The Home Secretary was not making it up- he did have a cat. She also may ‘know the stories about the Human Rights Act’ but stories alone are what they are.

The case concerning Maya the cat was judged in 2008 and then first misreported in 2009 thanks to the Sunday Telegraph despite the judiciary’s press office publicly denouncing the facts of the article. The uproar regarding Maya matters for a number of reasons not largely because of the huge constitutional importance regarding the future of the Human Rights Act but also the consistent failure of politicians including cabinet members and journalists to state the facts and get the basic law correct.

It would be extremely worrying if May really didn’t understand the law not only behind this specific case but also Article 8 itself and I don’t believe for one minute that she doesn’t. Surely it’s about time that misreporting of human rights cases stops. There have been numerous cases which have been reported inaccurately that may cause long term damage to our judicial system. Once the law is reported incorrectly it has a habit of spiralling off into oblivion and the facts rarely gravitate back down again.

The very fact that May used this case as one of her three examples for why the HRA ‘has to go’ demeans any logical argument concerning the abolition of the Act and replacing it with a Bill of Rights. The debate concerning the future of the HRA is one that needs to be had but as the Head of the Court of Appeal Lord Neuberger stated in a recent speech ‘debates must be based on facts not misconception deliberate or otherwise. Persuasion should be based on truth rather than propaganda’.

Not only were the facts behind this case so incorrectly reported but the example doesn’t have anything to do with human rights as the decision was largely based upon European free movement law as the man’s partner was European and so applied to him too. Thankfully the Justice Secretary stepped up to clear up the muddy facts and respected his political duty to get the facts right and not insult the intelligence of the British public. Leftist flag waver Clarke is not, however he has put himself at great risk of an early retirement and should be praised for getting the basic law right.  If May had addressed the issue that current human rights law is making deportations more difficult in a more intelligent manner this would have created much more intelligent debate without severely bruising herself and increasing strains within the cabinet.

Out of all the public gaffes Clarke has made this year, this is not one of them and certainly not something he should regret. He did however take a bold move in dismissing the concept of collective responsibility and the public unity of the cabinet. Perhaps in this green cabinet it is politically more acceptable for public divisions to emerge between ministers not just between the two parties but within them too. Maybe this will lead to a growing sense of political freedom within the cabinet which may not necessarily be a bad thing.

Filed under: clarepoliticsnews, conservatism, conservatives, europe, humanrights, ukpolitics
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Something good is going come out of the riots: people care about them. No news event since the 1980s has had people so aroused to read the news and try to really understand what has been happening. The events of recent weeks are a challenge to all traditional partisan narratives, and, to put it simply, no-one is at all sure what on earth we should do next. This is a good thing: the riots have raised the level of political engagement and debate in Britain to a level not seen in years. Everyone I meet is fizzing with ideas, thoughts, plans, and vivid emotions, from the right (string ‘em up!) to the left (the rich had it coming. Pass the houmous, dahling).

This won’t make the people who have lost their homes, jobs and, in a few awful cases, their loved ones, feel any better – if anything, it must make it worse that the powers that be are so utterly confused. But when the dust settles, it looks to me like the consensus of indifference, an ‘each to their own’ attitude to social issues and an ‘every man for himself’ attitude to the economy, that has characterised British politics since the early 1990s, has been found desperately wanting. Real change is going to come, and will be born out of the crucible of genuine ideological debate and political engagement.

For me, there are three urgent things that we need to reflect on.

The first is that, since Blair, the reaction of government to crisis is all about communications. They react to, and seek to do something about, the images that are relayed in 24-hour news, not the reality on the streets. This approach is characterised by the laughable phenomenon that is ‘Cobra’, the government’s crisis committee. Is the best thing to do when there’s an emergency that requires decisive action really to convene a committee to have a meeting? ‘Prime Minister, there’s a crisis.’ ‘Quick, find me Eric Pickles – I want to hear what he has to contribute to a round-table discussion.’ Indeed, the point that Cobra slows everything down has been made before, by former anti-terrorist chief Andy Hayman. Cobra had only been called (and in secret) a couple of times in history before July 7^th, but on that day, it seemed to the government that people found the idea of a secret committee with a cool name rather reassuring. Now, Cobra is called not for emergency issues of national security, but when there’s floods in Cumbria. The real point of meetings of Cobra is obvious: to give 24-hour news a story (which they can fill time with: ministers are arriving, ministers are meeting, ministers have left looking important) which is about how the government is doing something (buying politicians time to do what they do best: prevaricate).

