Pub Philosopher

The promised curbs on immigration - don't hold your breath!

In July I did a back-of-the-fag-packet calculation and estimated that the government's proposed immigration cap would only cut immigration by 36,000. Looks like I was way over-generous. Parliament's Home Affairs Committee reckons that, "the reduction in overall gross immigration would amount to 0.9%."  That's just over 5,000.

Why? Because non-EEA economic migrants account for only 17 percent of all immigration. Cutting that doesn't affect any of the other 83 percent. Professor David Metcalf summed up the problem:

[Y]ou've got three routes in: you've got work, study and family. You've got three groups: British, EU, non-EU. So you've got nine cells and we're only dealing with one of those cells.

The immigration cap is like putting a dam part way across a river.

The report said that the government had no chance of making significant cuts in immigration unless it reduced the number student visas and restricted family reunion rights.

This Home Office report, published in September, found that, of those entering the country in 2004, 55% of those coming to the UK on family reunion visas had been granted settlement by 2009. For those admitted to the UK to work, the figure was only 29%. In other words, although fewer people enter the UK for family reasons, they are much more likely to stay. Those who come to work tend to stay for a couple of years then go home.

But restricting family reunion rights presents the government with a problem. Foreigners who want to come here to work can't vote so it's easy to place restrictions on them. Those who want to come here to join their families have relatives in the UK. Those relatives can vote and are capable of kicking up a fuss.

As the Guardian's Alan Travis noted just after the election:

The limit is carefully worded to refer to non-EU economic migrants to reassure minority ethnic groups that it will not cover the much larger numbers coming to Britain for family reunion purposes.

In response to the Home Affairs Committee's report, Theresa May promised "fast and decisive action" while avoiding giving any details.

The so-called cap on immmigration was no more than an electoral stunt to enable the Conservatives to beat Labour up while disguising their lack of enthusiasm for any serious restrictions. All it does is inconvenience a few businesses and a few thousand would-be migrants, while doing very little to cut the number of people coming into the UK each year. If past experience is anything to go by, Theresa May's fighting talk is probably just another cover story.

Dancing at Whitsun

You might think it's the wrong time of year for a post with this title but all should become clear if you read on.

I usually write something at this time of year in remembrance of those who sacrificed youth, health, limbs and lives to keep the rest of us safe from harm. This time, though, I'm taking a slightly different angle on Armistice Day.

One of the most thought-provoking blog posts I have read was written by Alison a couple of years ago, about the impact that the First World War had on the women who were left behind:

One hazy morning in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School For Girls stood up in front of the assembled sixth form and announced to her hushed audience:

"I have come to tell you a terrible fact."  Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact. "Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can. "The war has made more openings for women than there were before. But there will still be a lot of prejudice. You will have to fight. You will have to struggle."

Sitting in the assembly hall among her shocked and silent schoolfellows was 17-year-old Rosamund Essex. She was never to forget those chilling words, recalling: "It was one of the most fateful statements of my life." When Rosamund, who never married, wrote her memoirs 60 years later she accepted that her teacher's pronouncement had been prophetic. "How right she was," she recalled. "Only one out of every ten of my friends has ever married."

As Alison says, this gender imbalance played no small part in the development of what would later become known as feminism. Sisters had to do it for themselves because there would be no men to provide for them.

Many of these women had lost husbands and fiancés in the war but, far from being offered sympathy, they were reviled and met with prejudice, fear and spite. 

When I was a child, there were a lot more old women around than old men of the same age, simply because many of the men had never made it beyond their early twenties.

I was reminded of this when my wife played me Dancing at Whitsun by Tim Hart. The song was written in 1967 by Austin John Marshall, husband of Shirley Collins, the godmother of English folk music. He tells the story here:

Many of the old ladies who swell the membership lists of Country Dance Societies are 1914/18 war widows, or ladies who have lost fiancés and lovers. Country dancing kept the memory of their young men alive. When Shirley Collins started singing the piece to the tune of The False Bride, the impact was disturbing, for many people in audiences identified with it. Tears were frequent.

At the burial of the unknown warrior, ninety years ago today, there was an outpouring of emotion the like of which Britain had never seen. The congregation in Westminster Abbey was made up mostly of bereaved women. In that coffin could have been anyone's brother, husband, fiancé or son.

On this Armistice Day, I'm remembering those who fell but also sparing a thought for those women who were left behind to dance on their own.

Here, then, is Dancing at Whitsun. The lyrics and some background on the unofficial "club" of First World War widows, who danced in memory of their lost loves, is on this page.

  

 

Vodafone protests outflank the left

Seemingly out of nowhere a movement against corporate tax avoidance has sprung up. On Wednesday, a group of about 70 protesters closed Vodafone's Oxford Street store and today, a number of Vodafone's outlets around the country have been picketed.

Although mainstream left-wing groups are now involved in the protests, they did not initiate or organise them. As this New Statesman article explains, these protests were  as much of a surprise to the left as they were to Vodafone.

The first thing to note about this protest is that it has been organised only slightly more efficiently than a French farce: the young people currently squatting determinedly in the doorway of the Vodafone store were mobilised via Facebook and Twitter with real names and the intended target freely discussed, and by the time more experienced activists had intervened to give basic security advice, it was too late.

This is not just the usual troublemakers making the usual nuisance of themselves. They are very young, they are very resolute, and they are certain that the left's usual response just won't cut it anymore.

Tax avoidance by powerful individuals and international companies has been going on for years. The left has moaned about it occasionally but never really organised any serious campaign against it. But then, the British left abandoned the economic war years ago, preferring instead to concentrate on cultural issues.

