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Nick Clegg is bound to defend the Tory record, as he's a Tory. It doesn't matter to us.
It is beyond delusional that Nick Clegg is proposing to the voters of Britain that British voters are better off with a coalition government, with him as a permanent fixture as the Deputy Prime Minister. It may be spun that ‘behind the scenes’, he is known to favour David Cameron as he has worked with Cameron, but seriously? You must have surely worked with people that you’ve come to hate? It is, rather, well known that Nick Clegg is a Tory. He is utterly spineless, and has no liberal principles of his own. That is why many people serious about Liberal values have left in droves – or rather hundreds of thousands. Liberal does not mean snoopers’ charters. Liberal does not mean control orders. Liberal does not mean secret courts. Liberal does not mean propelling competition to be the overriding principle of a NHS which outsources as much as possible to the private sector, when the Liberal Democrat’s own constitution emphasises the principle of collaboration.
The question is: what will it take to get rid of Nick Clegg finally? Thanks to the legislation of the fixed term parliament, we already know that he will have to honour his promise to go the full distance. Vince Cable may offer sunny uplands in the form of the Coalition early, but it is merely a mirage. Many activists are worried about armageddon, which is widely predicted for the European elections. Oakeshott will be there to tell you he told you so, and Nigel Farage will yet again be the new messiah. However, none of this fundamentally changes anything. Nick Clegg is a Tory, and what he wishes to do after May 8th 2015 is utterly irrelevant.
Do people really care whether he wants to be in a Coalition with Ed Miliband? I strongly suspect Ed Miliband doesn’t wish to work with Clegg in a million years. The practical issue is inevitably how Nick Clegg is going to lead his party to vote with Labour to reverse a series of legislative steps from the present Coalition. It is inevitable that Labour will have to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), and given the strength of feeling one cannot conceivably imagine LibDem MPs will now be whipped to vote against the legislation they originally delivered. Whilst it is common currency that most politicians are ‘professional’ and do what they are told, irrespective of what the country feels, Norman Lamb had no problems in implementing a £3bn top down reorganisation of the NHS when the political priority should have been to implement as soon as possible the Dilnot recommendations over the future of social care.
Say you’d submerged the Concordia, would you attempt to take credit for lifting it out of the waters? Say you’d driven a high speed train in Spain off the tracks, would you attempt to take credit for finding the ‘black box’ recorder? Nick Clegg incessantly criticised the economic policy under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling in the dying days of the the final recent Labour government, and did his best totally to misinform the public. It could be the case that Labour did a dreadful job in explaining how the £860 billion was deemed ‘necessary’ in keeping the banks afloat, whilst maintaining a record level of satisfaction in the NHS. However, Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes and Danny Alexander did a splendid job in a coalition of lies with George Osborne and David Cameron in arguing that Labour had bankrupt the UK and we were close to the Greek situation. It is therefore not a great achievement that we have a feeble recovery. The argument that ‘Ed Balls does not even agree with Ed Balls’ has not reached lift off despite the best peddling from Tim Farron and Nick Clegg, and the BBC, because the facts speak for themselves. Whilst they proudly boast that the UK economy did not have a double dip or triple dip, it is incontrovertible that the UK economy had actually been recovering in May 2010.
So what Nick Clegg wants is irrelevant. In as much politics can be politicised, Clegg has become a figurehead for anger amongst a wide variety of issues important to Labour voters. While Clegg maintains his stuck record mantra of ‘lifting people out of poverty’, the list of cock ups from Clegg is truly lamentable. It is impossible to know where to start – but you could try the UK economy, the scrapping of the employment support allowance, the shutting of libraries, the scrapping of Sure Start, the scrapping of ‘Building Schools for the Future, and the destruction of the network of legal centres in England. Clegg’s horrific, even if he is a ‘great reformer’ of sorts. He represents all that is fundamentally sick with unprincipled, undemocratic politics. He is a sickening ‘career politician’ who built a brand of ‘no more broken promises’, while breaking a promise he publicly signed a pledge for regarding tuition fees.
Ed Miliband continues to be slagged off by the Liberal Democrat hierarchy, though less so by some on the left of the Liberal Democrat Party. Why should he particularly wish to embrace them as part of the progressive left? The reason he might is that Ed Miliband is a social democrat who doesn’t particularly mind standing up for principles he believes in, even if this means antagonising the Blairite press such as David Aaronovitch or John Rentoul. He called out ‘irresponsible capitalism’ in an universally panned conference speech in Manchester in 2011, much to the ire of the Blairite critics (surprise surprise), but nobody can dismiss how this important concept, passported from the seminal work of Prof Porter at Harvard, has taken root. The ‘transformation’ of ‘reforming’ the public sector in outsourced services has been incredibly unpopular with the general public, who are much better informed than the Coalition politicians would like to believe. You’d have to be on Mars not to be aware of the fraud allegations of A4e, Capita, Serco or G4s.
The public will not give credit to the Liberal Democrats for the economy. They might conceivably give some credit to the Conservatives. And yet the picture of the UK economy is not clear. The total number of people in employment has been rising consistently for many years now, irrespective of who is government. The Conservatives will have real problems in establishing living standards, as the cost of living has risen exponentially due to privatised utilised creaming off profits in the utilities industries. These utilities industries are typical ‘oligopolies’, where the product is virtually the same for the end-user whoever the provider is, prices are kept artificially high by all the providers (but proving collusion by the competition authorities remains virtually impossible), and shareholder profits are shamelessly high. Norman Tebbit have dug out a trench in no foreign ownership of Royal Mail, but there is no such legislation about foreign ownership of the utilities nor indeed the NHS.
Nick Clegg may have been the future once. But he’s now finished.
Why not being able to organise a piss-up in a brewery suddenly matters
There’s one big problem with the branding of George Osborne as “The Austerity Chancellor”. That is, as a direct result of his own policies, he has made the economy much worse. Borrowing is going up, we’ve lost the “triple A” rating which Osborne himself was very proud of, consumer demand is effectively dead, and job security appears to be at its worst. It is of course vaguely possible that George Osborne is ‘sensitive’ about his own failings, and, to onlookers, he did look genuinely surprised at his level of unpopularity at an occasion which should have caused him immense pride.
And yet the popularity of his unpopularity cannot be underestimated. The YouTube video above has had 929,641 views. It seems that people have clicked on this video with the same relish that some people on a motorway slow down to observe a pile-up on the opposite carriageway. It is in a way easy to identify why George Osborne is unpopular; he gave a perception of enormous arrogance, and yet drove the UK economy into retropulsion with remarkable efficiency. Due to his policy, his target of ‘paying off the deficit’ by 2015 is pure science-fiction. People are undoubtedly sick of the ‘it’s all Labour’s fault’, and yet Labour members are still very enthusiastic about blaming the current UK’s troubles on Margaret Thatcher. It could be that George Osborne, with his Bullingdon past, has activated the ‘politics of envy’ button, and so there is a perception that he and Iain Duncan-Smith are “punishing” the most vulnerable members of society such as disabled citizens, while pursuing policies which are ‘friendly’ to the members of society with higher incomes.
