone, Brown.
This week Rentoul quoted with permission a plaintive letter he'd had from one Darren Canning, a Labour member and campaigner:
“I keep hearing how a new generation is in charge of Labour now and keep wondering if there is any place left in it for me... All we have had to say is ‘Vote for us, we’re not Tories.’ It isn’t enough to get excited about... I am pulling out of active campaigning and am seriously thinking of leaving the party altogether. At least then I will be free to defend the last 13 years without constantly being accused of being ‘disloyal’. I am writing to you asking for counsel, is there a place for those who still value the New Labour project in this new Labour party or is it time to take a break?”
On one level you have to say, tough-mindedly, that there is no point whining about where Labour's internal convulsions have taken it, because it's hardly unprecedented, and there's hardly anywhere else to go. But to sound a tad less brusque - I do approve the Canning analysis.

Against AV

This blog has had little to say on politics of late, possibly because this blog is increasingly Old, while politics has allegedly got New (while nonetheless looking to me about as sprightly as ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth.’) Consider this recent gobbet as quoted in the Independent:
‘A Labour source said: "Those opposing reform are from the old generation, rather than what some have called Generation Ed. Ed [Miliband] is prepared to work with Nick Clegg in the interest of something he believes in. This is what we mean when we talk about new politics..."’
Urgh. Still, it seems worth offering my tuppence on electoral reform, since everybody else is. I’m against AV, emphatically – there are no circumstances under which I’d welcome it, end of, even when first-past-the-post has been referred to by the Younger Generation as ‘an analogue system in a digital age’ that is due ‘an upgrade’... (Urgh 2.)
A chap called Mark Fuller spoke for me and others, I’m sure, on Twitter the other week: ‘I'll be voting No in May because I see nothing wrong in whoever gets the most votes winning...’ The most keenly-stated riposte to this position that I’ve heard is: ‘But under First Past the Post being popular just means having one more vote than the next guy.’ But it doesn’t ‘just’ mean that. Surely if it means one thing alone then that would be ‘popular as in none of the other ‘guys’ got more votes than you...’
The argument over the vote seems to be getting more fractious as we slouch toward polling day, and a good few advocates of AV have begun to wax irritable over the seeming non-comprehension by those of us agin. Let me at least try to nail down the planks of my position, in no particular order.
1. I’ve heard it said that AV reduces the need for tactical voting. I know that it didn’t manage to do so in the election for Labour leader last September. I know of several David Miliband supporters who, knowing DM would ‘get the most votes’ and yet was vulnerable still to defeat, voted for Ed Balls #1 and DM #2, solely because they rightly figured Balls would be the last of the also-rans to be eliminated. The ruse didn’t work on this occasion, but I daresay that particular electorate may know better next time. The point is that tactical voting will be alive and well under AV.
2. I’ve further heard it said AV ‘requires every MP to get the support of at least half their constituents.’ No it doesn’t require this. What if none of the voters, or a negligible share of them, chose to state more than one preference? This scenario is not so massively unlikely. And AV is bad, in any case, at measuring what we call 'support' in the proper, active sense.
3. This is the pro-AV line that makes my skin crawl – that it ‘categorically ensures that no candidate can be elected who is actively opposed by a majority of voters.’ No it doesn’t, per #2 above. Moreover, I find the notion of this spoiler/veto principle, to be wielded by the Mass of the Unpopular against S/he Who Got The Most Votes, pretty repellent. I’m sure most of its upholders would say they live in fervent abhorrence of the BNP (even though the polite name given to the menace in public seems to be ‘divisive candidates’, a category into which the aforementioned and perfectly mild David Miliband fell last September.) Well, I’d say first-past-the-post is doing well enough at reflecting and appropriately rewarding the BNP’s level of support in the country, which is negligible.
4. AV-ers have said that their desired reform will eradicate the supposedly moribund, corrupt (cf. expenses) business of ‘safe seats.’ Well, here we approach a crux. I do believe that most of us live where we live for good and/or salient socio/cultural-economic reasons, and that We the People then define the character of that given area, also the shade of political representation that area broadly endorses. By which measure, there ought always to be relatively ‘safe’ seats. The idea that the character of an area is something we think ought to be in continual flux from election to election seems to me queer, undesirable, worrisome.
5. I have to take this seriously as it is stated by the estimable John Rentoul:
‘[B]eing able to rank candidates in order of preference gives more voters more of a chance of a say in the outcome... and reduces wasted votes.’
Well, if you really feel you need such a 'say', that the right to vote is in itself just not enough, then I humbly defer to you. I speak as one who, in 22 years of voting, has not once had the pleasure of voting for a candidate who went on to win. But I can’t complain about any of those results that I failed to influence, and I accepted that my neighbours had spoken, their will had been done. If I had needed so badly to feel warm and fuzzy about my voting preference then I would have taken steps to up sticks and move elsewhere. But the area where you live needs to send one representative to parliament, and I believe it should be the person who comes out on top after the ‘Likes’ have been totted up – not the one who slips over the line once all the ‘Dislikes’ or ‘Don’t Minds/Not Bothereds’ have been brushed up into the dust-pan and dumped all over the count.
So, yes, I hope AV is voted down, but its supporters can take some small heart from my long and indefatigable record of having failed to endorse a winning candidate. For what it’s worth, the point I have found most incisive in all of this was made by the Independent’s Andy McSmith:
"What the FPTP does is give an unfair advantage to parties whose votes are geographically concentrated at the expense of those whose support is spread widely but thinly. In England, that is a bias in favour of both Labour and the Conservatives at the expense of all the others... The coalition government has passed legislation which simultaneously promised a referendum on the FPTP voting system and imposed a redrawing of constituency boundaries. The referendum may or may not reduce the bias in favour of the two big parties. Redrawing the boundaries will certainly benefit the Conservatives at the expense of Labour."

