Last night’s debate was the first I saw and I turned over after 20 mins that’s how much it gripped me, so I can’t say who won or lost but but it doesn’t seemed to have changed things radically judging by some of the post match commentary.
However what did catch my eye was the fact there was a Newsnight Wales Special for the Election and not only for the content, it included Welsh voters reaction to the debates and analysis from Welsh politicians.
I wrote last May that despite cutbacks BBC Scotland seems to be more committed to politics and news coverage and that is why they produce Newsnight Scotland which has been on air since 1999 discussing the days political events in Scotland post devolution. The programme normally runs for 20 minutes from 11pm after the first half hour of Newsnight, something that could easily be replicated in Wales.
Newsnight is a well respected political programme and an ideal format to scrutinise our reluctant Welsh Ministers and politicians over their decisions and policies on a daily basis and help make them more accountable to voters, something Welsh politics is in desperate need of.
So now that Newsnight Wales has had its first outing albeit at General Election time there is a good case for it staying and becoming a regular part of the Welsh broadcasting landscape - what about it BBC Wales?
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Uncomfortable truths about the Conservatives campaign
While the Labour Party desperately tries to limit the damage and move talk on to anything apart from yesterday’s disaster without much success, the Telegraph’s Benedict Brogan has a revealing insight into the state of the Conservatives Campaign
He writes "Months ago, the likes of Steve Hilton and George Osborne were predicting – and praying – that it would all come down to the campaign, and the likelihood that Mr Brown would somehow crack under pressure. They wanted to focus voters' minds on the hard truths about Mr Brown – his temper, his indecisiveness, his policy failings.
Until Mrs Duffy popped up, they were having to confront some hard truths of their own, not least that Mr Cameron's decision to agree to the televised debates that gave Mr Clegg equal billing, against the advice of many around him, was probably the single biggest strategic mistake of his leadership."
In fact, the Tories, champions of openness in politics, are concealing plenty of inconvenient truths of their own, from the hidden elements of their deficit reduction programme to Mr Cameron's own capacity for temper and rudeness. The truth about Gordon Brown is their weapon; the truth about themselves – most of it good, but difficult to sell – is best avoided.
I guess there is some truth in the claims that the Conservatives are making up their Election strategy as they go along – for all our sakes let’s hope they don’t do the same when they are in Government.
He writes "Months ago, the likes of Steve Hilton and George Osborne were predicting – and praying – that it would all come down to the campaign, and the likelihood that Mr Brown would somehow crack under pressure. They wanted to focus voters' minds on the hard truths about Mr Brown – his temper, his indecisiveness, his policy failings.
Until Mrs Duffy popped up, they were having to confront some hard truths of their own, not least that Mr Cameron's decision to agree to the televised debates that gave Mr Clegg equal billing, against the advice of many around him, was probably the single biggest strategic mistake of his leadership."
In fact, the Tories, champions of openness in politics, are concealing plenty of inconvenient truths of their own, from the hidden elements of their deficit reduction programme to Mr Cameron's own capacity for temper and rudeness. The truth about Gordon Brown is their weapon; the truth about themselves – most of it good, but difficult to sell – is best avoided.
I guess there is some truth in the claims that the Conservatives are making up their Election strategy as they go along – for all our sakes let’s hope they don’t do the same when they are in Government.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Are the Tories the natural party of Coalition?
Unless something earth shattering happens in the next week or so, the UK is on heading for a Parliament where no one party has overall control and while that prospect is exciting some and is good for democracy there are some who would prefer a clear cut result, not least the Conservative Party.
But if you look back coalition in the UK was a far more frequent occurrence and the Tories were willing to offer big concessions, over at the Next Left Blog it states ‘Strikingly, the Conservatives were frequently willing to offer the Premiership to a smaller partner, an offer turned down by Hartington in 1886 (with his Liberal colleague Goschen taking the Treasury a few months later) but accepted by the Liberal Lloyd George in 1918 and of course Labour's leader Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, as part of an attempt to project the idea that these coalitions were not simply Tory fronts.