In politics, leopards can change their spots all too easily. My gut feeling is that there will be another hung parliament in 2015. Sure, Ed Miliband managed to shoot ‘on target’ at an open goal today, and quite miraculously for some managed to avoid the crossbar. And thankfully the Liberal Democrats have blocked David Cameron’s “boundary changes” plan. All Ed Miliband has to do is to avoid losing, and there is absolutely nothing in it for him to play dangerously. In a similar vein, after the shambles that was last year’s Budget, George Osborne doesn’t need to pull any rabbits out of his hat. Last year, he was bigging up a great ‘reforming budget’ which rapidly disintegrated into a slanging match over pasties, and whether a railway Cornish pasty stall in a railway station had in fact shut down. Osborne will obviously be keen to avoid a repeat performance of last year’s catastrophe.
Not being able to organise a piss-up in a brewery suddenly matters. Commentators have often discussed openly what the Achilles’ heel of this Coalition might be. It is not disunity – there is no narrative of people violently throwing wobblies or mobile phones, or a similar episode of political fratricide. It could be that this Coalition is simply ‘out of touch’, and this is to some extent supported by evidence such as the “Millionaire’s tax benefit” or the “Bedroom tax”. However, the label of sheer incompetence is still a crucial one. Despite the screw-up that is the UK economy under the Coalition’s watch, certain voters are not blaming the Liberal Democrats. Despite the never-ending list of things that have gone wrong, such as the recent section 75 NHS regulations, there always seems scope for things to get even worse. Michael Gove does not want any further shambles over his school qualifications, while Theresa May’s star appears to be ‘in the ascendant’ with a perennial blistering attack on human rights. However, both parties do not wish to scupper their chances of a leadership bid if David Cameron fails in June 2015, and certainly are mindful of the old adage that “He who wields the knife never wears the crown”, with numerous former casualties such as David Miliband and Michael Heseltine.
Nick Clegg may suddenly have got ‘second wind’ having won Eastleigh, but this victory was only because Labour would have needed a miracle to win it (with Eastleigh around 250th on his “hit list”), and Maria Hutchings amazingly came third in a two-horse race. His party’s slogan “strong economy and a fair society” is obscenely fradulent at so many levels, even if you generously park his blatant lie about Labour having been incompetent over the economy. He himself had conceded the need for a £1 TN bailout of the banks as an emergency measure in the global financial crisis, and this is clearly stated in Hansard. The economy which was in recovery when he took over in May 2010 is now virtually dead, and heading for a “triple dip”. And if his “fair society” is epitomised by bedroom taxes victimising narrow sections of society, library closures, withdrawal of education support allowance, privatisation of the NHS which had been universal and free-at-the-point-of-use, high street closures of law centres denying thousands of ‘access-to-justice’, reports of suicides following welfare claims, Nick Clegg and his party genuinely need help. However, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are mindful that they have reached a “critical mass” of cock-ups, and the Liberal Democrats, lacking all insight and being in complete denial, still feel that they have a useful rôle to play in propping up any minority government. However, next time Labour intend to repeal the Health and Social Care Act, so it would be a joke for the Liberal Democrats to ‘support’ this if they found themselves in government again, but Labour might need their votes. The only way to avoid this scenario is for Ed Miliband after his lengthy policy review to convince voters that there are genuine reasons why he should be allowed to implement his ‘One Nation’ vision. However, all political parties are prepared to ditch symbols of their values. It could be that Labour has no problem with revisiting the issue of electoral reform, again, if the Liberal Democrats demanded it; Clegg couldn’t care less if this were to become yet another ‘once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity’.
The label of this Coalition is well deserved, in fairness. David Cameron knows himself that he is living on borrowed time, but it is the whole Cabinet which is incompetent. For all his perceived faults, Ed Balls is a committed Keynesian, and has called it right on the economy; the only reason David Cameron perseverates in his hate campaign of him is that he knows he is a threat. In fact, all of the opposition are, because the Coalition has somehow managed to alienate systematically disabled citizens, the chronically sick, lawyers, physicians, human rights activists, and so on, in fact anyone apart from big corporates. The fact that he has managed to piss off most of the country ultimately will be his downfall.
Eastleigh reminds us all that all the Conservatives need to do is lose
Eastleigh was a remarkable by-election. It reminded us that, for Labour to win the General Election, all the Conservatives need to do is lose.
It cannot be considered fatal to ‘One Nation’ that Ed Miliband failed to win a seat which was 285th on his list of targets. What is remarkable is that the voters of Eastleigh did not give a “bloody nose” to the sitting incumbents, who include the Liberal Democrats. Despite a maelstrom of accusations and counter-accusations regarding Chris Huhne and Chris Rennard, local voters, albeit in fewer numbers, decided to give their vote to the Liberal Democrats. Even more strikingly, they did not “blame” the Liberal Democrats for policy failures for their senior partners. The Conservatives failed to win this seat, not simply because they failed to produce an ‘attractive offer’ to the British electorate, but also some voters are beginning to blame them for noteworthy policy mistakes. There is a huge repertoire of policy mistakes to choose from, but it is remarkable that former Conservatives who have voted for UKIP appear to have done so for two particular reasons. Firstly, they don’t give a damn about David Cameron’s “caste iron” guarantees about Europe. Secondly, they do BLAME George Osborne for snatching a triple-dip recession from the jaws of a fragile recovery bequeathed to them in May 2010.
“If at first you don’t succeed, blame Labour” has become an all-too familiar mantra, but people are increasingly unconvinced by the mouthpieces who have told them this. The BBC, plagued by an obsession over horsemeat and Jimmy Savile, have failed to report the massive outsourcing and privatisation implications of recent legislation over the NHS. Many in the public are sick-to-death of the tribal partisan line on the economy, which refuses to concede that there was an emergency bailout by the previous administration of the banking sector which led the deficit to explode. They are cognisant, through the social media, that the deficit has not gone down by a quarter, and, as anyone who has been lied to, they feel cheated.
Above all, it is tragic given that the Conservatives have many junior MPs within them that their party currently lacks direction and identity. The economy is a mess, many through Twitter knows the NHS is being auctioned-off to the highest corporate bidder, and disabled citizens are hopeful that they will see their benefits re-awarded on appeal. The fact that people would rather vote UKIP than Conservatives means that the Liberal Democrats votes could stay solid, particularly if Tory-LibDem marginal seat voters don’t blame them for having been forced into a corner on policy decisions. And yet, if the Liberal Democrats win similar seats in the 2015 general election, the Conservatives could be deprived of a working majority.
