Cameron

It depresses the hell out of me...

Jock — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:17:42 +0000

...to think that, in a few short weeks , it looks possible that party activists of all political colours will be expected to trudge the streets once again asking people to believe a lot of spin, unachievable promises and heartfelt apologies and vote for for a "change", or maybe that should just be "vote, for a change".

Actually, I tell a lie, it doesn't completely overwhelm me. Sometimes there is a little frisson of excitement at the possibility that the people of Britain might just once collectively call time on this comfy carousel of political clap-trap. Just say no! as the song went...

No, Gordon! No, Dave! No, Jack, Hillary, Harriet or whoever! No, not even you Nick!

We've had quite enough for these past decades, nay centuries, of being shunted up the gary glitter by folk who think they know better than us but whose ambitions so clearly exceed their abilities.

What would happen if we all got up one "Good Morning" Polling Day and simply voted "no"? At what point would the Westminster clique conclude they had completely lost our confidence and call a halt to their corruption and crookery? Or at what point can we refuse, with impunity, to submit to their authority?

And then, how do we create a new, bottom up, rather than up its own arse, democracy? This has much to commend it. read more »

gordon brown

Spinning towards revolution?

Jock — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:11:22 +0000

This posting has been a very long time in the making. In fact, as is usual, I've been more than normally ponderous about our political system since the local elections and it has prevented me doing anything else. I wanted to be careful about what I say, lest I be seen simply as having sour grapes at having lost - but I hope you will see that far from it, I am hopeful of achieving more, and for others moreover, outside the formal government structure than inside it.

I have fallen out of love with democracy; at least the corrupt, broken, power-hungry, centralizing, suffocating, nanny state, infantilizing political game we seem to have wandered into at some point.

Whether it's Labour's desperation to beat me that made them put out a leaflet that can only have been intended to damage my personal standing and reputation negligible though it may be already, the various tit-for-tat accusations that ran right through the Crewe by-election and the London mayoral elections, Westminster's divorce from the rest of the country as regards how much they get to spend of our money feathering their personal nests and how much we should know about it, it stinks.

I was watching again the "Open Minds" interview with Milton Friedman the other day and when it was put to him, as in J S Mill's formulation, that democratic government is the way in which we put good, ungreedy and unselfish people in charge to prevent bad, greedy and selfish people from taking over his response was simple: "government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And who can argue, in the system we now have. The prize is enormous. Whoever lies his or her way to number 10 has the prospect of controlling nearly half of our entire national income. The mechanism of getting the top jobs is a sham - none of them in my opinion are competent to claim more wisdom than sixty million others of us that makes them able to take such a responsibility and they're only ever elected by a few thousand of those sixty million. Even in local government, tied up as it may be in red tape and Whitehall edicts, still the unscrupulous seem to make it to the top - look at Oxford Labour's own little lotacracy.

Tony Blair seemed to think he was virtually messianic, and now he believes apparently that he can solve all the world's problems now that he is no longer encumbered with such a small salary as the UK Prime Minister and the petty problems of Britain. But it doesn't matter who it is, Blair may have brought it to a head but neither Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Blair or whoever else may come next, has the capacity or competence to decide so much for so many.

And I don't think that I can suffer under this system much longer. If I was a young Muslim I'd probably be rounded up and accused of being "radicalised". Well I am radicalised. Radicalised and angry. It's a good job they've imposed a ban on unauthorized demonstrations outside of parliament, else I would hire a bunch of JCBs and lead a crowd to dismantle the Palace of Westminster stone by stone and cast its occupants into the river and hope they all wash up somewhere halfway up the Amazon where they would not be found for half a millennium - well actually I probably wouldn't, because I don't have that sort of courage, but I curse Guy Fawkes for having failed his opportunity!

In the local elections, nearly 70% of people did not vote. Even in generals, nearly 40% didn't vote last time. The Libertarian Party believes that this is a vast pool of voters who would readily switch to their, and my, image of a new Britain, with renewed freedoms and less state intervention. But I'm a Liberal, if not especially a Democrat, and my party is one of the three larger parties the LPUK blames for the lack of imagination in political discourse that has created this situation. And indeed, our regular flirtations with vaguely socialist redistribution policies rather than liberal level playing field policies, do seem to make us bed-pals with the two conservative parties trying to maintain their duopoly. Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change? Or can I pursue change, with a reasonable hope of getting it, through a party so deeply embedded in the political "game" as the Lib Dems?

