UK politics

Your Happening World (20)

Kittens!, Linky Linky, UK elections, UK politics, Video
Published on 1 Comment on Your Happening World (20)

The perfect Daily Express cover.

“Labour is facing a deep crisis that threatens its survival as a party of power, Ed Milibandwill be warned, on Wednesday as he is told to avoid the “politics of protest” and to focus on establishing political credibility.” Better not rock the boat Ed, or your masters might get upset. Play the game using the proper rules and don’t get so uncouth as to actually take it seriously.

The humilation of the Yes campaign: an analysis of why the AV Yes campaign failed, from a supporter: “From the outset, the YES campaign was all about the tiny coterie of people who feel strongly about electoral reform. The emphasis was on these people “having fun” and being invited to comedy evenings. In email after email from the YES campaign, the quirky behaviour of this “producer set” was celebrated and the “consumer set” ignored. So, some bunch of local activists who had written the letters Y, E and S in big letters on a beach were hailed as creative geniuses. Others were highlighted for running a particularly successful street stall. From the point of view of any observer, it was all about “them”(the micro-percentage of constitutional reform obsessives) never about “us” (the people). None of this self-indulgent madness won a single vote for the YES side, but it probably lost thousands.” OUCH!

One example of why any political activist should stay away from Facebook. It has been very good at conning people into thinking Facebook is just like the Internet, but you’re at the mercy of an unsympathetic commercial entity that’d rather you’d Farmvilled. Real activists get their own servers.

Clearing out the weeks old tabs on my browser, here are two articles on the Bristol Stoke Croft riots from OpenDemocracy: an eyewitness account and an analysis of how the police and media spun it.

Read all your links? Then have a kitten as a treat:



Yet Clegg does speak Dutch…

UK elections, UK politics
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Daniel Davies analyses the LibDem’s failings:

This is, to a large extent, why the vote share has collapsed. The median LibDem voter between about 2002 and 2010 was quite likely someone who believed (sensibly, a respectable case could certainly be made for this) that they were to the Left of Labour. Their signature policy was a hypothecated income tax increase for education, along with did-they-or-didn’t-they opposition to the Iraq War. Now, their electoral support consists of electoral reform trainspotters, about a dozen people who read the Orange Book and daydream about being Gerhard Schroeder, plus that part of the West Country that doesn’t get regular newspapers and believes that it is still voting for Gladstone. They have lost precisely that set of voters who they have spent the last year more or less intentionally losing.

Had Clegg made use of his Dutch heritage other than flattering Dutch newsmedia by talking to them in their own language, he could’ve boned up on the example of D66, like the LibDems a centrist party in some aspects to the left of the (Dutch) Labour Party. in the Dutch system coalition governments are of course the standard rather than the exception and D66 has had long experience with the opportunities and perils they offer.

D66 always has troubles in government because while usually the centre of a coalition, it’s also the smallest party, caught between two bigger ones with more opportunities to let their own voice be heard. So you’d have the CDA or VVD on the right fighting their corner, the PvdA on the left doing the same and D66 being crushed in the middle. As a rule of thumb, government participation leads to losing the next election. D66 knows this and therefore is careful to get something back for it; when they don’t and let the desire to be in government overrule their principles, they get punished even harder for it. Luckily for them the Dutch voter is more forgiving than the British and they have usually been able to quickly rebuild their following once back in opposition. Even so the party has been careful in getting concrete results in return for their support.

Something the LibDems forgot. If the best you can do is to get a referendum on a voting system you don’t actually want yourself, you haven’t really bargained all that well. Had I been Nick Clegg my two set in stone demands would’ve been getting the ministery of finance and getting a vote in parliament for proportional representation. It was the Tories who needed the LibDems, not the other way around. Instead Clegg traded everything for a chance to feel important and is now paying the price. Had he paid attention to Holland, he would’ve known better.

LibDem Fail

UK politics
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To start this post off, let’s look at the valiant effort one Andrew Hickey made a few weeks before last Thursday’s UK local elections/AV referendum, to defend the LibDem’s record in government by listing all the things it has done right. I won’t fisk it line by line, but if you look at it it’s all either penny ante stuff, or things the LibDems supposedly stopped their Tory partners from doing, but of course had the Liberals not enabled them in the first place to form a government, these plans couldn’t have been made in the first place…

It doesn’t weight up to the simple fact that the LibDems made possible the government that is busy slashing the welfare state through ideologically driven budget cuts, justified by the supposed need to get rid of an “unsupportedable” government debt to restore confidence in the economy. Child benefit frozen, housing benefits capped much lower, council housing rights changed from life to fixed terms, the chucking out of disabled and chronically ill people off the disability living allowance, freezing of public sector workings and cutting public sector jobs, cuts in pensions — all far outweight the supposed benefits the LibDems brought to the coalition government.

And now…

One of the entries on Hickey’s list is “Apart from protecting the NHS from Andrew Lansley” — not quite:

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:

* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.

* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.
* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.

* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.

* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.

* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.

* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.

The Sunday Telegraph found the details of hundreds of cuts buried in obscure appendices to lengthy policy and strategy documents published by trusts. In most cases, local communities appear to be unaware of the plans.

The Tories are still targeting the pillars of the welfare state and the LibDems enabled them to do so. Whether, as Lenny argues this is out of ideological concerns or, as I suspect, is just because the people at the top just like being in government is irrelevant. That’s why the LibDems got hammered in the local elections last Thursday, that’s why the AV vote went so disastrously wrong for the Yes camp, that’s even why the SNP won big in Scotland as the LibDem vote there switched over. Tories are Tories and nobody expected better of them, but people trusted the LibDems — no longer.

How the Tories/LibDems are dumping the disabled

UK politics
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Thanks to legislation introduced by Labour, the Tories and LibDems are now able to move almost a million people off disability benefits and onto much lower paying unemployment benefits, if any. Under the guise of getting people back into work, this is an another cynical move to cut spending as the jobs just aren’t there:

Half of those found fit for work are expected to move onto Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA); 30% will move onto another benefit; 20% will stop claiming altogether. In total, this Government is planning to move nearly one million people into the labour market over the next five years. The number of job vacancies in the first quarter of 2011 was just below 500,000 while nearly 2.5 million people were unemployed (including 1.45 million claiming JSA). When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith claims there are enough jobs for everybody, he is wrong by a factor of five. On top of this, the number of people thrown off ESA is set to push the JSA claimant count past two million and total unemployment past three million.

It reminds me all very much of what happened here in the Netherlands when our disability benefits system was deemed too expensive, after years of having it used by employers to cheaply dump unwanted employees. But that was in the somewhat more benign economic climate of the nineties. I’m not sure it actually saved the state any money in the long run, but it sure transferred a lot of money from people on benefits to all kind of dodgy “re-integration bureaus” helping them “get back into working habits”. But it wasn’t all bad: at least some lucky duckies found gainful employment as “eggroll corner folders”!

No to AV: cake now rather than cake later

UK elections, UK politics
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Or, any benefits of getting AV are speculative, but destroying Clegg’s career is an immediate payoff:

It seems to me that the AV system itself is highly unattractive, that all the possible benefits which might accrue as a result of it are really quite speculative and far-future things, with very considerable potential to go wrong (after all, the implementation of AV in Australia 93 years ago does not seem to have generated much momentum toward a more proportional system).

The benefit of destroying Nick Clegg’s political career, however, seems reasonably immediate and certain, and the possibility of putting an end to the Liberal Democrats as a party looks achievable enough to be worth a try. I don’t actually think it’s necessarily irrational at all to vote No out of Clegg-hate.