Contrary to what the BBC would have you believe, the Conservatives failed to win a majority last time. And support for LibDems in traditional LibDem areas is strong, because local activism of LibDem councillors and MPs is impressive. However, Labour find themselves in dangerous territory. They cannot afford to ‘take it easy’, thinking that their economic reputation will be restored if the economy screws up. There is a remote chance that, despite a prolonged experience of austerity-lite, the economy will slowly begin to recover. The truth, whether Labour likes it or not, is that the general public does not trust them with economic prowess; some people even still blame Ed Balls for making somewhat anti-immigration noises at the last election. So why doesn’t Labour campaign on a much stronger card of the NHS? There has become an increasing perception that Labour does not need to shore up their reputation in this regard, as they are ‘the party of the NHS’. This may be hard to sustain as their policy of NHS Foundation Trusts, and insidious marketisation of the NHS with a growing number of Trusts and departments going into an insolvency regime, is shredded to pieces. As a party supposedly representing social justice issues, Sadiq Khan MP, the Shadow Lord Chancellor, has all but resigned himself to the sweeping cuts in legal aid enshrined in the Legal Aid and Sentencing and Punishing of Offenders Act (2012), and parliament has generally been useless due to the arithmetic compared to moves afoot elsewhere, for example Lord Willy Bach’s “fatal motion”. The official Opposition part of HM Parliament seems powerless to stop unelected legislation at the moment, as another “fatal motion”, this time in the Lords from fellow Labour peer Lord Hunt, is one of the only mechanisms possible to stop the new statutory instrument on NHS procurement (SI 2012/057).
As outgoing Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, previously declared, this parliament was a ‘poisoned challice’. In a way, it is quite good for Labour that they have been given a few years to regroup their forces, and have had the Conservatives do some of their ‘dirty work’, in coping with a moribund economy, inflicting legal aid cuts, and accelerating the marketisation of the NHS. However, Labour has now a fighting chance of producing the arithmetic for a working majority in June 2015, but there is as yet no sense that Ed Miliband will be elected on a landslide. However, one very good thing to have emerged from Eastleigh is that the Conservatives seem to have retained their rather infamous ‘self-destruct’ characteristic, and all that needs to happen, for Labour to succeed in June 2015, is for the Conservatives to lose.
Eastleigh reminds us that all the Conservatives need to do is lose
Eastleigh was a remarkable by-election. It reminded us that, for Labour to win the General Election, all the Conservatives need to do is lose.
It cannot be considered fatal to ‘One Nation’ that Ed Miliband failed to win a seat which was 285th on his list of targets. What is remarkable is that the voters of Eastleigh did not give a “bloody nose” to the sitting incumbents, who include the Liberal Democrats. Despite a maelstrom of accusations and counter-accusations regarding Chris Huhne and Chris Rennard, local voters, albeit in fewer numbers, decided to give their vote to the Liberal Democrats. Even more strikingly, they did not “blame” the Liberal Democrats for policy failures for their senior partners. The Conservatives failed to win this seat, not simply because they failed to produce an ‘attractive offer’ to the British electorate, but also some voters are beginning to blame them for noteworthy policy mistakes. There is a huge repertoire of policy mistakes to choose from, but it is remarkable that former Conservatives who have voted for UKIP appear to have done so for two particular reasons. Firstly, they don’t give a damn about David Cameron’s “caste iron” guarantees about Europe. Secondly, they do BLAME George Osborne for snatching a triple-dip recession from the jaws of a fragile recovery bequeathed to them in May 2010.
“If at first you don’t succeed, blame Labour” has become an all-too familiar mantra, but people are increasingly unconvinced by the mouthpieces who have told them this. The BBC, plagued by an obsession over horsemeat and Jimmy Savile, have failed to report the massive outsourcing and privatisation implications of recent legislation over the NHS. Many in the public are sick-to-death of the tribal partisan line on the economy, which refuses to concede that there was an emergency bailout by the previous administration of the banking sector which led the deficit to explode. They are cognisant, through the social media, that the deficit has not gone down by a quarter, and, as anyone who has been lied to, they feel cheated.
Above all, it is tragic given that the Conservatives have many junior MPs within them that their party currently lacks direction and identity. The economy is a mess, many through Twitter knows the NHS is being auctioned-off to the highest corporate bidder, and disabled citizens are hopeful that they will see their benefits re-awarded on appeal. The fact that people would rather vote UKIP than Conservatives means that the Liberal Democrats votes could stay solid, particularly if Tory-LibDem marginal seat voters don’t blame them for having been forced into a corner on policy decisions. And yet, if the Liberal Democrats win similar seats in the 2015 general election, the Conservatives could be deprived of a working majority.
Contrary to what the BBC would have you believe, the Conservatives failed to win a majority last time. And support for LibDems in traditional LibDem areas is strong, because local activism of LibDem councillors and MPs is impressive. However, Labour find themselves in dangerous territory. They cannot afford to ‘take it easy’, thinking that their economic reputation will be restored if the economy screws up. There is a remote chance that, despite a prolonged experience of austerity-lite, the economy will slowly begin to recover. The truth, whether Labour likes it or not, is that the general public does not trust them with economic prowess; some people even still blame Ed Balls for making somewhat anti-immigration noises at the last election. So why doesn’t Labour campaign on a much stronger card of the NHS? There has become an increasing perception that Labour does not need to shore up their reputation in this regard, as they are ‘the party of the NHS’. This may be hard to sustain as their policy of NHS Foundation Trusts, and insidious marketisation of the NHS with a growing number of Trusts and departments going into an insolvency regime, is shredded to pieces. As a party supposedly representing social justice issues, Sadiq Khan MP, the Shadow Lord Chancellor, has all but resigned himself to the sweeping cuts in legal aid enshrined in the Legal Aid and Sentencing and Punishing of Offenders Act (2012), and parliament has generally been useless due to the arithmetic compared to moves afoot elsewhere, for example Lord Willy Bach’s “fatal motion”. The official Opposition part of HM Parliament seems powerless to stop unelected legislation at the moment, as another “fatal motion”, this time in the Lords from fellow Labour peer Lord Hunt, is one of the only mechanisms possible to stop the new statutory instrument on NHS procurement (SI 2012/057).
As outgoing Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, previously declared, this parliament was a ‘poisoned challice’. In a way, it is quite good for Labour that they have been given a few years to regroup their forces, and have had the Conservatives do some of their ‘dirty work’, in coping with a moribund economy, inflicting legal aid cuts, and accelerating the marketisation of the NHS. However, Labour has now a fighting chance of producing the arithmetic for a working majority in June 2015, but there is as yet no sense that Ed Miliband will be elected on a landslide. However, one very good thing to have emerged from Eastleigh is that the Conservatives seem to have retained their rather infamous ‘self-destruct’ characteristic, and all that needs to happen, for Labour to succeed in June 2015, is for the Conservatives to lose.