The other Lost Leader...

With Labour seemingly mired in one of its periodic phases of being led by windbags, hypocrites and small-scale connivers (it’s been that way for several years now...) it’s hard to think about ‘moving forward’, not with so much rebarbative recent history still to be digested… David Laws’ recent sour remarks about Ed Miliband (amid his hasty reminiscence of the ConDem shotgun wedding) should be set in context of Laws’ obvious Toryism and attendant hatred for Labourism. But the Mail's serialisation of Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge made for more disconcerting reading. Let’s set aside the risible spectacle of the Mail arrogating to itself the right to determine, Socialist Worker -style, exactly who is a traitor to the cause of Labour. The rest of us just need to read between the lines and marvel anew at how such a sanctimonious and scarily self-obsessed pair as Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman wound up at the very pinnacle of the Labour Party, prior to blessing Ed Miliband as their rightful inheritor.

John Rentoul’s revival of 'AJ4PM' is tongue-in-cheek, surely, for the moment has passed, just as so many other promising Labour ‘moments’ have crashed into the rocks over recent years. I haven’t been wowed by Johnson’s despatch box performances as shadow chancellor. But, rare in a politician, he remains a recognisible human being, one with just the right mix of frankness and canniness, and unlike his Leader he's not about to bang on about the defeatingly populist notion that people ought forever to hand back more than half their income once they've made their way to £150K.

Johnson's recent tribute to his Leader has a nicely minimal feel: 'Everyone’s got their views about how we get back into government and there’s a variety of views in the Shadow Cabinet… … we have to discuss those differences of opinion like mature people which is really a mindset that I think Ed has brought into the party that is I think commendable...'

No, I don't wish to re-run redundant quarrels so even I balked a little at Rentoul's observations in his print column today: "There were disloyal whispers at Westminster last week. Anonymous speculation about Brownites organising for Yvette Cooper to succeed [EdMili]. Sarcasm about when he was going to start in his new job. Grumbles about his breaking his paternity leave on Friday to provide a soundbite for TV news on Lord Young's resignation – a Tory bad news story that needed no help from him – instead of to surprise us with his plans, say, to be tough on immigration..."

But, y'know, if the cap fits... Or as the bracingly rude Daily Mash satirises it, 'Despite assurances from David Miliband that there would no repeat of the Blair-Brown 'soap opera', his supporters said that would be f**king right...'

Twitter: I spoke and someone hearkened...

I'm about 4-5 days into the whole what-kept-you-old-man? experience of 'Being on Twitter' and after going through the only-to-be-expected initial oddness of it (also realising that I'm not build to be any sort of regular/compulsive Tweeter...) I've now had what feels to me a Real Result in response to one Tweet, which is that John Rentoul considers me 'Excellent'... Oh boy, that makes it all worthwhile, I tell you - and in the wake of previous kind words from Hopi Sen, I'm feeling pretty buoyed by this whole business of electronic hand-shaking with the writers one most admires. So, I must now formally renounce all former cynicism as the Devil's work, and profess, in the manner of Stevie Wonder, that Blogging and Tweeting have made my life sweeter than ever. (Still struggling a tad with Facebook, though...)

