The Virtual Stoa

Is it a problem that both John Prescott and Bhikhu Parekh are Baron INSERT NAME HERE of Kingston-upon-Hull? Or does it make the crucial difference that I always see hyphens in the news reports for Prescott (Kingston-upon-Hull) but not for Parekh (Kingston upon Hull)? Ought they to have a fight, or something, to settle the matter of who is going to receive loyalty oaths from local vassals, or have the Kingston-upon-Hull serf population work from time to time on their estates? (I am reasonably confident that Prescott would win that fight.) Are there other examples of places with multiple peers attached? And do the locals mind this kind of duplication? Questions, questions.

This year’s UK Eurovision entry was so forgettable that I have — less than 48 hours later — entirely forgotten it. It was sung by someone called Josh — I remember that bit — but I couldn’t tell you what it was called, or anything at all about how it went.

The Virtual Stoa, nine years old today.

The 1937 Buxton Liberal Party Assembly:

This Assembly of the Liberal Party, indignantly aware of the grossly unequal distribution of property in this country, believes that the greatest possible measure of personal ownership, with the independence and security it brings ought to be enjoyed by all. It also believes that the opportunities for a full life hitherto open only to the rich should be placed before all. It recognises these twin ends as the inspiration of its domestic policy and pledges its whole strength in urging them on the nation in far-reaching reforms to achieve them.

The 1959 Liberal Party Manifesto:

People Count . . . This traditionally private-enterprise country must pull together to bring about ownership for all.

Liberals want co-ownership and co-partnership schemes encouraged through tax-reliefs. They want special tax-free employee savings accounts schemes brought in. They want more people to be able to buy their own homes. Schedule A income tax and Stamp duty must be abolished. To encourage mobility of labour, Liberals want temporary unemployment allowances increased.

The February 1974 Liberal Party Manifesto:

To finance all these proposals, there must be a radical redistribution of income and inherited wealth, the credit income tax proposals being the principal instrument for the former, and the Liberal proposal for a Gifts and Inheritance Tax, to replace Estate Duty and related in its incidence and rate to the gift or legacy and the wealth of the recipient, for the latter.

Stuart White on the abolition of the CTF, over at Next Left: “a great liberal policy killed by the Liberal Democrats”.

Is there anything interesting to say about Andy Burnham, or anything to report that reflects well on him? He’s one of those people who has largely flown under my radar. I remember seeing him on telly a few years ago, when he was reasonably new in some not insignificant job or other, and being underwhelmed, but since I don’t really get my political news from the TV, and I don’t follow the minutiae of Government policy, he’s basically passed me by this last parliamentary term or so. So: any Andy Burnham-related thoughts and observations would be more than more than welcome.

UPDATE [25.5.10]: Jamie K has more.

Is it my imagination, or are there a lot more cupcakes around than there used to be?

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to a spam infestation at the Virtual Stoa, which was showing up in Google stuff — the search engine, its cache and in the Google Reader thingummy.

The exhortations to buy Vicodin and Cialis and the like were probably more stimulating than the actual content they replaced; nevertheless, in the interests of restoring the usual service, I’ve delved deep into the bowels of the WordPress installation, zapped a few lines of extremely dubious-looking code, killed a few files that popped up in the plug-ins folder that really oughtn’t to be there, wiped from the memory banks a couple of unauthorized users and, finally, changed the passwords. It was all quite a lot easier than I’d anticipated — I get a bit nervous in the face of MySQL databases. And so, with luck, that hack’s been dealt with.

But, just in case anything does recur, please could my vigilant readers report any further unusual sightings: I don’t use Google Reader (I’m a Bloglines man myself), so I don’t tend to notice it when my readers all drift off in search of new opportunities to purchase these valuable drugs.

J. A. G. Griffith, author of The Politics of the Judiciary, born 14 October 1918, died 8 May 2010.

If you were marking examination papers on nineteenth century British political history, what mark would you give someone who described the 1832 Reform Act in these terms?

[It was] landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests, who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.

And what comment might you be tempted to write in the margin?

It’s good to read in tehgraun that “some of Italy’s most senior police officers have been given jail sentences of up to five years for what the prosecution called a “terrible” attack on demonstrators at the 2001 G8 meeting in Genoa and an attempted cover-up”, though sad also to read that, as with so many criminal trials with political ramifications in Italy, statutes of limitations mean that jail sentences are unlikely to be served.