This leads into the second point, the irresponsibility of the media. There’s a risk that thousands of people across the country may go out looting. What better way to encourage them than to write and talk about anarchy on the streets, Britain out of control, the police helpless? The riots weren’t truly riots: the word implies something like the poll tax riots, ordinary people pushed over the limit and out of control. What happened last week was that criminals – the kind of opportunistic criminals who break the law regularly – were given a free rein and the confidence to exploit an unprecedented opportunity to wreak havoc. The kind of crime that happens all the time in Britain’s cities therefore happened in a highly concentrated way. The media are entirely to blame for creating this situation – the media made the news. It should be no wonder that journalists have been so uninterested in the comparisons that can be made with similar riots in other countries - those in the banlieues of Paris in 2005, and in Vancouver earlier this year - for their priority is to present these events as occurring within a vacuum, as chaos. They get away with this because of the small-mindedness of our politicians, inhabiting a 24-hour news cycle, blind to the the long-term (as most horrifically demonstrated in recent times by our appalingly misjudged intervention in Libya). How I wish that on Tuesday morning David Cameron had appealed for calm rather than pledging to restore order. To adopt the language of a Steve Hilton, Britain needed to chill out. Dave just wound everyone up more, by prioritising image over action and doing what the media told him they expected him to do.

Thirdly, these riots weren’t caused by the cuts. All commentary on what ’caused’ the riots is being really very predictable. For the left, it’s the inevitable consequence of the alienation caused by unprecedented levels of inequality (it’s all rather tragic, dahling. Seriously, pass the houmous).  For the right, it’s ‘O tempora, O mores’, and it’s time to bring back national service and take away people’s benefits (like that’s even a thing). Some blame the banks (which is a bit like blaming your feet because you can’t run fast enough). And, yes, many are blaming the cuts (which haven’t actually happened yet, but politics is all about perception).

What we need to consider is the general context and environment out of which the violence on the streets came, and what we should do next. These riots grew out of the same origins as knife crime on London’s streets. The riots were about culture - the culture that motivates teenage boys to deliberately abdicate their future, by being disruptive, by not working, and by leaving school not just without qualifications, but barely able to read and write, seeking fulfilment and status through violence. Government and politics has far, far more power to shape cultural attitudes from the top down (whether it intends to or not) than our craven and irresponsible politicians and journalists realise.

In my view, it’s not “the cuts”, but the whole attitude that the government has held for the last generation towards the poor and the young, a context in which the cuts are no aberration - they fit perfectly neatly. It’s an attitude of indifference masked as liberalism, of apathy towards the needs of the most vulnerable enabled by a desire to not look like a snob, and that inability or unwillingness to empathise that leads to highly misguided policies like stop and search. What hope do we have that our ‘underclass’ can value things like libraries, sports programmes, schools and – most importantly – simply having a job, when their government so clearly doesn’t either? If we continually refer to the poorest, the most vulnerable, the least well educated as an ‘underclass’ they will indeed behave like one. I quite agree with David Cameron that the answers lie in our communities and in our ‘broken society’. I just don’t think he understands what that means. Thanks to this government’s policy, the entire city of Manchester will soon have just one public toilet. Do the government really believe people piss on the street just because they weren’t brought up right?

Filed under: Uncategorized, conservatives, davidcameron, labour, spendingcuts, tonyblair, ukpolitics
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The “phone-hacking scandal” needs a good name. “Hackgate” or “Phonegate” just won’t cut it — that nomenclature is for little controversies that one wryly compares to Watergate in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. This one actually is like Watergate, and its consequences could be no less far-reaching.