Gimme Shelter

I’m no right-winger, you understand… (Uh-oh, you might think, there’s a pretty ominous start to a post.) But nor did I consider the ideas of the Right to be axiomatically the Devil’s work. Following the lead of my literary hero Norman Mailer, who famously reckoned himself a ‘left conservative’ I try to use both sides of my head in an argument, and to resist the sanctimony by which some on the Left persuade themselves that all human history is class struggle, one in which they are – axiomatically – on the side of the poor and oppressed, whether or not required to match word by deed.
I can’t say exactly how hard we should be cutting in the light of this grim shortfall between tax revenues and public spending, but – since it seems likely that the cost of housing benefit for people of working age has risen by £5 billion over the past five years, i.e. roughly mapping the hopeless reign of Gordon Brown – then I’m quite sure that reform of housing benefit entitlements along the lines of what the ConDems have proposed is commonsensical and overdue, with a necessary cap on accommodation provided in the private rental market, as opposed to publicly-owned housing. As such, I now seem to be of the party of Max Hastings and the Daily Mail. Eh bien.
I’m quite certain the public purse has to assist key workers to live near their place of work. And people who are put out of work need to be given a hand with their rent for a reasonable period. I’m not some Chinese martinet seeking to cap families at exactly 1 Child. But I absolutely think people should act on their estimate of how many kids ‘they can afford decently to rear’ (cf. Hastings - 'decent' is a favourite Mail word, used as if they invented decency, but there's no reason we should let them own it.) Where six-figure sums have been paid annually to families of 6-8 kids, this was extravagant before and cannot continue. I don’t make light of the fear of mass evictions from Central London: one expects this cut to bite. But however harsh the ‘correction’, I understand there will be an emergency fund for true hardship cases. Otherwise, as Hastings puts it, ‘most of us take for granted the necessity to move home if our circumstances change.’ Indeed we do.
I can’t tell how Ed Miliband’s riposte to Cameron played in the chamber but to me, and to many others, I expect, he sounded just as John Rentoul puts it, conveying “the wrong message to the country, which simply cannot understand why so many billions of taxpayers’ money is poured into such a badly-designed benefit that undermines work incentives, profits landlords and keeps property prices higher than they would otherwise be.”
In other news, I am happily of the same mind as Hastings in respect of Polly Toynbee’s worth as an inverse barometer in any political argument, though he makes his point in a gratuitous manner, marshalling assertions the truth of which I can’t verify:
"There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Polly Toynbee and her kind in their concern for Britain’s underclass, though the charge of champagne socialism sticks pretty hard on anyone who, like herself, owns a villa in Tuscany and educated her children at private schools."
Similarly, readers will know I’m with Hastings on the profoundly annoying Boris Johnson, whose sickly coveting of David Cameron’s job rolls on unabated. Please, someone, tell me London can cough up a better prospect for mayor than the Bounderby-ish Johnson or the alligator-blooded Ken Livingstone.

Labour's choice, final strait, horses for courses...

The New Statesman was, I think, first out last night with the very welcome news that Jon Cruddas is endorsing David Miliband for Labour leader. Apparently Cruddas was very taken with DM's Keir Hardie Lecture a few weeks back (also noted here.) "What was interesting to me about this", Cruddas comments, "was when he started talking about belonging and neighbourliness and community, more communitarian politics, which is where I think Labour has to go." Hear, hear.
The Staggers itself has come out for Ed Mili today, declaring that he is somebody they feel could, conceivably, become a "bold, charismatic, compassionate and visionary" leader. I'm still left wondering which meeting I missed where the younger/shorter Miliband brother offered such powerful evidence of these inchoate qualities. John Rentoul today describes the sanctimony, the small-meeting-room populism and evidently mounting peevishness that many of us associate more readily with Miliband Junior.
The NS is careful to make a secondary case for David Miliband, however heavily they count against him what they call "his mistaken support for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq." But they see him as the darling of "the right-of-centre commentariat" whereas their man Ed is the "change candidate"; and so they hope that DM, if defeated, will remain in politics as "his brother's lieutenant-in-chief." This would require extraordinary stoicism on David Miliband's part, if it turns out that what his brother is selling really is what most Labour voters want... and I only hope we aren't forced to witness such a fraternal job offer being made in the first place, much less the ghastly spectacle of its acceptance. The differences between these candidates are clear now, and only one, it seems to me, would not be utterly wasted in a backseat capacity.

Budget 2010: Make the best of us, not the worst

For me as for many, I suspect, the merchant bankers snagged by TV news cameras supping in Corney & Barrow last night (could have been any C&B, didn't matter) looked altogether too relieved and thirsty and ready for the weekend. Not that I didn’t want the markets to approve the ‘Unavoidable Budget’™, you understand – au contraire. I was just fantasising that the markets' handmaidens might have to feel as sober and filled with foreboding as the rest of us, at least for an evening.
Because I have no imagination I couldn’t foretell any of yesterday’s Budget except for what had been leaked, plus the surety that Nick Clegg would be talking it up weasel-style in front of a camera and his imaginary legion of fans. I almost didn’t want to buy outright the Krugman thesis that we are on the brink of a historic error, austerity in a time of weak demand. And I didn’t fancy going along automatically with Alastair Campbell’s tribal reading of the runes: “...George Osborne puts the fragile recovery at risk with his ideological onslaught on public services, by pretending the economy is worse than it is, and using the quisling Lib Dems as political cover.”

However, it seems clear today that the poorest areas and people in this country have been disproportionately hit by Osborne’s cleaver. As Tory minister Bob Neill put it with such candour a few weeks back, "those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt." (Eh?) Anthony Painter gave a strong response today: “any group that disproportionately relies on benefits will be marginalised, plunged into poverty, and facing despair. This is not the way it’s meant to be. Not in a decent, relatively wealthy society. The basic post-war compact on support and advancement for all in exchange for doing the responsible thing was broken yesterday. Not only lone parents, but also those who are poor, mentally impaired or incapacitated, the disabled, certain minority groups, and anyone relying on benefits to get by.”