Someone who may very well be unhappy with these verdicts is Tony Blair. British readers may remember what his spokesman said at the time, when reports of police brutality were beginning to circulate: “The Italian police had a difficult job to do. The prime minister believes that they did that job.”

Over the fold is a bit of eye-witness testimony of the events in question, from my friend Uri Gordon, an Israeli anarchist and G8 protester, which I was privileged enough to be able to publish nine years ago in The Voice of the Turtle:

Read the rest of this entry »

Pinched from Hopi Sen, who grabbed it from the Downing St website:

Time to revisit some of the predictions I made before polling day, to see how they stack up in light of events…

Concerning the outcome, I wrote that “my hunch… is that the Tories are going to win fewer than 300 seats.” Well, they made it to over 300, though not by much, but what was really wrong with my guess at the Tory seat-count was that the assumptions I was working from proved to be quite wrong. I thought both that the Lib Dems would win all their seats, and make inroads into the Con-Lib marginals and that the Labour vote would be much less resilient in the Con-Lab marginals – and in the end things were the other way around: the Lib Dem “surge” failed to materialise, and in the end they lost ground to the Tories; while the Labour vote held up pretty well, and the party was able to hold on to 250+ of its seats.

Thinking about the prospect of a hung parliament, then, I said that I thought “a Tory minority government seems by far the most likely outcome”, and that a coalition government “seems implausible”. I gave three reasons: first, the parties hate one another; second, that the Lib Dems were an unbalanced formation, “with the activists to the left of the MPs, and the MPs to the left of the bulk of the Lib Dem voters”, and that this would work to paralyze the party in tricky political manoeuvrings; third, that the Lib Dems’ rules – the so-called “triple lock” – for ratifying a deal would mean that the other party leaders would be reluctant to try to deal with them.

Obviously, I was spectacularly wrong here, apparently on all three counts. First, there really doesn’t seem to be any significant animosity between the Tories and the Lib Dems, but rather the love-fest we’ve been witnessing over the last few days. Second, the initial analysis of data about how people voted seems to have more Lib Dem voters identifying with the centre-left rather than with points further right. (Though I still think that the votes the Lib Dems were chasing most energetically were right-of-centre votes in Lib-Con marginals.) And, third, as we saw today, the “triple lock” was terribly easy for the leadership to get through – I was following the #ldconf tweetfeed earlier today, and apart from one special conference delegate denouncing the coalition as an attack on the Welsh working class, there seemed to be general approval of the leadership’s behaviour, and achievements, over the last week-and-a-bit.

I think the clue to my general wrongness may come, though, in what I went on to get more or less right. I said that I thought that “if there’s a hung parliament, all the party bosses will be acting in a risk-averse kind of a way” as “they’ll all be nervous about a second general election”. But I was imagining that the Lib Dems would be gaining seats in the election, and that a Tory party that had failed to secure a majority would be unwilling to deal with a party that felt itself on an incoming tide. In fact, of course, the story of election night was Lib Dem failure, to the extent that the Lib Dems were sufficiently afraid of the prospect of that second general election that they were willing to countenance transforming themselves into, in effect, the left wing of the Conservative Party in order to avoid it. I thought that this kind of fear would get in the way of two parties making a deal; in fact (as Charles Kennedy confirmed in today’s Observer), it seems to be what made it possible.

Happily, my final paragraph of speculation proved to be spot on – “obviously it won’t turn out” as I forecast, I said, before going on to denounce three specific bits of punditry as fantasy politics: the prospect of a deal on PR, Clegg becoming Prime Minister, or the so-called “progressive alliance” beloved of the Toynbee tendency in the punditocracy. So, at least I got something right.

Like many other people, I thought Evan Harris was safe in Oxford West and Abingdon. There was a reason for thinking he might not be: the constituency boundaries had been redrawn to include less of Oxford and its student-heavy city centre, and more of the outlying Tory villages, but I was inclined to discount the importance of this. In general, the Lib Dems looked good in the polls, and, in particular, polling in marginals suggested that their vote was holding up well against the Tories. Harris’ majority was a healthy 7,683. And the Conservative candidate clearly looked like a bit of an idiot. So, as I say, I thought he was safe.