The LibDems' USP is, apparently, "a fair society and a strong economy". Their party name is a misnomer, but the USP is clearly fraudulent.
If you tell a big one, tell a big one!
One lie leads to another!
Choose your adage, and run with it. At two separate points, I thought of these sayings this weekend. The first time was when Nick Clegg was interviewed by Sophie Raworth about various issues, including the economy. Clegg wasted no time in criticising the previous Labour administration in the running of the economy. The second time was when I finally read the article in the Independent about David Laws writing the next Liberal Democrat manifesto of 2015.
David Laws and Nick Clegg believe that the the unique selling proposition (USP) of the Liberal Democrats is “a fair society and a strong economy”.
Let us take first the economy because of the famous saying, “It’s the economy stupid”. It is a fact that if you look at the actual figures Labour spending prior to the economy was in fact comparable to Ken Clarke and Norman Lamont. George Osborne went on record to say that he would match at least the spending plans of Labour, and possibly exceed them, in the last government. There was a £1tn bailout in the UK economy which all experts concede was due to the emergency measure of recapitalising the bank.
The argument for doing this massive bailout was to stop the banking system imploding. The argument runs something like follows: all banks are heavily in debt (leveraged), and therefore when one bank can’t repay its debts, the bank to which it owes its debts can’t then repay its debts, and so you then have a domino effect. Northern Rock and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a failure of the international securitised mortgages, saw the beginning of this dangerous situation. George Osborne puts a lot of store on credit ratings, ignoring the fact that Lehman Brothers had the top rating the second before it went bust.
Also, the Liberal Democrats’ economic policy has shared ownership with the Conservatives’ economic policy. They state clearly that their raison d’être of being in a Coalition is to reduce the deficit, even though the deficit has been going up due to falling tax receipts and increased levels of welfare payments. This policy, which has been criticised now by Ed Balls and the Labour Party, the head of Goldman Sachs, Prof. Stiglitz and Blanchflower, Lord Skidelsky and the trade unions, amongst others, has spectacularly failed, and the Liberal Democrats should be reminded at all opportunities about the mess they created following May 2010. They had inherited economy which was in a fragile recovery, squandered it, and for them to claim they aspire for a ‘strong economy’ is a disgusting laughable claim.
For the Liberal Democrats to have an ounce of credibility in the “damage that Labour did to the economy” argument, they must answer that one. True libertarians, it is argued, might have followed an argument akin to “creative destruction”, and allowed the banks to fail as per Iceland, a country which George Osborne praised before the Iceland economy went bust. It is argued by true libertarians that the best way to ‘cure’ the system overall is to allow the failing banks to fail, otherwise you unnecessarily give the wrong people money, and you’re in effect rewarding failure.
The Liberal Democrats are entirely silent on this matter.
The second part of the USP is no less fraudulent. The enactment of the Legal Aid and Sentencing of Offenders Act has seen law centres going out of business on the high street. Such law firms are essential for basic access-to-justice across a range of social welfare issues, not least disability and other welfare benefits, unfair dismissals and other employment disputes, immigration and housing matters, for example. In another Act, which only obtained Royal Assent because of the Liberal Democrats, the massive increase in the rôle of the private sector in running outsourced services for the NHS has become law, already leading to the marketisation and fragmentation of services offered by the NHS. This is a massive attack on the notion that the NHS is comprehensive, and even has threatened some services being “free-at-the-point-of-use”.
Disabled citizens do not feel that the LibDems have created a “fair society”. The Welfare Reform Act was steamroller-ed through Parliament and the House of Lords by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The appeals over people deemed ‘fit-to-work’ continue, as do the stories of inappropriate decisions, successful appeals, and, tragically, suicides.
The LibDems’ USP is, apparently, “a fair society and a strong economy”. Their party name is a misnomer, but the USP is clearly fraudulent. It is sick, disgusting, and needs to be scrutinised carefully in the next election campaign.
Cameron won't get as far as holding a referendum in 2017, as he'll have been shown the door long before then.
The reply “The Tories just feel like crap managers” was in response to my recent question, “Do you think people are excited about politics?” Suzanne Moore instead suggested, “Yes but not the political system or way it is represented.” Olivia simply replied, “If people were excited about politics wouldn’t more people vote? The fact that so few actually bother to vote, suggests that people are far from excited about politics.”
Unusually, somebody in her 60s last week told me that she and her husband were determined to vote in the General Election anticipated around June 2015. Vicky and John are not impressed by the current incumbents but feel passionately that any party is better than ‘this lot’. Returning to the answer, “The Tories are just crap managers”, there is an overwhelming feeling amongst my friends in real life, my 3000 friends on Facebook and 7000 followers on Twitter amongst both my accounts that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are playing for time. They offer no leadership, and are sub-standard managers.
They have bungled the forests issue, raised tuition fees, scrapped Building Schools for the Future, scrapped education support allowance, killed a growing economy from 2010, told Europe that they only wish to be in Europe on their own terms, unilaterally decided to scrap GCSEs, outsourced the NHS on the way to privatising it, produced a shambolic budget last year with numerous U-turns, and shut libraries.
The £3bn re-organisation of the NHS, which nobody voted for, was probably the pièce de resistance. The Conservatives have done a disgraceful job of explaining what these reforms mean, and the BBC have made no effort in explaining what is clearly a very significant issue of public interest. The public are none-the-wiser that NHS services have been completely thrown open to the private sector, such that you can walk into a walk-in centre with it having NHS branding but being run to maximise shareholder dividend for a private company. The medical Royal Colleges all opposed it, as did the BMA and the Royal College of Nursing. The marketisation of the NHS means that the service cannot be guaranteed to be anywhere near comprehensive, and already evidence is accruing of definite examples of rationing (e.g. in cataract surgery).
A similar disenfranchisement of key professionals was seen in the high street with the Government, the Conservatives enabled by the Liberal Democrats, ramraiding through the ‘Legal Aid and Sentencing of Offenders Act’ which has seen destruction of legal aid on the high street, killing off access-to-justice for social justice fields such as housing, immigration and asylum, welfare benefits and employment. The marketisation of law on the high-street means that the public are left with an incomplete fragmented service, and again these ‘reforms’ were officially opposed by the Law Society and the Bar Council.
A third disgrace has been the “reform” of GCSEs. Michael Gove barged through processes which meant that even examining in last year’s GCSE English ended up being a shambles, and had to go for judicial review in the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court. The teachers, notably the National Union of Teachers, were not consulted about the changes to the GCSE system, a completely ludicrous state of affairs that there are GCSE courses presently in progress.