Now, to say quickly - I do appreciate the rebuttal that to live 'disproportionately' on benefit is not right for any capable and able-bodied person, and in those cases should not be encouraged/tolerated. I agree that the public sector contains waste (and by that I include the NHS) and that Labour was going to have to cut big too. I’m not in fear of 'Bankrupt Britain' but I can feel the horror in the concept of interest on national debt exceeding the economy’s growth rate. I just haven’t ever trusted the Conservatives to do the harrowing – they’ve never been notably skilful at it. But I agree with Hopi Sen that it’s not a case of 'whether' but of ‘whose public sector pensions and pay should be cut.’ (Even John Redwood seemed to show some appreciation of the case for exemption of the low-paid public servant on Newsnight last week.)

And still, the thought of 25% less spending by government departments is stomach-churning. Surely paying more tax would be cheaper? This blog favoured the D. Miliband ratio of spending cuts to tax rises (2:1) rather than what looks like the 77-23 split of G. Osborne. That would be what’s properly called ‘a progressive alternative’, if the tax rises were sensibly applied to some of the sorts of ‘middle and high-income earners’ who were feeling so cheery round the bars of Broadgate and Exchange Square last night. But, but… I also acknowledge and defer to what John Rentoul described the other day as: “a strong “tree” bias (“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind that tree,” as Andrew Dilnot, formerly of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, once surprised me by chanting in a television interview).” And if everyone with taxable earnings between £37K and £150K is to be taxed at 40%, and at 50% above that, then that’s about as much income tax as I would have thought proper or permissible.

I do understand the thinking and appeal of a firm smack from government so as to teach that Britain should ‘live within its means.’ But the other day John Redwood did that quaint Tory thing of comparing the nation’s economy to a domestic household knuckling down to unavoidable frugality: ‘I know it is asking a lot for an outbreak of commonsense by public sector CEOs in councils and quangos. But can they spare us the crocodile tears and the parade of the bleeding stumps? Can they do what any household or company does when faced with a few percent off their income? Just get on and manage it in the least damaging way possible.’ Redwood’s analogies, however, were all drawn Margaret-style from good Grantham housekeeping: (‘You can holiday nearer at home… eat in more than in the local restaurants… draw some money out of the savings account... buy more of the value items at the supermarket, and put more vegetarian dishes into the home menus.’)
I’m sure a great many Britons have come to terms with the end of their excessive consumption based on borrowing, and so would fit Redwood’s model. If you are a company, though, then you just have to fire a proportion of your staff. And if you are someone who never earned enough to have significant savings, or weren’t reared on a middle-class diet, and did all your eating indoors on ‘value items’ anyway… What commonsense homily has John Redwood got to tell you then?

Labour has to offer an alternative, of course. No sitting on the hands. I further agree with Hopi Sen that this alternative ‘needs to be built on creating growth’, ‘we need to create jobs to grow’, and so we ‘need to be talking about measures to support private sector job creation and these can’t be simply extensions of State Aid.’ For sure, with all these benefit cuts we’re looking at a big reserve army of the unemployed. But, really, where will the jobs come from? Can anyone say? They’re hardly going to emerge blithely when people are afraid to spend, businesses afraid to invest, and our imagined export markets are outbidding each other in the austerity stakes, Germany 'leading by example' etc.

Over to you then, D. Miliband...

Crusaders and Citoyens

I don't really 'do' links on this blog, a disposition I've suddenly come to see as unfortunately solipsistic, given the promiscuous tendencies of one's everyday web-crawling habits. Still, return visitors here (that's you two, sit up straight) will probably have figured out which online writers I consult on a regular basis; and, yes, in respect of British politics, that would be John Rentoul of the Independent, Philip Stephens at the FT, Oliver Kamm & (with some lingering resistance) David Aaronovitch at the Times, and the widely-read blogger Hopi Sen.
So, this afternoon I was very gratified to have my opinion of the David Miliband campaign noted by Hopi Sen, who also had some kind words to say about Crusaders. The term 'comrade' is something else I don't 'do' on account of its now-ruined context (though I could still accept citoyen); and I would be getting ideas above my station to factor myself into any fancied club of 'co-thinkers'. But in politics, as in all parts of life, when it comes to convictions freely expressed then common ground is a fine thing to find.

How Impress the Working Classes of England?