If I’d really thought he was in danger, I might have voted tactically on the day to try and save him. After all, I’m a not-terribly-tribal tribal Labour person (just as Andromache – who left a dead mouse in our bed this morning – is a not-terribly-wild wild animal). I voted in the Compass ballot to endorse the issuing of a statement in support of anti-Conservative tactical voting, and, more generally, I think the Lib Dems are a less toxic political formation than the Conservatives. If politics really were just about choosing between them, then it wouldn’t be difficult to choose.

But I voted Labour instead, and I learned later in the evening that – basically – it’s people like me who denied Harris his victory. Harris lost by a minuscule 176 votes, and there were almost six thousand Labour votes, so only 3% of those Labour supporters had to switch their votes, in order for him to be safe. And, as time passes, I’m more and more glad I cast the vote I did.

I’ve heard that on election day, the Lib Dems were sending their local activists into Oxford East to help defeat the local Labour MP Andrew Smith, thinking that Evan Harris had the OxWAb election in the bag. And Labour supporters in OxWAb who might be tempted to vote for the Lib Dems need to be clear about this. If we cast an effective anti-Tory tactical vote in this constituency by voting for Evan Harris, what we are doing is helping to provide support for the Lib Dem anti-Labour campaign in the next constituency along. It’s much better for the Labour Party in Oxford that OxWAb is highly marginal between the Lib Dems and the Tories, and that this constituency sucks in as much campaigning effort as possible from the Lib Dems, so that we can concentrate on the important stuff, like winning Oxford East and controlling the City Council. (And, yes, both goals were achieved in Thursday’s election.)

There’s a tweet going round that reads like this:

A curious statistic: Oxford’s combined vote: LD: 41087 Con: 33633 Lab: 27937. One Con MP, one Lab MP. #electoralreform

On the face of it, that’s not a bad argument in support of some kind of reformed voting system — and, in general, I support some kind of reformed voting system. But appearances can be misleading. The Lib Dem raw total, for example, includes both those Labour supporters who cast a tactical pro-Harris vote in OxWAb and those Tory and Green supporters who cast a tactical anti-Smith vote in Oxford East. And so on. We live in a system that encourages tactical voting, as first-choices will so often not be available – so it’s tricky to use the numbers thrown up by that system straightforwardly as evidence for its unfairness.

What we can say is that a set of elections were held on Thursday in Oxford – in two parliamentary constituencies and in every ward for the City Council. The parties fought the elections on the same terms as each other, and under the same rules, and all of the local parties had plausible aspirations: the bigger parties to win parliamentary seats, and the Greens to win seats on the City Council. Those local parties pursued particular tactics and strategies to try to maximise their electoral gains, and the choices they made shaped the outcome of those elections. And those elections threw up a very clear winner — the Labour Party — and a very clear loser — the Lib Dems. The Oxford Lib Dems misunderstood what was going on around them and they over-reached, making a set of bad political choices. They thought they could win everything, and instead they won nothing. And, yes, the voting system has punished them, but not – it seems to me – unfairly.

I’d reach for the language of hubris and nemesis, but these are the Lib Dems we’re talking about, and for them (especially today, of all days, as they engage in talks with the Tories to put David Cameron into Downing St) the appropriate language isn’t that of tragedy.

It’s comedy: hahahahahaha.

Over here.

[thanks! DC]

Votes in the Jericho & Osney ward here in Oxford have just been counted:

Susanna Pressel (Labour) 1793 votes ELECTED
Catherine Hilliard (Lib Dem) 769 votes
Bill Wilson (Conservative) 513 votes
Kaihsu Tai (Green) 311 votes.

And, once again, results in Oxford are going against the national trend, and it looks as if the local Labour party is going to be consolidating its grip on the City Council.

If you’re curious about why Andrew Smith held on comfortably in Oxford East (despite the fact that the Lib Dem challenger was really quite good) and the Lib Dems crashed and burned in OxWAb (where the Tory challenger was clearly bonkers), then Don Paskini has a very plausible explanation. It certainly rings true to me: in two decades or so of writing to MPs, Evan Harris has been easily the worst correspondent with whom I’ve ever had to deal, and constituents remember this kind of thing.