Bombing Syria and fighting fascists

Hilary Benn’s speech was great.  His call to arms in defence of our values was moving.  I am also an internationalist, and I believe in the international rule of law and our collective responsibility to protect.  But here’s the thing.

Firstly, Tony Blair’s decision to back the neocon war in Iraq dealt a body-blow to the credibility of the United Nations and the entire system of international law, from which it is still reeling (see Crimea); and it was a knock-out blow to the responsibility to protect (see Gaza, Syria, Yemen, etc, etc).  The Labour Party has to take responsibility for this before we can take it seriously as an advocate of military intervention.  Hilary Benn’s speech was moving but it really is hard to suspend scepticism when you think that not all that long ago his party colleagues were giving speeches about the dodgy dossier in that very chamber, sowing the seed from which DAESH would flourish.

Secondly, if Benn is serious about fighting fascists, that comes at a cost.  The International Brigades lost up to 25,000 fighters in their fight against Franco; millions died to defeat Hitler and Mussolini.  Is Benn advocating sending in our troops against DAESH?  Because if this really is a war to defeat fascism, then we have to do what it takes.  Sending in bombers for a sanitised arms-length crack at the blackshirts feels like a politically-acceptable half measure taken mostly for show.

Halloween special: spooky parallels between UK and Canadian politics

REUTERS/Chris Wattie

Photo credit REUTERS/Chris Wattie

Canadian politics have fascinated me ever since I had the good fortune to spend four years in that country as a foreign diplomat. One of reasons I find Canadian politics so interesting is the way in which strange, almost spooky, parallels exist between trends in Canadian politics and trends in UK politics. Correlation is not causation and this is just a bit of fun but let’s take a look, shall we?

Canada UK
80s dominated by long-serving Tory PM Brian Mulroney 80s dominated by long-serving Tory PM Margaret Thatcher
1993: Mulroney, increasingly seen as an impediment to the Tory party’s fortunes, retires, succeeded by Kim Campbell. 1991: Thatcher, increasingly seen as an impediment to the Tory party’s fortunes, is ‘retired’, succeeded by John Major.
1993: Tories are trounced in a landslide win for the Liberals under charismatic Jean Chrétien. 1997: Tories are trounced in a landslide win for New Labour under charismatic leader Tony Blair.
1993-2004: Shattered Canadian right is convulsed by infighting and eventually reconfigures as the Conservative Party of Canada, positioned sharply to the right of the old Progressive Conservatives. 1997-2008: Shattered Conservative party is convulsed by infighting under right wing leaders Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. David Cameron’s Tory Party is sharply to the right of the ‘One Nation’ party Thatcher inherited.
2003: Jean Chrétien hands reins of power to his Finance Minister and bitter party rival Paul Martin who takes over as Prime Minister. 2007: Tony Blair hands reins of power to his Finance Minister and bitter party rival Gordon Brown who takes over as PM.
2006: Voters, sick of Liberals who seem to have become entitled and corrupted in office, hold their nose and elect a Tory minority government which is supported by the Bloc Quebecois. 2010: Electorate, sick of New Labour who seem to have become entitled and corrupted in office, hold their nose and elect a Tory minority who form a coalition government with the Lib Dems.
2011: Surprisingly, the Conservatives win an outright majority in the general election and roll out an even more radical right wing agenda under Stephen Harper. 2015: Surprisingly, the Conservatives win an outright majority in the general election and roll out an even more radical right wing agenda under David Cameron.
2012: in a reaction to dissatisfaction with the Harper government’s radical agenda and with “old style politics” as represented by the Liberals, socialist New Democrats under Tom Mulcair lead in the opinion polls. 2015: in a reaction to dissatisfaction with the Tories’ radical austerity agenda and with the “old style politics” represented by New Labour, socialist Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Party leadership and enjoys a high degree of popular support.
2015: Harper’s government is defeated in the general election which sees the return of a resurgent social democratic Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau. The NDP surge fades to nothing. 2020: …

 

One thing this table doesn’t tackle is the parallelism between Quebec and Scottish separatism/nationalism and how it has influenced national/federal politics. There’s a whole PhD thesis right there…

It will be interesting to see if Corbyn’s Labour Party can do a Trudeau or whether further changes need to take place in the UK political landscape first.