Most in today's Conservative party seem unaware of the depth of their pro-coalition history.
Why? Because history begins in 1979. For the ideologised post-Thatcher party, coalition is indeed anathema, as it never was for Disraeli. The post-Thatcher Tory party remains cut off from the party's historical, political and intellectual traditions by the enduring impact of Keith Joseph's famous declaration of 1975 that the history of actually existing British post-war Conservatism has been a betrayal - and "not Conservative at all".
Power-sharing, negotiation, compromise - the very stuff of politics - and any attempt at pluralist political reform are viewed primarily as attempts to shut the Tories out. Yet a deeper progressive Conservativism might have learnt from their history, rather than apparently being cut off from it. It would not see all political negotiation as an offence against strong government, and so would see in the increased pluralism of a post-devolution, multi-party politics enormous opportunities for a supple, pragmatic Tory statecraft. It would probably be preparing to compete and deal on electoral reform, rather than implying it would cling to the wreckage of first-past-the-post even if it blew itself up by providing a bizarre result with little democratic credibility at all. Indeed, it might particularly favour the Alternative Vote at least, for it would finally lock in Cameronism, just as the early '70s Tories were the party of devolution and more interested than Labour in electoral reform.'
I wonder what will be on offer to potential suitors if the Conservatives emerge as the largest Party but without an overall majority this time around.
But if you look back coalition in the UK was a far more frequent occurrence and the Tories were willing to offer big concessions, over at the Next Left Blog it states ‘Strikingly, the Conservatives were frequently willing to offer the Premiership to a smaller partner, an offer turned down by Hartington in 1886 (with his Liberal colleague Goschen taking the Treasury a few months later) but accepted by the Liberal Lloyd George in 1918 and of course Labour's leader Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, as part of an attempt to project the idea that these coalitions were not simply Tory fronts.
Most in today's Conservative party seem unaware of the depth of their pro-coalition history.
Why? Because history begins in 1979. For the ideologised post-Thatcher party, coalition is indeed anathema, as it never was for Disraeli. The post-Thatcher Tory party remains cut off from the party's historical, political and intellectual traditions by the enduring impact of Keith Joseph's famous declaration of 1975 that the history of actually existing British post-war Conservatism has been a betrayal - and "not Conservative at all".
Power-sharing, negotiation, compromise - the very stuff of politics - and any attempt at pluralist political reform are viewed primarily as attempts to shut the Tories out. Yet a deeper progressive Conservativism might have learnt from their history, rather than apparently being cut off from it. It would not see all political negotiation as an offence against strong government, and so would see in the increased pluralism of a post-devolution, multi-party politics enormous opportunities for a supple, pragmatic Tory statecraft. It would probably be preparing to compete and deal on electoral reform, rather than implying it would cling to the wreckage of first-past-the-post even if it blew itself up by providing a bizarre result with little democratic credibility at all. Indeed, it might particularly favour the Alternative Vote at least, for it would finally lock in Cameronism, just as the early '70s Tories were the party of devolution and more interested than Labour in electoral reform.'
I wonder what will be on offer to potential suitors if the Conservatives emerge as the largest Party but without an overall majority this time around.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
More evidence of the scale of Welsh public sector spending and the need for a bigger private sector
Yesterday the Centre for Economic and Business Research published its ‘State of the Nation’ report looking at how public money is spent is the nations and regions of the UK.
From a Welsh perspective three things stand out
Firstly the report says ‘The analysis shows that public expenditure as a share of GDP in two parts of the country (Northern Ireland and Wales) is about 70% of GDP.’ – hardly a favourable comparison as Northern Ireland has been through four decades of sectarian violence so there are at least reasons for their figures.
Secondly that ‘Public spending as a share of GDP has risen very sharply in 2009/10 as a result of the recession and the rise in public spending. In 2008/09 spending was 43.9% of GDP for the UK; in 2009/10 it has jumped to 48.1% on this definition and is likely to rise slightly more in 2010/11 to 48.4%.’