The “political process” is the third arm of the long-awaited policy review of the UK Labour Party. Whilst millions will have been spent cumulatively on the Scotland referendum, and the AV referendum, and on the introduction of Police Commissioners, there is no doubt that the political process is broken. David Cameron’s talk of holding a referendum in 2017 shows complete contempt that he has disconnected him and his party from major areas of society. The list goes on – disabled citizens are sick of the welfare reforms in progress, with the disastrous introduction of the ‘Personal Independent Payment’ following fast after the pitiful administration of Work Capacity Benefits by the Department of Work and Pensions.
Cameron won’t get as far as holding a referendum in 2017, as he’ll have been shown the door long before then.
The effect of government mistruths on voter trust
It is tweeted anyway, and especially every time the gold price hits a new high, that Gordon Brown lost the taxpayer billions by selling the national reserves of gold in 1999-2002. However, the corollary of this argument may be that George Osborne should have bought the gold back in May 2010 – it need not have cost him anything because he could merely have speculated in the gold futures market. PFI is another classic example. While originally ‘invented’ by John Major, the adoption of the accounting used in PFI accelerated under Labour. Indeed in April 2011, it was reported that George Osborne has pressed ahead with PFI projects on a multibillion-pound scale despite having dismissed the infrastructure funding mechanism as “discredited” when he was in opposition. A report on Channel 4 News at the time showed 61 PFI projects, worth a total of £6.9bn, have been taken forward since the general election. This is despite claims that private sector borrowing costs currently make PFI particularly poor value for money. Of course, all political parties tend to put a positive spin on their own particular messages, as Alastair Campbell and Craig Oliver well known, but when the situation becomes that the public cannot trust the media so much, that is when democracy becomes dangerous.
The question of how Labour, and indeed all political parties, have lost support has been progressing gradually over the ways, at probably much at the same rate as the decline in official circulation of print newspapers. People are possibly, however, engaging with “real issues” in private on the social media instead. It cannot be argued, although many people do, that part of the ‘disconnect’ between Government and its electorate has resulted from the Government enacting whatever it wants without an electoral mandate; this is the public perception, for example, of the abolition of PCTs or the enactment of the Health and Social Act (2012) in general. When I attended the fringe meetings at the Labour’s annual conference held in Manchester las year, a statistic kept re-occurring, that during the party’s 13 years in power it lost five million votes. In the Blair landslide of 1997, 13.5m people voted Labour. By 2010 the figure was down to 8.6m.
Over the Christmas period, Lib Dems were urged to spread the message that their Conservative coalition partners “can’t be trusted” to look after normal people rather than the super-rich. A leaked script of the party’s lines to take in the media apparently urged MPs, candidates and councillors to say that only the Lib Dems are committed to building “a fair society”.
The massaging of the truth, rather than genuine and truthful message, is entirely relevant to how Labour can reconnect with some of the potential electorate. Peter Kellner’s analysis provides some helpful information regarding how Labour and Liberal Democrat support have changed recently
“These numbers suggest that many defectors, though not a majority, opted for a left-of-centre alternative to Labour. However, Labour has already won most of these back. This autumn, the number of people who backed Labour 15 years ago but would vote Lib Dem today has slumped from two million to just 300,000. The vast majority who defected to the Liberal Democrats in 2010 have returned to Labour. The party now needs to hold onto them, but the initial reconversion has already taken place. Nevertheless, the total number of remaining defectors stands at three million. That’s still a large group; indeed, it’s ten per cent of the 30m people who are likely to vote at the next election. If Labour can win even half of them back, it will give the party a cushion against any revival of fortunes for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
Conservatives latterly have been demanding how the opposition must be “much stronger”, even while it is claimed that they have lost a nearly quarter of their voter base in the last year. The media have elected in general not to cover important issues such as the NHS reforms, or the legal aid reforms affecting the closure of law centres on the high street (while covering in vast detail Abu Qataba). There have been a number of noteworthy examples, however, of where untruths have been spoken, either innocently, fraudulently or negligently. It could be that the impact of each of them is pretty negligible, but when taken as a whole may confirm the general perception of this government being a permanent omnishambles (elegantly referred to, by Isabel Oakeshott, once as “permishambles”). It cannot be good for democracy, whatever the effect at the ballot box, that such massive “whoppers” have been spoken. They might reflect a lack of care by the people producing these alleged false statements, but could equally reflect a complacency that they would be unnoticed by other parts of the media which have become increasingly critical, perhaps in reaction.
You decide.
Revealed: how Osborne manipulated the borrowing figures
(George Eaton, New Statesman, 5 December 2012)
Against expectations, George Osborne announced in his Autumn Statementthat borrowing would fall, not rise, this year. The news cheered the Conservative backbenches and clearly surprised Ed Balls, who was jeered by Osborne and David Cameron as he mistakenly said the deficit was “not rising” (he meant to say it was rising). Borrowing so far this year is £5bn (7.4 per cent) higher than in the same period last year – it seemed there was no escape route for the Chancellor.
So how did he do it? Well, turn to p. 12 of the Office for Budget Responsibility document and it becomes clear that Osborne has performed an accounting trick worthy of Enron. First, he added the expected £3.5bn receipts from the 4G mobile spectrum auction – even though it’s yet to take place. Second, he included the interest transferred to the Treasury from the Bank of England’s Quantitative Easing programme (worth £11.5bn), despite the Institute for Fiscal Studies warning him that it would call into doubt his credibility. Were it not for these two measures, borrowing would be £15bn higher than stated by Osborne. If we add that £15bn to the £108bn figure provided by Osborne, then total forecast borrowing for this year becomes £123bn, £1.4bn higher than last year. Little wonder that the Chancellor was so keen to bag the 4G receipts early.
But while these fiscal somersaults might allow Osborne to claim he’s reduced borrowing, what reputation he had for statistical transparency has been destroyed. In his speech to the Commons, the Chancellor boasted that “it is a measure of the constitutional achievement that it is taken for granted that our country’s forecast is now produced independently of the Treasury”. That claims looks very questionable today.
David Cameron ordered stop saying NHS spending is up
(Daily Telegraph, 4 December 2012)
Mr Hunt, the Health Secretary, should “clarify” claims that expenditure on the NHS had risen in “real terms” every year under the Coalition, the UK Statistics Authority said. The chairman of the authority, Andrew Dilnot, issued the rebuke after upholding a complaint by Labour about statements by the Prime Minister and other senior Tories. Labour demanded that Mr Cameron correct his “misleading boasts” about protecting NHS resources. Mr Dilnot’s letter will be a blow to Mr Cameron, who repeatedly promised to protect the NHS in the run up to the last general election and in numerous public statements since. The health service is seen as one of the Conservatives’ most vulnerable policies after sweeping reforms to the structure of the NHS met with widespread opposition from medical professionals. The reforms eventually became law earlier this year, but only after a bruising fight that forced an unprecedented “pause” in the progress of the Bill through Parliament.