The one thing the scandal isn’t really about — not any more — is phone hacking. The revelation two weeks ago that a Private Investigator working for the News of the World may have hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler — along with those of the families of terrorist victims and of soldiers killed in action — was horrifying, but it doesn’t explain the period of continuous turmoil that has ensued.

The true significance of that revelation was that it, like Tiger Woods’ encounter with a fire hydrant two years ago, brought to the surface a cesspool of deceit, corruption and immorality that had fermented underground for decades. The problem was not just that thousands of phones were hacked. The problem was that a culture thrived in which journalists could operate free of all restraint, because the Murdoch press had the police in its pay and the politicians in its thrall.

Two weeks ago, it would have seemed absurd to suggest that the scandal could bring down the Murdoch Empire. And it would have seemed even more absurd to suggest that it might topple the Cameron government. Now both seem like real possibilities — possibilities that Rupert and Dave are actively battling to avert. This is not because any new evidence personally implicating Murdoch or Cameron has come to light. It’s because the public is sick of our rotten establishment, and it finally has a chance to clean it out.

Maybe we should call it the “watershed” scandal.

Filed under: conservatives, culture, davidcameron, jonathanbirch, journalism, media, ukpolitics
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Trotsky in 1938 defined the ‘Third Camp’ as the result of ‘the fetishism of two camps’ which ‘would give way to a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends.’ The attempt of the USSR and the USA to divide the world into opposing socioeconomic and political systems was opposed to the purer form of socialism Trotsky claimed to espouse; the question for those who claim to fall into the ‘Third Camp’ today is how to side in the many instances of conflict between rival states and movements, such as those for national independence, or rights for women.

A recent talk by a representative from the ‘Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’ divided the nature of the choice roughly into two: whether the strategic aims of the combatants were in accordance with general socialist principles, or for a more realist approach, on the extent to which supporting them would further socialist ‘revolution’. The latter belief - that the enemy of the ‘capitalist’ powers is therefore an ally, has led to what he feels is misdirected support for Islamic fundamentalist movements, in Afghanistan and Iraq. An article in a publication by ‘Workers’ Liberty’ (by Martin Thomas), though, demonstrates the complexity of the issues. It declares:

‘The AWL opposed the US-led war against Iraq in March-April 2003. We did so because of the record and nature of American and British imperialism. We were opposed to the Ba’thist dictatorship in Iraq… but we wanted it overthrown by the working class and peoples of Iraq’ (in the form of the Iraq Union Solidarity campaign, which attempted to bridge divisions between the Communist Party of Iraq and the Iraqi Workers’ Federation.) The movement’s approach seems to have become more cohesive since 1979, when several working class militants in Britain reacting to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, reportedly supported the Russian army in its attempt to “tear the head off capitalism.” Fortunately the majority of the party supported Afghan self-determination against the Russians (leading, of course, indirectly to the arming of the Taliban.)

While national independence movements may be in line with general Socialist principles of liberty, of property, political action and person, many would argue that the necessity of fostering ‘nationalist’ identities implies by definition a movement based on ethnicity and shared cultural values and practices. (Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities.’ Is it then hypocritical to support such a movement, if it is not based on the nationalisation of the means of production? Or if, worse, it is based on religious doctrines or those involving reduced rights for certain minorities, or for women?

This is an issue close to the heart of the Workers’ Liberty group, who have been highly critical even of Britain’s ‘welfare state’ in providing adequate measures to facilitate abortion and state provision for women’s mental health problems - the ‘Care in the Community’ policy they clearly did not feel was enough. One wonders how they would feel about the Taliban’s imposition of shar’ia law, by which women could be stoned to death for being victim to assault. ‘Care in the Community’ was nonexistent in a society which discouraged women from playing any part in the public sphere.

It is therefore difficult to judge how the socialist organisations in Britain - Solidarity being another - and across the world - should react to the foreign policies of their government. Libya, for example, is being couched in terms of a humanitarian intervention, but evidently there are wider political considerations, like the increased Franco-British defensive ties and, of course, the potential domestic popularity of toppling an unpopular dictator. While they may lack the resources and manpower to have a concrete impact on government action, it is good to know that socialism as an ideological force still has the power to influence thought, if not action.