London is broken

(Update, December 2015: this post generated considerable interest and led to an article in the Spectator in which I am referenced. The latest news is that The Glad has achieved status as an Asset of Community Value and the developer’s appeal against this was refused; but, unfortunately, so was the Walworth Society’s application to list the building. However Southwark Council are creating a new ‘Liberty of the Mint’ conservation area which will include The Glad, and this should give the pub further protection from demolition. Thanks to all who continue to show support!)

A few weeks ago, members of my extended family gathered in the Gladstone, a pub on Lant Street in Borough, just south of London Bridge, to celebrate the launch of my cousin Helen’s new book. The choice of venue was deliberate: the book opens with an imagined meeting between my great-grandmother, who lived on Lant Street, and my great-grandfather, a brewer, who we think worked in the brewery opposite the Gladstone and perhaps in the Gladstone itself. The pub was said to have been renamed after the Prime Minister who, family legend has it, regularly tipped my great-great-grandfather a gold sovereign for driving him to Parliament in his hackney cab. Gold sovereign or not, my great-great-grandfather’s business failed and he died in a poorhouse. The family moved out of Lant Street, and our connection to that part of London withered.

The Gladstone, Lant Street

Today, the Gladstone is a successful local watering hole, catering to the young professionals and creatives who populate that part of London now, and regularly staging live music. Each time I’ve been there it has been packed to the rafters. But the landlord is glum, despite his thriving business. Why? Because, like many London pubs, the Gladstone’s future is uncertain. It is owned by a faceless holding company based in the Isle of Man, one imagines for tax reasons, and they have applied to Southwark Council for permission to demolish the pub and replace it with luxury apartments.

Just up the road, London’s most celebrated gay pub, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, stares a similar fate in the face. The RVT, as it’s known, is a hugely popular and historic venue for London’s gay community. But it was recently sold to Austrian property developers who will not guarantee its future.

The Royal Vauxhall Tavern

So the Gladstone and the RVT may join over 3,700 other London pubs which have been lost to the local community in recent years. Each one of these pubs will have meant something special to a local person or a local community, just as the Gladstone and the RVT mean something special to my family and my friends. Not every local pub is a viable business, and some closures are inevitable, but there is something more sinister going on here.

The companies which have bought these pubs have no interest in making them work as a business. They are only interested in their assets. Which, in the case of London pubs, is not their clientele, nor their stock, nor their turnover, nor their brass fittings. It is their physical footprint. London’s frenzied property market is badly broken and out of control. If you’re rich, then it will make you richer. London property is the new Swiss bank account. If you have London property to sell, then you stand to make a mint. And if you have a plot on which you can erect a few luxury apartments, then it’s jackpot rollover time. Why slave away for slim pickings in the pub trade selling low margin beer and food when you can instantly quadruple your money as a property developer? As a capitalist, it’s a no brainer.

Which is why we have planning laws. Politicians have a responsibility to ensure that our neighbourhoods and communities are managed in a way which benefits the community as a whole. They are supposed to protect valuable local services from predators who value them only for the price their stripped carcasses will fetch. Somewhere, those responsible for governing London seem to have lost sight of this. Property is treated as a commodity with little intrinsic value beyond what it will fetch on the open market. Regulations are weakened, or abandoned entirely; the very word regulation is used as an insult. Is it any surprise that some developers think they are above the law?

Carlton-Tavern-a-V_3285536b

The Carlton Tavern in Maida Vale

We have some good local politicians, and local MPs. But the Mayor of London, and central government, have actively encouraged a culture of free market anarchy in London and this is celebrated by greedy groups and individuals who can’t see beyond their own winnings. Meanwhile, local communities are dying. People on average incomes can no longer afford to live in the inner city. Londoners’ quality of life is dropping as they are forced to spend more and more of their wages on accommodation and on transport. Local services, including pubs and shops, are priced out of existence.

The Green Man in Catford

Pubs have a unique place in British, and London, culture. They are a resource for the entire community. They create local jobs. Their value extends far beyond the pounds and pence that developers stand to gain by using their footprint to expand London’s ever-more-insane property bubble. We can fight to save the Gladstone and the RVT, and perhaps we will win. But it’s already too late for thousands of other London pubs, and individual victories alone will not win back a London that’s fit for Londoners.