Finally! Exposed! The deficit myth! So, David Cameron when are you going to apologise?
(Ramesh Patel, Huffington Post, 24 October 2012)
The last government left the biggest debt in the developed world. After continuously stating the UK had the biggest debt in the world George Osborne admits to the Treasury Select Committee that he did not know the UK had the lowest debt in the G7? Watch Also, confirmed by the OECD Those who use cash terms (instead of percentages) do so to scare, mislead and give half the story. It’s common sense, in cash terms a millionaire’s debt would be greater than most people. Therefore, the UK would have a higher debt and deficit than most countries because, we are the sixth largest economy. Hence, its laughable to compare UK’s debt and deficit with Tuvalu’s who only have a GDP/Income of £24 million whilst, the UK’s income is £1.7 Trillion. Finally, Labour in 1997 inherited a debt of 42% of GDP. By the start of the global banking crises 2008 the debt had fallen to 35% – a near 22% reduction page 6 ONS Surprisingly, a debt of 42% was not seen as a major problem and yet at 35% the sky was falling down?
Osborne’s claim that the deficit is down by a quarter is just plain wrong.
(Richard Murphy, Tax Research UK, 8 October 2012)
“The deficit is down by a quarter.” This is not true. No, that’s being too kind to George. That’s a lie. [We have the data] based on budgets from 1998 to 2012 on the current surplus and deficit on spending on and total borrowing (which includes the cost of investment) for the last 15 years, plus projections to 2017. The figures to 2011-12 are pretty reliable: after that they’re made up. We now know that 2012-13 is now going to be at least as bad as 2011-12: currently borrowing is higher. The deficit reached £156 billion in 2009-10. But that was because Labour spent to make sure that the worst impacts of the crash were beaten off by Keynesian policies that ensured that the economy was growing when they left office. The deficit for 2011-12 was £126 billion, subject to revision either way by a billion or so. This year it will be worse. That’s a 19% improvement on 2009-10. But it’s been done at a cost in terms of investment,
Factcheck: Is Britain a tax credit haven?
(The FactCheck Blog, 31 December 2012)
Iain Duncan Smith has had a long hard go at Labour for their welfare spending. Not for the first time, he says hard working taxpayers are paying for the big-spending ways of the last government. This time, he’s got the tax credits system in his sights. The current – though not for much longer – system was introduced by Labour as a way of bringing down child poverty. Instead, the work and pensions secretary wrote in the Daily Telegraph today: “It tells a sorry story of dependency, wasted taxpayers’ money and fraud.”
The claim
“Tax credit payments rose by some 58 per cent ahead of the 2005 general election, and in the two years prior to the 2010 election, spending increased by about 20 per cent.”
The verdict
We asked the Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which administers work and child tax credits, how much has been paid out since the current system started under Labour in 2003 (before that it was the Working Families Tax Credit). It said that in 2003-04, £16.4bn was paid, and the following year – the one that included the general election to which Mr Duncan Smith refers – £17.7bn. That’s an increase of 8 per cent, not 58.
Labour must indicate what its 'red line' issues are before 2015
Like it or not, there is now a sense that ‘anything goes’ in general elections. It could be that the arithmetic returns a Coalition government, where the Conservatives can only be in government with support of UKIP, or Labour can only govern with the support of the Liberal Democrats. Of course, the most preferred option for Labour members would be for a Labour government to be returned with a landslide.
The current coalition is what can only be described as a ‘miserable compromise’. As a result of the Conservatives continuing to be in denial that the explosion in the deficit had been caused by injecting money into the banks as an emergency measure in the global financial crisis, Labour still have difficult in making the case for safe management of the ‘nation’s finances’. This is of course extremely frustrating for Labour, since the facts are that Labour ran a deficit comparable to the tenure of Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke otherwise, and George Osborne, assisted by the Liberal Democrats, has managed to reverse a fragile economy into a double-dip, and now possibly a triple-dip recession, only saved by some creative accounting over the Olympics and the 4G receipts, as revealed by George Eaton.
In civil litigation, all parties are supposed to adopt a “cards on the table approach”, and given what has happened in the past, all parties should make clear, I feel, what are “red line issues” for them; in other words, what is unnegotiable. Labour might definitely wish to repeal the NHS act and to reverse Part 6 of the Act, UKIP might wish to withdraw from Europe, and the Liberal Democrats might wish to [insert a reasonable choice here]. The combined total of Conservative and UKIP polling figures suggests an alliance would significantly narrow the difference of popularity between the two parties. David Cameron has, in fact, promised the Conservatives will fight the 2015 general election as an anti-Europe party in a bid to see off the threat of UKIP. The Prime Minister delighted Conservative MPs last night when he pledged he will fight for his first overall majority from a ‘clear Eurosceptic position’. However, the chance of UKIP gaining a significant number of seats is still small. They are also dependent upon the continuation of the Eurozone crisis in order to maintain their popularity.
However, we can only really draw conclusions from by-elections, albeit they may fall under the ‘mid-term protest vote’ umbrella. According to Andrew Sparrow’s “live blog”, Nigel Farage is quoted as saying the following:
“It’s a big advance. It’s our best every byelection result. I said at Corby two weeks ago that Rotherham would move us on further. We’ve got a good, active local branch here. We fight local elections here. We are well known. The fostering row didn’t hurt our vote. But I rather agree [that] whilst people were very upset and outraged by it, not that many people changed their vote purely on that issue.”
No prime minister has improved his party’s vote share since October 1974, which is a bit of a special case anyway. The election of February 1974 had produced a hung parliament. Harold Wilson went back to the country soon afterwards to ask for a stronger mandate, repeating a tactic he had pulled off in the 1960s. The Liberal Democrats’ decision to frustrate boundary changes which Conservative high command regarded as vital to their chances of victory at the next election still is troublesome. Indeed, not all Conservatives have given up hope of getting the boundary changes through the Commons. Senior Tories have vowed to press on with changes to constituency boundaries, saddling taxpayers with a bill for £12 million, even though the Liberal Democrats have vowed to stop them going ahead. However, the Liberal Democrats have reason to wish their heels in. Tom Clark, also in the Guardian, provided a comprehensive overview of why the AV referendum was lost, with this as the no. 1 reason:
“1. If the lack of a hate figure was the gaping hole for the yes side, Nick Clegg provided an unbeatable one for the noes. The man himself recognised that voters wanted to poke him in the eye, and he dutifully kept a fairly low profile in the campaign that was by far the most visible single concession that he obtained from the Conservatives. Shrewd as it was for him to go to ground, it could not prevent the noes from warning that “President Clegg” would be kept forever in power by everybody’s second preferences. He had a horrendous hand to play last year, but he made things worse for himself by appearing to the country as a head boy thrilled at being unexpectedly tasked with helping to run the school. When the headteacher and his staff meted out their long-planned litany of horrors, it was not they but Clegg who felt the force of the pupils’ revolt. Having once dismissed Gordon Brown’s pre-election promise of an AV referendum as doomed by association with him, there is a bitter irony here. It is not association with Brown but association with Clegg that has now sunk the electoral reform he was so desperate to achieve.”