This jump has been exaggerated in the high spending regions of the UK. In Wales public spending rose last year from 62.8% to 68.8%; in Northern Ireland from 64.8% to 71.3%.’
And thirdly that ‘Table 2 shows a huge gap in the movements in public spending as a share of GDP between regions. In Wales the rise since 1998/99 is more than 18 per cent; in the South West the share has actually fallen, while in the South East the rise has been only just over 5%’.
No doubt WAG will have a pre-pared answer to this report that will say that Wales’s public sector is not too big and doesn’t hamper private sector growth, followed by something like the public sector needs protecting at all costs because of the scale of cuts that are coming Wales way after the General Election and to a point its true, but it misses the bigger point, a bigger private sector could take some of the strain of the massive job losses we in Wales will see over the next few years.
The sad thing is that WAG could do things to stop the dole cues getting longer in the coming months and inflicting the same misery on individuals, families and communities that many in Wales haven’t fully recovered from after the last recession because they refuse to accept what umpteen reports have said over the years, that more home grown private sector businesses would increase wealth and create jobs and be more of a protection in an economic downturn – How long before they get the message?
From a Welsh perspective three things stand out
Firstly the report says ‘The analysis shows that public expenditure as a share of GDP in two parts of the country (Northern Ireland and Wales) is about 70% of GDP.’ – hardly a favourable comparison as Northern Ireland has been through four decades of sectarian violence so there are at least reasons for their figures.
Secondly that ‘Public spending as a share of GDP has risen very sharply in 2009/10 as a result of the recession and the rise in public spending. In 2008/09 spending was 43.9% of GDP for the UK; in 2009/10 it has jumped to 48.1% on this definition and is likely to rise slightly more in 2010/11 to 48.4%.’
This jump has been exaggerated in the high spending regions of the UK. In Wales public spending rose last year from 62.8% to 68.8%; in Northern Ireland from 64.8% to 71.3%.’
And thirdly that ‘Table 2 shows a huge gap in the movements in public spending as a share of GDP between regions. In Wales the rise since 1998/99 is more than 18 per cent; in the South West the share has actually fallen, while in the South East the rise has been only just over 5%’.
No doubt WAG will have a pre-pared answer to this report that will say that Wales’s public sector is not too big and doesn’t hamper private sector growth, followed by something like the public sector needs protecting at all costs because of the scale of cuts that are coming Wales way after the General Election and to a point its true, but it misses the bigger point, a bigger private sector could take some of the strain of the massive job losses we in Wales will see over the next few years.
The sad thing is that WAG could do things to stop the dole cues getting longer in the coming months and inflicting the same misery on individuals, families and communities that many in Wales haven’t fully recovered from after the last recession because they refuse to accept what umpteen reports have said over the years, that more home grown private sector businesses would increase wealth and create jobs and be more of a protection in an economic downturn – How long before they get the message?
Monday, April 26, 2010
5 reasons why inequality persists in wealthy societies
A major new study into the hidden causes of inequality has identified five new ‘unjust beliefs’ it says are to blame.
Social commentator and geographer Danny Dorling claims that in rich countries with plenty of resources ‘hidden and unacknowledged beliefs’ based on elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair are propping up social injustice.
Based on significant academic research across a range of fields, Injustice : why social inequalities persists, argues that, as Beveridge’s five social evils of ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease are gradually eradicated, social injustices are now being recreated, renewed and supported by five new sets of unjust beliefs:
Elitism is efficient: ‘educational apartheid’ in the UK has risen as the majority of additional qualifications in recent decades have been awarded to a minority of young adults.
Exclusion is necessary: social segregation has increased as real financial rewards and benefits to the worse off have fallen and the riches of the wealthy have grown.
Prejudice is natural: a wider racism or ‘new social Darwinism’ which sees some people as inherently less deserving and able than those who 'need' great rewards to work.
Greed is good: economic growth is necessary at almost any cost including rising global inequalities and mounting debt.
Despair is inevitable: the rise in depression and anxiety is best understood as a symptom of living in times and places when wide inequalities are seen as acceptable.