In 1745 David Hume suggested that one day we may come to the conclusion that our current system of government needs complete overhaul. I for one have reached that point. And David Hume's prescription in the "Idea of the Perfect Commonwealth" seems to me to be vastly superior to the decrepit institutions and structures we currently have to endure. I'm not sure any of the current setup is salvageable. That current setup is coercive, corrupt and centralized. It is now clear, more than ever before, as Rousseau said, "The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

ID cards, the surveillance state, the lost war on drugs, the uneven playing field allowing monopolization and exploitation, drinking on the tube, detention without charge, foreign wars in support of oil hungry allies, petty bureaucrats spying on our every move, raiding our bins, taxing us through the nose. Is this what J S Mill was suggesting? Our parliamentary system was created in times when communications were difficult. Yet even then they took less power to themselves than now, when we are all a phone call or internet connection away from forging links with millions of other individuals on this planet.

The time has come for mutualism instead of representative government. People getting together either locally or in geographically dispersed interest groups focussing on particular problems in those communities. Refusing to accept that all the answers can come from a clunking fist in London or his puppets in the Town Hall.

But how do we do that, without turning spin into revolution? read more »

Seven minutes from Suss

Jock — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:32:36 +0000

Apparently wavey Davey Cameron was flouncing about with a "foot long form" that takes police "seven minutes" to complete in PMQs today, demanding that Mr Bean adopt their campaign to stop this bureaucratic nonsesne.

I rather hope that I am as unlikely as Davey or Gordon to be stopped and searched for whatever reason, but if I were, I would want a full justification for it, and there and then, in writing, and not on a tape that I would have to seek access to through some kind of data laws.

I am quite sure there is plenty of "bureaucratic nonsense" that the police have to carry out - like arresting people for possession of drugs say - that could be cleared away to better effect rather than a ticket that tells you, when you are wrongfully stopped and searched, why they suspected you, what for and what redress you can or cannot seek for the inconvenience. read more »

Tory selection processes

Jock — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:43:10 +0000

And so, having linked, I may as well cite The Daily Pundit who writes about the number of NuTory candidates who were once NuLabour members. But it's not so much their political backgrounds that I want to take issue with - to me the interchangeability of such political favours merely highlights that both parties are really merely sibling subsidiaries of the post-Thatcher Managerial Clique.

No, what I'm more interested in is how a serious political party, claiming to be democrats of some sort, and on the one hand with its leader wanting to hold "public primaries" for some of its candidates, selects its candidates through some sort of appointed committee and without an all-member vote in the consitutency or jurisdiction concerned.

It's not just the successor to Doris that was selected this way, but apparently the Judas Karim for the North West Euro-Parliament list. No wonder the latter thought his chances better with the Tories if he really only needed to butter up a few committee members rather than reach out to the activists and members.

Workfair - a question

Jock — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:00:07 +0000

This workfair business...can anyone answer me a question:

If there are jobs that need doing, someone should be employed to do them. Are people at the end of their two years on JSA simply being herded into compulsory minimum wage jobs then - in which case they may be miserable with the job they get but they would, by definition, no longer be on benefit? Or would they still be getting benefit rates, just being made to "do something" (anything?) to "earn" their benefits?

Obviously I don't like this idea. Citizens Income would solve all of this without any potential stigma that might be associated with a sort of "community service order" for benefits. To me it all just demonstrates that there aren't really any new ideas coming out of the Tories (or anyone else for that matter!) on welfare, just that "something must be done and this is something". read more »

Cameron's vacuous localism

Jock — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:56:42 +0000

So, we're going to get to hear later today what Dave means by "localism":

BBC NEWS | Politics | Tories offer votes on council tax:

Councils should hold referendums if they want to bring in "high" council tax increases, Tory leader David Cameron is due to say. If people voted against a rise, they would get a rebate the following year, he will add in a speech in east London. This would replace the current system of central government "capping" bills in England and Wales...Mr Cameron is expected to say he wants to improve "democratic accountability".