Richard Reeves, the Lib Dem leader’s senior strategist and speechwriter, has now left. Reeves, the ultimate in tong-term strategists, had personally worked out the three-step programme to see the leader through to 2015. First, the Liberal Democrats would share the spoils of a recovering economy, “after the mess that Labour had left”. Then they would move into the “differentiation” phase. Finally, they would set out their own agenda prior to a smooth disconnect at the election. The first phase is perceived to have gone well by loyal Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg, though Labour members still think that much legislation from the Conservatives has only been enabled through Liberal Democrat votes on the NHS, education support allowance, legal aid reforms, to name but a few. Few people in Labour have sympathy with Sarah Teather, who was sacked as minister for families in September, appears to have found some reservations.
“But she also makes no bones about the fact that, for her, the cuts and caps already agreed by the coalition are unacceptable and wrong. Brent, she points out, is an area with high rents where many people are already living in appallingly crowded conditions. She is in favour of that part of government policy which encourages people off benefits into work but not when it seeks to erode sympathy and support for the poor. “Having an incentive in the benefits system to encourage people to work is a good thing,” she says. “It is a good thing because it encourages people to participate in society. But having a system which is so punitive in its regime that it effectively takes people entirely outside society, so they have no chance of participating, crosses a moral line for me.””
However, such late confessions may not be sufficient for her seat to be saved ultimately. As regards “the economy stupid”, the Bank of England now thinks it is likely the UK economy will contract in the fourth quarter of 2012, with governor Sir Mervyn King predicting a “zig-zag” road to recovery thereafter. It recently downgraded its forecast for gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013 to around 1 per cent, while the UK government’s tax and spending watchdog is not much more optimistic, at 1.2 per cent.
So, quite unbelievably, Ed Miliband and Labour might be able to win the 2015 general election in some form or other, and as per usual the policy review is still under way. However, Labour could reap much political capital by saying what it definitely will not do, given that most of the most damaging actions of this Government were not set out in front of the electorate prior to May 2010 (the £2bn NHS restructuring for example). The danger is that, if Labour actually does win a landslide in 2015, it will not use this as an opportunity to reshape a definition of the UK, away from misguided marketisation of “New Labour”, but towards a society where citizens can aspire to be fully employed in salaried work and where the genuinely vulnerable are not troubled by securities over the health and social care for example. Nick Clegg’s pathological hatred for Gordon Brown and Labour may be ‘water-under-the-bridge’ if Labour does need to work with the Liberal Democrats, but it could be that Ed Miliband states that one red line he does not wish to cross is to work with Nick Clegg.
Nick Clegg's promise to be in the Top 40 was a promise too far
I’d like to take this opportunity to set a few things straight. Nick Clegg’s promise to be in the Top 40 was a promise too far. In fact, he didn’t enter the Top 40 at all as exclusively revealed on National Radio 1 yesterday, according to the Official Charts Company. Congratulations, however, to ‘Professor Green’ with ‘Avalon’ at number 38. Professor Green made his feelings known about ‘the Nick Clegg apology’ perfectly clear last night. 15 hours ago (as of the date and time of this post), Professor Green had received 1,933 re-tweets for this comment:
I am further disappointed and angry that Nick Clegg could not keep all his promises, such as to enhance the powers of PCTs in the NHS (in the Coalition Agreement). The PCTs have now been abolished. I am sorry, am sorry, so so sorry, but you are insincere, duplicitous, untrustworthy and a complete liar.
And please add to that ‘hypocrite’. It is easy to underestimate the significance of many students being conned into voting for the Liberal Democrats on the basis of a ‘cast-iron pledge’ not to increase them. Nick Clegg had previously sounded off about ‘broken promises’ in this PPB. Clegg had said categorically, “Now it is time for promises to be kept”, knowing full well that he had made an undeliverable policy.
The fundamental problem is that “Plan A” has failed due to a complex interplay of factors nothing to do with the Eurozone crisis, such as the withdrawal of infrastructure investment which might have kick-started key industries such as the construction industry (“Building Schools of the Future”) and the murder of consumer demand (through the controversial increase in VAT). As a direct consequence of this, Richard Reeves’ plan for the LibDems, Plan A, has been severely derailed. The first half of this parliament was of course to consolidate growth – and this failed as a predictable consequence of the economic incompetence of Coalition policy. The second half of this parliament is supposed to be ‘differentiation’, but there is nothing to distinguish the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in everything from austerity, to NHS privatisation, to scrapping of the education support allowance, to scrapping of libraries, to imploding GDP figures, demolition of high-street legal aid, and a welfare benefit policy providing a substantial tax cut for the rich, for example. This desperate situation is accurately described as one of ‘despair’, by Linda Jack, Chair of the ‘Liberal Left’, as described on BBC Radio 4’s “Westminster Hour” last night. Nick Clegg is not just a ‘figure of fun’ politically. Actually, politically, he is hated, in as much somebody that you have never met can be hated. There is absolutely no sense that the Coalition reaches a consensus on anything. The idea of a permanent coalition in UK politics, specifically, fills people with utter dread. The ‘pupil premium’ is cited as a LibDem triumph, but independent experts unanimously agree it’s been a damp squib. The Conservatives wished the Health and Social Care Act to be passed, giving a free run for the corporatisation of the NHS. They have succeeded. It is likely that all the key personnel of Monitor will from the big corporates. Even Jeremy Hunt’s new assistant is likely to be the Communications Manager of Circle, it is reported. When Nick Clegg offers to tax the wealthy more, because he feels that the current frontloading of the austerity agenda is unfair to those who are disadvantaged in society, he has to concede briefly, as he did on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday morning, that he does not have a cat in hell’s chance of getting this approved by David Cameron and George Osborne. This is a current example of why the idea that ‘coalition politics’ works is simply outrageous and banal, and insults the intelligence of voters.