Last time we had a major tax avoidance story, much bigger than the Vodafone one, the lefty press and bloggers hardly covered it at all. When American bank Merrill Lynch shovelled $29bn of its losses on US sub-prime mortgages into its UK subsidiary, there was barely a murmur from the left. This financial jiggery-pokery ensured that Merrill Lynch's highly profitable London operation would not have to pay UK corporation tax for decades. Every year, when the bank's UK arm makes a profit, it can pretend it has made a loss by offsetting its US sub-prime garbage against its UK profits.

When I posted on this at the time, I also commented on the lack of outrage from the left.

A trawl of my favourite left-ish sites found no mention of this scandal.  The Liberal Conspirators, judging by the comments traffic, are mostly worried about right-wing attacks on Obama, foundation schools and whether the Greens can beat the BNP. Bob Piper and Neil Harding are too busy having a go at Cameron.  Nothing either from Justin, Norm, Sunny, Brockley Bob or the Bloggers for Labour.  Even Oliver Kamm, who claims to be a leftie and, as a former investment banker, might have had something to say about this, is silent. At the very least, I would have expected an acerbic 'Merrill Lynch are thieving cunts' type of comment from Pigdogfucker.

Where is the left-wing outrage when you need it?

The left is still capable of mobilising groups of activists against things it doesn't like but, again, they seem to prefer the cultural rather than the economic battles. Palestine, the rights of asylum seekers and journalists saying horrid things about gay people will get the left out onto the streets. And, of course, the nasty Beeee Ennnn Peeee always draws a crowd. But corporations taking the piss out of our tax system? Naah!

Such was the legacy of New Labour. Peter Mandelson once said that he was relaxed about people getting filthy rich. One investment banker friend of mine summed up the regime thus:

The City can do whatever it likes, provided that it has the right equality and diversity policies in place.

The British left was always an uneasy alliance between working class socialism and middle class liberalism or, as one Labour party member I know put it:

The deal was that Hampstead got gay rights and Halifax got trade union rights. 

Over the last couple of decades, Hampstead set the left-wing agenda while Halifax was cut adrift. Trendy metropolitan causes became the left's main focus and the grievances of the working class were ignored.

But now a bunch of unknowns, pissed off at reports in Private Eye and, of all places, the Daily Mail's money site, have organised a campaign against the corporate tax-dodgers and the left is having to play catch-up. Cuts to pay and benefits, the results of a recession brought on by the antics of the super-rich, have created a growing sense of injustice. Stories about corporations dodging their taxes just add to the sense of unfairness. Rather than wait for the established left to take action, some outraged citizens have taken matters into their own hands.

Big corporations have been getting away with the most outrageous behaviour for long enough and they are still at it. This backlash is well overdue. As the report in the New Statesman said, people got fed up with waiting for the left to challenge these practices. Eventually, if discontent is not given a political voice, it will burst out somewhere else. Vodafone has been the first to experience this anger. It probably won't be the last.

Is aggressive secularism threatening Christianity?

The Christmas-is-cancelled stories have come early this year thanks to the Bishop of Rome's claim that Christmas is under threat from aggressive secularists. He didn't actually mention Winterval in any of his speeches but that hasn't stopped the tabloids from reviving this hackneyed old story. It is over ten years old now but remarkably persistent.

The truth is that Birmingham City Council never did try to rename Christmas. As an exasperated press officer from the council explained to Oliver Burkeman:

"We get this every year," a press officer sighs, eventually. "It just depends how many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it's bollocks, but it doesn't seem to make much difference."

According to an official statement from the council, Winterval - which ran in 1997 and 1998, and never since - was a promotional campaign to drive business into Birmingham's newly regenerated town centre. It began in early November and finished in January. During the part of that period traditionally celebrated as Christmas, "there was a banner saying Merry Christmas across the front of the council house, Christmas lights, Christmas trees in the main civil squares, regular carol-singing sessions by school choirs, and the Lord Mayor sent a Christmas card with a traditional Christmas scene wishing everyone a Merry Christmas".

None of this stops the story being repeated by journalists and bloggers desperate to show that Christianity is under threat from some sort of secularist conspiracy.

A typical example is this ill-informed post from Cranmer, one of the most widely read religious blogs. He claims:

Pope Benedict XVI comes to the United Kingdom at a time when the Christian conscience is besieged, the national church cowed and our liberties undermined in ways they have not been for centuries. 

He then reels off a series of tabloid stories which show how Christians have been victimised just for being Christians. However, like the Winterval story, when you did a bit deeper you find that these stories are a little more complicated.

Take Duke Amachree sacked, so Cranmer would have us believe, for mentioning God. In fact, Mr Amachree was dismissed for gross misconduct after he released confidential information to the press. The dismissal was upheld by an employment tribunal.

Then there was Jennie Cain, the school receptionist apparently threatened with disciplinary action after complaining that her daughter had been told off in class for talking about Jesus. The school's version of events was somewhat different:  Mrs Cain's daughter had told another child she would go to hell for not believing in God. The teacher had told her off for doing so. Mrs Cain then sent out an email to other parents in which she attacked the school and individual members of staff.

Any organisation would discipline an employee for circulating emails making allegations about other employees, regardless of the reason for doing so.

Unfortunately, we will never know the full facts of this case because both parties chose to settle out of court. But this case is more complex than those who peddle the Christian persecution myth would have us believe and is certainly not a clear cut case or religious discrimination.