Remember this when it comes to our chance to elect a successor to Boris Johnson on 5 May next year. And in the meantime stay vigilant and watch your local authorities. They have a legal obligation to consult the public and respect neighbourhood plans when considering planning applications.

Lobby Southwark Council to save the Gladstone here. Join the campaign to save the RVT here.

Treat 7 May as EU referendum day

The general election on 7 May 2015 will quite possibly be the most important election during my lifetime (so far – nearly half a century, folks). If you thought 1997 was a biggie (and for my generation it certainly was), this one has even more at stake. For the first time in quite a long time, we have a genuine choice between two diametrically opposed ideological visions: on the one hand, the incumbent Prime Minister offers us an even smaller state with radically reduced public services putting us on a par with Europe’s outliers; on the other hand, a return towards the European mainstream (I’d like to be more emphatic than that but that would be overstating it).

This is already quite enough to make this an election worth fighting for. But there is an even bigger issue at stake, one which would determine the UK’s entire future. And one on which there has been an alarming degree of silence during this election campaign. David Cameron is offering an in-out referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. The referendum would be held in 2017 after an attempt by the government to persuade the EU to “reform”. If satisfactory reforms are not forthcoming, the implication is that the government would not campaign to stay in. Even if it were to campaign for an in vote, who can say that the public will not treat the referendum as a chance to protest against an austerity government heading for its mid-term trough?

Abandoning its EU membership (‘Brexit’) would be catastrophic for Britain. I hold this to be self-evident, and if you disagree then you might as well stop reading now because anything I say from this point forward is not addressed to you. For a mercantile nation with a history of internationalism and pretensions to global influence, Brexit would be crazy. But it could happen. Cameron will not get the “reforms” he wants. (I use quotation marks because “reform” in this context is a transparent euphemism for the repatriation of powers. God knows the EU could do with genuine reform, but that is not on the agenda, certainly not in the context of a UK-driven treaty renegotiation.) He has painted himself, and the country, into a corner. If he wins, there WILL be a referendum in 2017; and there is every chance that the country will vote to leave an unreformed EU. Decades of toxic disinformation and woeful public education have queered the EU’s pitch, and the organisation has not helped itself.

All this is to say that it is essential for the future of the country that Cameron does not remain Prime Minister after 7 May. The duty of any patriotic voter is to do whatever he or she can to avert that possibility. Treat 7 May as EU referendum day. Cast your vote in whichever way is most likely to oust Cameron from office. Do it for yourselves, for your children, your neighbours, your pet, your Queen and country.

Freedom of expression means freedom to disapprove

The Charlie Hebdo massacre is deeply depressing for so many reasons. The dead, of course. The attack on our society’s values. But in this post I want to drill down a little and look at how this attack, and the reactions to it, affect our freedom of expression in more ways than the obvious.

This atrocity will change the way people take decisions about publishing offensive material. Some will say “publish and be damned, I stand up for freedom of expression and against intimidation.” Others will say (perhaps silently, to themselves) “no cartoon is worth risking my life for, I will take the safe option and self-censor.” This reduces the issue to a simplistic one of freedom of expression and intimidation. It is, of course, more complicated than that.

#JeSuisCharlie is the hashtag, showing solidarity with the murdered satirists. I share the sentiment. But I am not very comfortable with Charlie Hebdo’s editorial policy, what little I know about it, and the murder of its editorial staff doesn’t change that. I am not Charlie. Looking at the content of their cartoons, I see a Dawkins-like pleasure in ridiculing religion. Sometimes their work seemed to border on trolling.

Collectif-Charlie-Hebdo-N-498-Du-28-05-1980-Revue-450343330_ML

There are always going to be extremists who, by definition, are outriders in any religious group. They will always be looking for reasons to take offence, and be tempted to act against their offenders. Of course we should not allow them to intimidate us, but we need to have a serious and adult discussion about how to deal with the threat of these extremists. Personally, I don’t think that the answer is confrontation. This validates them and serves their purpose. I think a better strategy is to engage with them or, failing that, to ignore them. This is a discussion we should be having.  But yesterday’s events now frame the debate in a way which means that reservations about the confrontational approach adopted by Charlie Hebdo are seen as giving in to terrorism.