Filed under: afghanistan, defence, deficit reduction, democracy, identity
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It’s easy to be seduced by the prospect of change and fairness. After all, who wouldn’t say “Yes to Fairer Votes”, as supporters of the Alternative Vote arrogantly exhort us to do? Are we really expected to believe that all supporters of First Past the Post are deliberately resisting greater fairness? Fairness, of course, depends on your point of view, and it is quite possible to argue, as I shall do, that AV would be a considerably less fair voting system, not just the “miserable little compromise” and “politician’s fix” that Messrs. Clegg and Huhne described it as last year.

Both the Yes and No camps are guilty of fighting the most shamefully low and bad natured campaigns imaginable, and both are equally guilty of using really poor arguments. The AV system should be judged on its merits, with the central question of fairness at the forefront of our minds. Ignore the arguments on cost – money shouldn’t matter in matters of democratic importance; ignore the celebrity backers – they don’t know anything we don’t; ignore the partisan reasons on either side – we should be concerned with fairness to the voter, not to Labour or the Tories or the BNP; ignore those who say it’s a complicated system – anybody is capable of ranking candidates; and ignore the effects of AV in Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea – the decision before us tomorrow is about the UK. All these arguments ignore the fundamental question: is AV fairer? Here are ten good reasons why it isn’t.

1. AV can lead to far less proportional outcomes than FPTP

The central criticism of FPTP is that is produces a weak correlation between the share of seats and the share of votes. However, though there is clearly a problem of exact proportionality, our current voting system has always  reflected the national mood, with the party having the most votes forming the government and the next most popular forming the opposition. Extensive studies into AV have shown that, in one-sided elections, AV actually exaggerates the national trend, producing even bigger winning margins for the leading party, and potentially pushing the second party into a distant third, as would have happened to Labour in 1983 and the Tories in 1997, receiving 28% and 31% of the vote respectively, despite the Lib Dems getting only 24% and 17% of the vote.

2. AV does nothing to stop tactical voting

In fact, it just changes how tactical voting works. At the moment, some people clearly vote tactically to try to stop a certain party winning or because they think their real preference can’t win, and AV will not change this. True, under AV it will always be in your interests to rank your top choice first, but the nature of the preferential system is such that the order of elimination and preference transfer is incredibly important in determining who wins. Indeed, it is quite conceivable that you may be better off ranking your second preference third in order to give your first preference a better chance of winning. AV doesn’t end tactical voting, it just makes it more complicated and more calculating.

3. AV doesn’t get rid of safe seats

By the Yes campaigns own logic, why would the introduction of a 50% threshold help remove MPs who already sit on huge majorities? In the current parliament, over a third of MPs were elected with over 50% of the vote or had a 20% margin over their nearest challengers, and AV would do nothing to stop this creation of safe seats. Surely supporters of AV would think safe seats are the best kind anyway, since they already possess the magic 50% margin.

4. AV will lead to mushier politics

Love them or hate them, British politics under FPTP has been dominated by some of the great characters, but would the John Prescotts, Margaret Thatchers, Tony Benns and Boris Johnsons of this world have made it to Westminster under AV, a system that, as the Yes campaign proudly says, encourages politicians to compromise to garner more moderate votes? I for one think politics is too important to be conducted by a bunch of very well meaning, compromise candidates who stand for nothing controversial or bold. Real change is brought about by those with the courage to do what they think is necessary, and not by those who try to appeal to everyone. Broad, centrist appeal is a wonderful idea in theory, but would damage our politics in practice.

5. AV will create problems of legitimacy

Ask yourself: is it really right for someone’s fourth or fifth preferences to determine the outcome of an election? AV runs the very serious risk of creating two tiers of MPs – though legitimately elected under AV, can a candidate who came third in the first round but won with the help of third, fourth or fifth preferences clam to have the same mandate as one who won on the first round alone? The least disliked candidate elected by AV may often be the same as the most liked candidate elected by FPTP, but there is a clear problem when one has the clear support of the constituency and the other has had to rely on the half-hearted whims of the supporters of more popular candidates.