I spent the daylight hours of Election Day just gone doing a little bit of footwork on behalf of my brother David’s attempt to be elected a local councillor under the Liberal Democrat banner in Holloway ward, Islington. (En route to the morning shift I’d called into my elder daughter’s school and voted Labour across the board for Hornsey & Wood Green, so I felt I had both my family-over-party principles and my general karmic wellbeing in good order.) The photo above is a small souvenir of an interesting day, David and I with another of his friendly volunteers of the day, Kenny.
David polled an excellent 1940 votes, every one of them earned by his own hand and, evidently, on account of his good works in the locality over recent years. But in the end – and this became clear during the day – Labour had got its usual vote out with extreme efficiency, and their three councillors were returned, as was their local MP Emily Thornberry – one of the night’s dearly-fought prizes for Labour. In fact, this was rated one of the party’s model campaigns of Election 2010, as evinced by much post-mortem analysis, such as this from Jessica Asato at LabourList:

“In Islington South, voters weren’t swayed by the Cleggmania which was expected to grip the seat. Instead, the years of community campaigning by Emily Thornberry paid off, combined by assiduous door to door contact - the mountains of literature which the Lib Dems used failed to sway the electorate… There are other explanations for the victories in these seats - not least because most of them were metropolitan, and some of them had larger than usual ethnic minority populations. But we can't underestimate the impact of full time campaigning which they embraced.”

Interesting, as always, that 'metropolitan' and 'ethnic minority' remain coded Labour still. Moving on, Chris Smith made this bolder assertion on the New Statesman blog:

“Labour London… has created a formidable fighting machine and is buoyed by election results thought impossible a year ago. It is the kingmaker that will decide if David Miliband will take over… The political map of the capital now has a solid core of red. It controls eight more Labour councils, having gained more than 180 councillors. Westminster seats were secured despite Ashcroft cash; the party held Hammersmith - home of the Conservative easyCouncil project – plus Westminster North and Tooting. And it won the marginals of Harrow North and Enfield.”

London, maybe... but the South East is back to being a big headache for Labour, indeed Southern England more generally. John Rentoul offered the following dose of salts:
‘A correspondent emails with the numbers. Total number of seats in Southern England excluding inner London: 220. Total number of Labour wins: 12 (5 per cent)..."

The enigmatic James Purnell develops this thought in the Times today:
“Labour’s voters showed [their] party a lot of love on May 6. Despite everything, the core vote came out. People voted Labour in inner cities. There was even a swing to Labour from the Tories among ABs. But there’s bad news too: an 18 per cent swing to the Tories among C2s. The list of lost seats reads like a weekend supplement on holidaying in Middle England — Hastings, South Ribble, Worcester…”
I find myself a bit troubled by the pat-ness of this 'C2' thing (the 'A' and 'B' thing too.) Liam Byrne was going on about it in the Guardian the other day too, and some commenting reader asked if he calls people ‘C2s’ to their faces? It was only this morning that I decided to check out for myself how these famous social grades are properly defined. I found the following on Wikipedia, based on ‘Chief Income Earner's Occupation’ (though ‘living on benefit’ is counted at the bottom of the scale, while the upper end doesn’t factor in that layer of the upper class who don’t actually need to earn by dint of inherited wealth.)

A, upper middle class: Higher managerial, administrative or professional.
B, middle class: Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1, lower middle class: Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2, skilled working class: Skilled manual workers
D, working class: Semi and unskilled manual workers
E, Those at the lowest levels of subsistence: Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the welfare state for their income
You don't hear politicians using those D and E terms too often, do you? And there's a lesson there. Were I a skilled manual worker (indeed, a skilled anything...) I think I’d be fairly narked to hear my political convictions and voting intentions being bundled into some tacky plastic carrier bag marked 'C2'. Purnell, of course, is not standing, cannot stand, for the Labour leadership, and Byrne is said to be making up his mind, but any serious candidates need to get this part of the rhetoric right, I reckon.

Election Fever: a mild sweat

I didn’t watch Thursday night’s party leaders debate on ITV. I was down the pub, with two of my oldest mates, and, god knows, such opportunities crop up rarely at this time of life. Plus, I already know how I’m voting and why; and I know very well what I think of the Liberal Democrat party and of Nick Clegg, who nonetheless appears all of a sudden to be striking great swathes of the British people not as some mere potential kingmaker but, rather, the straight-talking force of common sense incarnate.
Seeking the upside... I suppose it makes a change from noting the main parties’ discreet wrangles over how to plug that £167 billion deficit in public finances. By contrast, for some voters, Clegg must indeed seem like a much-needed blast of honesty. And I have to admit that The Swing to Clegg is a more novel and welcome staging post in the course of this election than the previous week’s bleatings from all those Tory shopkeepers who (surprise!) don’t want to pay an extra 1% in National Insurance.
For me, the deficit is still the top story. The Treasury cannot be run in the manner of a private household, not is government a limited company, and so it still seems important to nail the Tories on their nonsense about efficiency savings, as did the excellent Oliver Kamm, quoting Nigel Lawson’s memoirs (‘Incoming Conservative Governments usually tend to be overoptimistic about the scope for ‘eliminating waste’ - a pledge which is always more popular than specific spending cuts...’)