In the midst of it, Clegg knows he has no choice but to carry on lying. He lies, lies, and thrice lies about the financial stimulus which was required by the last Government to avert a serious depression. Clegg also had no choice on tuition fees, the abolition of large swathes of legal aid including welfare benefits legal aid advice, or the education support allowances. The ‘Building Schools for the Future’ initiative, which would have assisted in the recovery through stimulation of the construction sector, was also killed by LibDem MPs. Clegg’s career is over, and he has done spectacularly in damaging the future of coalition politics forever. Nobody serious on the left can trust the Liberal Democrats to be a force for the public good, as evidenced by the examples above. He has also failed spectacularly on Lords reform, and the alternative vote, which had been deemed as ‘once in a lifetime opportunities’. People will be terrified to vote for the Liberal Democrats, because their function is toxic and poisonous, and actually worthless apart from supporting a weak government. This Conservative administration actually lost the election, and have been given no mandate to bring into law any of their unpopular or undemocratic policies. Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, and most Liberal Democrats feel as if they’re trapped are “in the loveless marriage”, where they are better off staying put in the Coalition for fear of going alone. Jon Lansman (@JonLansman) produced a very clever analysis on the blogpost in “Left Futures” this morning, which offers an interesting solution to the mess which is simply dragging the UK down ‘in the national interest’.
People are not stupid, and certainly not stupid enough for vote for him or his party in 2015. They simply would prefer not to take the risk. When he gets angry, he spits bullets at Gordon Brown and Labour in general, and his manner is repulsive. He has embued a visceral hatred by Labour members for the Liberal Democrat party, which are seen as limp, principle-less, direction-less and ineffective. Nick Clegg has proved himself to be willing to lie to the general public, against the advice of Danny Alexander and other members of his party, to win a few extra seats over a promise which he knew he could not deliver. Nick Clegg is treated with contempt for much good reason, and the demise of his political party is certain. The electorate’s frustration will be at tipping point when they finally have an opportunity to deliver a verdict on his MPs, but Clegg must know the ‘writing is on the wall’. He came from nowhere, so it’s only appropriate that he should return to nowhere. The tragedy is that some Liberal Democrat activists have had the “crisis of insight”. Clegg wishes to portray the situation as him needed not bailing out in a ‘difficult climb up the mountain’, but whilst Clegg, Laws and Swinson remain in this political suicide pact and do not comprehend that there is unlikely to be growth in the economy in the near future due to the death of consumer demand as a direct effect of Coalition economic policy, they do not comprehend that half-way up their mountain claim they have become submerged in a near-fatal avalanche.
Sending rights abroad
John Smith QC made a speech on 1 March 1993 entitled “A Citizen’s Democracy” in which he called for a ‘new constitutional settlement, a new deal between the people and the state that puts the citizen centre stage’. This objective found its way into the Labour Party’s proposals for constitutional reform published in 1993, and reiterated at their Conference in that year where a two-stage process was outlined: the incorporation of the Convention, followed by the setting-up of a Commission to prepare a British Bill of Rights.
In 1994, Lord Lester QC introduced a bill in the Lords which was based on the New Zealand Bill of Rights which would give the ECHR a similar status in UK law as that accorded to European Community law, i.e. allowing courts to disapply future and existing Acts of parliament, which were incompatible with the ECHR, imposing a duty on public authorities to comply with the ECHR and making provision for effective remedies (including damages) for breaches of the ECHR.
Lord Lester QC, of Blackstones Chambers, is recognised by Chambers UK 2012 as a leading silk in Administrative & Public law and Human Rights & Civil Liberties, with commentary that he “remains a much-revered figure of the Bar when it comes to constitutional and human rights-related public law issues.” He“remains one of the first names out of the hat for solicitors who require a practitioner with a wealth of human rights law expertise. His knowledge of the law is such that he took a major role in the promotion of the Equality Bill, which subsequently came into force as the Equality Act 2010.”
Upon the advice of senior members of the judiciary, a second bill was introduced in February 1997 which, unlike the first bill, did not confer the power on the courts to strike down Acts of Parliament. The bill had been introduced shortly after the publication on 18 December 1996 by the shadow Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw of a consultation paper headed “Bringing Rights Home” which put forward the case for incorporation of the ECHR into domestic law. The rationale for introducing the Human Rights Act is clearly set out there:
The United Kingdom is bound in international law to observe the Convention, which it ratified in 1951, and is answerable for any violation. In some limited circumstances, the United Kingdom courts can already take the Convention into account in domestic proceedings. But public authorities in the United Kingdom are not required as a matter of domestic law to comply with the Convention and, generally speaking, there is no means of having the application of the Convention rights tested in the United Kingdom courts. The Government believes that these arrangements are no longer adequate, given the importance which it attaches to the maintenance of basic human rights in this country, and that the time has come to “bring rights home”.
The election of Tony Blair’s Labour Party in May 1997 led to the publication of a white paper on the bill – “Rights Brought Home: The Human Rights Bill”. The Bill received its second reading on 3 November 1997. The Liberal Democrats supported the bill, as did several cross benchers including Lord Bingham. The bill was opposed by the Conservative Party. Historically, the Liberal Democrats had been very supportive of the Human Rights Act; for example, here is Nick Clegg pledging to protect the Act last year.
“So let me say something really clear about the Human Rights Act. In fact I’ll do it in words of one syllable: It is here to stay!” (Nick Clegg)
If the Human Rights Act were abolished, citizens would be able to free to try to take a case to Strasbourg, unless the UK left the European Convention of Human Rights (some say that we would have to leave Europe virtually to achieve this). This argument has been explained at length previously on this blog (in this article). A further complication is added by the changing nature of the Strasbourg Court, as described in a recent article by Noreen O’Meara on the ‘Brighton Declaration’ (on the Human Rights Blog):
A second reform which strays into the territory of affecting the role and function of the Court involves a new mechanism entirely. The proposed ‘advisory opinion’ mechanism (para 19(d)) would allow highest national courts to refer questions to Strasbourg, and allow national courts to apply the opinions provided to the facts of cases. Once the national judge does so, this would (in all but exceptional circumstances) prevent a further application to the Strasbourg court.
Too much is left to chance. This human rights version of the ‘preliminary reference’ model in EU law is couched in language which could harm comity and access to justice. Its current loose drafting should itself be a warning bell to the negotiators. Every proposed element of the procedure is optional (the mechanism is opt-in, highest national courts would have discretion on whether to use it, advisory opinions delivered by Strasbourg would be non-binding; and above all, litigants would “not ordinarily” have recourse to the ECtHR in the same proceedings following a national court’s application of an opinion to the facts. The extent to which this initiative would impact the Strasbourg court’s docket would depend on its approach to delivering advisory opinions—the ECtHR may have considerable latitude here.
While this proposed mechanism may achieve aims of developing a more co-operative dialogue between national judges and the Strasbourg court, its strict approach against applications to Strasbourg where the mechanism is used seems to be a further attempt to relegating the EctHR’s function as the ultimate arbiter in human rights disputes concerning the Convention. Nevertheless, it’s possible that this measure may have more continental appeal and that a more robustly drafted version may prove workable. The ECtHR plans to issue a ‘reflection paper’ on this proposal in the near future.
The bill successfully negotiated the Commons and the Lords as the Human Rights Act [1998], and entered into force on 2 October 2000.