Cranmer, and the Daily Mail, claimed that teacher Olive Jones was sacked for offering to pray for a sick pupil. Again, there is more to this story. Mrs Jones wasn't sacked; she was invited to a meeting to discuss a complaint from the parents of the pupil. She chose to interpret this invitation as a dismissal. According to the sick child's parents, Mrs Jones wasn't simply offering to pray either. They alleged that, on a number of occasions, after being repeatedly asked not to, Mrs Jones upset  their daughter by asking her to pray. In the event, far from being sacked for her behaviour, Mrs Jones was allowed to return to work with little more than a mild rebuke.   

And what of Caroline Petrie the nurse suspended for offering to pray for a patient? She was reinstated less than two months later and the disciplinary action against her dropped. This case looks like a misinterpretation of the law by over-zealous managers, which is understandable when you look at the sheer complexity of the religious discrimination legislation brought in by the last Labour government.

The claim that there is a significant level discrimination against Christians in the workplace doesn't stand up to scrutiny. In almost all of the cases where Christians have been dismissed or disciplined, they have been standing on their rights and kicking up a fuss to the point where they have breached their contracts of employment. Employers, themselves often unsure of the law, have been over-accommodating, instead of giving these troublemakers the short-shrift they deserve.

If anything, the aggression is not coming from secularists; it is coming from sanctimonious religious zealots who demand special treatment based on their strongly-held religious beliefs. Muslims were the first to make these demands and Christians have decided to jump on the bandwaggon too.

The Labour government must carry some of the blame for this. By extending anti-discrimination legislation to religion, it created a new set of contradictory and competing legal rights.  Inevitably, those who want to make a political or religious point seize on these laws and use them to make trouble in the workplace. Sometimes managers, understandably confused by the law and fearing litigation, make the wrong call. All this leads to a series of increasingly absurd court cases and a headache for employers.  

Christianity is not under threat from officialdom either. Like the religious discrimination stories, the scares about councils banning Christmas have little substance behind them. It is highly likely that some councils will not put on Christmas displays and events this year but that decision will be driven by of spending cuts rather than any secularist mission to eradicate Christmas. 

None of this will stop the Ban-on-Christmas stories appearing again over the next few months nor the claims of anti-Christian harassment next time some priggish harridan has a hissy fit about her faith in an office full of long suffering colleagues. There is no organised campaign against Christianity in this country but a persecution myth serves the interests of religious groups who want special treatment at the expense of everyone else.

Don't burn the Koran and don't ban the mosque

Americans may argue about the detail of their country's founding principles but high on the list, surely, must be freedom of expression, freedom of worship and property rights. Pastor Terry Jones is, therefore, well within his rights to buy books and set fire to them, whether they be copies of the Koran, the Bible, Grimm's Fairy Tales or Tony Blair's memoirs. Likewise, Muslims in New York are entitled to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. Subject to the usual planing and building regulations, if they own the land they can build whatever they like on it. To stop either Terry Jones from burning his books or Feisal Abdul Rauf from building his mosque would violate some of America's core values. No-one has the right not to be offended and that includes Muslims and people who resent the building of a mosque in downtown New York.

Having said that, burning books is a very stupid and childish thing to do. Like burning flags, it's the sort of behaviour we expect from ignorant and superstitious people, or excitable crowds whipped up by the tyrannical rulers of basket-case countries to divert attention from their own failings. Taking offence at the mildest insult, then burning everything in sight, is not the behaviour of  a civilised and self-confident people. It's what they do, not what we do.

I have defended people's right to insult Islam dozens of times on this blog but the Koran burning threat is not like the Danish Cartoons or the Fitna film. These drew attention to the effective censorship of legitimate criticism and satire by threats of violence from Muslim radicals. Burning Korans, by contrast, is just a gratuitous insult.

By supporting the burning of Korans and demanding the banning of the New York mosque, sections of the American right are abandoning some of their country's, and western democracy's, core principles. The banning of places of worship and the burning of books are activities hitherto confined to the darkest and most backward parts of the world. America is a civilised country; it is above that sort of thing.

Notting Hill Carnival passes off peacfully

Well that's the official line anyway.

The World Weary Detective has a somewhat different view.

Being pro-invasion is soooo last decade

John Prescott's dismissal of opposition to the Iraq war as 'fashionable' led to an angry response from Sunny Hundal and others on Twitter. At the time of the invasion, though, opposition to the war was less fashionable than it is now. As these YouGov statistics show, in 2003, more people supported the invasion than were against it. Like many other things, opposition to the war has only become fashionable in retrospect.

In 1976, the Sex Pistols played their first Manchester concert at the Free Trade Hall. Andy Kershaw once quipped that if everyone who says they were there really was there, they would have had to hold the gig at Maine Road. The famous gig and its I-was-there cult is now the subject of a book.

In a similar vein, a friend of mine who is a few years older than me commented on her generation's collective amnesia about glam rock:

It's hard to find anyone of my age who admits to being into glam rock in the early seventies. Everyone says they were into Motown all along, which is really strange because Slade, the Sweet and Gary Glitter regularly topped the charts while a lot of the Motown stuff never really did much. Someone must have been buying those records and going to those gigs but you'll be pushed to find anyone who admits it now.

That's how it goes with fashion. When something becomes hip, people try to pretend they were into it all the time.When something becomes unfashionable, everyone wants to forget it. And so it goes with our attitudes to the Iraq war. Suddenly, there are loads of people around who were against it right from the start.

The anti-war marches are a bit like that early Sex Pistols gig. It seems that everybody who was anybody was there.

You hear people say, "I marched against the war," or "I was vehemently opposed to the invasion." 

"Were you?" I think to myself. "I don't remember you saying much about it at the time."

Being in favour of the war is now about as fashionable as being into glam rock. It's hard to find many people who will actually admit to it, even though sixty percent of the population backed the invasion at one point.