Under the plan, there would be a "trigger threshold", above which councils would have to hold a referendum. In England this would be set by Parliament, with the Welsh National Assembly deciding the level for Wales. Bills sent out to households would ask whether they supported any "excessive" increase, with a referendum form attached. In his speech in east London, Mr Cameron will say: "All politicians in opposition talk about giving more power to local councils. But all governments seem to end up centralising power.

Right - so how are we going to reverse that, I wonder? Oh yes, we'll decide at Westminster what's excessive and force local government to hold a referendum. Like that's decentralizing? Not only that, but a post hoc referendum which will, it appears, do nothing to tell a local authority what it ought and ought not to be spending money on, and after the budget is set.

It seems to me that this is a man making a bid for power on behalf of his party. Power which, in this country, will allow him more or less to do as he pleases with local government. And yet not only is he not making any visible attempt actually to do something about what he describes as and the Taxpayers' Alliance found in summer polling to be the most hated tax, but he's taking the current system and adding another layer of Westminster control over it.

Dave, it's this simple - you cannot make local government more accountable without making it raise more of its own money. The very fact that your Westminster cronies set the levels of central funding that goes to councils means that council up and down the country have to make up for shortfalls with disproportionate council tax changes. If you want to set them, and local people, free, you need to trust them to raise their money and trust local people to boot them out of power at local elections on the whole of their record.

This has got to be one of the most inept, unimaginative, populist policy pronouncements yet from Dave, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of something he has repeatedly said is at the centre of Tory policy - localism. I do hope the speech is better than the press release.

Dave's Uncreative Conservative Futurology

Jock — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:20:23 +0000

So, Dave's been at the Googleplex trying to give an inspiring vision of what the internet can do for us, and especially our relationship with government. I imagine that if the fun-loving boffins at Google made up the audience they will have been yawningly underwhelmed or resorting to bouncing their hyper-activity stress balls off the video screens.

It's a bit of ironic timing though, after last week's debacle over Labour stealing the Tories' or more accurately the Lib Dem's policy clothing, as my speech writers are just putting the finishing touches to the second of my pieces on Revolutionary Liberalism covering a much bolder image of how technology is about to turn our entire way of life on its head in new and exciting ways that twenty-first century politicians are going to have to work with.

The duckies guarding Google from politicians
Originally uploaded by Yodel Anecdotal

Far, far greater change is afoot than simply providing national statistics to end users and citizens so they can chose and make policy in a more informed way, like the challenges of the end of money as we know it, a whole new way of working in the knowledge economy and in international commerce. A world in which the Googles, Verizons and UPSes will be the moderators and media of global trade rather than governments, where the webs of trust that nation states have established to provide the function of guarantors in worldwide business are rent asunder.

A world that has implications for all public services, creating a new era of interpersonal trust and co-operation moved by the power of market information in individuals' hands unencumbered by the protectionism of states and politicians. An era that will have the power, because it will be people based, to usurp the role of international credit markets, so 'dis-credited' in the past few weeks. And it is the geeks in Dave's audience today, not the politicians, who will be leading the way.

Cameron is right about one aspect - politicians have got to learn to back off, for if they don't do so voluntarily and in co-operation with this new world, they will be ignominiously cast aside, redundant - but I will believe that he himself is ready for that challenge when he makes policy to prove it. Some of the greatest steps in concentration of power to Whitehall and Westminster are, after all, only a couple of decades old, coinciding with the growth of the information economy in the late eighties.

Come on Dave, get Gideon to tell us which taxes you'll cut...

Jock — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:31:57 +0000

ConservativeHome highlights a speech at the LSE in which (despite what I assume to be an error in the first sentence) Cameron today says that whilst they will want to increase environmental behaviour modifying taxes, they will want to use this to cut taxes elsewhere.

Of course they already know that the Lib Dems have specific and costed taxation proposals that use green taxes to cut four pence off the basic rate of income tax and take many low income earners out of income tax completely. We also have a long standing commitment to replace the Council Tax (though of course you know I don't agree personally with our replacement Local Income Tax) which deals nicely with what turns out to be the most hated tax in today's annual Tax Payers Alliance survey, again highlighted yesterday by ConservativeHome. And our "Green Mortgage" proposals will help households deal with their most worrying expense - their fuel bills.