And that’s the problem. The extremists want us all to share their black and white view of the world. They don’t like nuance. They don’t like rational debate, compromise, consensus. They love confrontation and intolerance, it defines them and gives them their sense of purpose.

Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons offended many people, not just the gunmen. Fair enough, our free society means that we are all going to have to find ways to cope with being offended, tolerance means not taking an assault rifle to avenge every perceived slight. But freedom of expression also means that those who do take offence should be allowed to say so. Many will be much less willing to speak out after yesterday’s events.

There are clear parallels with the recent fuss over “The Interview”, Sony’s comedy film about assassinating Kim Jong Un. There, too, I found myself torn between outrage at another’s attempt to censor what I could see and irritation at a clumsy and offensive attempt at comedy which did more harm than good.  Humour is a powerful tool and requires careful handling. Done right, it can pull the rug out from under the feet of humourless bigots; done wrong, it can actually help them further their illiberal agenda.


A few minutes ago, many of my colleagues went outside to stand in the rain and observe a minute’s silence as a mark of respect for those who died yesterday. I remember doing the same thing after 9/11. Then, solidarity gave way to despair as the extremists’ agenda was eagerly adopted by people in powerful positions who took it as an opportunity to roll back our own society’s liberal values. Wouldn’t it be nice if, this time, we didn’t hand the terrorists their victory?

_80122506_5b9ffe3e-8610-4ff8-9e76-750b3168d2ed

Edit – perhaps I need a TLDR version: I think Charlie Hebdo were wrong to publish offensive cartoons (and Sony was wrong to green-light The Interview); but of course their right to publish must be defended.  We have to distinguish carefully between defending the right to offend, and defending the offence itself.  In the event – predictably – the offence has fed the cycle of misunderstanding and set back the cause of tolerance.  The only winners are those whose objective is to spread misunderstanding and intolerance.

Architecture and islamophobia

The UK far right’s indignation at the imagined encroachment of Islam into British life has given us some great comedy moments, including this week’s snafu by UKIP berating the BBC’s liberal bias for staging a vox pop in front of a mosque in central London, better known as the gorgeous Westminster Cathedral in Victoria. And who can forget this priceless EDL rant against the Muslamics for building a huge mosque near the sea front in Brighton?

Westminster Cathedral

#ThingsThatAreNotMosques

The fact is, Islamic civilisation has given us some stunning architecture, a source of inspiration to Western architects and artists for centuries. The Brighton Pavilion is one such building, but there are countless others. The inspiration flows in the other direction too; I doubt there’s a major city anywhere in the Islamic world which isn’t chock full of western-influenced buildings, from gothic to neo-classical to post-modern. I wonder if pilgrims to Mecca post angry Facebook rants about the Puginesque Clock Tower overshadowing the Ka’aba?

Clock Tower Mecca

Big Bennish

Our cultures have mixed and mingled throughout their illustrious histories, much to our mutual benefit. There are mosques that have become churches; and churches that have become mosques; and they are all the more interesting for it.

Hagia Sofia Istanbul

Church that became a Mosque

Cordoba Cathedral

Mosque that became a Church

So what exactly is it that the far right find so threatening? Is it the foreign architectural style which seems so out of place in frigid England? Then let’s say goodbye to Winchester Cathedral and York Minster, which use exotic imports from Islamic architecture such as the pointed arch and the rose window. What happens when British Moslems build their places of worship in the local architectural vernacular? Is that OK with the kippers and Britain First?

Tahir Mosque, Catford

Is this OK, UKIP?

When challenged on the Daily Politics, Nigel Farage made the excuse that his party’s activists “are not wholly trained”. Wholly trained in what? Architecture? Let’s call this spade a spade: this UKIP activist’s reaction betrayed her islamophobia, and the only training she lacks is how to hide it from public view. In this, she is not an exception, she is absolutely typical of every kipper I’ve ever encountered. UKIP is an islamophobic party. Who can doubt it?