6. AV has unclear consequences for the voter

Under FPTP, we all know what our vote means, but, although the process of AV is not difficult to understand, its implications often are. The voter should be able to rank the candidates in order of preference and expect the count to reflect that, but, as I said above, it may very well be in your interests to put your second favourite candidate third depending on the order of elimination. This is something the voter can never know for sure, and is therefore forced to guess, thus removing the conviction that should be felt when voting for your preferred candidates.

7. AV may lead to more coalitions

Just as it exaggerates one sided elections, AV has a tendency to muddy the waters rather more in closely-fought elections. As the last year has shown us, coalition government is not a desirable thing, and any system that creates more should clearly be distrusted. It was tuition fees this time, but who knows which policies the parties could drop from their manifestos in future if we had more coalitions – they would cease to be legitimate documents on which governments could be tested, and instead become meaningless pieces of paper. FPTP virtually always delivers strong, decisive government that the voters can easily kick out if they fail to keep their promises.

8. AV undermines the key principle of democracy

Under FPTP, everyone has an equal say – one person, one vote. This is not always true of AV. Not only do supporters of unpopular parties get several bites of the cherry, whereas supporters of mainstream candidates get only one, but the voter who expresses just one preference (as many surely will do) has a vote which is worth less than the voter who expresses multiple preferences. You may very well argue that this is the choice of the individual voter, but it is hardly fair when the system penalises them for voting in a particular way – this flies in the face of the fundamentals of a democratic voting system.

9. AV won’t help smaller parties

Caroline Lucas became the first Green MP in 2010, achieving 31% of the vote in Brighton Pavillion, but would she have been elected if the threshold had been raised to 50%? Small parties are, by definition, less popular and have historically been underrepresented by FPTP, but they have little chance of making the breakthrough to actually getting seats if they had to get 50% support. Indeed, it has been quite credibly suggested that the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cmyru could all have lost their seats under AV in 2010, and there would still have been no chance of UKIP, the BNP or any independents winning any.

10. AV is not a stepping stone to PR

By one definition at least, PR is a fairer voting system, but supporters of a move to far greater proportionality would do well to notice that AV is both not a more proportional system, as I have explained above, but also not supported by the advocates of PR. A Yes vote tomorrow would most likely kill off the question of electoral reform for another generation – remember: a No vote is a rejection of AV, and not necessarily an endorsement of FPTP.

With the mudslinging and lies put to one side, there is a genuine and fundamentally important debate to be had on the fairness of a change to AV. Don’t be swept away by the false promise of change, but look at the system on its real merits. First Past the Post isn’t perfect, but it isn’t broken either – real reform to politics won’t come through changing our electoral system. Like Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and Caroline Lucas, I also say yes to fairer votes, and that’s exactly why I’ll be voting no to AV tomorrow.

Filed under: constitution, democracy, electoralreform, ukpolitics
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In 21st Century Britain, monarchy is faring rather better than democracy. As public trust in politicians sinks to new, unprecedented lows, the Royal Family is enjoying a weird and immensely tedious resurgence in popularity. I don’t know if these things are correlated. But, either way, they are pretty alarming signs of the times.

The upshot is that, whatever the precise, record-shredding viewing figures for the Royal Wedding turn out to be, we can be fairly confident that fewer than half that number will turn up a week later to vote in the most important UK referendum since 1975.

To some extent, the apathy is understandable. Local elections are dull enough as it is. With the additional turn-off of a meta-vote on a technical change to the voting system, it will be a wonder if anyone turns up at all. And given the lazy nastiness of the campaigning on both sides, a 0-0 draw would probably be a fair result.

Nevertheless, this referendum matters, because the consequences of a switch to AV would be noticeable and far-reaching. At bottom, the difference between the systems on offer is relatively simple: while First Past the Post favours the most popular candidate, the Alternative Vote favours the least unpopular. In most constituencies most of the time, the procedures will agree on the winner. But when they do part ways, it’s inoffensive, non-polarizing, middle-of-the-road candidates that stand to gain most from the inclusion of second and third preferences — at the expense of candidates who are popular but divisive.