Something similar is happening to our view of the war in Afghanistan for which there was overwhelming support at the time. Again, there are now a lot of people around who claim to have been against it all along.

Don't get me wrong, I've no objection to people changing their minds. I have sort-of changed my mind about the invasion of Iraq. What annoys me is people pretending they never backed military action when they were saying something entirely different eight years ago.

As with fashion, when it comes to support for the war people like to re-write their own histories. They claim to have been somewhere else at the time, wearing different clothes listening to different music and hanging out in different places.

Well, I admit that I supported the Iraq invasion in 2003. Then again, in the early seventies, I spent my pocket money on Slade and Gary Glitter singles too.

Cameron's plan will only restrict immigration by 36,000

For a time during the election I thought we might get an honest debate about immigration. The politician who came closest to honesty during the debates was Nick Clegg. I don't agree with his proposed solution, an amnesty for illegal immigrants, but at least he was prepared to talk about the numbers, some 900,000, and the fact that there is very little we can do about them.

Unfortunately, whenever he raised the issue, David Cameron and Gordon Brown shouted him down for being soft on immigration and boasted about how tough they were going to be. Compare this wishy-washy amnesty with our butch and macho cap on immigration, said David Cameron. Well, OK, he didn't quite say that but that was the message we were meant to hear.

And many of us bought it. The media certainly did. But now it seems that the immigration cap is not quite as tough as we thought it was going to be. Firstly, it only covers people applying to work in the UK. In the year to 31 March 2010, 214,345 non-EEA nationals were allowed to settle in the UK. Of those, only 42% were allowed in for work purposes. (See the Home Office quarterly immigration statistics.) So, even if the cap on employment-related immigration could be implemented, it would affect fewer than half of the immigrants. It's rather like putting a dam halfway across a river.

Even the cap on work permits is running into trouble though. It seems that multi-national companies are not covered. They can still bring in whoever they like. The World Trade Organisation's General Agreement on Trade in Services prevents governments from restricting intra company transfers. 30,000 people were brought into the UK by large companies last year and this figure is expected to rise as the economy improves.  So if you subtract that from the 90,000 people allowed in for employment purposes, Mr Cameron's cap on immigration actually amounts to getting the remaining figure of 60,000 down to 24,100. That's a reduction of 36,000 out of the original 214,345 - about 16%.

Of course, this  may be watered down further by whatever concessions Mr Cameron makes to the Indian government and it still doesn't answer Nick Clegg's challenge about what you do with the 900,00o illegal immigrants already here or the 450,000 backlog of asylum seekers.

For the fact is, we can't send most of them back to where they came from. The UN convention on refugees prevents the UK from deporting people who would be at risk from persecution. Because of the sort of countries that they come from, many immigrants can make a convincing case that deportation would mean torture or death. That's why so many asylum cases drag on through the legal system. If the asylum seekers are gay, their right to stay here is pretty much a done deal.

By drawing attention to the UK's 900,000 illegal immigrants, Nick Clegg could have sparked a debate about why it was so difficult to find them and return them to their countries of origin. Instead, though, the other party leaders closed the discussion down with their macho posturing.

The debate we should have been having is about all the treaties we have signed over the years which effectively prevent us from restricting immigration. It's not just the EU agreements allowing free movement of people across Europe. We have also signed up to treaties which oblige us to allow family reunions, to grant asylum to people claiming to be fleeing from persecution, to allow multi-nationals to bring whoever they want into the UK and which stop us from deporting many of our illegal immigrants. Once in governmemt, most politicians come to understand this, which is why they have been quietly letting illegal migrants settle in the UK for years.

The government is left with very little room to manoeuvre. All it can do is reduce the number of immigrants by around 36,000. A drop in the ocean.

So much for the cap on immigration

Remember the Tories tough policy on immigration?

The good news is that the policy has made it into the Coalition's new Programme for Government.

The bad news is that it was never that tough in the first place. The Guardian has rumbled it:

The limit is carefully worded to refer to non-EU economic migrants to reassure minority ethnic groups that it will not cover the much larger numbers coming to Britain for family reunion purposes.

Throughout the election campaign, David Cameron was always careful to make sure he referred to a cap on the number of economic migrants, not the number of immigrants.

In truth, this is not a cap on immigration at all, it is just a cap on the annual number of work permits.

People will still be able to come here to rejoin their families or to study at the London School of Asylum and Benefit Fraud. Asylum seekers will still arrive here then vanish without trace. Many of those who are caught will stay in the UK by exploiting our legal system, which can prevent even the most dangerous foreign nationals from being deported.

But that's OK because the government is really going to clamp down on the people who play by the rules and apply for work permits.

Deficit Juke Box - Geddes Axe

A few recent articles have harked back to the 1920s when a coalition government reduced a large public sector deficit through severe cuts in spending. The programme was led by Sir Eric Geddes, and it became known as the Geddes Axe.

That reminded me that there was a heavy metal band around in the early 1980s called Geddes Axe. There can't be many bands names after government initiatives. I suspect they came up with it when they were messing about in a school history lesson trying to decide what to call their new band.

Geddes Axe have long since disappeared but here are a couple of their singles with strangely appropriate titles: Sharpen Your Wits and The Day The Wells Ran Dry.

 

 

Labour would be mad to cling to power

There are rumours going around this morning that a deal between Labour the Lib-Dems and others might still be possible. There is even talk of the party dumping Gordon Brown just to do a deal and stay in power.

I find it difficult to take any of this seriously. Such a ramshackle coalition would see a continuation of the slow bleeding to death that Labour has been going through since the collapse of Northern Rock. As I said yesterday, Labour avoided a complete meltdown on Thursday. Next time it may not be so lucky. Desperately clinging to power with a series of shabby deals might try the patience of those voters who gave the party the benefit of the doubt last week. 