John Rentoul also put it well last week in rubbishing Cameron’s 'Big Society' waffle:

"I am as opposed to the nanny state as the next person. I do not like Gordon Brown's statist assumptions on the economy and public services. But the helium at the heart of the [Tory] flying pig manifesto is the idea that if the Government stops doing stuff, people will organise themselves to fill the gap in ways that are equitable, fulfilling and tax-saving."

New Esquire (May 2010): RTK on Polanski's The Ghost

The new Esquire has on its cover Jay-Z, which is good news, as I might now find out just who that guy is and what he’s all about. Within, my film column is about Roman Polanski’s movie of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, in which I found much to enjoy while also finding myself unable to get past one mountainous error, namely the drama’s daft imagining of a Blairesque Prime Minister played by Pierce Brosnan – 'Adam Lang', as Harris calls him, an international statesman shown to be utterly devoid of qualities. As I write in the mag:
"Pierce Brosnan unsurprisingly flounders in trying to fill this cursory outline of a person. In Harris’s novel, the ‘Ghost’ decides finally that Lang is just ‘not a psychologically credible character.’ Quite. But while Harris intends us to read Lang as a pliable phoney, all that comes across is Harris’s consuming hatred of Tony Blair, whom Lang resembles in every respect but for the ones that actually matter..."
Admiring John Rentoul’s political writings as I do, and finding myself mostly in agreement with him about the rationale for and legality of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I suspect he would not be taken with my piece were he to read it, since he’s been vocal in his criticism of The Ghost and its makers (without having seen the movie); whereas I devote a fair few lines to my admiration of Polanski as a filmmaker, and attribute my overall liking for the film to it being so recognisably un film de Polanski.
As I say in the piece, it has ‘the quite inimitable Polanskian mood: a sense of creeping unease, of the slow-but-steady workings of fate, the unfussy, commonplace presence of evil in the world.’ Moreover, Ewan McGregor in the lead is ‘a classic Polanski hero in distress, naïvely courting trouble and yet, on some level, asking for it.’ And like so much of Polanski, The Ghost plays on the menacing theme of ‘the double’ – two men sharing a moral/physical resemblance and, possibly, a fate. Location-wise Polanski makes the North Sea island of Sylt ‘double’ as Martha's Vineyard, and it’s a great swap, because scenically the film has that mood evoked by Norman Mailer in his New England-set thriller Tough Guys Don’t Dance: the ‘cold sea air filled with the bottomless chill that lies at the cloistered heart of ghost stories.’ Those who treasure how Polanski shot the island of Lindisfarne in Cul-de-Sac will feel those embers warmed by The Ghost.
I must say, I don’t think Polanski undertook the filming of Harris’s novel on the grounds that he wanted to play his own part in dragging Blair up before The Hague. Rather, Polanski had been at work with Harris on a movie of one of the author’s earlier successes, Pompeii, but then the funding collapsed. As Harris tells it (or as reported by Michael White the other week) he then “offered [The Ghost] as an alternative to Polanski, who is not interested in politics. ‘This Gordon Brown, he’s schmuck, yes?’ was the limit of [Polanski’s] conversation.” That certainly sounds like Polanski’s diction, at least as Martin Amis once aped it in a famous appraising interview piece.

Britain Decides 2010: Trouble in Mind...

The polls open in less than six weeks and the odd, nervy, queasily fractious tone of our politics persists. I have read clever men in both the left/liberal and centre-right press saying this is an election that both main parties deserve to lose... Well, my vote is already in the bank, so to speak, but if I did need electronic help in my decision then I might take John Rentoul's steer toward the diverting game of VoteMatch.
Meanwhile Anatole Kaletsky said a few things with which I agreed in today's Times:
As Tory leaders become increasingly desperate and fill the airwaves with exaggerated denunciations of public debt, combined with hand-on-heart vows to protect every spending programme they mention and firm commitments to reduce taxes, what will voters conclude? That the Tories are Janus-faced on the most important issue facing the nation — the need to set responsible priorities for debt reduction through tax increases and spending cuts. And being two-faced translates into untrustworthy and contemptuous of the voters’ intelligence... The Tories want to present themselves as potential saviours for a nation that, under Mr Brown’s leadership, has suffered the economic equivalent of Dunkirk. But if they genuinely believe that Britain has suffered 13 years of shocking economic mismanagement since 1997, that reducing debt is an overriding moral obligation and that the country is now on the brink of bankruptcy, then Dunkirk-style sacrifices must be demanded. In that case — which might be described as the Greek scenario — the Tories are grossly irresponsible to promise tax cuts or protect spending programmes such as the NHS, not to mention foreign aid, bus passes and winter fuel payments...