Historically, the Liberal Democrats would have benefited enormously. Whether that’s still the case is anyone’s guess, since Clegg’s Lib Dems are anything but inoffensive and non-polarizing. With their poll rating still languishing in single figures, it’s not clear whether any amount of tinkering with the electoral system can save them from political annihilation.

So how to vote? Though both campaigns are making liberal use of the f-word, I’m afraid I see nothing inherently fairer about either system. Both are fair in a minimal sense: under either system, no one gets more than one vote in any given count, and all votes are worth the same. But neither system amounts to proportional representation, so those for whom “fair” means “proportional” should oppose both equally.

The choice, in a nutshell, is between two imperfect ways of aggregating preferences. By only considering first preferences, FPTP ignores the breadth of a candidate’s support among voters who prefer an alternative. By counting second and third preferences as full-blown votes in later rounds, AV ignores the extent to which voters actually want a candidate to win, prizing acceptability-to-most over desirability-by-anyone.

For what it’s worth, my gut feeling is that AV is a tiny bit better — a bit more likely to make people feel as though their vote counts, a bit less likely to leave them feeling bitter and disenfranchised. But it’s a leap in the dark, since the long-term consequences of a switch are extremely difficult to foresee. Above all else, I’m worried that, on the verge of a major referendum, the country’s collective attention seems a million miles away from the issues at stake. If AV arrives, it will arrive with little fanfare, and very little in the way of serious, informed discussion.

Filed under: democracy, electoralreform, jonathanbirch, ukpolitics
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(If you’re left wondering about the underscore in our URL, there’s someone tweeting about politics in County Clare, Ireland, who’s got in ahead of us. Bah.)

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When Edwina Currie visited Clare Politics in October, she donated a copy of Sarah from Alaska, which will soon be finding its way – autographed by its donor – into the Forbes Mellon Library. It gives a gripping account of the caffeine-fuelled chaos of the McCain/Palin campaign, which palpably fell apart in its final weeks of mutual recrimination, buck-passing and incompetence. Palin does not seem to have been well served by her staffers, though the blame for every major campaign cock-up – the Couric interviews, the scandalous cost of her wardrobe, the Sarkozy prank call – lies with her occasionally startling lack of common sense and her deep, deep naiveté. But when supported by organised staffers, with a little planning and preparation, Palin repeatedly pulled it out the bag – her game-changing RNC speech, her strong showing in debate against Joe Biden.

Palin has got where she is primarily because people continually underestimate her. She is determined, wilful, and charming, not to mention – a rare asset among American politicians – funny. She can deliver a knock-out speech, hold her own in debate, and she can connect and empathise with voters on the stump like no other politician around – because she isn’t like any other politician around. Palin doesn’t need to convince people that she’s an everywoman – she is one. It’s no act. The central preoccupations of Sarah Barracuda remain family, religion and sports.

Palin isn’t truly a conservative – as Alaska governor, she raised taxes more than once and can bash the corporations like a seasoned socialist. She is, rather, a populist, and her populist instincts make her a politician to be reckoned with. Her best sayings and slogans haven’t been the work of her staff – they’ve been hers. Her description of Obama’s health care committees as ‘death panels’ did more to turn Americans against the President’s proposals than anything O’Reilly, Limbaugh or any Republican legislator could come up with. She is, on occasion, inspired. Her nerve in running for local positions, like Mayor of Wasila, on pro-gun, anti-abortion platforms was audacious, and showed she does best when she follows her instincts. She is also, on occasion, perfectly willing to lie, as with the ‘death panels’ line, a paper-thin distortion, or her infamous, risible caricature of Obama ‘palling around with terrorists.’

Surely, she couldn’t win – could she? It is possible to run as the candidate of the Christian Right while also attracting moderates and independents – Reagan did it. But that was thirty years ago, and partisan politics in America has since become so much more entrenched and bloodthirsty. And to take a note from Lloyd Bentsen, Palin is no Ronald Reagan. Palin has not spent eight years as Governor of America’s most populous state. On the day of the 2008 election, 60% of exit poll respondents for Fox News described Palin as ‘unqualified’ to be President.