I can believe that a few senior politicians in the older generation might want such a deal. For them it would be their last chance of political power. But surely for the younger MPs, their best hope is to dump Gordon Brown as soon as they can. It is almost impossible to re-vitalise a political party while it is in government. A spell in opposition would give Labour time to renew itself and prepare for the next general election.

Indeed, being in opposition might be quite a lot of fun over the next two years. What better way to ease a new leader into the job than to start with the relatively simple task of attacking David Cameron as he tries to introduce unpopular spending cuts? Beating up a minority government and prizing open the cracks between the Tories and Liberal Democrats - or even the cracks between the Tories and the Tories- would be a laugh a minute and a great way of restoring the Labour Party's mojo.

Rather than being desperate for a deal with the Lib Dems, most Labour Party members must be praying for the Conservative-Liberal pact to succeed, or for David Cameron to form a minority government. That would be their quickest route back to power.

The Labour, Liberal and God knows who else coalition is a fantasy of a few old Guardian hacks and, perhaps, a few far-sighted Tories who realise how damaging it would be for Labour. Most Labour activists must know that the game is up, at least for the time being, and will surely reject such a deal.

I will go for a trawl around the leftie blogs later today to see what they are all saying but, if the Labour Party has any sense, it won't touch this deal with a barge pole. 

Why Labour won all those council seats

I've been trying to get my head round the seemingly contradictory national and local election results. How, I wondered, could Labour have been hammered at the polls but still have gained 420 councillors and won control of some high profile councils?

In my part of London, for example, a Tory authority that was rated as the Best Achieving Council by the Municipal Journal, and which even some local lefties quietly conceded had been doing a good job, was re-taken by Labour. It was a similar story in many other London boroughs.

It wasn't until I was sitting in the pub last night that the penny dropped. Labour did even worse in the 2006 local elections than it did on Thursday.

All the London councils and many of the metropolitan ones were elected in 2006 when the share of the vote was:

Conservative - 39%

Labour - 26%

Lib Dem - 25%

These elections took place a year after the Labour government's re-election, by which time hostility to Tony Blair had reached a peak. David Cameron, on the other hand, had only been Tory leader for five months and was still very much in a honeymoon period with his party and the electorate. As a result Labour lost 319 councillors and 17 councils.

In comparison, Thursday was nowhere near as bad for Labour and not as good for their opponents. Labour's share of the vote was three points up, the Tories' three points down and the Lib Dems' two points down. Some of the Labour voters who, in 2006, abandoned their party for the others, or simply stayed at home, turned out for Labour again last Thursday. It was this that saved Gordon Brown from total disaster and helped Labour to regain many of its lost council seats.

It would be dangerous to read too much into these results. People vote differently when they know they are choosing a government and that then influences how they vote in any local elections that are held at the same time. Even so, neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems did as well last week as they did in May 2006.  

One thing is certain, though, Labour is down but it is not out. It might be a bit early to say that the Labour fightback has begun but local election successes are a good platform from which to rebuild the party's morale and its cadres of local activists. I said last weekend that writing off the Labour Party was premature. Lib Dem fantasies about replacing it as the main opposition to the Tories have proved to be just that.

Reading some of the discussion threads on Conservative-leaning websites, I get the impression that many Tory supporters think that a second election in a year or so will be a done deal, finally providing the party with its overall majority. I wouldn't be so sure. While it is true that the Conservatives can easily out-spend their rivals that might not be enough to guarantee victory. By then, Labour will have elected a new leader. That alone will attract back some of its lost support. The nightmare scenario for David Cameron would be an early election, called in the hope of securing a Tory majority, delivering yet another hung parliament.

Electronic voting - the end of the secret ballot

I was waiting for this to happen.

Apparently, the hundreds of voters locked out of polling stations on Thursday are proof that our Victorian voting system is at breaking point. The answer, inevitably, is e-voting along with the equally predictable claims that internet and text voting would encourage more participation.

BULLSHIT!

Let's take the first of these assertions. Our Victorian voting system did not buckle under the weight of a huge voter turnout. Sixty-five percent of the electorate voted. That is still well down on the 1997 turnout and derisory when compared to most of the elections since the Second World War. Even in those constituencies where people were unable to vote, the turnout was rarely above the low seventies, a level we used to regard as normal.

The Telegraph has a list of the places where people were unable to vote. Where the specific constituency is not clear I have given them the benefit of the doubt and taken the highest turnout figure.

Sheffield Hallam - 74%

Liverpool Wavertree - 61%

Hackney - 63%

Lewisham - 65%

Manchester Withington - 60%

Birmingham - 62%

Chester - 68%

Leeds - 70%

Ealing - 74%

Lambeth - 58%

Islington South - 64%

Dalston - 60%

Hull - 52%

Newcastle - 65%

These turnouts are not especially high. Our Victorian voting system coped adequately with higher percentages than these for much of the Twentieth Century.

The chaos on Thursday night had nothing to do with increased voter turnout. It was due to good old-fashioned administrative cock-ups. Complacency, brought about by years of declining turnouts, together with cost cutting, planning failures and a bit of bad luck, meant that, in a few places, the system had not been resourced adequately. That's it!

There is a case for looking at staffing levels, the suitability of some premises used as polling stations and the boundaries of the polling districts. There might even be an argument for extending voting to more than one day. There is, however, no evidence of a crisis in this country's voting mechanism. Warwick and Leamington (84%), Kenilworth and Southam (81%), Renfrewshire East (77%),  Richmond Park (77%) and Somerset North East (76%) all managed high turnouts without denying anyone the right to vote.