Esquire (April 2010) now on stands

Leo DiCaprio is the cover star, looking like a swinging kind of guy. Inside is a rare sighting of Chris Morris, also a spot of erotic finesse courtesy of Rankin. My column is about Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, of which I say:
"One can imagine a great Greengrass movie shot at the eye-level of one soldier amid the fog of the Iraq war, trying to see his way through the morass. But the visual signature of Green Zone is a grand aerial shot across Baghdad, signifying that Greengrass and his writer Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Mystic River) have an overarching theory about the invasion of Iraq – one that tends heavily toward conspiracy..."
John Rentoul, who hasn't seen Green Zone, is nevertheless on the right track with his suspicions of it...

The invasion of Iraq, and the plain truth

Tony Blair's remark to CNN - concerning the current Chilcot inquiry and the rightness or wrongness of the Coalition invasion of Iraq - that he is 'happy to go through it all again', is likely to divide Blair's admirers and detractors as cleanly as a meat cleaver.
That division was never better exemplified in my eyes than by disparate columns last week from Sir Simon Jenkins in, I think, the Guardian, and John Rentoul in the Independent. Jenkins' sub-editor rather than Jenkins himself was presumably responsible for the headline 'We want Blair's head. But Chilcot won't give it to us.' (The Guardian is very good at speaking as 'We.') But Jenkins himself must be solely responsible for the following:
"We know the truth. The report can be written in a sentence. Tony Blair went to war in Iraq because he lacked the guts to stand up to George Bush, say the invasion was not justified by facts or law, and refuse to join him in Baghdad. Despite being told to his face by Hans Blix that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he deceived the cabinet and parliament and took his nation to war."
Now, quickly, compare with Rentoul on the same day:
"Everything important is known, with the kind of disclosure of official documents in the Hutton inquiry that would normally have taken 30 years or longer... in 2001 the British Government concluded that regime change in Iraq lacked a legal basis... the British view was always that regime change was inadequate legal basis for military intervention; that was why the legal basis was Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with UN disarmament resolutions."
In the gulf between these positions you will never see a meeting, and so like many I don't see the point of the Chilcot inquiry, which looks indeed to be rehashing old ground that was long ago sown with dragon's teeth and harvested bitterly.

"We've got to get rid of Brown..."

Not my words, those, but my old student newspaper editor Peter Hyman's on tonight's Newsnight - a show that has an increasingly ragged, tendentious, feckless air to it in these bunker days that we're living through. Hyman surely reflects a Blairite consensus that would include, inter alia, the likes of his fellow former PM-speechwriter Phil Collins, John Rentoul with his AJ4PM campaign, and the retiring Stephen Byers MP of North Tyneside. But the midnight hour is nigh - can anyone be found among the Parliamentary Labour Party with sufficient backbone for the bloody work being proposed?
How bad could it be for Labour if the Party is electorally annihilated on Brown's watch? If he leads then he will lose, for sure - but how ruinously? One shudders a little at the thought of the floating voter weighing his feelings on another 5 years of Gordon's doughty individual conscience. And could Brown stick around after defeat and play a Michael Howard-like role in helping the team find a new young winning captain? Doesn't seem remotely likely, does it? No, the odds suggest he'd be off in high dudgeon as of May 31, still believing he was right, while Cameron got the removers round. By that measure, yes, Brown should take the bullet now, for all of our sakes.
Like John Rentoul I admired Blair more by the end of his premiership than at the start, when I found it hard to look at him, never mind listen. In that 'final act' swansong period of Blair's he made the stunning observation that, in respect of the century-old split in Labour's origins between proletarian ILP and namby-pamby Fabian, he felt himself to be naturally amidst the party of the former. That he could say this, whether or not he believed it, was part of my creeping regard for him.
His admirers are generally a less breathtaking lot. Last week as I watched Sally Keeble MP on Newsnight effectively warning Brown not to (further) estrange the middle-class Mumsnet crowd over the axing of subsidised childcare for kids of 2-years-plus, I felt ancient, decrepit hackles rising. Be it said, mine is one of those households very, very glad of said subsidy. But is it really, in Sally Keeble's eyes, the moral last ditch of a Labour government? Is it even worthy of consideration as an 'untouchable' in this, the moment of enforced cutbacks in government spending? At any rate, it's got the New Labour ultras rolling their eyes in O tempora fashion. I don't know if I want to sit beside those guys 'n' gals anyhow, and I'm not sure how many of them are really concerned about whether (as some surely hope) the green leather benches can be remuneratively traded for the boardroom. But since it's not my livelihood at stake here, I freely declare from my swivel chair, 'Yep, you've got to get rid of Brown.'