(Postscript – if you’re interested in learning more about Islamic architecture, you might enjoy The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron and In Xanadu by William Dalrymple. Non-Amazon link.)

British Federalism and English Exceptionalism – Fear and Loathing in West Lothian

Following Scotland’s ‘No’, and the promise of constitutional reform, it seems that everyone is (again) agonising over the “West Lothian Question“, or (in short) how to give England fair treatment in a devolved UK.

More specifically, the question asks: should non-English MPs vote on purely English affairs in the Westminster Parliament?

Look, either I’m missing something obvious here, or the entire British commentariat are idiots. I’m not saying the former is impossible, but, well…

The United Kingdom’s national parliament – the House of Commons and the House of Lords – should vote on matters which are national competence. ALL parliamentarians, from ALL parts of the UK, should have equal treatment in a national parliament. Surely this is obvious?

If a matter is England-only, then why is it being dealt with by the UK’s national parliament? Scotland-only issues are not dealt with by the UK’s national parliament, they are dealt with by the Scottish Parliament. Wales-only issues by the Welsh Assembly. And so on.

Why on Earth would the UK’s national parliament in Westminster feel it is the right body to rule on issues which relate only to one region of the UK? Especially since we already HAVE a devolved system of regional government in the UK!

I think there are a couple of things going on here. They are linked, and in some respects overlapping.

One is our first-past-the-post system of constituency MPs who represent a specific geographical area, as well as a party. This is a strange system, full of contradictions and conflicts of interest, but I won’t go into them here, except to suggest that our MPs seem to believe that their links to constituencies give them legitimacy (in some cases SOLE legitimacy) as the democratic representatives of those constituencies for local as well as national (and European!) issues. This is toxic for local and regional (but also European) democracy.

I think the other issue here is English exceptionalism, and specifically Westminster’s blindspot when it comes to the value of other tiers of government. I’ve discussed this elsewhere. In Britain, especially in England, we are brainwashed from an early age to think that the national tier of government, from Westminster, is the only truly legitimate kind. One hears this all the time in the dismissive way our national politicians speak of the European Parliament; but it’s just as obvious when you look at the struggle our regions have faced to establish devolved local democracy. (Local democracy in modern Britain is in a sorry state.)

Every argument I have with anti-EU types always runs into the same brick wall: ‘but there’s no such things as a European demos!’ This is exactly the kind of thinking that sees the West Lothian Question as a conundrum up there with Fermat’s Last Theorem or peace in the Middle East. It’s muddle-headed, messy thinking, because it’s based on emotion and false assumptions, namely the notion that there is something exceptional about UK (and more especially English, specifically Westminster) democracy which makes other tiers of government – local, regional, European – less legitimate. (And ‘less legitimate’ easily elides into ‘illegitimate’ when you have a black and white UKIP view of the world.)

Clearly, such thinking can never deliver a just and functional federal form of government; though, as we so hate the ‘f’ word in Britain, let’s call it ‘devo-max’ – what the Germans might call ‘subsidiarity‘.

Yes, the Germans. Look at their federation. It works. Happily for the Germans their country has never been dominated by one region in the way that the UK has, and is. So it would never have occurred to modern Germany’s post-war founders to establish a federated democracy where a given region, say Bavaria, has a regional parliament (Landtag) but Nordrhein-Westfalen, where Bonn is situated, is governed directly by the national parliament (Bundestag). And where Bavarian members of the Bundestag are not allowed to vote on certain issues because they affect only Nordrhein-Westfalen.  No, the federal parliament governs the federal state, and it would be unthinkable to exclude the democratically-elected representatives of any part of that state from its decision-making process.

If we’re going to have devolved power in the UK, then it stands to reason that England must have its own devolved legislature just as the other regions do. Any other solution would be incredibly unjust, but also deeply irrational. It’s time for the UK to look again at the principle of subsidiarity – decisions should be taken at the appropriate level of government, as close as possible to the citizen; and each level (tier) of government should have strictly-defined, non-overlapping areas of competence. So there should be no question of the national parliament treating local, or regional issues; and the West Lothian Question simply does not arise.

2014: the Text Adventure

Here it is – 2014, the Text Adventure!

You are in the EU. Your quality of life is decent
but you are irritated with the number of foreigners
and the level of taxation. Exits are W, N, E, SE, S, SW.
What do you do?