She’s not stupid. Ignorant, maybe, and naïve – though both far less so now than in 2008. But she has the canniest knack for coining phrases of any politician since Reagan. Her devastating question to Obama – ‘How’s that hopey-changey thing going for ya?’ – perfectly expressed the disappointment and disenchantment most Americans are feeling with a President who let expectations of what he could achieve soar as high as his rhetoric. Palin is a gifted communicator, and a proven executive. Could a self-proclaimed ‘hockey Mom’, who had never left North America until a few years ago, become President?

Becoming the leader of the free world is a step further from, say, the Terminator becoming Governor of California, or a shambolic, adulterous aristocrat becoming Mayor of London. But when one looks at the list of America’s Presidents in the last thirty years, do any of them seem, on paper, any less improbable? Jimmy Carter was widely perceived to be just as much of a hick as Palin. Gerald Ford was widely seen as unintelligent, Ronald Reagan as a religious nut reliant on his advisors, Bill Clinton as a cynical shyster, Obama as detached and partisan. Anyone who thinks an Evangelical, ignorant of other cultures, ignorant of economics, prone to foot-in-mouth gaffes and a hawkish, reactionary approach to foreign policy can’t get elected President has a 2000-2008 shaped hole in their memory. It is hard not to suspect that when Palin is denounced as unelectable because she is ‘unqualified’, people mean because she is a woman. The paradigms of being ‘Presidential’ in the United States are all resolutely gendered. Palin’s biggest handicap is not her intelligence – it’s her sex.

Could she still win? First, one must ask the bigger question – can Obama lose? The euphoria that swept the globe on his victory in 2008, and the hope that swelled during the weeks before his inauguration blind most people to the narrowness of his win, and his vulnerabilities. John McCain won more votes than Clinton in the 1990s or Bush in 2000. Obama won by a smaller margin than Clinton in 1996 or Bush Sr. in 1988, and came nowhere near the landslides won by the likes of Reagan, Nixon and Johnson. The race may not have been as tight as 2000 or 2004, but Obama still only won several key states by tiny margins – Florida by 2.8%, Ohio by 4.6%, Indiana by just 1%, Now both parties have so many states locked up from the start, the swing required to propel Obama from office would not have to be that big – indeed, it would only have to be the swing towards the Republicans seen in November’s Midterms.

But surely Palin is too divisive a figure to achieve this? The Republicans have many credible candidates they could nominate – pragmatic, likeable Southern Governors Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels, or Jeb Bush, a figure with name recognition matched only by Palin, and a ready-made ability to reclaim the coalition that won his brother two terms. The Republican Party would not have nominated McCain if it was hostage to the Tea Party, or to Evangelicals. But to defeat Obama, they need a candidate who can mobilise that base while also reaching out to the independents who voted for change in 2008 and feel that change has not come. Would those voters ever trust Palin?

It’s entirely plausible that they could. Every statement Palin makes over the next year will be breaking news on every TV network. Perceptions of a woman few Americans had heard of three years ago are still fluid. Her fame gives her a unique opportunity to craft her image, reach out to independents, and present herself as a credible alternative. Such are her political instincts, there is every possibility that she will make the most of this opportunity and enter 2012 looking ‘Presidential’. The real question is whether she wants to – whether she will be so comfortable with the adulation of the Tea Party that she will never risk alienating some of them to reach out to moderates, or whether she would be so enjoying her newfound fame and wealth that she couldn’t stomach the idea of a gruelling campaign.

But if she runs, if the populist mother-of-five from Alaska, the woman who confuses North and South Korea yet has done more damage to Obama over the last two years than any other Republican leader, runs for the White House – can she win?

Yes, she can.

Filed under: barackobama, election2012, johnmccain, sarahpalin
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We all love to hate bakers - in fact, we hate bankers more than we hate politicians, which is saying something. This will not, I promise, be an attempt to defend the risky, arrogant and immoral behaviour exemplified by the city’s best in the last few years. I, like most people, would love to see the Bob Diamonds of this world give up their exorbitant bonuses, and I’d love to see the boards of all the UK’s major banks accept massive pay cuts - the problem is, they won’t. It’s very easy to be angry at this fact, but there is a bigger and far more important issue at stake for the British banking sector.