So Cameron, what are you and Osborne going to cook up to beat that? And when? You can't go on just blathering and blustering indefinitely with vague and vacuous platitudes to your CH readership. You're certainly not ready for government if you can't even tell us what you're going to do on taxes.

Speaking at the LSE David Cameron has crushed any idea that the balance of green tax measures under a Conservative government will be cuts to encourage good environmental behaviour rather than tax rises to discourage 'brown behaviours':

"By using green taxes as extra stealth taxes, Gordon Brown has given them a bad name.  I’m determined that the Conservative approach will be different. With my Government, any new green taxes will be replacement taxes, not new stealth taxes.

In a few days, our Quality of Life Policy Group will publish its report. It will contain many recommendations on tackling climate change, at home and abroad, including recommendations on green taxes.  As with all the reports in our Policy Review, we will study its proposals carefully.

But let me be clear.  We will raise green taxes, and use the proceeds to reduce taxes elsewhere.That is the right direction for the environment and it’s the right direction for our economy. It is the best way to deliver the green growth that must be our aim." read more »

Oops - standby for another Tory bloomer?

Jock — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 23:28:05 +0000

Today's Observer highlights a story about the Conservative's upcoming report on "Quality of Life" which includes measures to be outlined to "burnish their green credentials". Amongst the measures highlighted is that a future Tory government will ban the provision of "standby buttons" on things such as TVs:

Ban the standby button, say Tories

Conservatives target plasma TVs in radical report on how to tackle global warming

Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday September 9, 2007
The Observer

Television sets and other domestic appliances will be fitted with special devices to switch off standby power as part of a radical plan to cut wasteful use of electricity, a special Conservative report will recommend this week.

Now, I know these policy review groups have been going on since sometime shortly after BC ("Beginning of Cameron") but I thought I had heard something like this previously. So taking a quick look around I found this...

July 12, 2006
TV standby buttons will be outlawed

By Lewis Smith and Mark Henderson

THE Government is to outlaw standby switches on televisions and video and DVD players to cut the amount of electricity wasted in the home. etc, etc...

It's not by any means a record time-lapse between original announcement by someone else and the Tories deciding to brand the policy as their own, but thirteen months is really quite impressive. I know it's difficult keeping an eye on what's going on in the big bad world out there, but if you hope to run the country one day, it's quite an important skill I'd have thought.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of fear of crime

Jock — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:05:44 +0000

This idea of David Cameron's that we're living in "Broken Britain" and of the Sun that we are witnessing "Anarchy in the UK" has been eating at me a bit. And with Dave's essay in the Telegraph outlining his ideas for mending his broken Britain by branding ten year old boys as failures and keeping them down a year at school got me looking out crime statistics.

I suspect this might not be what Dave had in mind (no, really!), but one thing sticks out in the British Crime Survey attitudes to crime, and in particular fear of crime. That the better educated you are, the better the newspaper you read, the more you earn, the less likely you are to fear crime, and the more accurate a perspective you're going to have as to the real levels of crime and anti-social behaviour going on in Britain.

Another interesting thing is that when people are asked about their perceptions of levels of crime throughout the country compared with in their local area, all groups are about half as likely to perceive crime as a growing problem in their local area, where they have on the ground experience, compared with nationwide.

So, what can we conclude, if anything, from that? Clearly, where people rely on the national media, and particularly the tabloid newspapers, for news of what's going on around the country, they get the impression that there's a lot more crime going on "somewhere else" compared with what they see and hear about in their local area. Are they just wearing rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to their own area? Maybe - local pride and disbelief that "such a thing could happen here" might be very influential. But more likely we are being manipulated by the media for whom crime, and particularly the nastiest most vicious sort of crime, sells newspapers.

So yes, a better educated nation will be less fearful of crime because they won't have to rely so much on sensationalist news reporting to form their opinions. Better still would be if our politicians stopped pandering to this tabloid agenda and feeding their appetite for fear-mongering with populist speeches and snappy but misleading headlines.