More sinister though are the suggested remedies for this non-existent problem. Internet or text voting would be even more of a gift to fraudsters than postal voting. The poll-riggers would not even need to set up special factories. The local hard-men could browbeat the weaker members of their communities into handing over their passwords, then simply type in the data through proxy severs. In some constituencies there would be no point in holding an election at all. It would be quicker just to get the so-called community leaders together and ask them who they wanted for their MP.

Machine voting at polling stations is less open to fraud but still opens up the possibility of voter intimidation. As soon as data is collected electronically, it is much easier to analyse and manipulate than paper based data. In theory, it is probably possible to find out how people voted using the current system but it would be a laborious process. But once data was held electronically there would need to be an audit trail to tie each electronic vote back to a registered voter. That information would be accessible to anyone with the right security levels or the knowledge to hack into the system.

There seems to be an iron law now that any data held on a government system will be leaked at some point, even when that information is highly sensitive. Voting records would be of interest to people who try to rig the electoral system or to those who want to intimidate voters for other reasons. It would also be useful to those who want to impose a political orthodoxy in their organisation. For example, unions are already keen to ban BNP members from public sector employment. What if they called for every teacher who had voted BNP to be sacked? It would only take one hacker to publish all the voting information on the internet and people's careers could be ruined.

Most of the countries that have tried electronic voting have experienced problems. In 2006, some municipalities in the Netherlands went back to pen and paper after they discovered that their voting machines could be monitored by wireless. Ireland also abandoned plans to introduce e-voting in 2006. In Germany, electronic voting has been declared unconstitutional. Campaigners in India are hoping for a similar ban. Even the UK's limited experiments with e-voting have been criticised for lack of transparency and possible counting inaccuracies.

While it may be old-fashioned, our current voting system has the advantage of being both secret and transparent. Individuals vote in secret but the counting is done in full view. No special expertise is needed to verify what has taken place. Electronic voting, as the experience of other countries shows, removes both the secrecy and the transparency of the electoral process.

If all this is starting to sound familiar it is because the arguments for e-voting are very similar to those used to justify ID cards. First, find a small problem and then blow it up out of all proportion, claiming that, due to the increasingly complex nature of modern society, the problem will only get worse. Then propose an expensive and intrusive technology-based solution. Finally, justify it with soothing words about efficiency, modernity and reductions in crime and fraud.

Electronic voting is an expensive solution to a problem that does not exist. Worse still, it would effectively put an end to the secret ballot which, for very good reasons, our ancestors fought long and hard to achieve. A few isolated cock-ups on election night is not a good enough reason to abandon secrecy and transparency for the black box of  e-voting.

Everyone's a loser

The election result is extraordinary. It's the first one I can remember where everyone has lost. The only parties with anything to celebrate this morning are the Greens and the Alliance Party.

Most disappointed of all must be the Lib Dems. Despite all the high poll ratings during the campaign, their support turned out to be about normal. They have slightly increased their share of the vote but will probably have fewer MPs. The Lib Dem breakthrough just didn't materialise. This is one aspect of the election that the opinion polls didn't predict. What happened? Did people lie to the pollsters because they thought it was cool to like Nick Clegg or did they really mean it at the time but changed their minds when they got to the polling booths. The result is a double blow because the Lib Dems can't even combine their seats with Labour to make a majority government. Their only viable coalition partners are the Conservatives, which makes their negotiating position much weaker.

Labour have been trounced but not quite as badly as most pundits thought they would be. This has enabled Gordon Brown to cling on and pretend he can form some sort of coalition with the Liberals, SNP and Greens. This is, of course, preposterous as it would have no legitimacy and would involve way too many concessions. At the moment, the media are colluding with Labour in the pretence that such a coalition would be viable but that's because, in the absence of a clear result, they have spare air-time and column inches to fill.

As for the Conservatives, some of them are claiming that their party has won but last night was really a humiliation for David Cameron. Pitched against a jaded and demoralised Labour Party led by a man most voters couldn't stand the sight of, Cameron could not get a majority. He had a lot more cash to spend than all his opponents put together but he will probably get fewer than 310 seats. This is not a victory it is a dismal failure. The UK's unwritten constitution says that a prime minister has to command the confidence of the House of Commons. David Cameron is still a long way from that.

That said, the Conservatives hold the best hand as they have the most MPs. A government without them is almost impossible. They also have a joker to play; they are the only party with enough money left to be able to fight another general election. If the other parties defeat them when they try to form a government they can call another election in which they would probably get a better result.

It may yet come to that. Last night's performance has shown that the voters have little enthusiasm for the Tories even though they hate Labour more. Financial muscle seems to be the only clear advantage the Conservatives have. Using that to grind down their opponents might be their best strategy. It would be a shabby way to win an election but most voters seem to think that politics is shabby anyway. That's why they delivered last night's damning verdict on all the political parties.

It's going to be a long night

Most of last night's opinion polls still indicate a hung parliament. Most of the predictions do too. Of the pollsters, only Angus Reid is brave enough to back a Tory majority. The betting markets are hovering just under the break-even threshold too after briefly moving into Tory majority territory over the weekend.

There are early indications that the turnout will be higher than at the last two elections but no-one has a clue as to what that will mean in term of results.

One consequence of the closeness of the result is that we probably won't know who has won until breakfast time. In 1997, Blair passed his majority threshold sometime during the small hours of the morning. Even if Cameron eventually gets a majority he is unlikely to have 326 seats in the bag before it gets light. For this reason, I may change my usual election night strategy. Instead of staying up until I drop with exhaustion, I might go to bed early then get up at sunrise to watch the final results come in.