> Go W

You find yourself confronted by a heavily armed policeman
shouting at you to lie on the floor. What do you do?

> Put hands up

You have been shot. You are dead.
GAME OVER

Would you like to go back to your last saved game?

> Y

You are in the EU. Your quality of life is decent 
but you are irritated with the number of foreigners 
and the level of taxation. Exits are W, N, E, SE, S, SW. 
What do you do?

> Go N

You have fallen into a giant supervolcano. You are dead. 
GAME OVER

Would you like to go back to your last saved game?

> Y

You are in the EU. Your quality of life is decent 
but you are irritated with the number of foreigners 
and the level of taxation. Exits are W, N, E, SE, S, SW. 
What do you do?

> Go E

You find yourself in a war zone. All around you are shattered 
buildings and piles of rubble. You see a convoy of white lorries. 
What do you do?

> ask for help

The lorries had Spetsnaz special forces inside them! You have been 
shot. You are dead.
GAME OVER

Would you like to go back to your last saved game?

> Y

You are in the EU. Your quality of life is decent 
but you are irritated with the number of foreigners 
and the level of taxation. Exits are W, N, E, SE, S, SW. 
What do you do?

> Go SE

You find yourself in a city without electricity or water. 
There seem to be a lot of ruins. There are explosions
all around you. Next to you is a school run by the UN. 
What do you do?

> Enter school

You find yourself with a group of women and children. 
A tank shell blasts through the classroom wall. 
You are all roasted in a fireball. You are dead. 
GAME OVER

Would you like to go back to your last saved game?

> Y

You are in the EU. Your quality of life is decent 
but you are irritated with the number of foreigners 
and the level of taxation. Exits are W, N, E, SE, S, SW. 
What do you do?

> Go S

You have been kidnapped by a group of men dressed 
entirely in black, but they are not ninjas. 
One of them has a videocamera. He speaks to you in an 
East End accent. What do you do?

> Ask for help

The man with the East End accent makes a speech to the 
camera and cuts off your head. You are dead. 
GAME OVER

Would you like to go back to your last saved game?

> Y

You are in the EU. Your quality of life is decent 
but you are irritated with the number of foreigners 
and the level of taxation. Exits are W, N, E, SE, S, SW. 
What do you do?

> Go SW

You catch Ebola. You are dead.
GAME OVER

Would you like to go back to your last saved game?

> Y

You are in the EU. Your quality of life is decent 
but you are irritated with the number of foreigners 
and the level of taxation. Exits are W, N, E, SE, S, SW. 
What do you do?

> wait

You are still in the EU. Your Prime Minister calls a 
referendum. You can vote YES to leave or NO to stay. 
What do you vote?

> NO

You are in a minority. Your country leaves the EU. 
GAME OVER


(Inspired by Rob Fahey)

Cameron is pulling a Suarez over Juncker

cameronsuaraz

Much has been said and written about the British government’s campaign against the Spitzenkandidat process and against Juncker personally, and I’m not going to rehash that. But something else needs saying.

The British political establishment and press are colluding in misrepresenting the rest of the EU as unprincipled and anti-democratic. This is what has everyone outside Westminster stumped. It’s a bit like Luis Suarez saying that Chiellini bumped into his teeth with his shoulder. It’s such an obvious subversion of the truth that no-one can quite believe that it’s meant in earnest.

Example: sources close to the Prime Minister say that he is fighting for a principle. Standing alone again, Britain defends democracy against those on the continent who would threaten it! The affrontery of this argument is breath-taking – it is Cameron who is being unprincipled here, reneging on an arrangement to which he had previously agreed, dishonestly representing this good-faith attempt to reinforce European democracy as… wait for it… anti-democratic!  Cameron cannot win this argument outside the echo chamber of Westminster where they have convinced themselves – contrary to all the evidence – that their “demos” is the only one that counts.