Too much has been said and written about who, if anyone, was responsible for the recent baking crisis and recession. The time has come to stop focusing on the mistakes of the past and look at solutions for the present and the future. There can be no doubt that the behaviour of some bankers, not properly regulated by the government, contributed to our present economic problems, but, like it or not, Britain needs banks. Be it the thousands of people they employ, the millions they generate in tax revenue, or the loans they make to small businesses, banks are vital to our national economic survival.

It is these things that the coalition should be focusing on. Instead of trying in vain to stop big bonuses, they should be guaranteeing higher tax yields, more jobs and, most crucially, bigger loans from the banks. The government owns 84% of RBS and 43% of Lloyds, they have the power to introduce measures such as a transaction tax, and they have a moral duty to make banks comply with tax laws - these are strong bargaining chips with which to start. The size of executive bonuses pales into insignificance compared to the good that banks could do for the economy by paying more tax, employing more people and making bigger loans available to small companies.

To achieve these aims, we need to incentivise the best bankers to work in the UK, and, if that means paying them big bonuses, then it’s a sacrifice worth making. Rhetoric on bonuses is too often pious and destructive - the Labour Party has become very good at criticising the coalition’s lack of progress on reducing bonuses, but it was they who failed to ensure the government’s right to control the bonuses in banks they’d just bought a stake in; similarly, trade unions are very quick to call for bankers to be driven overseas by high taxes and no bonuses, but don’t seem to have recognise how many of their members would be unemployed if this happened.

Bankers are the easiest of targets, but are also the most vital of solutions to Britain’s economic problems. The government, the opposition, the unions, and the public need to start working with bankers to achieve what is in everyone’s interests - a smaller deficit and a healthy, growing economy. When we’re paying £120 million day on debt interest, and when millions are struggling to get jobs or start businesses, Bob Diamond’s reported £8 million bonus is a tiny drop in a very big ocean.

Filed under: business, deficit reduction, global financial crisis
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Trouble at the Mill?

One crucial detail seems to have failed to permeate the present analysis of the comments recorded by The Daily Telegraph from some Liberal Democrat Ministers.

It is the nature of politics for different elements of the truth to be emphasised at different times. The current controversy is an example of another important condition which shapes the version of the truth often heard from politicians. Essentially, the message is designed to target a particular audience; the version of the truth you hear sometimes depends on who you are.

In order to understand the significance of The Daily Telegraph’s scoop, therefore, the sentiments expressed by Vince Cable, Steve Webb and any others must be contextualised. Sitting in their constituency office, the Ministers were approached by, as I understand it, two young, female reporters who presented themselves as Lib Dem supporters. The Ministers are no doubt aware of anxiety towards the Coalition among the grass-roots, so would immediately have begun thinking of the message they needed to get across to keep these assumed activists on side. They owe their seats to left-of-centre Lib Dem voters. They had to convince what they saw as their people that they were still, despite the Conservative-led Coalition government, the same Lib Dem MPs they always were. They had to play to the gallery to keep their jobs.

It is inevitable that, in a coalition, there will be disagreements. As among any group, personalities, as well as principles and ideologies, will probably rub against one another. This conflict can be positive, and lead to public debate on the merits or otherwise of policy and strategy, free Ministers from the stranglehold of central control and, potentially, lead to better government. There are differences of opinion and necessary compromise in any administration, from which, if the compromises are in their view unsatisfactory, a Minister should resign to maintain their integrity, principles and credibility. 

The sentiments expressed in the recordings of the Ministers’ conversations are probably not without truth. Equally, however, they were influenced by the manner in which their interlocutors presented themselves. The Coalition will stay together, and should stay together, for as long as it acts in the broad national interest, as it has done since taking office. The recent episode may have revealed imperfect judgement on the behalf of the Ministers concerned, but they would be wrong to undermine the government by allowing themselves to be captured by narrow interests. Given the support the Coalition has and could probably muster in the face of a threat, the very voters they tried to please would not reward them for it.

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