Despite all the opinion polls swings, I'm still sticking with my predictionof a narrow Tory majority. I may end up looking like a prat if there is a Tory landslide or a Tory collapse but I don't think either of those things will happen.

It's going to be a long night then, but at least it's only once every five years. Unless......

Election Day funnies - Leaders' Wives

These made me laugh, especially the end bits.

 

Police investigate postal vote fraud

It will come as no surprise to Ealing residents that one of the five Metropolitan Police investigations into electoral fraud is centred on this borough. Politics in Ealing, and especially in the Ealing Southall constituency has had a whiff of Tammany Hall about it for some time.

The other four investigations are all in Tower Hamlets where, just yesterday, a reporter for the Independent was badly beaten up by Bengali youths while following up these stories. When the boys discovered that Jerome Taylor was looking for one of the alleged fraudsters, they subjected him to a vicious assault.

A change in the law has led to a massive increase in the number of postal votes. Before 2004, you had to give a reason for wanting a postal vote. Now, anyone can have a postal vote provided that they apply in time.

While this might sound like an extension of individual choice, the reality is somewhat different. It is much easier to intimidate someone and force them to vote a certain way when they vote by post than when they have to turn up at a ballot box. By introducing postal voting on demand, the government has effectively deprived some people of their right to a secret ballot.

A year after the change in the law, three Birmingham councillors were found guilty of operating a vote-rigging factory in a warehouse. Postal ballot papers obtained by deception or intimidation were completed on an assembly line and posted to the town hall.

The victims of this intimidation are disproportionately women from Asian communities whose ballot papers are taken from them by so-called community leaders. In 2008, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust noted:

[T]here is no denying that numerous convictions for electoral fraud since 2000 have concerned postal and proxy ballot fraud in specific inner-urban wards, where a large concentration of voters originate from the Indian sub-continent. The convictions successfully brought in relation to local elections in Oldham(2000), Blackburn(2002), Burnley (2004) and Birmingham(2004) all concerned British Muslim communities and collectively account for 50 per cent of the convictions for electoral offences contained on the CPS files (see appendixC). Significantly, these convictions have emerged alongside anecdotal evidence of more widespread, and long-run, practices associated with Pakistani, Kashmeri and Bangladeshi traditions of Biraderi (‘brotherhood’) clans in influencing voting behaviour.

In particular, it is widely suggested that extended family and kinship networks, frequently with their origins in settlement patterns in Pakistan and Bangladesh, are mobilised to secure the support of up to several hundred electors,effectively constituting a ‘block vote’. In areas such as the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, such practices are frequently referred to as ‘village politics’, in light of the direct lines of connection between aspects of local party politics and tribal elders in Bangladesh.

In effect, a form of communal politics has been transported to the UK from parts of the Indian subcontinent where it is normal for tribal elders and religious leaders tell people how to vote. This is why it is important for election candidates in some constituencies to have the support of mosques and other community leaders. Many of these bigwigs do more than simply influence local opinion; they literally deliver large numbers of votes to the count. Postal voting was a gift to the local hard men. It has given a huge boost to their power bases.

It is strangely ironic that the Labour Party, which claims to be the party of gender and racial equality, should have brought in a law which disenfranchises so many Asian women.

A friend told me last week that the postal votes have already started arriving at Ealing Town Hall. They are disproportionately from women with Indian names. Of course, that doesn't prove anything. It may be that a lot of Asian women just like to vote by post. Proving that fraud and intimidation has taken place will be a difficult job for the police and, as the Independent's reporter found, just asking the wrong questions might upset a few people.

Preacher banged up for upsetting someone

Yesterday, I went out and had a few Bank Holiday beers with some friends. On my way between two pubs, by this time rather the worse for drink, I heard a Christian preacher banging on about sin. Among the sins he listed were blasphemy, drunkenness and same sex relationships. Now, as a habitual drunk, I was deeply offended by this so I went over to the preacher to remonstrate with him.

Despite the fact that I was clearly a member of the rat-arsed community, the preacher repeated his assertion that drunkenness is against the word of God. Well I wasn't having that so I went straight to the police hate-crimes unit and made a formal complaint, explaining that the preacher had harassed me in the middle of the shopping precinct.

Thankfully, the police reacted swiftly. They took the preacher away in a van, banged him up in the police station and charged him with using abusive or insulting language, contrary to the Public Order Act. Quite right too, I thought. Serves him right for harassing people with bible quotes just because they like a few beers.

By now most readers will have realised that I have made this story up. It is, indeed, completely preposterous because nothing like this could ever happen. Could it?

Hat Tip: The Ranting Kraut

The end of the party?

This picture in the weekend Guardian says it all. It's not just the facial expressions, it's the body language too. The way the senior Labour politicians are holding themselves shows that they are heading for defeat and they know it.

It's a long way from the smiles and the things-can-only-get-better bounciness of May 1997. Newspapers that usually support Labour have abandoned it for the Liberal Democrats and some opinion pollshave Labour finishing in third place. The party is on course of its worst performance since the Worzel Gummidge election of 1983.

Labour loyalists are already blaming the media but, as Gaby Hinscliff says, voters made up their minds about Gordon Brown a long time ago. It didn't really matter what he said in the TV debates. Most people mentally switched off as soon as he started talking. OK, the Lib-Dem surge was partly due to undecided voters suddenly noticing Nick Clegg  but there is some evidence that his party was already gathering support before the TV debates.

It is probable that Labour will crash and burn on Thursday but does this mean that the party is finished? Will the Liberal Democrats really replace Labour as the opposition to the Tories?