Another example: a Tory MP defends Cameron by claiming that he is challenging vested interests in the system. Again, they try to frame a narrative where Britain stands alone against an out-of-touch elite in Brussels. But the ‘Spitzenkandidat’ procedure challenges those vested interests – the old status quo where EU top jobs are settled behind closed doors during late-night horse-trading. By linking EU top jobs to the outcome of the European elections, this new arrangement seeks to address the obvious disenchantment which we so clearly saw reflected in last month’s election results. Cameron wants to keep the old system while claiming to represent those people who so clearly rejected the old system! It’s the kind of double-think which can only work in an environment where years of negative misreporting have so distorted perceptions as to disconnect a closed group of people from reality.

The rest of us watch with slack-jawed amazement. Why is he doing this? What can he hope to gain?

Perhaps this image gives us a clue:

camsupport

Yes – Cameron’s strategy is working for him at home. He is boosting his own popularity, and shoring up support within his own party.  With elections next year, and with May, Johnson, and Gove circling in the middle distance, Cameron is doing what politicians do.

The problem is, by winning his own local game, Cameron effectively guarantees that he will lose the bigger game being played by the rest of the EU.  Let’s be honest, he isn’t even really playing. To those of us outside the Westminster bubble, this is bizarre behaviour from a major leader. But this is what Cameron has done all along, from his decision to take the Conservatives out of the EPP, to his ill-judged veto of the Fiscal Compact, to his bizarre stance on Juncker.  Cameron’s playing snap while everyone else is playing chess.

The line taken by the UK government on Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych during his final months in power was that he had sacrificed his country’s long-term interests for the sake of short term personal interests.  It’s hard to see how the UK’s current EU policy is any different.

(edited on 30 June to add the cartoon sourced from https://twitter.com/Manon__Dufour/status/483536929045356544)

Coalition woes

Watching the post-election Lib Dem implosion is painful.  I’ve read many tweets from people saying that it was entirely predictable from the moment they hooked up with the Tories.  I disagree.  I was one of those people who voted LD in 2010 and who was excited at the prospect of a proper coalition government in the UK.  I thought it might mark the beginning of a new, more continental, consensual kind of politics.  If I was naive and wrong then so were many other people, including practically the entire Liberal Democrat Party.  Why were we wrong?  Here are a few speculative thoughts:

Cultural disconnect.  Many Lib Dems, including crucially Nick Clegg himself, have strong roots in Europe and European politics and feel comfortable with coalition politics.  They underestimated the degree to which this is alien to British politics.  The adversarial British system will not disappear over night (as much as we wish it would).  This being so, the Lib Dems seem to have badly overestimated the degree of influence they would have within a coalition where the larger partner has no culture or tradition of compromise.

Perhaps most importantly, they also badly underestimated public patience and understanding for the nature of coalition politics.  Without a tradition of coalition and compromise, British voters simply couldn’t understand or forgive the fact that the party which they had voted for, and put into government, was unable to deliver on its manifesto pledges.  The junior coalition partner, put where it was by voters protesting the two-party establishment, was always going to alienate those voters as soon as it became part of that establishment.

Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that Lib Dem tactics and strategy could have been better.  Look at this table:

coalitionThis is pretty damning.  True, some of the policies in the right-hand column do actually reflect Liberal Democrat (or at least Orange Book) values, and if this came as a surprise to some people who voted for them in 2010, well, they only have themselves to blame for not doing their research.  But on key issues, key red lines (such as tuition fees), the Lib Dems gave ground; and if they got anything in return (that left-hand column should not be that empty) then they spectacularly failed to get this across to the voting public.

On several occasions during the life of this coalition government, red lines were crossed and the junior partner should have pulled the plug.  (For example, after the European Council veto debacle of 9 December 2011.)  There would have been casualties, but the party would probably have survived in better shape than it now is or will be for a long time post-2015.

No doubt there is a grand strategy behind the decision to stick it out and keep this coalition government alive.  But the handling of the doomed electoral reform referendum gives me absolutely no faith in the powers of Lib Dem strategists.

Edit – in the interests of fairness, I point to this article reporting Nick Clegg’s party conference speech last year in Glasgow which he used to highlight sixteen issues on which the Lib Dems had blocked Tory policies.  That list of sixteen is not exhaustive.  So the table above is not a fair representation, except of the general public’s impressions, and that matters of course.  Because the Lib Dem brand is very badly damaged and there’s no point in denying it.

(edited twice on 28 May)