Professor Dorling said: ‘These are beliefs which have been publicly condemned as wrong and most individuals would claim not to support them.
‘However, their acceptance by just a few, and the reluctance of many others to confront those few, is crucial to maintaining injustice in such times and lands of plenty.’
His research also identifies new sets of ‘victims’ including a sixth of people in the more unequal rich countries that are 'debarred' or excluded from full membership of society because of poverty and the third of families in Britain, which now contain someone who suffers from depression or a chronic anxiety disorder.
Social commentator and geographer Danny Dorling claims that in rich countries with plenty of resources ‘hidden and unacknowledged beliefs’ based on elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair are propping up social injustice.
Based on significant academic research across a range of fields, Injustice : why social inequalities persists, argues that, as Beveridge’s five social evils of ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease are gradually eradicated, social injustices are now being recreated, renewed and supported by five new sets of unjust beliefs:
Elitism is efficient: ‘educational apartheid’ in the UK has risen as the majority of additional qualifications in recent decades have been awarded to a minority of young adults.
Exclusion is necessary: social segregation has increased as real financial rewards and benefits to the worse off have fallen and the riches of the wealthy have grown.
Prejudice is natural: a wider racism or ‘new social Darwinism’ which sees some people as inherently less deserving and able than those who 'need' great rewards to work.
Greed is good: economic growth is necessary at almost any cost including rising global inequalities and mounting debt.
Despair is inevitable: the rise in depression and anxiety is best understood as a symptom of living in times and places when wide inequalities are seen as acceptable.
Professor Dorling said: ‘These are beliefs which have been publicly condemned as wrong and most individuals would claim not to support them.
‘However, their acceptance by just a few, and the reluctance of many others to confront those few, is crucial to maintaining injustice in such times and lands of plenty.’
His research also identifies new sets of ‘victims’ including a sixth of people in the more unequal rich countries that are 'debarred' or excluded from full membership of society because of poverty and the third of families in Britain, which now contain someone who suffers from depression or a chronic anxiety disorder.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
‘Three's a crowd: How the unexpected rise of a third contender broke the cosy two-party system’
Just like last year’s book, Lords of Finance about the bankers role in the 1920’s Crash and Great Depression, David Marquand’s new book, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy looks at Labour’s leapfrog of the Liberals back in the 1920’s and the years since is also well timed as we are in the middle of a General Election campaign that might see the Liberal Democrats emerge as the second party of UK politics ahead of Labour.
There are plenty of caveats of course such as the First Past the Post System favours a two party system, no one knows the true strength of Lib Dems new support or how tactical voting will play out plus the TV debates have skewed the Election coverage meaning we are now having a political beauty contest.
But David Marquand writing about the similarities between then and now in the Independent said ‘What does this complex story tell us about the politics of 2010? What parallels are there between the political actors of 1923-4 and those of today?
Three stand out. The most obvious is the parallel between David Cameron and Baldwin. Indeed Cameron sometimes seems to be trying, quite consciously, to act the part of Baldwin Mark II – emollient, inclusive, honourable and, above all, reassuring. His penchant for cycling to work (with photographers in tow) is a 21st century equivalent of Baldwin's penchant for striding along country lanes, clad in a baggy tweed suit (and also with photographers in tow). Before the First World War, the Conservatives had been the nasty party, using their majority in the Lords to throw out the Budget in 1909, and then flirting with armed rebellion in Ulster.
Like Cameron, Baldwin was trying to lay the ghost of Conservative nastiness and to speak in a carefully crafted contemporary idiom instead of the grandiloquent language of the past. His ostentatiously honourable refusal to countenance an anti-Labour manoeuvre in early 1924 was part of that strategy. But the parallel mustn't be pushed too far. Baldwin had far stronger cards in his hand than Cameron has. He was Prime Minister at the start of the story and leader of the largest party throughout. It was far easier for him to contain Ramsay MacDonald's challenge than for Cameron to contain Clegg's. All he had to do was wait for Labour to run into trouble, whereas Cameron has to strain every nerve to recapture the ground lost to the Liberal Democrats.