I'm not convinced. Even if Labour comes third in the popular vote, thanks the vagaries of our electoral system, it will still have many more MPs that the Lib-Dems. Over time, people tend to forget who got the largest share of the vote and the party with the most MPs makes the most noise. Unless he can elbow his way into some sort of coalition, Nick Clegg will once again be relegated to that corner in the Hose of Commons where no one can see him. Labour will be the official opposition and, having dumped Gordon Brown for someone fresher and more telegenic, will attack the Conservatives with renewed vigour.

Some Lib-Dems are convincing themselves that we are seeing the start of a re-alignment in British politics but a few week's opinion poll ratings is hardly evidence of a fundamental shift in party allegiances. Last time this country saw such a re-alignment was when the Labour Party replaced the Liberals in the 1920s. That shift was driven by major social changes which had been building up for decades and which were given the final shove by a cataclysmic war. Sure, we have just had a major financial crisis but it's not quite the same.

Crucially, Labour's rise was driven by the interest of the industrial working class, many of whom had only been given the vote in 1918. Socialism had an intellectual argument which captured the imagination of the intelligentsia, but it also promised direct material improvements in the living standards of large numbers of people. Winning arguments alone would not have propelled Labour to power. The driving force behind the party's rapid rise was its appeal to the self-interest of the working class.

There is no equivalent engine behind the Nick Clegg surge. Even if the Lib-Dems were winning the intellectual arguments, which is debatable to say the least, there is no critical mass of voters who see the party offering them something tangible. In short, there is no movement behind the Liberal Democrats capable of creating and sustaining the momentum they would need to replace Labour. The Lib-Dem surge is largely the result of voters' antipathy to the two main parties. This is due, for the most part, to the expenses scandal and the perception that both the Conservatives and Labour are in the pockets of the casino financiers who plunged us into the worst recession for 60 years. The Lib-Dem surge is more about a dislike of the other two parties than a long-term shift in support.

In all likelihood, then, the Labour Party will not collapse and, at least in England, we will return to something like the two-and-a-half party system we have been used to. It is true to say that party loyalties are eroding, especially among younger voters, but our traditional tribal allegiances will hold up for a while yet.

While it may not be the end for the Labour Party it is certainly the end for Gordon Brown. He will be dumped as leader very soon after the results are declared. There is a bitter irony about Gordon Brown's story. He spent so long desperately wanting to be Prime Minister only to mess it up almost from day one. I say almost because there was a brief period when he was very popular. Few now talk about the Brown Bounce but Gordon enjoyed a honeymoon summer with the voters before the Northern Rock crash started the inexorable slide in the Autumn of 2007. July 2007  would have been the time to call an election.

That is the real tragedy of Gordon Brown's premiership. Had he asked for a new mandate as soon as he became Prime Minister he would now be secure until the Spring of 2012, long enough for the economic recovery to change at least some voters' minds. But Mr Brown is famously risk averse. There is a quote attributed to Geena Davies, 'if you risk nothing you risk everything'. Whatever bad decisions Gordon Brown has made, his unwillingness to take a small calculated risk in June 2007 was the one that finally sealed his fate.

Mocking religion gets you a suspended sentence and an ASBO

This is outrageous! A man has been given a 6-month suspended jail sentence, 100 hours of community service and a five-year ASBO just for putting leaflets mocking Jesus, the Pope and Islam in an airport prayer room.

Over the last decade, the government has insisted that its legislation protecting religion (the Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the offence of religiously aggravated harassment buried in the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001) were simply designed to stop people stirring up hatred against particular faith groups. Free speech, it assured us, would not be affected by these new laws.

That assurance was clearly false. Harry Taylor was found guilty of religiously aggravated harassment under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, as amended by the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001. Labour's religious protection legislation, brought in under the pretext of maintaining public order, has been used against someone distributing satirical cartoons cut from Private Eye.

Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, warned that this interpretation of the legislation effectively creates a new blasphemy law, one that is far more draconian than the old one.

When I posted about the abolition of the blasphemy laws, Phil A asked:

How long before the state re institutes these laws for all religions in some form? They have thought seriously about it already.

We now know the answer to that. The blasphemy laws are no longer necessary because the government has all the legislation it needs to appease religious fanatics and persecute those who mock or criticise them.

One of the reasons I first started this blog was to express my anger over proposals to restrict free speech and curb the criticism of religion. It seems that some people were way ahead of me though. As early as 2002, lawyer Neil Addison warned:

Now that religiously aggravated harassment exists, any newspaper that runs a series of articles on any religious cult could find itself prosecuted or sued, as could the journalists and anyone else involved. Political correctness, and the desire to "play safe", would have a field day.

Part of the definition of harassment is causing distress which is a far wider definition than the old blasphemy law and is far easier to prove. Under harassment case law it is possible to cause someone distress even when there is no intent to do so, when they are not an intended victim and have merely been told by a third party about something said or done that they find "distressing".

[E]xperience shows that when a law exists it is used in ways that were never foreseen. As with any law, often the threat is more effective than the reality. Most people prefer to "play safe" and if threatened with the law may back down, even if in reality they would probably win any case. So, insidiously, the creation of the crime of religiously aggravated harassment may inhibit behaviour and free speech in a way the Government has not anticipated.......

Whatever the government anticipated, Neil Addison has been proved right. Most people seeing this judgement will think twice before making any criticism of religion or religious zealots for fear of a suspended custodial sentence and an ASBO.

In a desperate attempt to appease Muslim voters and other religious extremists who jumped on their bandwaggon, the once radical and progressive Labour Party has taken us back to 1921.

Hat Tip: MediaWatchWatch