FT today: RTK on Robert Harris's Lustrum

My short-ish write-up of Harris's second Cicero novel runs in the Financial Times today. This was my first real encounter with Harris's bestselling storytelling, though I've long been a big fan of his non-fiction, especially his books on Neil Kinnock and Bernard Ingham, both of which evoke brilliantly a world of British politics that now feels like aeons ago - albeit not so far-distant as 63BC, where Lustrum begins.
So wryly skilful is the novel's use of ancient history that I wish it had been around in those years when I was studying Classics for 'O' and 'A' Level (years when Kinnock still had his tin hat on, trying to lead Labour out of the trenches, while Ingham was browbeating the press corps Yorkshire-style on behalf of his beloved Margaret.) Still, at least in the late 1980s I had Gore Vidal's scurrilous Creation to help me inject some irony into the 'Golden Age of Athens' part of the examination paper.
Had I the word-space in the FT I would have added of Lustrum that it clearly extends Robert Harris's compulsion to explore the mindset and behaviour of Tony Blair through fictive means. Throughout, there are meaningful if toga-clad allusions to things Blair has said and done, sometimes expressed through the vehicle of Cicero, other times through Gaius Julius Caesar - in other words, sometimes in a reasonably sympathetic manner, other times with the sort of animus that John Rentoul has instinctively deplored.

Labour: The vastness of the North devours us

The last days, the bunker days... and tonight BBC1's Question Time fielded a quite conspicuously skewed-right-of-centre panel, there to jump up and down on a cut-out of Gordon Brown, cheered to the hilt by a rowdy audience. But, then again, since Harriet Harman was the allotted speaker for Labour, I was indeed minded to vote for Anyone But.

So, has this been as ghastly a day for Brown as his detractors would desire? The Lockerbie blowback continues, and for sure the Government's inability to say what it thought about Scotland's choice (and why) is rather shameful. As for the Baroness Scotland - the debacle serves her right, though I wouldn't have wanted her to go until her high-handed third-rate attempt at an apology - like the expenses thing, can none of these people feel the gorge of their own hypocrisy rising up to flood their throats?

Shriti Vadera? Well, I see Robert Peston rides in manfully to say that her new job is all of a piece with Gordon's wishes. And I hope that is so, because the vultures of the press were squatting over that story all bloody day long, hoping perhaps that Vadera would flounce out in high dudgeon and give Gordon a hard boot in the sporran on her way out.

I admire Charles Clarke MP and can't argue with any of what he said the other day. I admire the serial Brown-basher John Rentoul too, have done ever since reading his outstanding biography of Tony Blair, but while I find it noteworthy that Rentoul "admired [Blair] more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning" (since I did too), I rather feel he's now going a tad overboard on this same sentiment. Still, I remain his fan, and we are likeminded too in wanting Alan Johnson for Labour leader.

But what really preys on me is this headline today from the FT: "Labour’s support in north collapses." Without serving up any hard data from their new research that I can see, the paper nonetheless warrants that "The Tories have built a narrow four-point lead in the north, eradicating the 19-point Labour lead in the region that underpinned Tony Blair’s last general election victory." Dear me how, the shame of it. I suppose it partly depends on how you define The North. In the Spectator David Blackburn looks at things in the round, arguing "the evidence that Middle England is not fully behind Mr Cameron will cause a few headaches in Central Office. But if the Tories win in Newcastle, a marginal victory in Redditch is of no consequence."

Had away, bonny lad. I guess conceivably the Lib Dems could turn their municipal success in Newcastle into a dominance of Tyneside's Westminster seats too. But the Tories? Truly I would gan to the top of our stairs. Not that there aren't Tories in NE1, mind you - but in the main they either travel by chauffeur or hide behind mansion walls; and that has never seemed quite sufficient to win a polling majority.

None of this, I know, is any comfort to Brown, or "The Wolf", as I ought really to call him were I to extend the entirely regrettable WWII analogy of this post's title and opening lines, occasioned probably by there being a new biography of the appalling Alan Clark going round... Divvint get wuh started on that one.

William Hill: Brown 6/4 to go before the next election

As reported in the Spectator, "Brown is 6/4 to go before the next election 7 to 2 to leave this year 15/8 to be replaced in 2009, 11/10 to go in 2010." This is tough-minded betting. In the Independent the other day Johann Hari was suggesting that Brown accept he's lost the next election and embark on some berserker spree of red-blooded socialism for the 2 years he has left. And John Rentoul, the smartest biographer of Blair, was chastising those disciples of the former PM who fell in meekly behind Brown last year, after a token bit of moody shilly-shallying. David Aaronovitch in the Times raised the issue of all that rancid karma Brown and his best pals stored up for themselves during the presumptive Blair-baiting wait for succession. (And I have to say to my eye the worst of Brown is his rotten taste in political allies and little proteges.) It's hard to see a bracing blast of economic good news sufficient to save Brown within the next 18 months, the time-frame he would need. I can't see him going out in some blaze of redistributive glory. I don't see how Charles Clarke or Alan Milburn could lead the party, though perhaps as stalking horses they could smoke out a more considerable stiletto-wielder. I don't think the public are ready to accept a second consecutive unelected PM, least of all in these grim circumstances. And I'm not sure a smart young man like David Miliband wants to bet the house this year or next, and risk fast-forwarding to the end of his and all political careers, i.e. failure. So what do I think is going to happen? What would I like to happen? I'll decide once there's a bit of clear blue water between us and the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.