Which is where the second parallel comes into the story: that between Brown's Labour Party and Asquith's Liberals. Asquith had been a hugely successful Prime Minister. His Government had been the greatest reforming government since Gladstone's in 1868. Yet after 1918, and the arrival of universal male and partial female suffrage, all this availed him nothing. He appeared pompous, boring and hopelessly out of joint with the times. The causes that made him – taming the House of Lords, Irish Home Rule, Free Trade – no longer resonated. He was like a whale, beached by the tides of history. He seemed out of tune, a ghost from another age.
The same was true – in spades – of the Liberal Party. It embodied a great tradition of individual freedom and equal opportunity going back to John Locke and John Stuart Mill. The Whig ancestors of the Liberal Party had carried the great Reform Act of 1832. Liberal governments had broken the Anglican stranglehold on the ancient universities, reformed local government, abolished the sale of Commissions in the Army and almost secured Home Rule for Ireland. Gladstone, the greatest peacetime Prime Minister in our history, was a Liberal. So was Lloyd George, the founder of the welfare state and the second greatest wartime Prime Minister. Liberal thinkers such as TH Green, the philosopher, LT Hobhouse, the father of British sociology and JA Hobson, the precursor of Keynesian economics, had dominated the national conversation.
But the liberal ideal perished in the trenches and mass mobilisations of 1914-1918 and the class conflicts that followed. The age of the individual gave way to the age of the collective. The still, small voice of liberal individualism was drowned out by the big battalions of labour and capital. Despite occasional spurts of intellectual energy, the Liberal Party was hopelessly at sea in a mass society whose politics were dominated by the rival collectivisms of paternalist conservatism and state-centred socialism. It was consumed by factional disputes – backward-looking Asquithian grandees versus Lloyd Georgite adventurers – that meant nothing to the electorate.
If this sounds familiar, it is. In the intervening 90 years, the wheel has come full circle. The age of the collective is over. A new kind of individualism is in the ascendant. The mass society has disappeared; its preoccupations have disappeared with it. The great liberal issues that seemed quaintly archaic in the 1920s – citizenship rights, the devolution of power, individual freedom – have returned to the centre of the stage. The state-centred collectivism which the rising Labour Party offered in place of liberalism, and to which it still obstinately cleaves, is patently a busted flush, just as liberalism was in the 1920s. And, again like the Liberals of those days, Labour is consumed by personal bickering that means nothing to anyone outside its inner circle.
Against that background, the third of my parallels – that between the Liberal Party of today and the Labour Party of the 1920s – falls into place. The Liberal party of that era was sick, but it did not die of its own accord. It was Labour, and above all Labour's leader, Ramsay MacDonald, that despatched it to the knacker's yard. Labour's strategy had two prongs. First, it sought to re-draw the map of politics: to prove that the old battle between Liberals and Conservatives was over; that a new battle between socialism and capitalism had taken its place; and that in that new battle, Labour was ranged equally against both the old parties. Secondly, however, Labour also sought to show that it was the heir of the old Liberal Party, that what MacDonald had once called "advanced and sturdy radicals" now belonged in the Labour Party, that democratic socialism in fact encompassed liberalism.
There are plenty of caveats of course such as the First Past the Post System favours a two party system, no one knows the true strength of Lib Dems new support or how tactical voting will play out plus the TV debates have skewed the Election coverage meaning we are now having a political beauty contest.
But David Marquand writing about the similarities between then and now in the Independent said ‘What does this complex story tell us about the politics of 2010? What parallels are there between the political actors of 1923-4 and those of today?
Three stand out. The most obvious is the parallel between David Cameron and Baldwin. Indeed Cameron sometimes seems to be trying, quite consciously, to act the part of Baldwin Mark II – emollient, inclusive, honourable and, above all, reassuring. His penchant for cycling to work (with photographers in tow) is a 21st century equivalent of Baldwin's penchant for striding along country lanes, clad in a baggy tweed suit (and also with photographers in tow). Before the First World War, the Conservatives had been the nasty party, using their majority in the Lords to throw out the Budget in 1909, and then flirting with armed rebellion in Ulster.
Like Cameron, Baldwin was trying to lay the ghost of Conservative nastiness and to speak in a carefully crafted contemporary idiom instead of the grandiloquent language of the past. His ostentatiously honourable refusal to countenance an anti-Labour manoeuvre in early 1924 was part of that strategy. But the parallel mustn't be pushed too far. Baldwin had far stronger cards in his hand than Cameron has. He was Prime Minister at the start of the story and leader of the largest party throughout. It was far easier for him to contain Ramsay MacDonald's challenge than for Cameron to contain Clegg's. All he had to do was wait for Labour to run into trouble, whereas Cameron has to strain every nerve to recapture the ground lost to the Liberal Democrats.
Which is where the second parallel comes into the story: that between Brown's Labour Party and Asquith's Liberals. Asquith had been a hugely successful Prime Minister. His Government had been the greatest reforming government since Gladstone's in 1868. Yet after 1918, and the arrival of universal male and partial female suffrage, all this availed him nothing. He appeared pompous, boring and hopelessly out of joint with the times. The causes that made him – taming the House of Lords, Irish Home Rule, Free Trade – no longer resonated. He was like a whale, beached by the tides of history. He seemed out of tune, a ghost from another age.
The same was true – in spades – of the Liberal Party. It embodied a great tradition of individual freedom and equal opportunity going back to John Locke and John Stuart Mill. The Whig ancestors of the Liberal Party had carried the great Reform Act of 1832. Liberal governments had broken the Anglican stranglehold on the ancient universities, reformed local government, abolished the sale of Commissions in the Army and almost secured Home Rule for Ireland. Gladstone, the greatest peacetime Prime Minister in our history, was a Liberal. So was Lloyd George, the founder of the welfare state and the second greatest wartime Prime Minister. Liberal thinkers such as TH Green, the philosopher, LT Hobhouse, the father of British sociology and JA Hobson, the precursor of Keynesian economics, had dominated the national conversation.
But the liberal ideal perished in the trenches and mass mobilisations of 1914-1918 and the class conflicts that followed. The age of the individual gave way to the age of the collective. The still, small voice of liberal individualism was drowned out by the big battalions of labour and capital. Despite occasional spurts of intellectual energy, the Liberal Party was hopelessly at sea in a mass society whose politics were dominated by the rival collectivisms of paternalist conservatism and state-centred socialism. It was consumed by factional disputes – backward-looking Asquithian grandees versus Lloyd Georgite adventurers – that meant nothing to the electorate.
If this sounds familiar, it is. In the intervening 90 years, the wheel has come full circle. The age of the collective is over. A new kind of individualism is in the ascendant. The mass society has disappeared; its preoccupations have disappeared with it. The great liberal issues that seemed quaintly archaic in the 1920s – citizenship rights, the devolution of power, individual freedom – have returned to the centre of the stage. The state-centred collectivism which the rising Labour Party offered in place of liberalism, and to which it still obstinately cleaves, is patently a busted flush, just as liberalism was in the 1920s. And, again like the Liberals of those days, Labour is consumed by personal bickering that means nothing to anyone outside its inner circle.
Against that background, the third of my parallels – that between the Liberal Party of today and the Labour Party of the 1920s – falls into place. The Liberal party of that era was sick, but it did not die of its own accord. It was Labour, and above all Labour's leader, Ramsay MacDonald, that despatched it to the knacker's yard. Labour's strategy had two prongs. First, it sought to re-draw the map of politics: to prove that the old battle between Liberals and Conservatives was over; that a new battle between socialism and capitalism had taken its place; and that in that new battle, Labour was ranged equally against both the old parties. Secondly, however, Labour also sought to show that it was the heir of the old Liberal Party, that what MacDonald had once called "advanced and sturdy radicals" now belonged in the Labour Party, that democratic socialism in fact encompassed liberalism.
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